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.

Associate Professors Yang Wang and Yun Huang are spearheading a project in collaboration with experts from the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University to help ensure emerging artificial intelligence (AI) development proceeds in a democratic manner that is mindful of underserved groups. Informatics PhD student Tanusree Sharma is also leading this initiative as a critical component of her dissertation work.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2023, which will be held from August 19-25 in Macao, S.A.R.

Associate Professor Dong Wang is the lead author of a book that introduces a new paradigm integrating edge computing, humans, and artificial intelligence (AI). Social Edge Computing: Empowering Human-Centric Edge Computing, Learning and Intelligence (Springer) is coauthored by Daniel "Yue" Zhang, research scientist at Amazon Alexa AI. 

PhD student Smit Desai received the Gary Mardsen Travel Award to present his research at the ACM conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) 2023, which was held on July 19-21 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The award, worth $2,500, supported Desai’s travel expenses.

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).

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research and contribute in a number of other ways at DH2023, the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), on July 10-14 in Graz, Austria. The digital humanities (DH) conference is the largest event of the international DH community and unites scholars from across the globe. The theme of this year's conference is "Collaboration as Opportunity."

Doctoral candidate Nikolaus Parulian successfully defended his dissertation, "A Conceptual Model for Transparent, Reusable, and Collaborative Data Cleaning," on June 29.

Associate Professor Jingrui He is developing computational tools to protect against leaks and/or unauthorized use of sensitive data held and distributed among Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies and other parties. Her project, "Privacy-Preserving Analytics for Non-IID Data," has been awarded a three-year, $651,927 grant from the DHS Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency (CAOE).

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at The ACM Web Conference 2023, which will be held from April 30 to May 4 in Austin, Texas. The conference is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics related to the Web.

Associate Professor Ryan Cordell and Assistant Professor Emily Maemura will discuss their research at a symposium exploring the materiality and historical value of digital texts. Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography and Rare Book School, Preserving and Analyzing Digital Texts will be held online on April 21 from 3:00-4:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

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. 

A paper coauthored by PhD student Zhixuan (Kyrie) Zhou and Mengyi Wei, a PhD student at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, received the Best Paper Award at the 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-56). The conference, which was held in Maui on January 3-6, is one of the longest-standing working scientific conferences in information technology management.

The University of Illinois is part of a nine-university consortium led by the University of Buffalo that has been awarded a $20 million grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish a national institute that develops artificial intelligence systems that identify and assist young children with speech and/or language processing challenges.

Members of Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, will present their research at the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022), which will be held from November 29-December 1 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and also virtually. NeurIPS is one of the most prestigious and competitive international conferences in machine learning and computational neuroscience.  

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 25th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2022) and the 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2022). 

How can current and future generations help to ensure that technologies are created and used ethically? One way is effectively teaching students about cybersecurity and AI ethics. Associate Professor of Information Sciences Yang Wang and colleagues from the University of Illinois and other universities are interested in the topic and have been conducting research into how to improve instruction. Notably, their research team also has two high school students.

It is evident that Hurricane Ian's recent devastation in Florida will impact the state economically for years to come. Tragedies such as this have motivated scientists to gain a better understanding of when such events might occur and how to cope with them once they do.

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."

Students often have difficulty estimating how well they know a topic, which can lead to inefficient learning or suboptimal educational outcomes. A new project led by Associate Professor Dong Wang and Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch aims to improve students' ability to estimate their knowledge using artificial intelligence (AI) methods. The researchers were recently awarded a three-year, $850,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their project, "A Metacognitive Calibration Intervention Powered by Fair and Private Machine Learning."