News

Good Systems: Ethical AI at UT Austin is one of the three campus-wide Bridging Barriers Research Grand Challenges. Good Systems recently held an internal seed-funding competition for interdisciplinary faculty teams at UT pursuing projects at the convergence of AI design, human values, and societal need and three out of six grants were awarded to iSchool faculty: Angela D.R. Smith, Earl Huff, Jr., and Ying Ding.

We are pleased to announce career milestones for two iSchool professors, both of whom are leaders in their fields and highly valued members of our campus community. Dr. Min Kyung Lee has been recommended for tenure and promotion to associate professor, and Sarah Norris has been recommended for promotion to associate professor of practice.

The iSchool invited scholars and visitors into a hive of research energy last Friday Feb. 27, as doors opened on the annual Research Showcase event at the Texas Union on UT Campus. For those in attendance, three hours was scarcely enough time take in the dizzying depth and breadth of all the research projects on display. Still, a unifying narrative emerged: The iSchool’s researchers are forward-looking, collaborative, and focused not just on substantive findings but also on effective communication of what their work means and why it matters.

I am writing to all of you to provide some iSchool context to the news shared by President Davis about our moving under the umbrella of a new School of Computing within the College of Natural Sciences in the fall. The college and University have committed to maintaining all our current academic credentials for students and for prospective students and to bringing new resources to bear for faculty hiring, supports for our students, and interdisciplinary research co-led by our community.

Effective February 1 of this year, Prof. Ken Fleischmann will take the reins as incoming leader of the iSchool, leading the unit into its next phase. Fleischmann is a trusted and familiar face at the iSchool, a cutting-edge researcher on human-centered AI,and an experienced administrator at the iSchool and beyond.

Prof. David Lankes on his new book and the future of the library and archival professions

Chinmayee Channuri, an undergraduate senior double-majoring in Informatics at the School of Information and Management Information Systems at McCombs School of Business, has won the Fall 2025 Dean’s Choice Award for her capstone project “Building Product Growth Metrics for Voila Voice.” Dean’s Choice Awards are selected from among graduating iSchool students by Interim Dean Soo Young Rieh at our semi-annual iSchool Capstone Poster Session events.

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.