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IT Excellence at Illinois: News

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  • Kolla Receives NSF CAREER Award to Investigate NP-Hard Problems

    CS Assistant Professor Alexandra Kolla recently received a prestigious young faculty NSF CAREER award to better understand the limitations of approximation algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Also known as NP-hard, these types of problems are nearly impossible to solve quickly.

  • Joe Bradley, Clinical Assistant Professor

    Joe Bradley and Team Awarded Nearly $3.5 Million to Develop Pathway for Underrepresented Students in NSF STEM Innovation Program

    Joe Bradley, clinical assistant professor in Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a member of a team who received almost $3.5 million to research and evaluate ways to develop infrastructure that improves diversity and inclusion in STEM entrepreneurship.

  • Research Engineer Olaolu Ajala (left) and Professor Alejandro Dominguez-Garcia (right) sitting in front lab equipement with their research displayed faintly on computer screens above and behind them.

    ECE researchers part of $25 million grid-integration technology consortium

    Illinois ECE Professor Alejandro Dominguez-Garcia and Research Engineer Olaolu Ajala are part of a $25 million Department of Energy-funded consortium that is addressing the reliability challenges involved in integrating more solar and wind energy onto the nation’s electric grid. The Universal Interoperability for Grid-Forming Inverters (UNIFI) consortium brings together leading researchers from more than 40 university, industry, and utility organizations to evaluate and design grid-forming inverter solutions that will enable the seamless integration of inverter-based renewable resources while ensuring the grid’s stability and reliability. 

  • 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.

  • Experiments Show that a Few Self-Driving Cars Can Dramatically Improve Traffic Flow

    "Our experiments show that with as few as 5 percent of vehicles being automated and carefully controlled, we can eliminate stop-and-go waves caused by human driving behavior," said Daniel B. Work, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a lead researcher in the study.

  • 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.

  • It displays of the photo of faculty advisor Holly Golecki

    Undergraduate Research Experience Leads to Job Opportunities at Sandia National Labs

    ECE juniors Alyssa Bradshaw and Adia Radecka, who are members of an all-undergraduate engineering research team, recently presented their work on biocompatible actuators at RoboSoft 2021, a major IEEE international conference on soft robotics.

  • Headshot of Angela Kou

    $7.5M DOD MURI award to explore creation of qubits based on Majorana zero modes

    IQUIST’s Angela Kou will analyze proposed materials and investigate qubits’ limitations. Qubits lie at the heart of quantum computing—and they aren’t all the same. The quantum successor to classical computing’s bits, they can be created in a variety of ways that have yet to be fully explored. The chosen approach matters, because it has implications for how robust the resulting qubit will be and how well it will perform.

  • [Image ID: a group of 15 people clusters and poses around a silver and white robot, that has a cyllindrical body and two arms. End ID]

    CSL Professor Creates Robotic Avatar for Hands-Free Medical Care

    In James Cameron’s blockbuster movie “Avatar,” humans explored a new planet without ever leaving their lounge chairs on Earth. CSL’s Kris Hauser and his team are creating a new type of avatar that could provide a similar ability to health care workers, who could treat patients remotely during a pandemic like the current COVID-19 crisis.

  • Atlas Wang Recognized By Chinese Government, Baidu, and Illinois

    ECE PhD student Zhangyang Wang won a Baidu Research Award, a Chinese government award for outstanding graduates abroad, the Thomas and Margaret Huang award for graduate research, and the Illinois graduate college’s dissertation completion fellowship. The awards recognized accomplishments ranging from his excellent academic record to his research into deep learning and computer vision.

  • Microsoft and University of Illinois Launch Accessibility Lighthouse Program

    The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is partnering with Microsoft on a new program to promote digitally accessible classrooms, encourage the creation and use of accessible software, and provide a pipeline to careers in technology for Illinois students who have autism.

  • 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.

  • Hoiem and Lazebnik Receive Sloan Research Fellowships

    Two computer science professors have been selected to receive 2013 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Professors Derek Hoiem and Svetlana Lazebnik are among 126 early career scientists and researchers from 50 colleges and universities who have been honored with a two-year fellowship.

