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IT Excellence at Illinois: News

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  • Headshot of Professor Goldschmidt

    Elizabeth Goldschmidt receives NSF CAREER Award

    Illinois Physics Assistant Professor Elizabeth Goldschmidt has been selected for a 2022 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. This prestigious award recognizes outstanding junior faculty who excel in both research and education and who have the potential to become lifetime leaders in their respective fields. Goldschmidt is an experimentalist specializing in quantum optics for applications in quantum information and quantum networking.

  • Roth Named Fellow of the Association of Computational Linguistics

    CS Professor Dan Roth was named a 2013 Fellow of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL). He was recognized for "significant contributions to machine learning and inference in natural language processing."

  • Jianming Jin Wins Chen-To Tai Award from IEEE APS

    Professor Jianming Jin won the Chen-To Tai Distinguished Educator Award from the IEEE Antenna and Propagation Society. Jin teaches graduate courses in electromagnetic theory and computational electromagnetics, and has been at Illinois for 22 years.

  • Machine-Learning Discovery and Design of Membrane-Active Peptides

    Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed a new machine learning approach to discover and design ⍺-helical membrane active peptides based on their physicochemical properties.

  • [Image ID: three side-by-side images of the same pink-tinged cell tissue, which are amorphous blobs with other blobs of different shades inside. The image on the left has the least distinct detail, and what look like white scratches distorting some of the color of the image. The one in the center is a lighter pink with more distinct purple details. The one on the left is deeply saturated purple, with pink, blue, black, and green details that show up very distinctly. End ID]

    Hybrid Microscope Could Bring Digital Biopsy to the Clinic

    By adding infrared capability to the ubiquitous, standard optical microscope, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign hope to bring cancer diagnosis into the digital era.

  • University of Illinois-led SONIC Center Awarded $30 Million for Computing on Nanoscale Fabrics

    Led by faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a multi-university research team has received $30 million to launch the Systems On Nanoscale Information fabriCs (SONIC) Center.

  • New Paradigm Enables More Secure, Reliable Control Networks for Power Grid

    Oregon State's Bobba, UIUC's Sanders, Nicol, and Campbell, along with their collaborators at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL), Ameren Corporation, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), are working to solve that problem of creating a global view of all communication flows through a $4.9 million software-defined networking (SDN) project funded by the Department of Energy and led by SEL.

  • ECE ILLINOIS Alumnus Receives IBM Fellow Distinction

    ECE ILLINOIS alumnus Kyle Brown (CompE '98) was recently named as an IBM Fellow, IBM's "pre-eminent technical distinction, granted in recognition of outstanding and sustained technical achievements and leadership in engineering, programming, services, science, design and technology" per the IBM website.

  • Composite image of left to right Professors: Klara Nahrstedt, Gang Wang, Nancy Amato, and Josep Torrellas

    Illinois, IBM Ready to Push the Boundaries of What's Possible in Computing

    18 Illinois CS faculty are involved in research projects through the new IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute that will further advance technology spanning the hybrid cloud and AI, materials discovery and quantum computing.

  • Cyber-Physical-Human Systems: Making the Whole Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

    Led by CS Professor Alex Kirlik, Illinois researchers have received a $950,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to study cyber-physical-human systems to further investigate how humans need to be added to the equation of automation for many aspects of our lives.

  • ECE Illinois Alumnae Develop Emergency Notification Device at CIE

    Anansi is a personal safety band that people wear on their wrists that is able to monitor the wearer's fight or flight senses. If the bodily function crosses a certain threshold, then the band will automatically alert the authorities in order to provide the user with help.

  • Illinois Graphic Design Professor Fights Human Trafficking with App, Education

    Professor Lisa Mercer created Operation Compass, an app that allows anonymously reporting suspected cases of human trafficking.

