Associate Professor Yun Huang, Assistant Professor Jiaqi Ma, and Assistant Professor Haohan Wang have received computing resources from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a two-year pilot program led by the National Science Foundation in partnership with other federal agencies and nongovernmental partners. The goal of the pilot is to support AI-related research with particular emphasis on societal challenges. Last month, awardees presented their research at the NAIRR Pilot Annual Meeting.

Doctoral candidate Kanyao Han successfully defended his dissertation, "Natural Language Processing for Supporting Impact Assessment of Funded Projects," on January 7, 2025.

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.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData 2024), which will be held from December 15-18 in Washington, D.C. BigData 2024 is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics in artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics.

Complementary medicine approaches, such as natural products, acupuncture, and meditation, are increasingly used by the public and accepted by the medical community. However, knowledge of the safety and effectiveness of these approaches, as well as their impact on human health, is limited in comparison to conventional medical approaches.

The highly technical language used in biomedical publications makes it difficult for nonexpert audiences to fully understand their content and draw insights. The BioLaySumm competition focuses on making biomedical research publications more accessible to lay audiences. This year, the winning team was a group from Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu's research lab: PhD students Zhiwen (Jerome) You and Shufan Ming and Computer Science master's student Shruthan Radhakrishna. 

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Kahyun Choi joined the faculty as an assistant professor on August 16, 2024. She most recently served as an assistant professor in the Department of Information and Library Science at Indiana University Bloomington.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024), which will be held from August 11-16 in Bangkok, Thailand. ACL 2024 is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics in natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2024), which will be held from June 16-21 in Mexico City, Mexico.

Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo and Mine Dogucu, professor of statistics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California Irvine, have coauthored a chapter in the new book Teaching Accessible Computing. The goal of the book, which is edited by Alannah Oleson, Amy J. Ko and Richard Ladner, is to help educators feel confident in introducing topics related to disability and accessible computing and integrating accessibility into their courses.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie and Professor Ted Underwood will present their research at the Digital Humanities International Symposium on March 13 and 15 in Japan.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research at the 37^th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023), which will be held from December 10-16 in New Orleans, Louisiana. NeurIPS is one of the most prestigious and competitive international conferences in machine learning and computational neuroscience.

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).

A project to examine the circulation of newspaper reports about anti-Black violence in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. newspapers could provide context to the spread of white supremacist ideologies in social media today. 

Assistant Professor Jessie Chin and her team have received a $30,000 Arnold O. Beckman Research Award from the U of I Campus Research Board for their project, "Augmenting Health Self-Regulation across the Cancer Survivorship Continuum by Digital Phenotyping." The researchers will develop a model of how breast cancer survivors manage their health by passively tracking survivors' interactions with their personal digital devices to identify when assistance is needed. 

Doctoral candidate Linh Hoang successfully defended her dissertation, "Natural Language Processing to Support Evidence Quality Assessment of Biomedical Literature," on December 8.

Randomized clinical trials are valuable in determining the effectiveness of health treatments. But problems with design, execution or reporting of the trial process can lead to unreliable findings, excessive costs, and, potentially, harm for patients. Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and his colleagues seek to address this problem with the help of a $1,328,502 grant from the National Institutes of Health.

A new project led by Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and Associate Professor Jodi Schneider will assist researchers and journals in evaluating citation behavior in biomedical publications. They recently received a two-year, $300,000 grant from the Office of Research Integrity of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for their project, "Natural Language Processing to Assess and Improve Citation Integrity in Biomedical Publications."

Professor Catherine Blake will present the keynote at the Health Science Librarians of Illinois (HSLI) Annual Conference, which will be held virtually from September 7-9. HSLI promotes the professional and educational development of Illinois librarians, information professionals, and library students in the health sciences.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students presented their research at Digital Humanities 2022, the annual conference of the International Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. The theme of this year's conference, which was held online on July 25-29, was "Responding to Asian Diversity."