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.
The University Library's Diversity Committee and the iSchool's Diversity Committee are recipients of a Strategic Programs Initiative Funds grant to support programs on "Becoming a Trans Inclusive Library."
For a decade, the Illinois Cyber Security Scholars Program (ICSSP) has been offering scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Illinois in exchange for government service after graduation. The program is offered through the University's Information Trust Institute (ITI), an interdisciplinary research center addressing all aspects of information trust.
Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, is the recipient of a 2019-2020 Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellowship from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The Fiddler Fellowship is part of a $2 million endowment from Jerry Fiddler and Melissa Alden to the University of Illinois in support of the Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media (eDream) Institute at NCSA.
Affiliate Professor Karrie Karahalios, professor of computer science, been recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, as a 2019 Distinguished Member.
Director of the Center for Health Informatics and iSchool Research Scientist Ian Brooks gave an invited talk at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Kaleidoscope academic conference, which was held on December 4-6 in Atlanta, Georgia. ITU is the United Nations' specialized agency for information and communication technologies. Brooks’ presentation was part of the WHO special panel on the digital transformation of the health sector.
Adjunct Assistant Professor Ellen Knutson (MS '02, PhD '08) was part of the U.S. delegation to the Dartmouth Conference: U.S.-Russia Citizen Dialogue in the 21st Century, which took place on December 3-5 in Dayton, Ohio. The Dartmouth Conference is the longest continuous bilateral dialogue between citizens of Russia and the U.S. focused on the changing nature of the relationship between the two countries.
Associate Professor and BS/IS Program Director Emily Knox has coauthored a chapter in the book Freedom of Information and Social Science Research Design, which is being published by Routledge this month. Edited by Kevin Walby and Alex Luscombe, the book demonstrates how Freedom of Information (FOI) law and processes can contribute to social science research design across sociology, criminology, political science, anthropology, journalism, and education.
Affiliate Professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, professor and coordinator for information literacy services in the University Library, has been elected as the co-secretary general of the International Steering Committee (ISC) for the UNESCO Global Alliance on Partnerships for Media and Information Literacy (GAPMIL). GAPMIL is a groundbreaking effort to promote international cooperation to ensure that all citizens have access to media and information competencies. In consultation with the international agencies, the ISC coordinates the overall implementation of GAPMIL activities.
