Complementary medicine approaches, such as natural products, acupuncture, and meditation, are increasingly used by the public and accepted by the medical community. However, knowledge of the safety and effectiveness of these approaches, as well as their impact on human health, is limited in comparison to conventional medical approaches.

The highly technical language used in biomedical publications makes it difficult for nonexpert audiences to fully understand their content and draw insights. The BioLaySumm competition focuses on making biomedical research publications more accessible to lay audiences. This year, the winning team was a group from Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu's research lab: PhD students Zhiwen (Jerome) You and Shufan Ming and Computer Science master's student Shruthan Radhakrishna. 

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.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Kahyun Choi joined the faculty as an assistant professor on August 16, 2024. She most recently served as an assistant professor in the Department of Information and Library Science at Indiana University Bloomington.

Identifying whether online information is faulty or ungrounded is important to ensure information integrity and a well-informed public. This was especially challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic when misinformation spread like wildfire across the Internet. A new project led by Associate Professor Dong Wang will integrate diverse human and machine intelligence to examine multimodal data (e.g., text and image) that was produced during the pandemic. His project, "Crowd-Assisted Human-AI Teaming with Explanations," has been awarded a three-year, $599,999 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024), which will be held from August 11-16 in Bangkok, Thailand. ACL 2024 is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics in natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2024), which will be held from June 16-21 in Mexico City, Mexico.

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2024), which will be held from May 11-16 in Honolulu, Hawaii. 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 2024 is "Surfing the World."

A new study conducted by PhD student Michelle Bak and Assistant Professor Jessie Chin, which was recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), reveals how large language models (LLMs) respond to different motivational states. In their evaluation of three LLM-based generative conversational agents (GAs)—ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Llama 2—the researchers found that while GAs are able to identify users' motivation states and provide relevant information when individuals have established goals, they are less likely to provide guidance when the users are hesitant or ambivalent about changing their behavior.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie will be the keynote speaker for the 2023 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR 2023), which will be held on March 19-23 in Austin, Texas. In addition to information interaction and retrieval, the multidisciplinary conference explores topics such as human-human information interaction, novel interaction paradigms, new evaluation methods, and related research from various fields.

With their nearly completed "Whole Tale" project, Bertram Ludäscher, professor and director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS), and his team have created methods and tools for scientists to link executable computer code, data, and other information to online scholarly publications, which helps ensure reproducibility and paves the way for new discoveries.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Jiaqi Ma will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2023, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Ma is a PhD candidate in School of Information at the University of Michigan (UMSI). He earned his bachelor's degree in automation from Tsinghua University. For the 2022-2023 academic year, he will be a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.

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."

Associate Professor Jana Diesner and her students have organized two tutorials for 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.

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.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Dong Wang will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2021. He is currently an associate professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Notre Dame.

Doctoral candidate Yun Hao successfully defended her dissertation, "Towards a Better Understanding of Music Playlist Titles and Descriptions," on April 6. Her committee included Professor J. Stephen Downie (chair); Associate Professor Vetle Torvik; Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch; Xiao Hu, associate professor at The University of Hong Kong; and Andreas Ehmann, manager of research/data science at Pandora Inc.

Professor Emerita Linda C. Smith presented her research at two conferences this month, the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) UK Conference and the LibPMC: International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries.

PhD student Yingjun Guan will present his research at the Conference on Statistical Learning and Data Science / Nonparametric Statistics, which will be held June 4-6 at Columbia University. The conference brings together researchers in statistical machine learning and data mining from academia, industry, and government to discuss topics such as big data analytics, classification, learning theory, network analysis, and signal and image processing.

Members of the Whole Tale Archaeology Working Group will meet with fellow computational archaeologists, environmental scientists, and other researchers for the first "Prov-a-thon" on practical tools for reproducible science. Held in conjunction with the DataONE All-Hands Meeting in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico, the two-day workshop on August 31 and September 1 is cosponsored by the NSF-funded projects Whole Tale, DataONE, and the Arctic Data Center.