Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider has been named a 2020-2021 Linowes Fellow by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. The fellowship "provides exceptionally promising tenure-stream faculty with opportunities for innovation and discovery using the Cline Center'

With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, many public health organizations have found themselves overwhelmed by the need to make fast, data-focused operation decisions, but often they do not have enough staff with the necessary data science skills. The University of Illinois, meanwhile, has a diverse student population with strong technical skills and professional expertise who would like to help combat the pandemic but do not know how to get involved.

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.

PhD student Clair Irwin (MS '16, CAS '18) has a personal connection to her research on the embodied information behaviors of people with diabetes.

People are being asked to change their behavior to help contain the spread of COVID-19. Dean Eunice E. Santos and PhD students Suresh Subramanian and Vairavan Murugappan studied the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and the social phenomena and events that influenced whether people in Mexico decided to cross the border into the U.S. at various times during the outbreak. Their work provides insights that can help public health officials plan for events such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. They talked with News Bureau arts and humanities editor Jodi Heckel.

Ian Brooks, iSchool research scientist and director of the Center for Health Informatics, and Sebastian Garcia Saiso, director of the Department of Evidence and Intelligence for Action in Health for the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), presented their preliminary social media analytics research on COVID-19 at the World Health Organization (WHO). 

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider a $174,981 grant for reducing the spread of retracted research. When retracted papers are cited both before and after retraction, the scientific publication network inadvertently propagates potentially faked data, fundamental errors, and unreproducible results. According to Schneider, a retracted source paper concerning a fraudulent trial of blood pressure medication is still in the top 1% of most cited articles, with 930 citations in the abstract and citation database Scopus.

Associate Professor Jingrui He and Arun Reddy Nelakurthi, senior engineer in machine learning research at Samsung Research America, have coauthored a new guide to user behavior modeling. Their book, Social Media Analytics for User Behavior Modeling: A Task Heterogeneity Perspective, was recently published by CRC Press.

Jessie Chin is an assistant professor in the iSchool and the principal investigator of The Adaptive Cognition and Interaction Design (ACTION) Lab. Her research aims to advance knowledge in cognitive sciences regarding evolving human interaction with the contemporary information technologies and translating theories in social and behavioral sciences to the design of technologies and interaction experience to promote health communication and behavior across the lifespan. 

Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu will give an invited lecture on February 6 at the University of Kentucky Institute for Biomedical Informatics.

His talk, "Promoting Transparency in Biomedical Publications using Natural Language Processing," will focus on how biomedical language processing and text mining (bioNLP) techniques can be used to promote the rigor, reproducibility, and transparency of biomedical research.

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.

Director of the Center for Health Informatics and iSchool Research Scientist Ian Brooks gave an invited talk at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Kaleidoscope academic conference, which was held on December 4-6 in Atlanta, Georgia. ITU is the United Nations' specialized agency for information and communication technologies. Brooks’ presentation was part of the WHO special panel on the digital transformation of the health sector.

Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu will give an invited talk at the conference on “Meta-research for transforming clinical research,” which will be held on November 25 at the Académie Nationale de Médecine in Paris. The conference, organized by the EU-funded Methods in Research on Research (MiRoR) consortium, will bring together experts on meta-research from the U.S. and Europe. MiRoR is an interdisciplinary, joint doctoral training program for future generations of scientists working at the intersection of meta-research and medicine.

Director of the Center for Health Informatics and iSchool Research Scientist Ian Brooks gave an invited talk on health informatics at "Celebrating 25 Years of the Core Health Indicators," a side event held on September 30 during the 57th Session of the Pan-American H

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.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Jessie Chin will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2019, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. She is currently a research assistant professor in biomedical and health information sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Halil Kilicoglu will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2019, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. He is currently a staff scientist at the U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider will present her medical informatics research at the 3rd European Conference on Argumentation (ECA 2019), which will take place on June 24-27 in Groningen, the Netherlands. The biennial conference attracts scholars on argumentation worldwide from various disciplines. The theme of ECA 2019 is "Reason to Dissent."

PhD student Linh Hoang presented her research with Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider at the AAAI 2019 Spring Symposium on Combining Machine Learning with Knowledge Engineering, which was held March 25-27 at Stanford University. 

A class project in the Global Health Informatics course has resulted in a journal publication for Ian Brooks, instructor and research scientist, and students Noah Samuel (PhD) and Janina Sarol (CAS).