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IT Excellence at Illinois: News

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  • TOYOTA Research Institute Launches Collaboration With Illinois, Other Academic Institutions

    The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) announced today that it has selected 13 additional academic institutions to participate in the next five year phase of its collaborative research program. These universities join MIT, Stanford and the University of Michigan which have worked with TRI over the last five years to expand the body of research into artificial intelligence (AI) with the goal of amplifying the human experience.

  • Multi-Institution Team Advances Semiconducting Graphene

    Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California, Berkeley have demonstrated a new way to change the amount of electrons that reside in a given region within a piece of graphene, a proof-of-principle in making the fundamental building blocks of semiconductor devices using the 2D material. The study was a collaboration between the research groups of Andrew Rappe at the University of Pennsylvania, Lane Martin at the University of California, and Moonsub Shim, an associate professor of materials science and engineering and a Willett Faculty Scholar at Illinois. Its results were published in the journal Nature Communications.

  • Recent Illinois Alumnus Receives Alfred W. Allen Award

    Yifan Yao, who graduated from Illinois with a B.S. in material science and engineering and a minor from ECE ILLINOIS, received this award in recognition of his academic excellence.

  • Headshot of Assistant Professor Bin Hu

    Hu earns prestigious NSF CAREER award to merge control theory and machine learning

    For more than 50 years, control theory has guided the creation of sophisticated mathematical tools that underpin modern safety-critical and dynamic systems like commercial aircraft and nuclear power plants. More recently, machine learning algorithms have harnessed the power of massive amounts of data to enable computers to recognize a visual scene, understand written text, or perform an action in the real world.

  • Computer Simulation Playing Big Role in DOE-Funded Project

    A group led by Brent Heuser is nearing the end of its first year of research to develop improved cladding for nuclear fuel rods. Computer simulation led by Tomasz Kozlowski, an assistant professor in NPRE, is supporting research on the experimental side. Kozlowski is one of a growing number of researchers taking advantage of high-performance computers such as the Illinois Campus Cluster to predict optimal outcomes prior to experiments and in some cases to explain the outcomes afterward.

  • Illinois Researchers Making Virtual Surgery Simulation a Reality

    Researchers from the University of Illinois led by Professor of Industrial and Enterprise Engineering Kesh Kesavadas is at the forefront of a technology that will make that training virtual. Raven will allow future doctors hands-on training in robotic surgery without the use of a patient.

  • Researchers Explore the Mystery of Neuron Coding and Its Applications

    How neural impulses are timed--and how they can be replicated artificially--has been mathematically determined by a team of researchers composed of ECE ILLINOIS and CSL Professor and ADSC director Douglas L Jones, ECE ILLINOIS alumnus Erik Johnson (BSEE ’08, MSCompE ’13, PhD CompE ’16), and Rama Ratnam. These CSL affiliates have been developing their research in the Health Care Engineering Systems Center.

  • [Image ID: a boxy white robot sits between two rows of green cornstalks. The robot has thick black tires and a round sensor on the front. End ID]

    Chowdhary Tackles Agricultural Challenges with Autonomous Robot

    Illinois ECE affiliate faculty member and director of the Field Robotics Engineering and Sciences Hub Girish Chowdhary was recently featured on a OneZero article, highlighting his work with his startup EarthSense. EarthSense sells an autonomous agriculture robot that Chowdhary developed to phenotype plants for breeders.

  • Kim Honored as ACM Fellow for Work on Power-Efficient Computing

    Illinois ECE Professor Nam Sung Kim has been named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. He is honored "for contribution to design and modeling of power-efficient computer architectures."

  • Bailey Wins ACM Best Paper Award for Heartbleed Research

    "The Matter of Heartbleed," a paper co-written by Associate Professor Michael Donald Bailey, won the best paper award at the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Internet Measurement Conference.

  • Novel Silicon Etching Technique Crafts 3D Gradient Refractive Index Micro-Optics

    Working with colleagues at Stanford and the Dow Chemical Company, UIUC researchers fabricated 3-D birefringent gradient refractive index (GRIN) micro-optics by electrochemically etching preformed Si micro-structures, like square columns, PSi structures with defined refractive index profiles.

  • Four Illinois Women Named Rising Stars

    Four Illinois students were among the 40 elite graduate and postdoctoral women invited to the Rising Stars of EECS workshop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last month: Hyojin Sung, Yemaya Bordain, Katherine Kim, and Yafang Tan.

