Research conducted by Assistant Professor Jessie Chin's Adaptive Cognition and Interaction Design Lab (ACTION) provided the foundation for an article recently published in the high-impact Journal of Medical Internet Research. PhD student Tre Tomaszewski is the first author on the peer-reviewed article, "Identifying False Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccine Information and Corresponding Risk Perceptions from Twitter: Advanced Predictive Models."

Sara L. Schwebel, professor and director of the Center for Children's Books, and Jocelyn Van Tuyl, professor of French at New College of Florida, have coedited a new book, Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children's Literature at the Newbery Centennial, which was recently published by Routledge. The Newbery Medal, the oldest and most influential children's book award in the United States, marks its 100th anniversary this year. In Dust Off the Gold Medal, Schwebel and Van Tuyl collect fourteen essays, written by contributors across the country, who examine Newbery winners that have been understudied by literary scholars.

The iSchool at Illinois is part of a multidisciplinary research team that has been awarded $750,000 to develop digital literacy tools to curb the deleterious effects of online disinformation. The grant is from the National Science Foundation's Convergence Accelerator, a program launched in 2019 that builds upon basic research and discovery to accelerate solutions toward societal impact. The research team, led by the University of Buffalo (UB), includes experts in artificial intelligence, the humanities, information science and other fields. In addition to Illinois and UB, partners include Clemson University, Lehigh University, and Northeastern University.

The iSchool at Illinois will host the 2021 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), which will be held virtually from September 27-30. JCDL is a major international forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. The conference will feature paper and poster presentations as well as a wide variety of tutorials and workshops offering hands-on experiences with different digital libraries and online archives.

Join iSchool faculty, staff, and students for the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), which will take place virtually from September 20-24. The theme of ALISE 2021 is "Crafting a Resilient Future: Leadership, Education, and Inspiration."

In the event of a natural disaster like Hurricane Ida, artificial intelligence (AI) may be used to assess damage, using imagery reports to identify the severity of flooded areas. Using AI in disaster scene assessment has its limitations, however, and input from the people affected is needed, in order to get a better picture. A new project being led by Associate Professor Dong Wang will explore the power of human intelligence to address the failures of existing AI schemes in disaster damage assessment applications and boost the performance of the system. Wang has received a three-year, $499,786 National Science Foundation (NSF) Human-Centered Computing (HCC) grant for his new project, "DeepCrowd: A Crowd-assisted Deep Learning-based Disaster Scene Assessment System with Active Human-AI Interactions."

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to assess how to identify potential sources of bias in research and how confident we can be in the conclusions drawn from a particular body of evidence. This prestigious award is given in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Schneider's project, "Using Network Analysis to Assess Confidence in Research Synthesis," will be supported by a five-year, $599,963 grant from the NSF.

Associate Professor Maria Bonn and Professor Mike Twidale have authored a two-part concept piece on "Informated Food" in the ASIS&T publication, Information Matters. It is one of the first featured pieces in this new digital-only forum for information science, which shares research evidence and industry developments, news, and opinion with various audiences, including the public, industry professionals, educational practitioners, and policymakers.

A paper authored by PhD student Smirity Kaushik and Associate Professor Yang Wang received the IAPP SOUPS Privacy Award at the 17th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2021). The symposium, which was held August 8-10, brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners in human-computer interaction, security, and privacy.

A paper by Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and Informatics PhD students Haoyang Liu and Janina Sarol received the Best System Paper Award at the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021). SemEval, which was held on August 5-6, is a series of natural language processing (NLP) research workshops whose mission is "to advance the current state of the art in semantic analysis and to help create high-quality annotated datasets in a range of increasingly challenging problems in natural language semantics."

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois offers a variety of summer programs that provide undergraduates with the opportunity to address fundamental challenges in high-performance computing, data analysis, visualization, cybersecurity, and other areas of interest. This summer, interns participated and contributed to various interdisciplinary projects at NCSA involving high-performance computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. BS/IS student Shriya Srikanth participated in the NCSA's Students Pushing INnovation (SPIN) program.

The iSchool's Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) will highlight responsible data science and artificial intelligence (AI) in a special speaker series this fall. Topics to be addressed in the new series include explainability, reproducibility, biases, data curation and governance, and privacy. 

According to Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider, a silver lining of the pandemic is that it has brought attention to the retraction of scientific publications. Schneider's project, "Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda," has also brought attention to the problem of retracted research, resulting in a recent report with recommendations. The project, which was supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, brought together a variety of stakeholders, including funders, editors, peer reviewers, authors, and publishers.

iSchool researchers presented their work at Balisage, an annual conference devoted to the theory and practice of descriptive markup and related technologies for structuring and managing information. The conference, which attracts markup practitioners and theoreticians worldwide, was held virtually from August 2-6.

PhD students Jessica Cheng and Lo Lee have been awarded Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships from the Beta Phi Mu Honor Society. The $3,000 fellowship supports students who are working on their dissertations in library and information science, information studies, informatics, or a related field.

Teaching Associate Professor David Dubin and Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu have been named National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Faculty Fellows for the 2021-22 academic year. This competitive program for faculty and researchers at the University of Illinois provides seed funding for new projects that include NCSA staff as integral contributors to the research.

While empathy is important in almost every aspect of daily life, it is not always a priority in the development of technology, especially technology using artificial intelligence (AI). iSchool researchers are working to address this gap by using empathy to teach high school students about cybersecurity and AI ethics issues. Led by Associate Professor Yang Wang, the project, "Teaching High School Students about Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence Ethics via Empathy-Driven Hands-On Projects," has received a two-year, $297,575 National Science Foundation (NSF) Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER). Assistant Professor Yun Huang; Pilyoung Kim, associate professor of psychology at the University of Denver; and Tom Yeh, associate professor of computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder, will serve as co-principal investigators.

PhD student Smit Desai will discuss his research with Assistant Professor Jessie Chin at the ACM Conversational User Interfaces conference (CUI 2021), which will be held virtually from July 27-29. The goal of the conference is "to further develop a collaborative community around human-computer interaction issues in speech and language technology, with a specific interest in theory-based and applied scientific issues in the field of speech and text-based conversational user interfaces."

Teaching Associate Professor David Dubin, Postdoctoral Research Associate Jacob Jett, and Adjunct Lecturer Bobby Bothmann presented their research at the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization (NASKO 2021), which was held virtually on July 9-11. The theme of this year's symposium was "Resilience, Resistance, and Reflection: Knowledge Organization at a Crossroads."

iSchool researchers have co-organized a highly interactive workshop on traceable, transparent, and trustworthy research as part of ProvenanceWeek 2021. The T7 Workshop: Provenance for Transparent Research aims to engage attendees in a focused conversation about how methods for automated provenance capture, storage, query, inference, and visualization can make research more transparent and the trustworthiness of results easier to evaluate, both by other researchers and the public. The free workshop will be held on July 22 from 9:00 a.m.-12:45 p.m. CT.