  • Tong Wins NSF-Amazon award to Improve AI Fairness

    Computer science professor Hanghang Tong and a team of researchers recently received an three year award for over $1 million from the National Science Foundation and Amazon. The award is a part of their joint Fairness in Artificial Intelligence program. The initiative supports computational research focused on fairness in AI to ultimately create trustworthy systems that can help tackle society’s biggest challenges.

  • It displays the photo of Illinois ECE Assistant Professor Pengfei Song

    Song and Mayo Clinic Researchers Awarded $2.2M DOD Grant for Breast Cancer Imaging Study

    Four in ten* patients screened for breast cancer are at a higher risk of misdiagnosis due to the presence of dense breast tissue. Traditional mammography cannot reliably diagnose the disease in these patients, sometimes even with the help of supplemental screening.

  • Software Canaries to Detect Failures in Computer Processors

    ECE Assistant Professor Rakesh Kumar and ECE alumnus and University of Minnesota Assistant Professor John Sartori (MSEE 10, PhD 12) have received a $300,000, 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation and the Semiconductor Research Corporation to research the use of software canaries in detecting hardware failures.

  • Leburton Combines Biology and Nanoelectronics to Find Innovative Solutions

    One of the hybrid projects Leburton works on is a nanoscale transistor that harnesses the remarkable electrical properties of graphene, a novel mono-atomic layer carbon material, to sequence individual strands of DNA (roughly a billionth of a meter wide).

  • North American Power Symposium (NAPS) Recognizes ITI Researchers

    ECE ILLINOIS Assistant Professor Hao Zhu, ECE ILLINOIS graduate student Hao Jan Liu, and visiting scholar Lin Yu Lu were recently awarded the second best paper award at the 2016 North American Power Symposium (NAPS). All three are Information Trust Institute researchers.

  • Faculty Collaborates on $8.3 Million DARPA Initiative

    The University of Illinois has received an $8.3 million grant to develop foundational computing technologies for next-generation autonomous systems for defense and commercial applications. The multi-university initiative includes collaborators from Princeton University, Raytheon Missile Systems (RMS), and GLOBALFOUNDRIES.

  • Lyding Receives NBIC Award

    Professor Joseph W. Lyding gave the keynote address at the NanoDays@Penn on the University of Pennsylvania campus. He had been honored with the Award for Research Excellence in Nanotechnology, which is accorded to one international researcher each year by Penn’s Bio/Nano Interface Center.

  • Sensors Detect Disease Markers in Breath

    University of Illinois researchers have created devices sensitive enough to detect markers at levels that are far too low to smell, yet are important to human health.

  • Headshot of Paris Smargadis overlaid on a pastel mixed color background remincient of the Beattles "Get Back"

    Smaragdis Lends His Research Talents to the Benefit of Beatlemania

    For Peter Smaragdis, what’s followed is a career in academia that centered his Artificial Intelligence research on the question: What does it mean to take a stream of sound and then break it down into its individual components? This key interest paced his Masters, PhD and postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It fueled his academic career here and as a research scientist with Adobe Research. It provided opportunity to become an IEEE Fellow in 2015 and the IEEE chair of the Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee. And it helped him produce widely published research and more than 40 patents. Through it all, nothing he’s accomplished has been more “mind-bending” than the recent work he completed with a team of engineers to boost the audio quality of director Peter Jackson’s recent documentary titled “The Beatles: Get Back.”

  • CU Set to Become Living Lab with US Ignite NSF Award

    National Science Foundation awarded $6 million to US Ignite--an independent, nonprofit organization whose mission is to spur development of advanced Internet applications that enable transformative public benefit--for a project to develop "living lab" communities across the country. Participating cities will serve as testing grounds for smart gigabit applications.

  • Refuse-to-Crash System Could Make Skies More Friendly

    In a perfect world, the skies would always be friendly and airplanes would always fly smoothly. The reality is that airplanes encounter a variety of disturbances, from turbulence and inclement weather to instrument and/or material failure.

