Ben Lee and co-collaborators Jim Casey, Samantha Blickhan, Chris Dancy, and Tiffany Smith’s project titled “Communities in the Loop: AI for Cultures & Contexts in Multimodal Archives,” is an AI4LAM Innovation Award Finalist, and was presented at the AI4LAM Fantastic Futures Conference.

Martin Saveski received the 2026 Center for the Informed Public (CIP) Robert Mason Outstanding Mentorship Award.

Ben Lee gave a keynote titled “Govscape: Toward Multimodal Search & Discovery for Government PDFs,” at the Federal Depository Library Conference 2026.

Jochen Scholl’s paper titled “Passive Acoustic Monitoring for Iberian Orca Conservation and Maritime Safety: Managed Coexistence in the Strait of Gibraltar,” was published in Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

Melanie Walsh and co-authors Neel Gupta, E. Tiago Ramos, Alexis Martin, Karalee Harris, and Lurier Bao’s paper titled “What’s Seattle Reading? An Interactive Viewer and Open Data Pipeline for Two Decades of Public Library Circulation,” was accepted to the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2026).

Rachel Moran and co-authors Melinda McClure Haughey, Jessica Huseman, and Kate Starbird’s paper titled “Experts on Call: Infrastructuring Temporary Collaboration Spaces to Support Journalists,” was accepted to the 29th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2026).

Emmi Russo (PhD Student) and co-authors Nisha Devasia and Alexis Hiniker’s paper titled “How Romantic Partners Build ‘Sound relationship Houses’ Through Shared Gaming,” was accepted to the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY 2026).

Melanie Walsh and co-authors Advait Deshmukh, Nora Benedict, and Maria Antoniak’s paper titled “The Garden of Forking Prompts: How Users Explore Narrative Space in Story Generation,” was accepted to the Conference on Language Modeling (COLM 2026).

Stacey Wedlake, C. Scott, L. Williams, C. Eggerman, and G. Pacheco’s co-presented a panel titled “Community Engagement Methods for Community Data,” at the Association for Small and Rural Libraries Conference (ARSL 2026).

Chris Jowaisas, Stacey Wedlake, and Jason Young co-presented a session titled “Yes Let’s Do This’ to ‘Ugh, no. Do I have to’: Engaging Your Community About AI,” at the Association for Small and Rural Libraries Conference (ARSL 2026).

Ben Lee, Molly Hardy, Daniel Evans, and Brett Bobley co-presented on a panel titled “AI and Government Data: Preservation, Discoverability, and Collaboration in LAM’s,” at the AI4LAM Fantastic Futures Conference.

Shahan Ali Memon (PhD Student) was invited to a panel titled "Where Should AI Stop? Drawing the Line Between Assistance and Authorship in Research," hosted by The Open Question by ResearcherPlus.

Ben Lee and Robert Ehrenreich gave a talk titled “AI and the Future of Holocaust research and Memory: Reflections, Provocations, Refusals,” at the AI4LAM Fantastic Futures Conference.