A poster coauthored by Assistant Professor Peter Darch was a finalist for the Best Poster Award at iConference 2020, which was held virtually on March 23-27. The poster's lead author is Live Kvale, a doctoral student at Oslo Metropolitan University co-advised by Darch.

Associate Professor Jingrui He was recently named a Senior Member of IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The organization is the world's largest technical professional society and serves professionals involved in all aspects of the electrical, electronic, and computing fields and related areas of science and technology.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider a $174,981 grant for reducing the spread of retracted research. When retracted papers are cited both before and after retraction, the scientific publication network inadvertently propagates potentially faked data, fundamental errors, and unreproducible results. According to Schneider, a retracted source paper concerning a fraudulent trial of blood pressure medication is still in the top 1% of most cited articles, with 930 citations in the abstract and citation database Scopus.

When universities began closing their campuses and going to online classes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, academic librarians were faced with questions about how those decisions would affect libraries and whether to close their doors or restrict access. "People are looking to best practices in the field, but also to what actions their colleagues and peers are taking and how they are thinking about this," said Affiliate Professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, professor and coordinator for information literacy services and instruction in the University Library.

Most universities around the country have ended classroom instruction, told students to go home, and asked professors to continue teaching their courses online, to help stop the spread of the new coronavirus. Melissa Wong, an adjunct lecturer at the iSchool, has been teaching online since 2001. Her online courses include e-learning and instructional strategies and techniques. She recently gave two webinars about moving courses online.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden presented her research at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine workshop, "Opportunities for Accelerating Scientific Discovery: Realizing the Potential of Advanced and Automated Workflows," which was held virtually on March 16-17. 

The following iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in iConference 2020, which will be held virtually on March 23-27. The annual event brings together scholars, researchers, and information professionals to share insights on critical information issues. The theme of this year's conference is "Sustainable Digital Communities."

Associate Professor Jingrui He and Arun Reddy Nelakurthi, senior engineer in machine learning research at Samsung Research America, have coauthored a new guide to user behavior modeling. Their book, Social Media Analytics for User Behavior Modeling: A Task Heterogeneity Perspective, was recently published by CRC Press.

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the Women in Data Science Urbana-Champaign Conference (WiDS), which will be held on March 6 at the University of Illinois. The event, which is organized by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and cosponsored by the iSchool, is one of over 200 WiDS conferences being held worldwide.

Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner will give an invited talk at the conference "The Data Quality Challenge: Research during the Digital Transformation," which will be hosted by the German Council for Scientific Information Infrastructures on February 27-28 in Hanover, Germany. The conference will examine topics such as research integrity and trust, data quality as a political issue, criteria for the scientific quality of data, the data lifecycle, and data quality standards.

Associate Professor Carol Tilley will be a keynote speaker at the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (C2E2), which will be held on February 28-March 1. C2E2 brings together the best of pop culture, including comics, graphic novels, and manga, as well as movies, TV, video games, and more.

Professor Emerita Linda C. Smith has returned to the iSchool on a part-time basis as interim executive associate dean for faculty affairs. In this role, she will provide leadership for iSchool faculty affairs and administrative oversight for the work of the School's associate deans.

Jessie Chin is an assistant professor in the iSchool and the principal investigator of The Adaptive Cognition and Interaction Design (ACTION) Lab. Her research aims to advance knowledge in cognitive sciences regarding evolving human interaction with the contemporary information technologies and translating theories in social and behavioral sciences to the design of technologies and interaction experience to promote health communication and behavior across the lifespan. 

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will present her reproducibility research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting, which is billed as the world's largest general scientific gathering. The 2020 meeting, with the theme "Envisioning Tomorrow’s Earth," will take place on February 13-16 in Seattle, Washington.

Associate Professor Emily Knox has been named interim associate dean for academic affairs for the iSchool. In this role, she will provide leadership and oversight for academic programs, including program development, curriculum coordination, and continuous improvement of educational experiences. Knox most recently served as the School's first program director for the new BS/IS degree. Associate Professor Kate McDowell, who previously held the position of interim associate dean for academic affairs, stepped down to return to her teaching and research.

Members of Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, will present a paper and tutorial at the thirty-fourth Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference, which will take place on February 7-12 in New York. The AAAI meeting is one of the world's leading conferences in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The event promotes research in artificial intelligence and scientific exchange among researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will present the webcast, "Community Efforts Advancing Reproducibility and Transparency in Data- and Computationally-Enabled Research," on February 7. Her talk is part of a nine-week series of webcasts hosted by Project TIER (Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research), in which leaders in research transparency discuss their latest thinking on how to make statistical research open, reproducible, and credible. Registration for the webcast, which will take place at 12:00 p.m., is free but required to access the live stream.

Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu will give an invited lecture on February 6 at the University of Kentucky Institute for Biomedical Informatics.

His talk, "Promoting Transparency in Biomedical Publications using Natural Language Processing," will focus on how biomedical language processing and text mining (bioNLP) techniques can be used to promote the rigor, reproducibility, and transparency of biomedical research.

Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, has been awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant to spend three weeks at Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia. During her visit, which will take place in May 2020, Chan will lecture on feminist data methods and give a workshop on community data.

A multi-institutional $1.2M grant from the National Science Foundation will accelerate discovery and exploration of the synthetic biology design space. Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie serves as a principal investigator on the project, "Synthetic Biology Knowledge Systems," which brings together researchers from the University of Illinois; University of Utah; University of California, San Diego; Virginia Commonwealth University; Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and the non-partisan and objective research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.