Glen Worthey, associate director for research support services at the HathiTrust Research Center, is among the first recipients of new grant funding to advance digital scholarship in cultural institutions, through a joint initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council. Worthey is the project director of "AEOLIAN (Artificial intelligence for cultural organizations)," a collaboration with Loughborough University in the U.K. The project will bring together a team of experts to develop and examine new approaches–particularly artificial intelligence and machine learning–for improving access to and use of digital collections that are currently restricted due to privacy concerns or copyright protection. 

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.

Health care workers often don't adopt new guidelines for best practices in medical care until well after those guidelines are established. A team of researchers led by Eunice E. Santos, the dean of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has developed a new computational modeling and simulation framework to analyze decision-making and identify effective dissemination strategies for medical guidelines.

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021), which will be held virtually from May 8-13. The conference, considered the most prestigious in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, attracts researchers and practitioners from around the globe. The theme for CHI 2021 is "Making Waves, Combining Strengths."

iSchool researchers will present their work at The Web Conference 2021. The conference, which will be held virtually from April 12-23, 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.

Associate Professor Jingrui He will present her research at the International Workshop on Deep Learning on Graphs, which will be held in conjunction with the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'21) on February 2-9. The one-day workshop brings together academic researchers and industrial practitioners from different backgrounds to investigate new approaches and methods at the intersection of Graph Neural Networks and real-world applications.

Doctoral candidate Natã Barbosa successfully defended his dissertation, "Exploring Algorithmic Realism in the Data Economy," on January 14. His committee included Associate Professor Yang Wang (chair); Professor Michael Twidale; Gang Wang, assistant professor of computer science at Illinois; and Blase Ur, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Chicago.

PhD student Linh Hoang will present her research with Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider and Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch at the AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) Annual Symposium, which will be held virtually from November 14-18. The symposium showcases the latest innovations from the community of biomedical informatics researchers and practitioners.

Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and PhD student Linh Hoang will present their research at the AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) Annual Symposium, which will be held virtually from November 14-18. The symposium showcases the latest innovations from the community of biomedical informatics researchers and practitioners.

iSchool Affiliate Professor Clara M. Chu, director of the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs and Mortenson Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois, along with collaborators from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and the University of Texas at Austin, have received a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The $208,142 grant will fund the IDEA (Innovation, Disruption, Enquiry, Access) Institute on Artificial intelligence (AI).

Doctoral candidate Rezvaneh (Shadi) Rezapour will present her research at the 2nd Annual Michigan Institute Consortium for Data Scientists in Training, a virtual event held from October 29-30. Rezapour is part of the Institute’s 2020 cohort, which includes researchers from 28 universities. The competitive program offers graduate students and postdocs the opportunity to participate in research talks, networking sessions, and mentoring opportunities.

The Department of Homeland Security has awarded Associate Professor Jingrui He a two-year, $319,568 grant to study how the risk of foreign influence on news media can be mitigated. Her project, "Towards a Computational Framework for Disinformation Trinity: Heterogeneity, Generation, and Explanation," will lead to a new suite of algorithms and software tools to detect, predict, generate, and understand disinformation dissemination. Hanghang Tong, associate professor of computer science at Illinois, will serve as co-principal investigator.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch a three-year, $987,015 grant to study potential bias in adaptive learning software through his project, "Collaborative Research: Exploring Algorithmic Fairness and Potential Bias in K-12 Mathematics Adaptive Learning." Bosch will observe and interview students using adaptive math learning software to discover what aspects of their identity are most salient in the adaptive learning context and then investigate possible algorithmic biases related to the identities that students express. Steven Ritter, founder and chief scientist at Carnegie Learning, will serve as co-principal investigator on the project, which also includes researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Illinois College of Education.

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.