Large language models are built with safety protocols designed to prevent them from answering malicious queries and providing dangerous information. But users can employ techniques known as "jailbreaks" to bypass the safety guardrails and get LLMs to answer a harmful query.

Associate Professor Dong Wang will present the keynote at the second workshop on generative AI for recommender systems and personalization on August 4, in Toronto, Canada. The event will be held in conjunction with KDD 2025. 

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.

President Donald Trump has threatened to levy higher tariffs on more than two dozen countries and on various products in the past few months. China in particular has been a target of the administration’s trade wars, aimed at preventing its dominance in areas such as artificial intelligence, although the U.S. government announced recently that it would sell advanced semiconductors used in AI to China. Assistant Professor Meicen Sun spoke with News Bureau arts and humanities editor Jodi Heckel about the effects of trade restrictions.

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. 

Glen Layne-Worthey, associate director for research support services for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), and J. Stephen Downie, professor and HTRC co-director, have edited a new book, Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Organisations, which was recently released by UCL Press. 

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Yonghan Jung will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2025, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. 

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.

A new project led by Professor Jingrui He aims to help scientists monitor disruptions to the Earth’s ecosystem, such as climate change. She recently received support for her work through an Amazon Research Award, which includes $60,000 in cash and an additional $40,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits.

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. 

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.

PhD student Tianxin Wei has been awarded an Amazon Post Internship Fellowship, which will provide $20,000 in unrestricted funds and $20,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits to support Wei's research with his advisor, Professor Jingrui He. For the past two summers, Wei has served as an applied scientist intern at Amazon in Palo Alto, California. He has been part of a team that is working on search query understanding within Amazon apps and services, as well as developing shopping foundation models.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Professor Ted Underwood will give an invited lecture on artificial intelligence (AI) and the humanities on October 23 at the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The lecture is part of the center's "Forum on Keywords" programming for 2024-2025.