CIL is a research group at George Mason University located in Fairfax, Virginia, who studies the dynamics of local communities, technology-enabled groups, and information infrastructures using computational methods and socio-technical approaches.

News

Oct. 2024
The 2024 annual report of the College of Engineering and Computing (CEC) at Mason covers CIL's Information Ecology project as a featured article.
Myeong gives an invited talk on the information ecology of disability services at the 31st Conference of the Korean Society for Information Management, held at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.
PhD student Matt Willis presents our ERF paper on prospective professionals' onboarding strategies into the cybersecurity community at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), held in Salt Lake City, Utah.
CIL welcomes Gie Myung Lee who begins his Ph.D. journey in the IST department, and M.S. students Adarsh Gorremuchu and Poojitha Anuvalasetty who will work on a news deserts project.
CIL extends a warm farewell to Victoria Gonzales (BS in Statistics & Computational Data Sciences), who graduates this month, and to Angela Sidhu (CS), who is transferring to Georgetown University.
Myeong presents two papers at the DH conference held in Arlington, Virginia, one of which is co-authored with PhD student Julia Hsu.
Jul. 2024
PhD student Julia Hsu presents our poster on YouTuber collaboration networks at the IC2S2 conference in Philadelphia, PA.
CIL congratulates PhD student Matt Willis on his AMCIS paper being selected among the top 25% of papers.
Jun. 2024
Undergraduate student Rodrigo Plaza presents our poster on YouTuber collaboration networks at the NetSci conference in Québec City, Canada.
CIL welcomes five interns, both high school and college students, for the Aspiring Scientists Summer Internship Program (ASSIP) 2024!
May 2024
CIL congratulates Tulsi (MS in Data Analytics Engineering) and Rodrigo (BS in Business) on their successful completion and graduation! After graduation, Tulsi will work as a Data Scientist at the Fairfax County Department of Family Services (DFS).
PhD student Julia Hsu and Myeong receive the Conference Bursary Award from DH 2024, which is granted to select early-career researchers.
Mar. 2024
CIL congratulates undergraduate student Victoria Gonzales on being selected to receive a 2024 OSCAR Student Excellence Award.
CIL congratulates Ph.D. students Julia Hsu and Zhehan Zhang, along with undergraduate students Rodrigo Plaza and Victoria Gonzales, for winning the 3rd Place Prize at the I-Week Poster Competition (Graduate Track).
CIL welcomes undergraduate student Angela Sidhu, who will work on community informatics projects.
Feb. 2024
CIL's graduate and undergraduate students present three posters at the Innovation Week event (a.k.a., I-Week) hosted by the College of Engineering and Computing, showcasing their ongoing research projects.
Jan. 2024
CIL congratulates Ph.D. student Julia Hsu for being accepted as the COVES (The Commonwealth of Virginia Engineering and Science) Fellow for Summer 2024, hosted by the Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.
Myeong is appointed as Visiting Scholar at New York University's Department of Sociology for Spring 2024.
Nov. 2023
Myeong receives a Best Paper Reviewer Award from the Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST '23).
Sep. 2023
CIL congratulates undergraduate student, Victoria Gonzales, who has been accepted as a Program Analyst at the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Aug. 2023
CIL congratulates the ASSIP 2023 interns (Megan, Stephen, Linh, and Leyat) on their successful presentation of their ChatGPT-related YouTube Data Analysis results at the ASSIP Final Presentation Event.
CIL congratulates Ph.D. student Julia Hsu who receives a GRA award from GMU's Center for Advancing Human-Machine Partnership (CAHMP) and the Provost Office as part of the CAHMP Seed grant.
CIL welcomes undergraduate student Rodrigo Plaza, who will work on community informatics projects as an OSCAR Undergraduate Research Assistant.
Jun. 2023
CIL welcomes four interns, both high school and college students, for the Aspiring Scientists Summer Internship Program (ASSIP)!
CIL is grateful to the Center for Advancing Human-Machine Partnership (CAHMP) for their support of our social capital research through a seed grant.
CIL congratulates Nnamdi Ojibe and Joel Adeniji on their successful completion and graduation in Computer Science!
Myeong receives the OSCAR Mentoring Excellence Award from George Mason University, thanks to the undergraduate researchers at CIL.
Mar. 2023
CIL is grateful to the Virginia Board for People with Disabilities (VBPD) for their generous support of our project aimed at understanding the information ecology of disability services in Virginia.
CIL congratulates the ASSIP 2022 team on making the finalists for the Award for Best Poster (top-5) at the iConference 2023.
Myeong and his collaborators, Richard and Ms. Robinson, present their work on the impact of urban renewal at the City of Asheville's Community Reparation Commission meeting.
Feb. 2023
