IT Excellence at Illinois: News

A team of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers led by physics and astronomy professor Charles Gammie is part of a large international collaboration that unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. This result provides evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which researchers think reside at the center of most galaxies.

Working at the intersection of control theory and machine learning, ECE Associate Professor Max Raginsky explores fundamental questions about how to design complex systems that automatically learn to perform various tasks better on the basis of experience despite changing requirements and environments. His research results have applications in electronic circuit design automation, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence. This past year, Maxim Raginsky was appointed co-chair of the premier international conference on machine learning theory and artificial intelligence. The 35th annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) is scheduled to be held July 2-5, 2022, in London.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign materials science and engineering professor Nancy Sottos has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest professional honors a scientist can receive. She is among 120 members and 30 international members elected this year to recognize their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

The Center for Advanced Electronics through Machine Learning (CAEML), which has been funded as a Phase I IUCRC by the National Science Foundation since 2017, has just received funding from NSF to proceed with a second five-year phase. Phase II research will officially kick off on August 1, 2022. AEML’s research vision is to apply machine learning to the design of optimized microelectronic circuits and systems, thereby increasing the efficiency of electronic design automation (EDA) and resulting in reduced design cycle time and radically improved reliability.  

A cross-disciplinary UIUC team has demonstrated a major breakthrough in using automated synthesis to discover new molecules for organic electronics applications. The technology that enabled the discovery relies on an automated platform for rapid molecular synthesis at scale—which is a game-changer in the field of organic electronics and beyond. Using automated synthesis, the team was able to rapidly scan through a library of molecules with precisely defined structures, thereby uncovering, via single-molecule characterization experiments, a new mechanism for high conductance. The work was just reported in Nature Communications and is the first major result to emerge from the Molecule Maker Lab, which is located in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The remnants of a collapsed neutron star, called a pulsar, are magnetically charged and spinning anywhere from one rotation per second to hundreds of rotations per second. These celestial bodies, each 12 to 15 miles in diameter, generate light in the x-ray wavelength range. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed a new way spacecraft can use signals from multiple pulsars to navigate in deep space.

Concrete is the most popular building material in the world, and we use between 10 and 30 billion tons each year. But the price of that progress is a cost to the environment: Cement, an essential ingredient in concrete, is responsible for 8 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Enter the power of artificial intelligence. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Meta, and concrete supplier, Ozinga, partnered on discovering better concrete formulas using AI. The early-stage results found the AI-powered formulas reduce the carbon footprint of the concrete by 40% while maintaining strength and durability. Meta tested the formulas on multiple structures at the company’s DeKalb data center, namely the floor slabs of the guardhouse and construction management team’s temporary offices.

Professor Catherine Blake and Jodi A. Flaws, professor of comparative biosciences at the University of Illinois, have developed an automated approach that moves beyond the retrieval of relevant literature to the extraction step of the information synthesis process. In a recent study of cell death and proliferation—two fundamental hallmarks of cancer—they demonstrate how simply counting the number of outcomes shows a very different picture than focusing on how key outcomes have changed.

The National Science Foundation awarded a 7-year, $15 million project to a multi-university team led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The resulting ground-breaking and path-finding research, entitled “Mind in vitro - Computing with Living Neurons,” will imagine computers and robots that are human designed, but living.

About eight years ago, Illinois Computer Science professor Brighten Godfrey and collaborators formed a research team to dramatically increase the speed of the internet. At its core, Godfrey and this team believed they could develop an internet with close to speed-of-light latency. Their idea represented not just an improvement to internet performance, but an overhaul to the way it operates and how it is built.