iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021), which will be held virtually from May 8-13. 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 2021 is "Making Waves, Combining Strengths."

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.

Members of Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner's Social Computing Lab will present a tutorial, paper, and posters at the 6th Annual International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which will be held virtually from July 17-20. The conference 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.

iSchool PhD student Natã Barbosa and his advisor Associate Professor Yang Wang have received a $65,053 grant from Facebook for their project, "In-Situ Privacy Controls of Profiling and Ad-Targeting." The goal of the project is to design a privacy control framework that makes profiling and ad-targeting more transparent to ordinary Internet users.

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.

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.

PhD student Shadi Rezapour will present her research with the Diesner lab at the 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2019), which will be held November 9-13 in Austin, Texas. CSCW brings together experts from industry and academia to explore the technical, social, material, and theoretical challenges of designing technology to support collaborative work and life activities.

Doctoral candidate Shubhanshu Mishra successfully defended his dissertation, "Information Extraction from Digital Social Trace Data with Applications to Social Media and Scholarly Communication Data," on June 24.

Master's student Sharon Han has been selected as the winner of the 2019 Student Writing Award sponsored by Ex Libris Group and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) for her paper titled "Weathering the Twitter Storm: Early Uses of Social Media as a Disaster Response Tool for Public Libraries During Hurricane Sandy."

A class project in the Global Health Informatics course has resulted in a journal publication for Ian Brooks, instructor and research scientist, and students Noah Samuel (PhD) and Janina Sarol (CAS).

The identification of proper names of people, organizations, and locations from raw texts, referred to as Named Entity Recognition (NER), can be highly accurate when researchers use NER tools on a large collection of text with proper syntax. However, using existing NER tools for analyzing social media text can lead to poor identification of named entities. TwitterNER, an open-source tool developed by doctoral student Shubhanshu Mishra, who is supervised by Assistant Professor Jana Diesner, can help researchers interested in performing NER on social media text.

Doctoral student Shubhanshu Mishra will present his research at the 29th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, which will be held July 9-12 in Baltimore, Maryland. The conference will focus on the role of links, linking, hypertext, and hyperlink theory on the web and beyond.

Assistant Professor Jana Diesner is the program co-chair of the 3rd International Workshop on Social Sensing (SocialSens 2018). The workshop will be held on April 17 in Orlando, in conjunction with the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI 2018).

The 2014 Ebola virus epidemic that originated in West Africa and spread to other parts of the globe was the deadliest Ebola outbreak in history. During this period, a frightened public turned to social media and internet search engines for information and to share news of the outbreak. According to a team of international researchers, including iSchool Research Scientist Ian Brooks, understanding the social media activity around a health crisis, like the 2014 Ebola outbreak, can help health organizations improve their communication strategies and prevent misinformation and panic.

The Center for Children’s Books will host the 2016 Gryphon Lecture on Friday, March 11. The annual lecture, which is free and open to campus and the public, features a leading scholar in the field of youth and literature, media, and culture. Denise Agosto, GSLIS research fellow and professor in Drexel University’s College of Computing & Informatics, will deliver this year’s lecture

Assistant Professor Jana Diesner spoke at the ninth International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) on May 27. Hosted annually by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, ICWSM addresses themes in social and computational sciences related to human social behavior on the web. The 2015 conference was held May 26-29 at the University of Oxford.

Several GSLIS affiliates presented this week at HASTAC 2015, the annual conference of the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. Held at Michigan State University May 28-29, HASTAC 2015 featured presentations relating to the theme, "Art and Science of Digital Humanities." GSLIS postdoctoral research associate Sayan Bhattacharyya presented an interactive session…