CIL's graduate and undergraduate students present five posters at the Innovation Week event (a.k.a., I-Week) hosted by the College of Engineering and Computing, showcasing their ongoing research projects.
Jan. 2023
CIL welcomes Latifah Abubakr who begins her Ph.D. journey at the IST department and M.S. students Tulsi Shrivastava and Merlin Kolli who will work on social computing and civic data projects.
Dec. 2022
Students from the AIT722: Theories and Models in Geo-Social Data Analytics course crunch numbers and build map-based web applications to help address local community issues. Check out their final projects.
Nov. 2022
Myeong gives an invited talk on information ecology at the Information Access Summit in Richmond, Virginia, organized by the Virginia Board for People with Disabilities.
CIL congratulates ASSIP co-mentors (Hiba and Jinyi) and high-school interns Arnav, Kaavya, Jiwoo, and Scarlett for their poster on YouTubers' collaboration networks being accepted to the iConference 2023, the International Conference on Information.
Oct. 2022
Sep. 2022
CIL welcomes undergraduate student Nnamdi Ojibe who will work as a Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Undergraduate Research Assistant on civic data projects.
CIL's Ph.D. Students are selected as Student Volunteers at ACM RecSys 2022 (Julia and Hiba) and ACM CSCW 2022 (Jinyi).
Aug. 2022
CIL congratulates Ph.D. student Jinyi Kim who is awarded the Predoctoral Fellowship from GMU's Institute for Digital InnovAtion (IDIA) to work on identifying multi-level risk factors that shape youth development.
CIL welcomes undergraduate student Joel Adeniji who will work on developing the map-based system for visualizing information deserts in people's use of Boston's 311 system.
Jul. 2022
We are grateful to the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Human-Centered Computing (HCC) Program for their generous support of our project on designing the future of risk prediction IT in fire departments.
CIL will collaborate with Arizona State University on identifying and minimizing biases in social service provisioning systems, thanks to the generous support from the National Science Foundation's DASS program.
Jun. 2022
We are grateful that our paper on social justice in Boston's 311 system receives the Best Full Research Paper Runner-Up from European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS).
CIL welcomes six undergraduate interns for the Summer Team Impact Program (STIP) and four high school interns for the Aspiring Scientists Summer Internship Program (ASSIP)!
Ph.D. student Hiba Siraj, Myeong, and collaborators discuss a paper on informal risk work during COVID-19 at the Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines (WAIM) Summer Conference in Washington D.C.
May 2022
Myeong gives an invited Special Lecture on Word Embedding Models at the Kyungbook National University's iSchool.
Apr. 2022
Myeong becomes a core faculty member at GMU's Center for Advancing Human-Machine Partnership (CAHMP).
Jan. 2022
Myeong gives an invited talk on the competition structures of local groups on Event-based Social Networks at Myongji University's Department of Computer Science.
Dec. 2021
We are grateful to receive a Summer Team Impact Award from GMU Provost Office (OSCAR) to host an undergraduate research internship at GMU in Summer 2022 .
Oct. 2021
CIL welcomes Master's student Ishana Shinde and undergraduate student Victoria Gonzales who will work on the 4-VA project.
Aug. 2021
Myeong presents a paper on Boston's 311 data analysis at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting.
CIL congratulates Ph.D. student Jinyi Kim who receives a GRA award from GMU's Center for Advancing Human-Machine Partnership (CAHMP) to work on the Remapping Southside Community project.
CIL welcomes Matt Willis and Jinyi Kim who start their Ph.D. journey at the IST department.
Myeong gives an invited BK21 Special Lecture on Digital Curation Methods at the Kyungbook National University's iSchool.
Jul. 2021
We are grateful for receiving a 4-VA Collaborative Research Grant to conduct a pilot study on community-level Human-AI collaboration on Event-based Social Network platforms.
Jun. 2021
Our team launches the Remapping Southside Community platform as part of the Urban Renewal Impact project.
May 2021
Katie and Myeong present a CHI paper on risk perception during the COVID-19 pandemic and receive an Honorable Mention Award!
Mar. 2021
Ph.D. student Mark Peterson presents a paper on multi-generational stories of urban renewal at the iConference 2021.
CIL welcomes Master's student Samriddhi Dashora who will work on the NSF CIVIC project.
Feb. 2021
We are grateful for receiving an CIVIC Innovation Challenge Stage 1 (planning) Grant from National Science Foundation to study people's civic technology reappropriation processes during a public health crisis.
Jan. 2021
CIL welcomes Hiba Siraj who starts her Ph.D. journey at the IST department.
Consequential, a Carnegie Mellon's Podcast, covers Myeong's discussion on information deserts in their episode, "Is Information Democratized?"

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If you are interested in joining or collaborating with CIL, contact the CIL Director through email, please.