Associate Professor Yang Wang will share his work at the National Science Foundation (NSF) Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) Principal Investigators' Meeting, which will be held on October 28-29 in Washington, D.C. He will share his research from two SaTC-funded projects.

iSchool faculty and students will participate in the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting, which will be held October 19-23 in Melbourne, Australia. The theme of this year’s conference is “Information…Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime, Anyway.” The meeting, now in its 82nd year, is the premier international conference dedicated to the study of information, people, and technology in contemporary society. Associate Professor and MS/IM Program Director Catherine Blake serves as co-chair for this year’s conference. Associate Professor and BS/IS Program Director Emily Knox and Affiliate Professor Clara Chu are members of the ASIS&T Board of Directors, contributing to governance activities.

Faculty, staff, and students represented the iSchool at the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC), held on October 1-4 in Orlando, Florida. Produced by AnitaB.org and presented in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), GHC is the world's largest gathering of women technologists.

Associate Professor and Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Kate McDowell has authored a chapter in the book, Transforming Young Adult Services, Second edition, which was recently published by ALA Editions. In the new edition, leaders in the field present a diverse array of topics addressing current issues in teen libraries.

Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner has received a $200,000 grant from the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI) for her project, "Reliable Extraction of Emergency Response Networks from Text Data and Bench-marking with National Emergency Response Guidelines." CIRI is a Center of Excellence of the Department of Homeland Security that aims to enhance the resiliency of the nation's critical infrastructures.

Director of the Center for Health Informatics and iSchool Research Scientist Ian Brooks gave an invited talk on health informatics at "Celebrating 25 Years of the Core Health Indicators," a side event held on September 30 during the 57th Session of the Pan-American H

PhD student Lo Lee will present work from Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh's research group at the Connected Learning Summit 2019, which will be held October 2-5 at the University of California, Irvine. The mission of the summit is to "fuel a growing movement of innovators harnessing emerging technology to expand access to participatory, playful, and creative learning." The program includes presentations and workshops ranging from speculative design, to game walkthroughs, sharing work in progress, and research panels.

A new informatics approach developed by Associate Professor Catherine Blake and Rebecca Kehm, a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, will assist physicians and researchers in their systematic review of medical literature. While previous automated methods to identify outcomes have extracted sentences, Blake and Kehm introduce a more precise method that extracts noun phrases rather than the entire sentence.

Associate Professor Yang Wang will present his research on inclusive privacy at Facebook's Digital Literacy & Transparency Design Jam on October 1 at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Design Jams are interactive workshops organized and facilitated by the Trust, Transparency and Control (TTC) Labs, a cross-industry effort driven by Facebook that hosts research, insights, and prototype design patterns related to improving user experiences for privacy and data. Wang will join a global team of experts from Facebook's Accessibility Team and the TTC Labs in creating innovative designs focused on transparency and control for people with low tech literacy.y

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has appointed Dean Eunice E. Santos to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum Board of Directors. Santos was named dean of the School of Information Sciences in August. She previously served as the Ron Hochsprung Endowed Chair and Professor, and department chair of computer science, at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

A project to support interdisciplinary game studies at the University of Illinois has received funding through the University's Investment for Growth initiative. Games @ Illinois: Playful Design for Transformative Education will support research and teaching at the dynamic intersection of play, immersive technologies, and interactive design. Participating units include the iSchool, Illinois Informatics Institute, College of Media, and College of Fine and Applied Arts.

Collecting and understanding data is important, but equally important is the ability to tell meaningful stories based on data. Students in the iSchool's Data Science Storytelling course (IS 590DST) learn data visualization as well as storytelling techniques, a combination that will prove valuable to their employers as they enter the workforce.

iSchool researchers will present their work at the Workshop on Research Objects 2019 (ro2019), which will be held in conjunction with eScience 2019 on September 24-27 in San Diego, California. The Research Objects approach proposes a way to "package, describe, publish, archive, explore, and understand digital research outputs by reusing existing Web standards and formats." Workshop participants will explore recent advances and challenges remaining to increase Research Object uptake among data providers, researchers, and other stakeholders.

Join iSchool faculty and students for the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), which will take place from September 24-26 in Knoxville, Tennessee. The theme of ALISE 2019 is "Exploring Learning in a Global Information Context." Dean and Professor Eunice E. Santos will provide welcoming remarks at the iSchool-sponsored School Representative's Breakfast at 7:30 a.m. on September 25.

Six iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Summer 2019. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. pau

Professor Ted Underwood will present his research on machine learning at the University of Pittsburgh on September 19. His talk is part of the University's Sawyer Seminar, a year-long project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that brings together a diverse range of practitioners and disciplinary specialists to analyze the co-evolution of data and method across more than a century.

Associate Professor Anita Say Chan presented her research at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S 2019), which took place in New Orleans on September 4-7. The Society is an international, nonprofit association that fosters interdisciplinary scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine (a field often referred to as STS). The theme of this year's meeting was "Innovations, Interruptions, and Regenerations."

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider presented her research on argumentation mining at a doctoral workshop at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland on September 2-3. Her lecture and tutorials were featured during the University’s Language and Cognition program’s “Linguistic and Corpus Perspectives on Argumentative Discourse” workshop. Schneider discussed problem definitions, corpora, and argument annotation for mining arguments from text. 

Associate Professor Masooda Bashir will present her research on trust formation in human-agent collaboration at the Intelligent Systems Conference (IntelliSys) 2019, which will be held September 5-6 in London. The conference, which brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields, focuses on areas of intelligent systems and artificial intelligence and how they apply to the real world.

Associate Professor Carol Tilley shared her comics research at two conferences this summer: 6th International Comics Days, held at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, and the 2nd Annual Conference of the Comics Studies Society, held at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. At the latter event, she received an unexpected honor acknowledging her efforts to support comics scholars.