PhD candidate Andrew Zalot successfully defended his dissertation, "'Tweet of the Town:' Synthesizing Local and Social Media Discourse on Book Bans," on July 3.

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025), which will be held from April 26 to May 1 in Yokohama, Japan. 

Associate Professor Anita Say Chan will present research drawn from her new book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, at two named lectures this month. The lectures, which celebrate Women's History Month, will be held at the University of Minnesota and Carnegie Mellon University.

Associate Professor Anita Say Chan has authored a new book that identifies how the eugenics movement foreshadows the predatory data tactics used in today's tech industry. Her book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, was released this month by the University of California Press and featured in the news outlets San Francisco Chronicle and Mother Jones.

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."

A new study by PhD student Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo has uncovered the existence of gender bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) in the U.S. and China. The researchers examined public discussion about this topic on the social media platforms Twitter (now X) and Weibo, finding reports of gender bias in the LLMs ChatGPT and Ernie, China's ChatGPT-equivalent.

Doctoral candidate Qiuyan Guo successfully defended her dissertation, "Exploring Chinese Celebrity Fans’ Online Information Behaviors and Understandings of Their Practices," on December 6.

PhD student Morgan Lundy won first place in the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) /Jean Tague-Sutcliffe Doctoral Student Research Poster Competition for her poster, "'Have a flare with me!': A content analysis, grounded theory, and collaborative design approach to disability storytelling on TikTok." For the competition, posters were judged on practical/theoretical significance, design and method of research, the student’s oral presentation, and the organization, clarity, and aesthetics of visual materials.

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.

A new study conducted by PhD student Morgan Lundy, which was recently published in the International Journal of Communication, reveals how TikTok's unique features have been used to spread COVID-19 misinformation. Unlike Twitter, which uses a text format, the micro-video format of TikTok makes it more difficult to detect deceptive information.

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.

iSchool Research Scientist Ian Brooks and Associate Professor Kate McDowell are leading an international effort to combat health infodemics such as that which arose following the COVID-19 pandemic.

A paper coauthored by PhD student Lanyu Shang and members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, received the best paper award in the research track during the 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2022).

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 25th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2022) and the 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2022). 

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.

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.

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which will be held in Chicago on July 19-22. IC2S2 brings together academic researchers, industry experts, open data activists, and government agency workers to explore challenges, methods, and research questions in the field of computational social science.

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.