Associate Professors Yang Wang and Yun Huang are spearheading a project in collaboration with experts from the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University to help ensure emerging artificial intelligence (AI) development proceeds in a democratic manner that is mindful of underserved groups. PhD student Tanusree Sharma is also leading this initiative as a critical component of her dissertation work.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2023, which will be held from August 19-25 in Macao, S.A.R.

Associate Professor Dong Wang is the lead author of a book that introduces a new paradigm integrating edge computing, humans, and artificial intelligence (AI). Social Edge Computing: Empowering Human-Centric Edge Computing, Learning and Intelligence (Springer) is coauthored by Daniel "Yue" Zhang, research scientist at Amazon Alexa AI. 

Library professionals have long held sacred the right of patrons to privacy while using library facilities, and the privilege is explicitly addressed in the American Library Association's Bill of Rights. The advent of the digital age, however, has complicated libraries' efforts to secure and protect privacy, Associate Professor Masooda Bashir has learned.

Associate Professor Jingrui He is developing computational tools to protect against leaks and/or unauthorized use of sensitive data held and distributed among Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies and other parties. Her project, "Privacy-Preserving Analytics for Non-IID Data," has been awarded a three-year, $651,927 grant from the DHS Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency (CAOE).

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at The ACM Web Conference 2023, which will be held from April 30 to May 4 in Austin, Texas. The conference is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics related to the Web.

A paper coauthored by PhD student Zhixuan (Kyrie) Zhou and Mengyi Wei, a PhD student at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, received the Best Paper Award at the 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-56). The conference, which was held in Maui on January 3-6, is one of the longest-standing working scientific conferences in information technology management.

How can current and future generations help to ensure that technologies are created and used ethically? One way is effectively teaching students about cybersecurity and AI ethics. Associate Professor of Information Sciences Yang Wang and colleagues from the University of Illinois and other universities are interested in the topic and have been conducting research into how to improve instruction. Notably, their research team also has two high school students.

The National Science Foundation-funded project aims to reduce online fraud among older adults, who lose billions of dollars each year. The iSchool is co-leading a two-year, $5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator phase 2 project to create digital tools that help older adults better recognize and protect themselves from online deceptions and other forms of disinformation.

Students often have difficulty estimating how well they know a topic, which can lead to inefficient learning or suboptimal educational outcomes. A new project led by Associate Professor Dong Wang and Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch aims to improve students' ability to estimate their knowledge using artificial intelligence (AI) methods. The researchers were recently awarded a three-year, $850,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their project, "A Metacognitive Calibration Intervention Powered by Fair and Private Machine Learning."

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing Lab, presented their research at the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 25th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI 2022). The conference, which brings together AI researchers from around the world, was held in Vienna, Austria, from July 23-29.

Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo have built and currently lead an interdisciplinary, collaborative group of researchers at the intersection of everyday information, knowledge governance, and misinformation to address how people experience, produce, and manage misinformation in their everyday lives.

Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo has been awarded a $54,000 grant from RStudio, PBC to make its open-source scientific and technical publishing system Quarto more accessible. For his project, "Improving Accessible Reproducibility for Data Science Publishing System," he will collaborate with RStudio, PBC to develop and improve accessibility components of Quarto for people with and without dis/abilities.

PhD student Yuanxi Fu received scholarships for two summer institutes in cybersecurity, network analysis, and computational social science. The summer institutes, which took place in June, were hybrid events hosted by Carnegie Mellon University.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing Lab, will present their research at The ACM Web Conference 2022. The conference, which will be held virtually April 25-29, is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics related to the Web.

Associate Professor Yang Wang has received a one-year, $100,000 grant from Meta for his project, "Global South Citizens' Privacy Perceptions and Management of Targeted Ads on Social Media." His doctoral students Tanusree Sharma, Smirity Kaushik, and Yaman Yu will serve as co-investigators. The goal of the project is to learn from users in the Global South, with a focus on India and Bangladesh, about their experience with targeted ads.

People who are blind take pictures and videos and share them with others but face a unique challenge—they cannot independently review their pictures and videos to identify unnecessary private or sensitive content. A set of new algorithmic and interactive techniques being developed by researchers at the iSchool and partner institutions will empower people who are blind to independently safeguard private information in their pictures and videos. Principal investigators on the project include Associate Professor Yang Wang; Danna Gurari, assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado Boulder; and Leah Findlater, associate professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering Department at the University of Washington. The collaborative project, "Novel Algorithms and Tools for Empowering People Who Are Blind to Safeguard Private Visual Content," received a four-year, $1,199,993 grant from the National Science Foundation, with the U of I team led by Wang receiving $315,931.

Cyber risk is everywhere, so cyber defense abilities are naturally in high demand from employers. However, there aren't nearly enough job candidates available who have both the technical skills and the broader contextual understanding that today's cybersecurity positions require. Developing a stronger cybersecurity workforce has therefore become a national priority, and experts are looking for ways to get more students interested in this vitally important but often-misunderstood field.

A paper authored by PhD student Smirity Kaushik and Associate Professor Yang Wang received the IAPP SOUPS Privacy Award at the 17th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2021). The symposium, which was held August 8-10, brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners in human-computer interaction, security, and privacy.

While empathy is important in almost every aspect of daily life, it is not always a priority in the development of technology, especially technology using artificial intelligence (AI). iSchool researchers are working to address this gap by using empathy to teach high school students about cybersecurity and AI ethics issues. Led by Associate Professor Yang Wang, the project, "Teaching High School Students about Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence Ethics via Empathy-Driven Hands-On Projects," has received a two-year, $297,575 National Science Foundation (NSF) Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER). Assistant Professor Yun Huang; Pilyoung Kim, associate professor of psychology at the University of Denver; and Tom Yeh, associate professor of computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder, will serve as co-principal investigators.