Sandy Littletree was recognized as the recipient of the Jill and Joe McKinstry Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Native North American Indigenous Knowledge.

Paul Jason Perez (PhD Student) received a Simpson Center for the Humanities Digital and Data Humanities Summer Fellowship for his project “Digital Archive of Philippine Transnational Activism”.

Melanie Walsh was appointed as one of two University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Information Research Fellows for the 2025-2027 cohort. 

Charles Bugre (PhD Student), Shahan Ali Memon (PhD Student), Kelis Hightower (Informatics Student), Emily Hao (Informatics Student), Zoe Huang (Informatics Student), and Sanjana Pavani (Informatics Student) were all recognized in this year’s Husky 100. 

Lindah Kotut gave a workshop and keynote lecture titled “Negotiating the Uncertain Ethics of Emerging Technologies” with the Tech Justice Lab at Purdue University.

Batya Friedman and David Henry published the second edition of their book Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination.

Melanie Walsh gave an invited talk titled “How Do Books Travel on the Internet? Literary Circulation, Memes, and Data,” at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Information School. 

Chance Hunt gave an invited talk titled “Book Bans, Book Challenges, and the Freedom to Read” at the Bellevue Sunrise Rotary. 

Melanie Walsh gave a Postgraduate Research Seminar titled “How Do Books Travel on the Internet?” at Queen Mary University in London.

Ryan Calo and Jevin West spoke at an event hosted by the Center for an Informed Public (CIP), Tech Policy Lab, and the Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA), titled “Live: The Risks and Realities of AI Chatbots,” which was recently published on KUOW.  

The Information School researchers and students were well-represented at this year’s ACM Conference on Himan Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026): 

• Paper (Best Paper Award): “Families are Messy’: From Parent-Child Tensions to Family-Centered Design of Smart Home Technologies” by co-authors Kaiwen Sun, Jade Xiaoyi Li, Irene Chung, Jenny Radesky, Jason Yip, Christopher Brooks, and Florian Schaub

• Paper (Best Paper Award): “With Visual Integrity and Care: A Framework for Mixed Methods Research on Visual Social Data” by co-authors Nina Lutz, Joseph Schafer, Priya Dhawka, Phil Tinn, and Kate Starbird

• Paper (Honorable Mention): “Quantifying the Novelty Bias when Evaluating Interactive Prototypes” by co-authors Yumeng Ma, Alexis Hiniker, and Jacob Wobbrock

• Paper (Honorable Mention): “MIND: Empowering Mental Health Clinicians with Multimodal Data Insights through a Narrative Dashboard” by co-authors Ruishi Zou, Shiyu Xu, Margaret Morris, Jihan Ryu, Tomothy Becker, Nicholas Allen, Anne Marie Albano, Randy Auerbach, Daniel Adler, Varun Mishra, Lace Padilla, Dakuo Wang, Ryan Sultan, and Xuhai Xu

• Paper (Honorable Mention): “The Siren Song of LLMs: How Users Perceive and respond to Dark Patterns in Large Language Models” by co-authors Yike Shi, Qing Ziao, Qing Hu, Hong Shen, and Hua Shen (former Postdoctoral Scholar)

• Paper: “Pringles, Prangles, or Prongles? Negotiating Creative Authorship in Children’s Remix Practices” by co-authors Michelle Newman (PhD Student), Daeun Yoo (PhD Student), Runhua Zhao (PhD Student), Emily Tuy (MSIM Student), Hannah Yi (Informatics Student), Darae Kim, Jin Ha Lee, and Jason Yip

• Paper: “Becoming a Healthy Player: “Exploring Teen Esports Players Perspectives on Mental Well-Being through Participatory Design” by co-authors Yeonhee (Johnny) Cho (PhD Student), Daeun Hwang (PhD student), Ally Lam (Informatics Student), Jin Ha Lee, and Jason Yip

• Paper: “Towards Understanding Children’s Collaborative Interaction Patterns in Child-AI Co-Creative Interfaces” by co-authors Francesca Fusco, Caroline Pitt (Postdoctoral Scholar), Michele Newman (PhD Student), Jason Yip, and Nikita Soni

• Paper: “Relief or Displacement? How Teachers are Negotiating Generative AI’s Role in their Professional Practice” by co-authors Aayushi Dangol, Smriti Kotiyal (MSIM Student), Robert Wolfe, Alex Bowers, Antonio Vigil, Jason Yip, Julie Kientz, Suleman Shahid, Tom Yeh, Vincent Cho, and Katie Davis 

• Paper: “Generative AI and Creative Mediums for Youth’s Emotion Regulation: An Interview Study with Clinicians” by Daeun Yoo (PhD Student), Daniela Munoz Lopez, Xiaotian Daisy Hu, Jason Yip, and Katie Davis