  • PhD Student Advances Precision Medicine through Research

    Big data analytics has endless possibilities in health care, Arjun Prasanna Athreya, a PhD student, advised by ECE ILLINOIS Professor Ravishankar K Iyer, works at the forefront of this precision medicine work with Mayo Clinic.

  • Assistant Professor Kyle Smith. Photo by L. Brian Stauffer

    Smith's Theory of Pore-Scale Transport to Enable Improved Flow Batteries

    Redox flow batteries are an emerging technology for electrochemical energy storage that could help enhance the use of power produced by renewable energy resources. These power resources are inherently irregular in their supply, which doesn’t typically align with demand on the power grid. In principle, redox flow batteries can be designed to have an energy-storage capacity that is independent of its power rating. However, in practice, the ease with which redox-active molecules are transported to electrode surfaces plays an important role in determining their efficiency, the power that is produced or charged and, in some instances, their length of life.

  • Nanavati in front of the JWST in cleanroom gear

    Alumnus Nanavati leads team ensuring seamless communication with newest and most powerful space telescope

    More than 25 years in the making, the James Webb Space Telescope ("Webb") blasted into space recently on a one-million-mile journey to reveal the origins of our Universe while capturing the formation of stars and planets in distant galaxies—some of which may be capable of sustaining life. While much of the attention was focused on the launch site in French Guiana that day, Illinois ECE alumnus Shashvat Nanavati (BSEE '13) and his communications subsystem team were nearly 3,000 miles away in the Mission Operations Center (MOC) in Baltimore, MD, ensuring that critical communications with the NASA-funded satellite were occurring properly.

  • Alumni-Founded Fullstack Academy Offers Cutting-Edge Coding Education

    Fullstack Academy, an immersive software engineering school founded by ECE ILLINOIS alumnus David Yang and CS @ Illinois alumnus Nimit Maru, offers an intensive three-month coding workshop in New York for people from a variety of backgrounds who want to learn coding.

  • Iyer Leads Search for New Computer Platform to Speed Genomic Data Interpretation

    The new Center for Computational Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine (CCBGM) seeks to develop a new platform for generating, interpreting, and applying genomic data for a variety of applications.

  • Shanbhag Leads Effort To Enhance Speed And Battery Life of Mobile IOT Devices

    Research conducted through a partnership between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Micron Technology, Inc., could help your cell phone and IoT devices run applications faster and conserve battery life at the same time. Led by ECE ILLINOIS Professor Naresh R Shanbhag, these advancements are courtesy of the team’s development of a new deep in-memory architecture (DIMA) for NAND flash memory, which provides data storage for most of the world’s mobile devices.

  • 'Shot in the Dark' Provides a Path Toward Collaborative Research That Better Predicts COVID-19 Severity

    The radiologist for DuPage Medical Group only knew Forsyth as a leading expert in Artificial Intelligence. Their lack of a relationship didn't undo the excitement he had to form a collaborative research effort, though. His goal was to guide medical imaging in a new direction, one that could offset a few growing trends in this country’s healthcare system.

  • Upgrading Programming for Mobile Cloud

    CS Professor Gul Agha, along with CS Associate Professor Darko Marinov, proposes a new methodology for building mobile cloud applications that can leverage cloud resources in a scalable way, while dramatically simplifying the development effort.

  • CS Alumnus Shannon Chen Receives SIGMM Outstanding PhD Thesis Award

    Chien-Nan (Shannon) Chen (PhD CS '16) won the SIGMM Outstanding PhD Thesis Award.

  • polarization lenses for silicone smartphone chips

    Gruev discusses implications of polarization techonology

    IMAGINE A CAMERA that's mounted on your car being able to identify black ice on the road, giving you a heads-up before you drive over it. Or a cell phone camera that can tell whether a lesion on your skin is possibly cancerous. Or the ability for Face ID to work even when you have a face mask on. These are all possibilities Metalenz is touting with its new PolarEyes polarization technology. (WIRED Magazine)

  • Illinois Receives $4.2 Million to Train Students in Cyber Security

    The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has received a four-year, $4.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to renew a program that trains students in cyber security, a field that is projected to experience an annual shortage of 20,000 to 40,000 skilled workers for the foreseeable future, according to a 2012 Reuters report.

  • Hutchinson, Chung Developing Solution for GPS-Denied Environments

    Professor Seth Hutchinson and Aerospace Assistant Professor Soon-Jo Chung are working to create algorithms that can map areas where GPS signals aren't available.

