News Bureau

A group of students is gathered around a table in the basement of the Campus Instructional Facility at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, looking at boxes filled with beetles, walking sticks, spiders, dragonflies and other insects.

The students are searching for inspiration for what creatures might look like on a swampy alien planet. They are designing the characters and environment for a Concept Art for Video Games class offered through Illinois Informatics and taught by Michael Curtin, the innovation coordinator for campus information technology and a former video game industry artist.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign information sciences professor Kate McDowell leads a data storytelling project that helps librarians use data to advocate for public libraries.

Large language model-based chatbots can’t effectively recognize users’ motivation when they are hesitant about making healthy behavior changes, but they can support those who are committed to take action, say University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers.

Elizabeth Hoiem, an information sciences professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, examines how children’s literature and material culture responded to industrialization and shaped the class politics of playful learning in her new book “The Education of Things.”

The biggest challenges libraries face in protecting the privacy of patrons are a lack of training and technical knowledge, particularly with increased use of digital services, according to a study by information sciences professor Masooda Bashir.

New research led by data science experts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and United Nations Global Pulse found that there is no strong evidence that YouTube promoted anti-vaccine sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, performed an algorithmic audit to examine if YouTube’s recommendation system acted as a “rabbit hole,” leading users searching for vaccine-related videos to anti-vaccine content

Information sciences professor JooYoung Seo is developing a data visualization tool that converts data to sound or Braille to make visual representations of statistical data accessible to researchers who are blind or visually impaired.

Emily Knox, a professor of library and information sciences, will testify before the Senate judiciary committee about the right to intellectual freedom and why people attempt to ban books.

Educators need to help students understand and use artificial intelligence language tools in appropriate ways to prepare them for a future in which their use is commonplace, says English and information sciences professor Ted Underwood.

Ryan Cordell, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor of information sciences and of English, is leading a project to examine how stories of racial violence circulated in late 19th century and early 20th century newspapers and how those stories relate to trends in contemporary social media.

Library schools should teach social justice storytelling skills to students so they can advocate for the needs of underserved patrons, says information sciences professor Kate McDowell.

Grocery shopping in person remained extremely common throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, while restaurant dining was more vulnerable to surges in case rates, according to a new study examining how Americans acquired food at various points during the pandemic.

The Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online project aims to preserve digital records when web servers and physical records and objects are at risk of being destroyed by Russian attacks on Ukraine.

University Library professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe said the actions are a significant shift in policy from a long tradition of scientific diplomacy.

Emily Knox, a professor in the School of Information Sciences and the author of “Book Banning in 21st-Century America,” said societal issues, such as changing racial demographics and disagreements over how to teach the history of race, prompt challenges to certain kinds of books.

A book of scholarly essays and a symposium consider what Newbery books reveal about attitudes toward children’s literature.

A new computational framework incorporates social interactions to analyze how best to communicate about new medical guidelines to encourage their adoption.

The digital scholarship project involving University of Illinois and U.K. researchers will work with materials from Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.

Information sciences professor Elizabeth Hoiem created a digital resource to evaluate 19th-century children’s stories that taught about how commodities such as sugar were made.

Information sciences professor Jodi Schneider is leading an effort to prevent the spread of retracted research.

University of Illinois information sciences professor Victoria Stodden proposes a way to develop recognized data science processes for research.

An online survey is tracking the responses of academic libraries to the COVID-19 pandemic and providing data on their actions in real time.