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.

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 Yaoyao Liu joined the faculty as an assistant professor on September 5, 2024. He most recently served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Yue Guo joined the faculty as an assistant professor on August 16, 2024. She recently completed her PhD in biomedical and health informatics at the University of Washington. 

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.

A project led by the Game Studies and Design (GSD) program in Informatics has been selected to receive the Illinois Global Institute New Approaches to International Area and Global Studies grant. The project, "Extending Capacities of Area and Global Studies to Shape the Future of Emerging Technologies," is the inaugural recipient of the two-year, $30,000 award.

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.

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.

Doctoral candidate Jenna Kim successfully defended her dissertation, "Evaluating Pre-Trained Language Modeling Approaches for Author Name Disambiguation," on June 11, 2024.

Doctoral candidate Lanyu Shang successfully defended her dissertation, "A Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence Approach Towards Equality, Well-Being, and Responsibility in Sustainable Communities," on June 19.

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.