Professor Yang Wang has been appointed by Governor JB Pritzker to serve on the newly created Autism Data Privacy Advisory Group, established under Executive Order 2025-02 to strengthen protections for the civil and human rights of people with autism in Illinois. 

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in the Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC 2025), which will be held from September 18–20 in Washington, DC.

PhD student Muhammad Hassan has been selected as an IAPP Westin Scholar Award honoree. The annual awards were created by the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) to support students who are identified as future leaders in the field of privacy and data protection. 

Doctoral candidate Smirity Kaushik successfully defended her dissertation, "Digital Trust, Safety, and Privacy in the Age of Emerging Technologies," on June 16. 

Doctoral candidate Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou successfully defended his dissertation, "A Pragmatic and Human-centered Approach to Promoting Software Accessibility: Design, Education, Governance," on April 3.

Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo have co-edited a new book, Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons, which was recently published by Cambridge University Press. An open access edition of the book is available, thanks to support from the Governing Knowledge Commons Research Coordination Network (NSF 2017495). The new book explores the socio-technical realities of misinformation in a variety of online and offline everyday environments. 

Associate Professor Yun Huang, Assistant Professor Jiaqi Ma, and Assistant Professor Haohan Wang have received computing resources from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a two-year pilot program led by the National Science Foundation in partnership with other federal agencies and nongovernmental partners. The goal of the pilot is to support AI-related research with particular emphasis on societal challenges. Last month, awardees presented their research at the NAIRR Pilot Annual Meeting.

A team of researchers from the SALT (Social Computing Systems) Lab has been selected as a winner in an international hackathon hosted by the Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence. The LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon brought together over 3,000 students, researchers, and practitioners from 127 countries to build and showcase innovative work in large language model (LLM) agents, grow the AI agent community, and advance LLM agent technology.

Doctoral candidate Zachary Kilhoffer successfully defended his dissertation, "Human Factors in the Standardization of AI Governance: Improving the Design of Risk Management Standards for Ethical AI," on January 24, 2025.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData 2024), which will be held from December 15-18 in Washington, D.C. BigData 2024 is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics in artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics.

Teenagers use generative artificial intelligence for many purposes, including emotional support and social interactions. A study by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers found that parents have little understanding of GAI, how their children use it and its potential risks, and that GAI platforms offer insufficient protection to ensure children’s safety.

Little did doctoral candidate Kainen Bell know in 2013 when he was an undergraduate studying abroad in Brazil that the country would play a major role in his future dissertation research. Since his first trip, he has returned to Brazil multiple times, even completing a Fulbright study and working for a community-based organization in the country. Now, Bell is preparing to return again, this time to spend ten months conducting research as a recipient of the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowship.

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.

PhD student Abhinav Choudhry has received a 2024-2026 Institute for Information Literacy at Purdue research award for his project, "Gamified Finance Simulator for Older Adults: A Financial Literacy and Vulnerability Intervention." The $4,000 award is intended for research that enables people to navigate and contribute to today's information environment. Associate Professor Rachel Adler and PhD student Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou will serve as co-principal investigators on the project, which aims to create a gamified simulation of digital banking. 

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the Web Conference 2024, which will be held from May 13-17 in Singapore. The Web Conference is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics related to the Web.

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."

Thanks to new European Union (EU) legislation, those who perform on-demand work through an app or website, such as DoorDash or Uber, will enjoy better working conditions. PhD student Zachary Kilhoffer, who spent four years working as a researcher for the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels prior to entering the iSchool's doctoral program, authored or co-authored several policy research pieces that informed the creation of the EU Platform Work Directive.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to learn how to recognize online deceptions and prevent the spread of elder fraud. That, in a nutshell, is the idea behind Deepcover, a free new app available for download on Apple's App Store and Google Play that aims to equip older adults with the skills they need to safely navigate the increasingly complex digital world we inhabit.

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. Informatics PhD student Tanusree Sharma is also leading this initiative as a critical component of her dissertation work.