Associate Professor and MSLIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke will discuss her research on fake news, misinformation, and disinformation at the 2018 Public Interest Technology Summit, which will be held on October 13 at Harvard University. The summit is hosted by digital HKS, an independent project at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs that is committed to teaching public leaders to understand how to design, build, and engage with digital technologies as they relate to civic participation, digital equity and inclusion, governance of government platforms, and accountability.

Doctoral candidate Kirstin Phelps will participate in ISIC 2018: The Information Behaviour Conference, which will be held October 9-11 in Krakow, Poland. The conference is a platform for a broad and multidisciplinary community of researchers to present and discuss how people engage with information in a myriad of contexts.

The 2018 Illinois Library Association (ILA) Annual Conference will be held from October 9-11 in Peoria. The theme of this year's conference is "Libraries: All Inclusive." Visit with the iSchool at Booth #315 in the Exhibit Hall on October 10 and 11. The School will also host an alumni breakfast on October 11.

PhD student Michael Gryk presented his research in data curation at iPRES 2018, which was held in Boston from September 25-27. The conference brought together researchers, archivists, librarians, providers, and other experts to share recent developments and innovative projects in the field of digital preservation.

Doctoral students Jamillah Gabriel and Lettycia Terrones will discuss diversity in LIS education at the Joint Conference of Librarians of Color (JCLC), which will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from September 26-30. The conference brings together librarians, staff, and supporters as well as community participants to explore issues of diversity in libraries.

Ashley Batchelder, a master's student in the Leep online program, presented her library's physical activity programs at the Association for Rural and Small Libraries (ARSL) Conference, which was held from September 13-15 in Springfield, Illinois. Batchelder, who is an assistant children's librarian at the Mt. Zion (IL) District Library, took part in the session, "Let's Get Moving at the Library! Physical Activity Programs for Fun and for Health." She presented two programs that promote physical activity at her library: the Music and Movement program she developed and the library's Annual Garden Party that kicks off the summer reading program.

When Nintendo introduced the Wii home video game console in 2006, the company needed to show the general public how the Wii was unlike other game consoles currently on the market. To do so, Nintendo created an experience trailer to help potential users understand how it would feel to use the Wii. Professor and MS/IM Program Director Michael Twidale and Stefan Rennick-Egglestone, a senior research fellow in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham, discuss this area of research in their article, "Experience Trailers."

Doctoral student Jessica Cheng will present her research at the 18th European Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop, which will take place on September 13 in Porto, Portugal. The workshop, held in conjunction with the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2018) and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI 2018), will explore the potential of knowledge organization systems (KOS) such as classification systems, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, and lexical databases in the context of current developments and possibilities.

Doctoral candidate Jacob Jett presented his research in digital cultural heritage collections at the Japanese Association for the Digital Humanities annual conference (JADH 2018), which was held September 9-11, in Tokyo, Japan. The theme of this year's conference was "Leveraging Open Data."

Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner will serve as a keynote speaker for the fifth annual Historical Network Research Conference (HNR 2018), which will be held from September 11-13 in Brno, the Czech Republic. The conference brings together historians, social scientists, and computer scientists to foster awareness of the possibilities of network research and create opportunities for sharing cross- and multidisciplinary approaches to the networked past.

A class project in the Global Health Informatics course has resulted in a journal publication for Ian Brooks, instructor and research scientist, and students Noah Samuel (PhD) and Janina Sarol (CAS).

The identification of proper names of people, organizations, and locations from raw texts, referred to as Named Entity Recognition (NER), can be highly accurate when researchers use NER tools on a large collection of text with proper syntax. However, using existing NER tools for analyzing social media text can lead to poor identification of named entities. TwitterNER, an open-source tool developed by doctoral student Shubhanshu Mishra, who is supervised by Assistant Professor Jana Diesner, can help researchers interested in performing NER on social media text.

Associate Professor Carol Tilley will be the keynote speaker at the Marantz Picturebook Research Symposium, "Comics and the Graphic Narrative: The Future of the Movement," which will be held August 5-6 at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie was the keynote speaker for The Future of the Scholarly Book conference, which was held July 31 at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. The event, sponsored by Springer Nature and organized by the ANU Library, was designed to address challenges, issues, and trends in the modern scholarly monograph, particularly in social sciences and humanities.

The first Annual Conference of the Comics Studies Society, "Mind the Gaps! The Futures of the Field," will be held August 9-11 at the iSchool at Illinois. This inaugural conference, cosponsored by the iSchool and The Center for Children's Books, seeks to bring together scholars, artists, and other members of the international comics studies community for critical conversations about the future of the field, in all its multidisciplinary and transcultural formations.

Assistant Professor Peter Darch will discuss problems with reproducibility in research at the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2018 Conference, which will be held July 25-28 at Lancaster University in the UK. EASST brings together a variety of disciplines, with many members having qualifications in both natural science/engineering and social sciences. The theme of this year's conference is "Meetings – Making Science, Technology, and Society Together."

Associate Professor Kate McDowell will present her research on storytelling at two upcoming conferences, the Midwest Association of Colleges and Employers (ACE) Annual Conference, which will be held July 23-25 in Rosemont, Illinois, and the National Storytelling Summit, which will be held July 25-28 in Kansas City, Missouri.

Every year, more than one in three individuals aged 65 and older will experience a fall. Falls are the most common cause of injury in older adults, and can create ongoing health problems. But treatment and awareness of falling usually happens after a fall has already occurred.

Assistant Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner has been named a 2018-2019 Linowes Fellow by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. The fellowship "provides exceptionally promising tenure-stream faculty with opportunities for innovation and discovery using the Cline Center's data holdings and/or analytic tools."

Assistant Professor Matthew Turk will present the Whole Tale research project at the 17th annual Scientific Computing with Python conference (SciPy 2018), which will be held July 9-15 in Austin, Texas. The conference brings together participants from industry, academia, and government for tutorials, talks, and developer sprints.