  • A Lifetime of Achievement in Real-Time

    Computer Science Professor Tarek Abdelzaher, a Donald Biggar Willett Scholar in the College of Engineering, was named the winner of the 2012 Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award by the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems in December.

  • Mak Discusses Social Facets of Data Science

    Associate Professor Bonnie Mak was invited to share her expertise at a National Science Foundation (NSF) workshop on "Social Facets of Data Science."

  • NPRE Researchers To Investigate Load-Following Capabilities For Molten Salt Reactors

    To be competitive with other energy producers, the newest generation of nuclear reactors will need to lower their output during times of reduced electricity demand. A team of researchers from Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are examining ways to enable this load-following capability. The scientists are conducting simulations to determine how to remove unwanted fission by-products that slow reaction rates and, thus, energy production.

  • Surgical Probe Seeks Out Where Cancer Ends and Healthy Tissue Begins

    A new surgical tool that uses light to make sure surgeons removing cancerous tumors "got it all" was found to correlate well with traditional pathologists' diagnoses in a clinical study, showing that the tool could soon enable reliable, real-time guidance for surgeons.

  • Social Media as Good a Barometer of Public Health Attitudes as Traditional Phone Polling

    Social media data can be used as an additional source of information to gauge public opinion about health issues alongside traditional data sources like phone-based polling, says new research co-written by U. of I. psychology professor Dolores Albarracin.

  • [Image ID: a rendered image of a silver cylinder labeled "Ground Electrode". Inside there are two orange and one white ring, labeled "High-Voltage Electrode." The electrodes are attached to a black box and some tubes. End ID]

    Improving Aerodynamics During Entire Flight, not just Takeoff and Landing

    Currently in use on the wings of airplanes are little fins near the leading edge or just upstream of control surfaces to help control the aircraft during takeoff or landing. But these vortex generator vanes and other similar solutions are fixed in place across the entire flight, creating a cruise penalty from the drag. A promising new idea for a device was tested at the University of Illinois that uses an electric spark that can be turned on and off when needed to generate rotating air across the wing for better lift.

  • Book Title "Young McDonald Had a Botanical Farm" on a cloud background surrounding a picture of a McDonald's logo character

    New children's book on botanical farming features AI-generated art

    The potential for creating artworks with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) has been attracting increasing interest. In February, CSL predoctoral scholar Alayt Issak and her advisor, Lav Varshney, published a children’s book on which they collaborated, Young McDonald Had a Botanical Farm, whose illustrations were created by Issak using AI tools.

  • Popescu Named SPIE Fellow

    Professor Gabriel Popescu has been named a Fellow of the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE).

  • Wolske Asserts 'Radical Reconsideration' of Digital Literacy in New Article

    Martin Wolske, senior research scientist and lecturer, takes a critical look at digital literacy for the twenty-first century in his paper, "A Radical Reconsideration of Digital Literacy." The article was published in the Summer 2016 issue of Information for Social Change.

  • Gropp Named to HPCWire's "People to Watch"

    HPCWire has named William D. Gropp, Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Parallel Computing Institute, one of its People to Watch in 2013. According to the publication, the annual list is comprised of the best and brightest minds of HPC whose hard work, dedication and contributions are predicted to reach beyond the spectrum of high performance computing and will influence the direction that technology will lead us in 2013 and beyond.

  • Dragic's Paper Picked for OSA Spotlight

    A recent paper titled, "Brillouin Scattering Properties of Lanthano-Aluminosilicate Optical Fiber," by Lecturer Peter D. Dragic has been featured as a spotlight article by the Optical Society of America, or OSA, for a new kind of fiber optic cable he's developed along with collaborators at Clemson University and the Institute of Photonic Technology in Jena, Germany. It has 10 times the performance of the current industry standard and dramatically improved capabilities for sensing differences in stress and temperature.

  • IMLS Grant for Library and GSLIS

    The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded $398,844 to the University of Illinois Library and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science through its Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. Harriett Green, English and Digital Humanities Librarian at the University Library, is the principal investigator on the project, "Digging Deeper, Reaching Further: Libraries Empowering Users to Mine the HathiTrust Digital Library Resources."

