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."

Members of Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu's research lab won third prize, valued at $20,000, in the LitCoin Natural Language Processing (NLP) Challenge. The challenge, which was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), brought together government, medical research communities, and data scientists to create data-driven knowledge graphs that consolidate scientific literature knowledge across domains.

iSchool students, faculty, and staff presented their research at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2022), which was held in a hybrid format on June 20-24.

PhD student Yuanxi Fu received scholarships for two summer institutes in cybersecurity, network analysis, and computational social science. The summer institutes, which took place in June, were hybrid events hosted by Carnegie Mellon University.

Doctoral candidate Ly Dinh successfully defended her dissertation, "Advances to Network Analysis Theories and Methods for the Understanding of Formal and Emergent Structures in Interpersonal, Corporate/Organizational, and Hazards Response Setting," on May 19.

There are approximately 600,000 individuals in the U.S. who are undergoing hemodialysis (HD) therapy for kidney failure. In hemodialysis, a machine filters wastes, salts, and fluid from the blood when an individual's kidneys are no longer healthy enough to do this work adequately. While lifestyle changes such as getting more exercise and making better nutritional choices would benefit HD patients, they are not popular with patients—leading to poor health outcomes. A new project, led by Assistant Professor Jessie Chin, aims to boost HD patients' commitment to exercise through a long-term motivational interviewing conversational agent (LotMintBot).

Risk assessments are conducted to determine if a chemical found in the environment is harmful to public health; for example, answering questions such as "does chemical 'x' promote cancer?" Conducting an impartial analysis of chemicals is thus critical to ensure that public policies reflect the best available scientific evidence. Unfortunately, the process of retrieving, extracting, and analyzing findings reported in scientific literature is time consuming and can delay when policies are updated to reflect new evidence.

iSchool faculty will present their research at the AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) Informatics Summit, which will be held from March 21-24 in Chicago. The symposium showcases the latest innovations from the community of biomedical informatics researchers and practitioners.

Associate Professor Ryan Cordell will deliver the keynote address at the Marbach-Weimar-Wolfenbüttel (MWW) Research Association Mid-Term Conference, which will be held virtually from Germany on October 14-15. The goal of the MWW is "to provide future-oriented impulses for collaboration in the field of humanities and cultural studies research." The association's mid-term conference will focus on engagement with material and medial losses in the archive and library.

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."

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."

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.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Ryan Cordell will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2021, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. He previously served as an associate professor of English at Northeastern University (NU) and core founding faculty member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks.

A team including Associate Professor Jana Diesner has received a $1 million, three-year grant from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Germany) for their project, "TextTransfer: Assessing Impact Patterns in Research Texts Applying Corpus Driven Methods." The collaborative project is a continuation of the previously funded "Text Transfer" pilot project, in which Diesner and colleagues used a mixed methods approach to build taxonomies and prediction models for secondary practical uses of research findings from final reports of grant-funded work. Their methods included interviews, information extraction, natural language processing, and machine learning.