PhD student Morgan Lundy won first place in the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) /Jean Tague-Sutcliffe Doctoral Student Research Poster Competition for her poster, "'Have a flare with me!': A content analysis, grounded theory, and collaborative design approach to disability storytelling on TikTok." For the competition, posters were judged on practical/theoretical significance, design and method of research, the student’s oral presentation, and the organization, clarity, and aesthetics of visual materials.

BSIS student Anee Anisa discusses her practicum experience at the American College of Emergency Physicians, a professional organization of emergency medicine physicians in the U.S.

MSLIS student and author Jessica Smith, who uses the pen name Jessika Fleck, has published a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, Murder at the Old Willow Boarding School. In her latest book, readers (as students in the academy for gifted children) must solve their own murder and stop the killer from striking again.

Informatics PhD student Daniela Markazi has been named the doctoral student winner of the 2023 Graduate Student Leadership Award from The Graduate College. The award recognizes two graduate students (one master's and one doctoral) who have exhibited outstanding services that has positively impacted the UIUC campus and wider communities.

Several faculty and students will present their research at the 2023 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW 2023), which will be held in Minneapolis, Minneapolis, from October 14-18. CSCW is the premier venue for experts from industry and academia to explore the technical, social, material, and theoretical challenges of designing technology to support collaborative work and life activities.

Join iSchool faculty, staff, and students for the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), which will take place from October 2-5 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The theme of ALISE 2023 is "Bridge the Gap: Teaching, Learning, Practice, and Competencies."

Two students who were enrolled in the Government Information (IS 594) course this past spring are now published authors. Their papers began as their final project for the course, which acquaints students with government publications. With the students' permission, course instructor and Adjunct Lecturer Dominique Hallett submitted the papers to DttP: Documents to the People, and they were published in the journal's most recent edition (Vol. 51, No. 3).

BSIS student Miranda Ma discusses her internship at the AbbVie Innovation Center. Ma advises job seekers to keep an open mind and not limit their job search to a specific industry, especially for a field like user experience.

MSLIS student Andrea Serna has been selected to participate in the 2023-2025 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Kaleidoscope Diversity Scholars Program. The Kaleidoscope Program offers financial support to scholars as well as leadership development through the ARL Annual Leadership Symposium, a formal mentoring program, career placement assistance, and a site visit to an ARL member library.

Associate Professors Yang Wang and Yun Huang are spearheading a project in collaboration with experts from the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University to help ensure emerging artificial intelligence (AI) development proceeds in a democratic manner that is mindful of underserved groups. Informatics PhD student Tanusree Sharma is also leading this initiative as a critical component of her dissertation work.

PhD student Courtney Richardson has been selected as the winner of the 2023 Litwin Books Award for Ongoing Dissertation Research in the Philosophy of Information. The award, which consists of $1,000 and a certificate, is given annually to a graduate student who is working on a dissertation on the philosophy of information, broadly construed.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2023, which will be held from August 19-25 in Macao, S.A.R.

The PhD degree program at the iSchool celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2023. This profile is part of a special series featuring PhD alumni. Miriam Sweeney (PhD '13) is an associate professor at the University of Alabama.

Leep (MSLIS online) students Amanda Helm and Kaitlyn Weger have been selected to receive scholarships from the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI). The scholarship provides financial assistance to current employees of CARLI Governing Member Libraries who are pursuing a master's degree in library and information science (MSLIS) at the University of Illinois. CARLI provides library services and support to 128 Illinois public universities, community colleges, private colleges and universities, and special libraries.

PhD student Zachary (Zak) Kilhoffer sums up his research interests in two words: tech policy. He joined the iSchool in 2021 after working overseas as a labor economist.

PhD student Smit Desai received the Gary Mardsen Travel Award to present his research at the ACM conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) 2023, which was held on July 19-21 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The award, worth $2,500, supported Desai’s travel expenses.

A paper coauthored by PhD student Sullam Jeoung, Associate Professor Jana Diesner, and Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu was named Best Long Paper at TrustNLP: Third Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing, which was held in conjunction with the Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023).

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research and contribute in a number of other ways at DH2023, the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), on July 10-14 in Graz, Austria. The digital humanities (DH) conference is the largest event of the international DH community and unites scholars from across the globe. The theme of this year's conference is "Collaboration as Opportunity."

Doctoral candidate Nikolaus Parulian successfully defended his dissertation, "A Conceptual Model for Transparent, Reusable, and Collaborative Data Cleaning," on June 29.

Doctoral candidate Ruohua Han successfully defended her dissertation, "Exploring the Sharing of Autobiographical Memories and Memory Objects in Chinese Families," on June 15.