  • Physics Illinois Alumnus M. George Craford Awarded IEEE Edison Medal

    Physics Illinois alumnus M. George Craford has been selected for the IEEE Edison Medal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

  • Banerjee Receives NSF CAREER Award for Work Emulating a Biological Spine in Robots

    Illinois ECE Assistant Professor Arijit Banerjee recently won the NSF CAREER award for his work with bio-inspired design methods for distributed electromechanical actuators to emulate a biological spine. This prestigious award supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

  • Khandelwal Receives CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award

    CS senior Urvashi Khandelwal was one of four recipients of the 2015 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers Award. This award recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.

  • Singer, Illinois Engineering Doubling Down on Entrepreneurship

    With the Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC) as its anchor, the College of Engineering has been working across the University to build a reputation as one of the leaders in commercializing innovative ideas.

  • Composite images of the night sky taken by a telescope with bright streaks running accross them.

    Protecting dark and quiet skies from satellite constellation interference

    If you’ve ever tried to star gaze in a residential or urban area, you know that a streetlight or even the lights from a nearby town can greatly interfere with your ability to identify Orion’s Belt and see a rare comet or other celestial bodies. But what is more of a disappointment for us is a cosmic disruption for scientists and others in the space industry.

  • Cunningham Named Fellow of OSA and NAI

    Professor Brian T. Cunningham, an alumnus of the department, was recently appointed a Fellow of both The Optical Society and the National Academy of Inventors.

  • Fan Lam Wins Two Best Paper Awards for Brain Imaging Research

    Beckman postdoctoral fellow Fan Lam (MS '11, PhD '15) has won two best paper awards: the Student Best Paper Award at the 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging in New York, and the First-Place Paper Award of the MR Spectroscopy Study Group at the 2015 International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine Annual Meeting in Toronto.

  • PhD Student Leads Team to Success at Global Visual Recognition Challenge

    Honghui Shi, an ECE ILLINOIS PhD student with affiliation at Beckman Institute and the Coordinated Science Lab, led a team that placed second in all four categories of object detection and tracking from video

  • Iyer Helps Develop Tools to Aid in Alzheimer's Diagnosis and Prognosis

    A team of researchers, led by Illinois ECE Professor Ravishankar K Iyer, George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor of Engineering, is working to create tools that could help improve the diagnosis of the illness and produce more accurate prognoses.

  • Milenkovic Looks for Big Data Storage Solution in DNA

    Associate Professor Olgica Milenkovic is looking to use DNA as a way to store Big Data, in an attempt to replace today's traditional devices, such as flash drive memories, hard disks and magnetic recording devices.

  • Office of Diversity, Equity, and Access Honors Wireless Elevator Remote Control

    ECE ILLINOIS staff member and alumnus Dan Mast (BSEE '84) is a member of the University of Illinois project, Wireless Elevator Remote Control (WERC). Mast and other members of WERC were recognized for their "Excellence in Access and Accommodations" by the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Access (ODEA).

  • CS @ ILLINOIS Has Strong Showing at SC13

    CS Professor Marc Snir, the Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professor, was presented with IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award for his contributions to high-performance parallel computing. Kale also received an award at the conference. He was part of a team that received the HPCwire Editors’ Choice Award for Best Use of HPC in Life Sciences for its use of the Blue Waters supercomputer to achieve a significant breakthrough in understanding the HIV virus. The organization of this year’s conference was led by CS Professor William Gropp, the Thomas M. Siebel Chair.

  • Optical-Electric Switch Could Boost Computer Speeds

    Engineers are unveiling an upgrade to the transistor laser that could be used to boost computer processor speeds -- the formation of two stable energy states and the ability to switch between them quickly.

  • Illinois ECE Professor Raluca Ilie

    Ilie Wins NSF Career Award for Geospace Research

    Illinois ECE Professor Raluca Ilie was recently awarded the NSF CAREER award to develop an improved understanding of the Earth-space environment or geospace. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the NSF's most prestigious awards to support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models and lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

  • Popescu and a female student looking at a display screen with equations labeled: Phase Contrast, Gabor's holography, and Phase shifting inferometry

    Popescu recievces 2022 SPIE Dennis Gabor Award in Diffractive Optics

    The SPIE Dennis Gabor Award in Diffractive Optics recognizes outstanding accomplishments in diffractive wavefront technologies, especially those that further the development of holography and metrology applications. Gabriel Popescu is a leading force in the emerging field of quantitative phase imaging (QPI), a form of label-free imaging which combines holography and optical microscopy. 