• Paper: “Generative AI in Children’s Creative Collaboration: Impact, Perception, and Design Guidelines” by Daeun Yoo (PhD Student), Michele Newman (PhD Student), Caroline Pitt, Kevin Huu Vo (Informatics, Kids Team), Michelle Zhang, Michelle Kim, Katie Davis, and Jason Yip

• Paper: “Rethinking Misinformation: A Holistic Community Model for Youth Resilience through Socioemotional Learning and Sociocultural Design” by co-authors Jason Yip, Michele Newman (PhD Student), Runhua Zhao (PhD Student), Darae Kim, Jan Lim, Matthew Kyle Pedraja, Swati Sachdeva, Xiaoyu Zheng, Yifang Zhou, Chris Coward, and Jin Ha Lee

• Paper: “A Framework to Characterize Reporting on Generative AI Use,” by co-authors Agathe Balayn, Varun Nagaraj Rao, Su Lin Blodgett, Aylin Caliskan, and Solon Barocas

• Paper: “’ In a Pinch, If You Have Nothing’: An Exploration of Money-Making Apps in Homeless Shelters” by co-authors Esther Han Beol Jang, Anosh Ardeni, Kunsang Choden (PhD Student), Jennifer Webster, Jason Young, and Kurtis Heimerl

• Paper: “A Framework for Adapting In-Car Touchscreen Interfaces to Driver Behaviors, Perception, and Cognition” by co-authors Seokhyun Hwang (PhD Student), Xiyuan Shen, Alexandre Filipowicz, Andrew Best, Jean Costa, Scott Carter, James Fogarty, and Jacob Wobbrock

• Paper: “Ability Heuristics for Conducting Accessibility Inspections,” by co-authors Claire Mitchell (PhD Student), Junhan Kong (PhD Student), Jesse Martinez, Amy Ko, Alexis Hiniker, and Jacob Wobbrock

• Paper: “TaskAudit: Detecting Functionality Errors in Mobile Apps via Agentic Task Execution” by co-authors Mingyuan Zhong, Xia Chen, Davin Win Kyi, Chen Li, James Fogarty, and Jacob Wobbrock

• Paper: “Decoupling of Usefulness and Novelty: Evaluating the Impact of Generative AI on Design Outputs and Novice Designers Creative Thinking” by co-authors Yue Fu (PhD Student), Tony Zhou, Bin Han (PhD student), Marx Wang (PhD Student), Yixin Chen (PhD Student), Zelia Gomes Da Costa Lai, Rock Yuren Pang, Katharina Reinecke, Jacob Wobbrock, and Alexis Hiniker

• Paper: “The Toronto Water Atlas: Staging Encounters with Nature Through Design” by co-authors Taneea Agrawaal, Nils Bonfils, Amelia Dogan (PhD Student), Siyi Wu, and Robert Soden

• Paper: “More than Decision Support: Exploring Patients Logitudinal Usage of Large Language Models in Real-World Healthcare Settings” by co-authors Yancheng Cao, Yishu Ji, Yue Fu (PhD Student), Sahiti Dharmavaram, Meghan Turchioe, Natalie Benda, Lena Mamykina, Yuling Sun, and Xuhai Xu

• Paper: “Hesitation and Tolerance in Recommender Systems” by Kuan Zou, Aixin Sun, Yitong Ji, Hao Zhang, Jing Wang, Zhuohao (Jerry) Zhang (PhD Student), Xuemeng Jiang

• Paper: “The Engagement-Prolonging Designs Teens Encounter on Very Large Online Platforms” by co-authors Yixin Chen (PhD Student), Yue Fu (PhD Student), Zeya Chen, Jenny Radesky, and Alexis Hiniker

• Poster: “Co-Designing for the Triad: Design Considerations for Collaborative Decision-Making Technologies in Pediatric Chronic Care” by co-authors Ray-Yuan Chung, Jaime Snyder, Zixuan Xu, Daeun Yoo (PhD Student), Athena Ortega, Wanda Pratt, Aaron Wightman, Ryan Hutson, Cozumel Pruette, and Ari Pollack

• Workshop: “Human-AI Interaction Alignment: Designing, Evaluating, and Evolving Value-Centered AI for Reciprocal Human-AI Futures” presented by Hua Shen (former Postdoctoral Scholar), Tiffany Knearem, Divy Thakkar, Pat Pataranutaporn, Anoop Sinha, Yike Shi, Jenny Liang, Lama Ahmad, Tanu Mitra, Brad Myers, and Yang Li

• Workshop: “Science and Technology for Augmenting Reading (STAR)” presented by Tal August, Andrew Head, Alexa Siu, Elena Glassman, Jonathan Kummerfeld, Joseph Chee Chang, Lucy Lu Wang, and Marti Hearst

• Workshop: “Tools for Thought: Understanding, Protecting, and Augmenting Human Cognition with Generative AI – From Vision to Implementation” presented by Yue Fu (PhD student) and many others