iSchool Associate Professor Masooda Bashir and Informatics PhD student Tanusree Sharma have published a paper, "Use of Apps in the COVID-19 Response and the Loss of Privacy Protection," in Nature Medicine. In the paper, they examine how digital surveillance used to contain the spread of COVID-19 may impact privacy rights.

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). 

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. 

Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, has been awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant to spend three weeks at Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia. During her visit, which will take place in May 2020, Chan will lecture on feminist data methods and give a workshop on community data.

PhD student Lo Lee will present work from Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh's research group at the Connected Learning Summit 2019, which will be held October 2-5 at the University of California, Irvine. The mission of the summit is to "fuel a growing movement of innovators harnessing emerging technology to expand access to participatory, playful, and creative learning." The program includes presentations and workshops ranging from speculative design, to game walkthroughs, sharing work in progress, and research panels.

Associate Professor Masooda Bashir will present her research on trust formation in human-agent collaboration at the Intelligent Systems Conference (IntelliSys) 2019, which will be held September 5-6 in London. The conference, which brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields, focuses on areas of intelligent systems and artificial intelligence and how they apply to the real world.