  • NICER Makes Strides Toward Creating "Friendly" Robots

    Aptly titled, NICER, or Non-Intrusive Cooperative Empathetic Robots, aims to develop mobile robots with which humans feel comfortable. Robots have the potential to benefit humans in the workplace and home -- they could help seniors with daily living tasks, for example -- but to accomplish that, humans must trust robots to help and not harm them.

  • Rosenbaum Leads NSF-Funded Center Advancing Silicon Chip Design and Verification

    The new Center for Advanced Electronics through Machine Learning (CAEML) will leverage machine-learning techniques to develop new models for electronic design automation (EDA) tools, which semiconductor companies use to create and verify chip designs for mass production.

  • Diesner and Mishra Publish Paper on NER Tool for Social Media Research

    The identification of proper names of people, organizations, and locations from raw texts, referred to as Named Entity Recognition (NER), can be highly accurate when researchers use NER tools on a large collection of text with proper syntax. However, using existing NER tools for analyzing social media text can lead to poor identification of named entities. In particular, Twitter text frequently includes inconsistent capitalization, spelling errors, and shortened versions of words.

  • It displays the photo of a professor at The Grainger College of Engineering and Carle Illinois College of Medicine, William King

    Illinois ECE Researchers Publish Article Describing Illinois Rapidvent Emergency Ventilator

    The design, testing, and validation of the Illinois RapidVent emergency ventilator has been published in the journal Plos One. The article, “Emergency Ventilator for COVID-19,” with contributions by multiple Illinois ECE researchers, is the first of its kind to report such details about an emergency ventilator that was designed, prototyped, and tested at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

  • Bayram Wins IEEE Electron Devices Society's Early Career Award

    Assistant Professor Can Bayram has won the IEEE Electron Devices Society's Early Career Award.

  • Four Grad Students Won IEEE APEC Best Presentation Awards

    Enver Candan, Christopher Brandon Barth, Andrew R Stillwell, and Thomas Peter Foulkes, all ECE ILLINOIS graduate students advised by Assistant Professor Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, won best presentation awards at the 2017 IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference (APEC).

  • Professors Fletcher (Left) and Torrellas (Right)

    Fletcher, Torrellas Included in Intel's New Resilient Architectures and Robust Electronics Multi-University Research Center

    Intel Labs' University Research & Collaboration Office (URC) is pleased to announce the opening of a new multi-university research center called Resilient Architectures and Robust Electronics (RARE). The center will focus on assessing and improving the resiliency, reliability, and security of Intel® hardware and software, including the security of Intel® silicon integrated circuits. In addition, all research will be made public to the general semiconductor industry.

  • Dankowicz Authors "Recipes for Continuation"

    A joint effort by MechSE professor Harry Dankowicz and Dr. Frank Schilder from the Technical University of Denmark, "Recipes for Continuation" explores methods for numerical continuation, the computational analysis of nonlinear problems, and their solutions. Published in May 2013, the book is meant to be used in tandem with a MATLAB-based software platform, the Computational Continuation Core (COCO).

  • Access to Big Data Is Crucial for Credibility of Computational Research Findings, Says Stodden

    Science is being transformed so that massive computation is central to scientific experiments, with scientists using computer code to analyze huge amounts of data. Computational science might be used to study climate change, to simulate the formation of galaxies, for biomolecular modeling or for mining a vast set of data looking for patterns. But, Stodden says, this relatively new form of scientific inquiry has not yet developed standards for communicating the details of how the work was done or for validating results. The lack of such standards is causing a credibility crisis, Stodden says. Her research looks at the "reproducibility" of computational science -- how findings can be verified and an experiment replicated or used as a basis for further research.

  • Latest Awards Demonstrate Positive Energy for Startup Touch Light

    Student Swarnav Pujari's Touch Light Innovations is pioneering the way the world harvests ambient energy to power daily tools and create a green environment. Its flagship product, Power Pad, is a low-profile device that sits beneath any moderate to heavy foot traffic location. Each step a passerby takes on the Power Pad generates up to 10 watts of power. By targeting the commercial building market space in city locations, Touch Light is able to offer a clean technology product that is designed for city-like environments.

  • [Image ID: a man in a button-up shirt stands in a blue-lit classroom, facing the camera. There is a rounded visor over his eyes, and he holds the handles of two controllers with rounded heads. He's in a position as though he is hammering something. In front of him is a yellow computer screen with a lantern, presumably the VR program, on it.]

    Team Creates Game-Based Virtual Archaeology Field School

    Before they can get started at their field site – a giant cave studded with stalactites, stalagmites and human artifacts – 15 undergraduate students must figure out how to use their virtual hands and tools. They also must learn to teleport.