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.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing Lab, will present papers at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2021), which will be held virtually from December 15-18.

Several iSchool researchers participated in the recent Misinformation Research Symposium, which was hosted by the Center for Social and Behavioral Science and sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study, Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute, and National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The goals of the symposium were to help connect misinformation research on campus, foster interdisciplinary teams interested in collaborating on external submissions, and learn more about the needs of existing and emerging research groups on campus. 

Research conducted by Assistant Professor Jessie Chin's Adaptive Cognition and Interaction Design Lab (ACTION) provided the foundation for an article recently published in the high-impact Journal of Medical Internet Research. PhD student Tre Tomaszewski is the first author on the peer-reviewed article, "Identifying False Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccine Information and Corresponding Risk Perceptions from Twitter: Advanced Predictive Models."

The iSchool at Illinois is part of a multidisciplinary research team that has been awarded $750,000 to develop digital literacy tools to curb the deleterious effects of online disinformation. The grant is from the National Science Foundation's Convergence Accelerator, a program launched in 2019 that builds upon basic research and discovery to accelerate solutions toward societal impact. The research team, led by the University of Buffalo (UB), includes experts in artificial intelligence, the humanities, information science and other fields. In addition to Illinois and UB, partners include Clemson University, Lehigh University, and Northeastern University.

In the event of a natural disaster like Hurricane Ida, artificial intelligence (AI) may be used to assess damage, using imagery reports to identify the severity of flooded areas. Using AI in disaster scene assessment has its limitations, however, and input from the people affected is needed, in order to get a better picture. A new project being led by Associate Professor Dong Wang will explore the power of human intelligence to address the failures of existing AI schemes in disaster damage assessment applications and boost the performance of the system. Wang has received a three-year, $499,786 National Science Foundation (NSF) Human-Centered Computing (HCC) grant for his new project, "DeepCrowd: A Crowd-assisted Deep Learning-based Disaster Scene Assessment System with Active Human-AI Interactions."

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.