Library makerspaces offer community members the opportunity to tinker, design, experiment, and create with a range of technology in an informal learning space. However, because current makerspaces and maker tools are highly vision oriented, blind and visually impaired (BVI) people have limited access to these learning opportunities. A new project led by Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo and Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh, director of the CU Community Fab Lab, seeks to address this problem by creating accessible maker programs for BVI learners and developing training materials for librarians and maker professionals on accessible making. The researchers were recently awarded a three-year, $498,638 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant LG-252360-OLS-22) for their project, "Promoting Computational Thinking Skills for Blind and Visually Impaired Teens Through Accessible Library Makerspaces."

Assistant Professor Jessie Chin and PhD student Smit Desai will present their research at the Technology, Mind and Society (TMS) Conference, which will be held virtually November 3-5. Hosted by the American Psychological Association, TMS brings together scientists, industry leaders, practitioners, students, and policymakers to explore the critical role that psychology plays in the design, use, adoption, and impact of technology and the artificial intelligence that powers it.

PhD student Smit Desai will discuss his research with Assistant Professor Jessie Chin at the ACM Conversational User Interfaces conference (CUI 2021), which will be held virtually from July 27-29. The goal of the conference is "to further develop a collaborative community around human-computer interaction issues in speech and language technology, with a specific interest in theory-based and applied scientific issues in the field of speech and text-based conversational user interfaces."

The iSchool is pleased to announce that JooYoung Seo will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2021. He is a PhD candidate in the Learning, Design, and Technology program at Pennsylvania State University and also an RStudio double-certified data science instructor and accessibility expert certified by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP).

According to Professor Michael Twidale, bad usability can be an irritation for everyone but "especially awful" for the underprivileged. In "Everyone Everywhere: A Distributed and Embedded Paradigm for Usability," which was recently published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Twidale and coauthors David M. Nichols (University of Waikato, New Zealand) and Christopher P. Lueg (Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland) present a new paradigm to address the persistence of difficulties that people have in accessing and using information.

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.

Professor and Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) Director Bertram Ludäscher and collaborators are presenting their joint work and tools for data quality, cleaning, and provenance at the 33rd Annual Biodiversity Information Standards conference, TDWG 2017, from October 1-6 in Ottawa, Canada. The annual conference provides a forum for developing standards and demonstrating new technologies and tools for biodiversity informatics. 

Thanks to a new online resource for paleoenvironmental data and models under development at Illinois and partner institutions, historian Richard Flint can gauge whether environmental factors played an important role in driving the migration of Pueblo Indians from the Spanish province of New Mexico in the seventeenth century. Using SKOPE (Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments), scholars such as Flint and the larger community of archaeologists will be able to discover, explore, visualize, and synthesize knowledge of environments in the recent or remote past.

A project led by iSchool Professor Les Gasser, "Simulating Social Systems at Scale (SSS)," has laid the groundwork for a prestigious award to a student researcher. Santiago Núñez-Corrales, an Informatics PhD student directed by Gasser, was recently chosen from among several hundred applicants to receive an ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational & Data Science Fellowship.

Assistant Professor Jana Diesner will moderate a panel on Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the Big Data Summit on November 10 in Champaign. The annual summit brings together experts from the University of Illinois Research Park, industry, and academia to share knowledge about big data and its business applications.

Assistant Professor Vetle Torvik has been named the iSchool's Centennial Scholar for 2016-2017. The Centennial Scholar award is endowed by alumni and friends of the School and given in recognition of outstanding accomplishments and/or professional promise in the field of library and information science.

Developed in the 1940s and 1950s, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy measures physical and chemical properties of atoms or molecules by measuring change in the magnetic resonance of the nuclei of atoms. The process is used by scientists for a variety of applications, such as substance identification. In biomolecular science, NMR supports discovery and identification of new drugs, disease and metabolic research, study of structural biology, and more.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $5M to the "Whole Tale" project, led by Professor Bertram Ludäscher (PI) along with CIRSS affiliate Matthew Turk (co-PI, NCSA) and Associate Professor Victoria Stodden (co-PI).

Several members of the GSLIS community will speak at the International Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries (QQML), which will be held May 24-27 at the University of London.

Jon Gant, research associate professor and director of the Center for Digital Inclusion, will speak Monday at Michigan State University’s Quello Center for Telecommunication Management and Law.

Who influenced Charles Darwin when he was writing his pioneering theory of evolution, On the Origin of Species? Indiana University (IU) professor Colin Allen wants to know, and the HathiTrust Research Center may now hold the answer.

GSLIS students and staff spoke last week at the fifteenth annual Information Literacy Summit, held on April 29. The theme of the conference was “Shifting Perspectives: Developing Critical Approaches in Information Literacy.”

As society ages and human knowledge progresses, we expect innovations from scientists that will improve quality of life for older adults and help society adapt to the realities of a changing population. Yet the scientific workforce itself is aging, potentially affecting its own capacity for innovation. The relationship between innovation in the scientific workforce and the increasing demand for innovation is complex, with far-reaching implications influencing everything from healthcare to the economy.

Two chapters written by members of the GSLIS community are featured in the latest volume of the Advances in Librarianship book series titled, Perspectives on Libraries as Institutions of Human Rights and Social Justice (Volume 41).

Senior Research Scientist and Lecturer Martin Wolske spoke this week at the 2016 Nonprofit Technology Conference, hosted by the Nonprofit Technology Network on March 23-25 in San Jose, California.