This semester, the iSchool welcomed Craig Evans as a new lecturer. Evans will be the primary instructor for Introduction to Database Concepts and Applications (IS 206), a required course in the iSchool’s undergraduate programs.

Doctoral candidate Michael Gryk successfully defended his dissertation, "Explorations in Provenance in the Information Sciences," on May 3.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research in transparent data curation and cleaning, provenance management, certified transparency, and data ethics at the 18th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC24), which will be held from February 19-21 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The theme of this year's conference, which brings together individuals, organizations, and institutions across all disciplines and domains involved in curating data, is "Trust Through Transparency."

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

Documenting the Future: Navigating Provenance Metadata Standards, a new book authored by PhD student Michael Gryk and alumni Rhiannon Bettivia (PhD '16) and Jessica Yi-Yun Cheng (PhD '22), explores provenance, which is the study and documentation of how something has come to be. Provenance documentation is critical for authenticity, trustworthiness, and reproducibility in science. 

Two projects led by iSchool faculty members have been selected as Humanities Research Institute (HRI) Research Clusters for 2022-2023. 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.

Doctoral candidate Jessica Cheng successfully defended her dissertation, "Agreeing to Disagree: Applying a Logic-based Approach to Reconciling and Merging Multiple Taxonomies," on May 25. 

Teaching Associate Professor David Dubin and Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu have been named National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Faculty Fellows for the 2021-22 academic year. This competitive program for faculty and researchers at the University of Illinois provides seed funding for new projects that include NCSA staff as integral contributors to the research.

Teaching Associate Professor David Dubin, Postdoctoral Research Associate Jacob Jett, and Adjunct Lecturer Bobby Bothmann presented their research at the North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization (NASKO 2021), which was held virtually on July 9-11. The theme of this year's symposium was "Resilience, Resistance, and Reflection: Knowledge Organization at a Crossroads."

PhD students Michael Gryk and Jessica Cheng and alumna Rhiannon Bettivia (PhD '16) organized a provenance workshop, which was held on February 17 in conjunction with the 15th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) in Dublin, Ireland. 

Doctoral candidate Jacob Jett successfully defended his dissertation, "Towards a General Conceptual Model for Bibliographic Aggregates," on August 12.

PhD student Michael Gryk presented his research in data curation at iPRES 2018, which was held in Boston from September 25-27. The conference brought together researchers, archivists, librarians, providers, and other experts to share recent developments and innovative projects in the field of digital preservation.

Doctoral candidate Jacob Jett presented his research in digital cultural heritage collections at the Japanese Association for the Digital Humanities annual conference (JADH 2018), which was held September 9-11, in Tokyo, Japan. The theme of this year's conference was "Leveraging Open Data."

Assistant Professor Matthew Turk will present the Whole Tale research project at the 17th annual Scientific Computing with Python conference (SciPy 2018), which will be held July 9-15 in Austin, Texas. The conference brings together participants from industry, academia, and government for tutorials, talks, and developer sprints.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Karen Wickett (MS '07, PhD '12) will join the faculty in August 2018. She is currently an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin.

Assistant Professor Peter Darch and Research Associate Professor David Dubin participated in the Research Data Alliance (RDA) 9th Plenary Meeting, which was held April 5-7 in Barcelona, Spain. 

iSchool staff and students will participate in the 12th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC), which will be held on February 20-23 in Edinburgh, Scotland

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? Children playing this educational video game on their school's computer in the 1990s got an entertaining geography lesson while in hot pursuit of Carmen and her villains. Preserving a video game such as this for future generations to study and appreciate involves challenges beyond the obvious fact that computers no longer support the software needed to play the game.

Professor Bertram Ludäscher will present the international tutorial at the thirty-first Brazilian Symposium on Databases (SBBD2016) in Salvador-Bahia on October 4-7. SBBD, an official event of the Brazilian Computer Society, is the largest venue in Latin America for presenting and discussing research results in the database domain.

Provenance information describes the origin and history of artifacts. Because of the vital role played by data and workflow provenance in support of transparency and reproducibility in computational and data science, creating tools for capturing and using provenance information is an important yet challenging task.