Associate Professor Jingrui He has been awarded a three-year, $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop explainable techniques to detect and track rare categories. For her project, "RareXplain: A Computational Framework for Explainable Rare Category Analysis," she will focus on real-world problems where underrepresented, rare (abnormal) examples play critical roles, such as defective silicon wafers resulting from a new semiconductor manufacturing process and rare but severe complications (e.g., kidney failure) among diabetes patients.

People who are blind take pictures and videos and share them with others but face a unique challenge—they cannot independently review their pictures and videos to identify unnecessary private or sensitive content. A set of new algorithmic and interactive techniques being developed by researchers at the iSchool and partner institutions will empower people who are blind to independently safeguard private information in their pictures and videos. Principal investigators on the project include Associate Professor Yang Wang; Danna Gurari, assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado Boulder; and Leah Findlater, associate professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering Department at the University of Washington. The collaborative project, "Novel Algorithms and Tools for Empowering People Who Are Blind to Safeguard Private Visual Content," received a four-year, $1,199,993 grant from the National Science Foundation, with the U of I team led by Wang receiving $315,931.

Assistant Professor Yun Huang and students will present their research at the 24th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2021), which will be held virtually on October 23-27. 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.

Associate Professor Ryan Cordell will deliver the keynote address at the Marbach-Weimar-Wolfenbüttel (MWW) Research Association Mid-Term Conference, which will be held virtually from Germany on October 14-15. The goal of the MWW is "to provide future-oriented impulses for collaboration in the field of humanities and cultural studies research." The association's mid-term conference will focus on engagement with material and medial losses in the archive and library.

Research conducted by Assistant Professor Jessie Chin's Adaptive Cognition and Interaction Design Lab (ACTION) provided the foundation for an article recently published in the high-impact Journal of Medical Internet Research. PhD student Tre Tomaszewski is the first author on the peer-reviewed article, "Identifying False Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccine Information and Corresponding Risk Perceptions from Twitter: Advanced Predictive Models."

In the event of a natural disaster like Hurricane Ida, artificial intelligence (AI) may be used to assess damage, using imagery reports to identify the severity of flooded areas. Using AI in disaster scene assessment has its limitations, however, and input from the people affected is needed, in order to get a better picture. A new project being led by Associate Professor Dong Wang will explore the power of human intelligence to address the failures of existing AI schemes in disaster damage assessment applications and boost the performance of the system. Wang has received a three-year, $499,786 National Science Foundation (NSF) Human-Centered Computing (HCC) grant for his new project, "DeepCrowd: A Crowd-assisted Deep Learning-based Disaster Scene Assessment System with Active Human-AI Interactions."

The iSchool's Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) will highlight responsible data science and artificial intelligence (AI) in a special speaker series this fall. Topics to be addressed in the new series include explainability, reproducibility, biases, data curation and governance, and privacy. 

While empathy is important in almost every aspect of daily life, it is not always a priority in the development of technology, especially technology using artificial intelligence (AI). iSchool researchers are working to address this gap by using empathy to teach high school students about cybersecurity and AI ethics issues. Led by Associate Professor Yang Wang, the project, "Teaching High School Students about Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence Ethics via Empathy-Driven Hands-On Projects," has received a two-year, $297,575 National Science Foundation (NSF) Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER). Assistant Professor Yun Huang; Pilyoung Kim, associate professor of psychology at the University of Denver; and Tom Yeh, associate professor of computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder, will serve as co-principal investigators.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Ryan Cordell will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2021, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. He previously served as an associate professor of English at Northeastern University (NU) and core founding faculty member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks.

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.