PhD student Yaman Yu has been named a recipient of the 2025 Google PhD Fellowship in Privacy, Safety, and Security. The fellowship program recognizes outstanding graduate students who are conducting exceptional and innovative research in computer science and related fields, with a special focus on candidates who seek to influence the future of technology. Google PhD fellowships include tuition and fees, a stipend, and mentorship from a Google Research Mentor for up to two years. Google.org is providing over $10 million to support 255 PhD students across 35 countries and 12 research domains.

Professor Dong Wang is the lead author of a book that offers a new perspective on human-centered AI design and human–AI collective intelligence. Social Intelligence: The New Frontier of Integrating Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Social Space, which was recently published by Springer Nature, is co-authored by Lanyu Shang (PhD '24) of Loyola Marymount University and Yang Zhang of Miami University.

Associate Professor Jessie Chin has received a $215,000 grant from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (NMSS grant RFA-2411-44091) for a two-year project to improve how people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS) manage depression. 

Associate Professor Yun Huang has been named a 2025–2026 Linowes Fellow by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. She is also the recipient of a 2024–2025 fellowship, which "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 Jessie Chin has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to support lifelong learning and foster information literacy. 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. Chin’s project, “Search as a Mechanism for Learning,” will be supported by a five-year, $629,451 grant from the NSF.

PhD candidate Michelle Bak successfully defended her dissertation, "Promoting a Healthy and Comprehensive Diet through Theory-Driven Large Language Models-based Agents," on July 14.

Doctoral candidate Smirity Kaushik successfully defended her dissertation, "Digital Trust, Safety, and Privacy in the Age of Emerging Technologies," on June 16. 

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Marianne Aubin Le Quéré will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2026, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Aubin Le Quéré is a PhD candidate in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University. For the 2025-2026 academic year, she will be a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025), which will be held from April 26 to May 1 in Yokohama, Japan. 

Informatics PhD student Olivia Wang won the Grand Prize at the 2025 Research Live! competition, which was held on April 8 in the Campus Instructional Facility Atrium. At the event, which is hosted by the Graduate College, thirteen finalists presented their graduate research in three minutes or less to a general audience. Wang received $500 as the Grand Prize winner.

A team of researchers from the SALT (Social Computing Systems) Lab has been selected as a winner in an international hackathon hosted by the Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence. The LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon brought together over 3,000 students, researchers, and practitioners from 127 countries to build and showcase innovative work in large language model (LLM) agents, grow the AI agent community, and advance LLM agent technology.

Across the nation, 911 dispatch centers are facing a worker shortage. Unfortunately, this understaffing, plus the nature of the job itself, leads to dispatchers who are often overworked and stressed. Meanwhile, when community members need to report a crime, their options are to contact 911 for an emergency or, in a non-emergency situation, call a non-emergency number or fill out an online form. A new chatbot, SafeRBot, designed and developed by Associate Professor Yun Huang, Informatics PhD student Yiren Liu, and BSIS student Tony An seeks to improve the reporting process for non-emergency situations for both community members and dispatch centers.

Teenagers use generative artificial intelligence for many purposes, including emotional support and social interactions. A study by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers found that parents have little understanding of GAI, how their children use it and its potential risks, and that GAI platforms offer insufficient protection to ensure children’s safety.

Little did doctoral candidate Kainen Bell know in 2013 when he was an undergraduate studying abroad in Brazil that the country would play a major role in his future dissertation research. Since his first trip, he has returned to Brazil multiple times, even completing a Fulbright study and working for a community-based organization in the country. Now, Bell is preparing to return again, this time to spend ten months conducting research as a recipient of the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowship.

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the 26th International Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) ACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2024), which will be held on October 28-30 in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The conference is the premier forum for presenting research on design, evaluation, use, and education related to computing for people with disabilities and older adults.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo a four-year, $459,000 grant to create inclusive learning environments and advance workplace equity for persons with disabilities in STEM fields. The project will build on Seo's work in developing open-source tools that can augment visual charts into touchable (braille), readable (text), and audible (sound) representations.

Associate Professor Yun Huang has been named a 2024-2025 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."

Doctoral candidate Si Chen successfully defended her dissertation, "Designing Ethical Emotion AI-based Learning Experience among Ability-Diverse Users," on July 30.

iSchool faculty are studying ways to improve user experience, with a common goal of improving technology and applications for the needs of individual users. These researchers are working with diverse groups to gain feedback, and several current projects are focused on experiences for users with disabilities.

PhD student Abhinav Choudhry has received a 2024-2026 Institute for Information Literacy at Purdue research award for his project, "Gamified Finance Simulator for Older Adults: A Financial Literacy and Vulnerability Intervention." The $4,000 award is intended for research that enables people to navigate and contribute to today's information environment. Associate Professor Rachel Adler and PhD student Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou will serve as co-principal investigators on the project, which aims to create a gamified simulation of digital banking.