  • $20 Million Award will Fund Resilience Research Center for Five More Years

    The Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has renewed a cooperative agreement that funds the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning. Originally established with a $20 million award in 2015, the center will receive an additional $20 million in support over the next five years. Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) professor Paolo Gardoni (above) will continue to serve as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Illinois) campus principal investigator.

  • Headshots Left to right: Chao Pan, Charles Schroeder, Kasra Tabatabaei

    Expanded alphabet, precise sequencing make DNA the next data storage solution

    Adding seven new letters to DNA’s molecular alphabet and developing a precise readout method enabled Illinois researchers to transform the double helix into a robust, sustainable data storage platform fit for the Information Age.

  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Central to New, $320-million Digital Lab for Manufacturing

    The Digital Lab for Manufacturing is an applied research institute that will develop digital manufacturing technologies and commercialize these technologies with key industries. These technologies will be used to make everything from consumer products to heavy machinery to equipment for the military. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s world-renowned National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) are central to the Digital Lab for Manufacturing. Professor William King from Illinois’ Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering is the Digital Lab’s principal investigator and will serve as its Chief Technical Officer.

  • Three Illinois Professors Named Sloan Research Fellows

    Three U. of I. professors are recipients of Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowships this year.

  • Liberzon and Viswanath Named 2013 IEEE Fellows

    ECE Professors Daniel M. Liberzon and Pramod Viswanath have both been announced as IEEE Fellows for 2013.

  • NSF Features Bashir's Work in Cybersecurity Education

    The National Science Foundation recently featured current research about cybersecurity education programs, one of which is co-led by GSLIS Assistant Professor Masooda Bashir.

  • La Barre Invited to Speak at Knowledge Organization Colloquium

    Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre has been invited by the Knowledge Organization Research Group (KOrg) to work with doctoral students and faculty in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

  • Illinois CS Researchers Among Teams Selected by DARPA to Unleash Power of Specialized and Reconfigurable Hardware

    The general-purpose computer has remained the dominant computing architecture for the last 50 years, driven largely by the relentless pace of Moores Law, the transistor-scaling that has allowed for a half-century of rapid progress in electronics. As this trajectory slows, however, it has become increasingly more challenging to achieve performance gains from generalized hardware, setting the stage for a resurgence in specialized architectures.

  • Postdoctoral researcher Gang Wang loads a sample into the system used to perform the nanotube crosslinking operation while Joseph Lyding looks on.

    Improving The Electrical and Mechanical Properties of Carbon-Nanotube-Based Fibers

    The Lyding Group recently developed a technique that can be used to build carbon-nanotube-based fibers by creating chemical crosslinks. The technique improves the electrical and mechanical properties of these materials.

  • An Electric Sock For the Heart

    A team of scientists led by John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has created a web of electronics that wraps around a living heart and measures everything from temperature to electrical activity.

  • AmpliMy Project to Give a Voice to Those Who Have Trouble Being Heard

    A team from the University of Illinois is developing a voice amplifier for U. of I. art history student Alexis Wernsing, front, that will be attached to her wheelchair and that she can control with the nudge of her elbow.

  • Tiny Aquariums Put Nanoparticle Self-Assembly on Display

    Postdoctoral researcher Juyeong Kim, graduate student Zihao Ou and professor Qian Chen have developed a new technique for observing colloidal nanoparticles while they interact and self-assemble.

  • abstract drawing of circuit paths in the shape of a brain

    FAIR Guidelines Set the Tone for Data Accessibility and Reusability

    Researchers from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign collaborate with various institutions across the country to make data exchange and artificial intelligence tools more FAIR – findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

  • The Next Scientists

    Undergraduate institute prepares students to integrate computer science, other research disciplines...

  • "Define the Future" at Engineering Open House, March 11-12

    Visitors will be treated to more than 200 interactive student-run exhibits...