The National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes program awarded $20 million to the Center for Digital Agriculture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for the new Artificial Intelligence for Future Agricultural Resilience, Management, and Sustainability (AIFARMS) Institute. The program, a joint effort between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture was created in response to the White House's 2019 update to the National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan, which aims to provide support for AI research that focuses on impacting and improving society. iSchool Associate Professor Jingrui He is one of the researchers involved in the AIFARMS Institute.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Zoe LeBlanc will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2021. She is currently a postdoctoral associate and the Weld Fellow at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University.

Two projects led by iSchool faculty members have been selected as Humanities Research Institute (HRI) Research Clusters for 2020-2021. Formerly known as the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, HRI fosters interdisciplinary study in the humanities, arts, and social sciences at the University of Illinois. HRI Research Clusters enable faculty and graduate students to “develop questions or subjects of inquiry that require or would be enhanced by collaborative work.” Projects selected as clusters receive grants of $2,500 to support their activities.

Assistant Professor Jessie Chin has received a $389,810 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to identify false information about the HPV vaccine and model its impact on risk perceptions.

Dawei Zhou and Yao Zhou, PhD students in computer science, will present the work of iSchool Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, at The Web Conference 2020. The conference, which will be held virtually from April 20-24, will address the evolution and current state of the Web through the lens of computer science, computational social science, economics, public policy, and Web-based applications.

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the Women in Data Science Urbana-Champaign Conference (WiDS), which will be held on March 6 at the University of Illinois. The event, which is organized by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and cosponsored by the iSchool, is one of over 200 WiDS conferences being held worldwide.

Members of Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, will present a paper and tutorial at the thirty-fourth Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference, which will take place on February 7-12 in New York. The AAAI meeting is one of the world's leading conferences in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The event promotes research in artificial intelligence and scientific exchange among researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines.

A multi-institutional $1.2M grant from the National Science Foundation will accelerate discovery and exploration of the synthetic biology design space. Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie serves as a principal investigator on the project, "Synthetic Biology Knowledge Systems," which brings together researchers from the University of Illinois; University of Utah; University of California, San Diego; Virginia Commonwealth University; Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and the non-partisan and objective research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.

Professor Ted Underwood will give a lecture at Leiden University in the Netherlands as the Visiting Scaliger Professor for 2019. The position is affiliated with both the Scaliger Institute of Leiden University Libraries and the Faculty of Humanities. In his talk on November 21, "The Role of the Humanities in an Information Age," Underwood will discuss how "humanists are joining hands with data science to create a form of public reflection that fuses the scale of machine learning with the historical self-consciousness of humanistic tradition."

Assistant Professor Yun Huang presented her research at the 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2019), which was held November 9-13 in Austin, Texas. CSCW is the premier venue for experts from industry and academia to explore the technical, social, material, and theoretical challenges of designing technology to support collaborative work and life activities.

A new informatics approach developed by Associate Professor Catherine Blake and Rebecca Kehm, a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, will assist physicians and researchers in their systematic review of medical literature. While previous automated methods to identify outcomes have extracted sentences, Blake and Kehm introduce a more precise method that extracts noun phrases rather than the entire sentence.

Professor Ted Underwood will present his research on machine learning at the University of Pittsburgh on September 19. His talk is part of the University's Sawyer Seminar, a year-long project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that brings together a diverse range of practitioners and disciplinary specialists to analyze the co-evolution of data and method across more than a century.

Associate Professor Masooda Bashir will present her research on trust formation in human-agent collaboration at the Intelligent Systems Conference (IntelliSys) 2019, which will be held September 5-6 in London. The conference, which brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields, focuses on areas of intelligent systems and artificial intelligence and how they apply to the real world.