News

Nineteen UT Austin iSchool scholars, led by Interim Dean Prof. Soo Young Rieh, will present their research at the ASIS&T 2025 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., November 14–18. Several community members, including Prof. Yan Zhang, Jiaxin An, and Akhil Adavi, received special recognition for their outstanding contributions.

As artificial intelligence has boomed over the past several years, industry commitment to responsible AI has often failed to keep pace, perhaps because executives do not see such practices as essential to their bottom line. This fall, iSchool professor Min Kyung Lee will embark on an investigation, funded by a coalition of major philanthropies including the Ford Foundation and the Omidyar Network, to identify the relationship between companies’ responsible AI practices and their financial outcomes.

This year’s ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW) kicks off in Bergen, Norway on October 18, and the University of Texas School of Information will be well represented. More than 15 current iSchool faculty and students will be presenting papers and posters at the event.

On Tuesday, September 23, over 250 undergraduate and graduate students of the University of Texas School of Information converged on the Texas Union Ballroom on the Forty Acres to meet potential employers and practice their professional development skills. The event was the second annual iSchool Career Fair, conceived by leadership as a way to bring professional opportunities directly to students – and to help employer partners meet hiring needs. 

As a new school year gets underway at the University of Texas School of Information, the iSchool leadership team gains one new face and sees another familiar figure changing roles. Dr. James Howison, most recently interim associate dean for research, will be stepping into the role of interim associate dean for academic affairs. The vacancy in his former role will be filled by Dr. Ken Fleischmann, the new interim associate dean for research. 

The University of Texas School of Information is pleased to announce the hiring of two outstanding scholars for faculty roles beginning next year: Chan Young Park and Jiaxin Pei. Their brief biographical statements can be found below. Both new assistant professors bring with them cutting-edge expertise in large language models and artificial intelligence, with a focus on human contexts, experiences, and impacts.  

Please join us in welcoming new Assistant Professor David Gray Widder, who starts at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information in December 2025. Widder arrives most recently from Cornell University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Life Initiative from 2023-2025. Prior to that, he received his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, where his dissertation was titled “Ethics down the AI supply chain: playing with power.”  

The School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin welcomes Assistant Professor Ryan Moore. Moore joins the iSchool from Stanford University, where he earned his PhD in Communication and most recently spent a year as a New Map of Life Fellow at the Stanford Center on Longevity. 

The School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin congratulates Prof. Hanlin Li, who in July received a grant from the Wikimedia Research Fund for her proposal “Informing Memory Institutions and Humanities Researchers of the Broader Impact of Open Data Sharing via Wikidata.” The grant, which totals $49,450, involves both outreach to GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) and the proposed creation of a tool to help facilitate the use of Wikidata by such organizations. 

The University of Texas School of Information is proud to introduce its latest cohort of PhD graduates, who have successfully navigated the rigors of the dissertation process to emerge as new leaders in the field: Anubrata Das, Siqi Yi, and Chongyan Chen. These scholars are engaged in important research projects that advance, in new and exciting ways, conceptual and practical approaches to information science, where humans and technology meet.