  • Hwu Won CGO Test of Time Award

    Professor Wen-Mei W Hwu won the CGO Test of Time Award, also known as the Most Influential Paper Award, presented by the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, for "Program Optimization Space Pruning for a Multithreaded GPU."

  • Left: Nam Sung Kim, Right: Rakesh Kumar

    UIUC faculty sweep 2021 MICRO Test of Time Awards

    The University of Illinois swept the MICRO 2021 Test of Time Awards this year, with UIUC faculty authoring both of two papers that were recognized this year. CSL’s Nam Sung Kim and Rakesh Kumar received the award, presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which “recognizes the most influential papers published in prior sessions of the International Symposium on Microarchitecture, each of whom have had significant impact in the field,” according to the SIGMICRO website. Each year, the award is given to 1-3 influential MICRO papers whose influence is still felt 18-22 years after its initial publication. 

  • It displays the photo of Lara Waldrop, Illinois ECE Assistant Professor

    Waldrop Leads $75 Million NASA Mission to Investigate Earth's Atmosphere

    Lara Waldrop, Illinois ECE Assistant Professor and Y. T. Lo Fellow in Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been selected by NASA to develop a Solar Terrestrial Probes (STP) Science Mission of Opportunity, budgeted for $75 million.  Her mission, titled “Global Lyman-alpha Imager of the Dynamic Exosphere”, or “GLIDE” for short, was chosen for implementation after a competitive selection process and is expected to be launched in 2025. 

  • Karin Jensen, a white woman with brown hair and a white labcoat, stands in front of a bank of computers. She is smiling at the camera.

    Jensen Receives CAREER Award to Address Undergrad Mental Health

    Bioengineering professor Karin Jensen received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for her proposal “Supporting Undergraduate Mental Health by Building a Culture of Wellness in Engineering.” 

  • It displays the photo of Illinois ECE Professor Brian T Cunningham

    Cunningham Leads Team to Create Fast, Cheap, and Accessible Covid-19 Antibody Test

    As the numbers of those infected with COVID-19 has continued to climb, the desperate need for a vaccine was apparent. Even now with the invention and administration of several COVID-19 vaccinations, the question remains: How effective are these vaccines? HMNTL students Congnyu Che, Weijing Wang, and Nantao Li, also members of the ECE Nanosensors Group, along with Postdoctoral Researcher Bin Zhao and Illinois ECE Professor Brian T Cunningham have recently been published in Talanta journal for the development of a cost efficient COVID-19 antibody test.

  • Graduate Student Wins IEEE Power Electronics Fellowship

    Enver Candan was named as the winner of the IEEE 2017 Joseph J. Suozzie INTELEC Fellowship in Power Electronics for his project "A Series-Stacked Power Delivery for 48V Data Center Power Architecture."

  • It displays the photo of Illinois ECE graduate student Rong "Ronny" Guo

    ECE Student Wins 2021 Beckman Institute Graduate Fellowships

    Seven Illinois graduate students have been awarded 2021 Beckman Institute Graduate Fellowships. The program offers University of Illinois graduate students at the MA, MS, or PhD level the opportunity to pursue interdisciplinary research at the institute. Illinois ECE graduate student Rong "Ronny" Guo was one of the seven recipients of the fellowship.

  • Airswap Exceeded $1M of Transactions on First Day of Operations

    ECE ILLINOIS alumnus Stamford Hwang (BSEE '09) has helped contribute to the recent success through his expertise at the intersection of entrepreneurship, law, engineering, and blockchain.

  • illustration of nuclear power plant with salt molecule in the background.

    Pass the salt: machine learning accelerates molten salt simulations for nuclear power applications

    Researchers used machine learning to perform accelerated simulations of the physico-chemical properties of molten salt FLiNaK. Their framework can help characterize and screen other molten salts and determine which are ideal to use in an advanced nuclear reactor.

  • High-Performance 3D Microbattery Suitable for Large-Scale On-Chip Integration

    By combining 3D holographic lithography and 2D photolithography, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a high-performance 3D microbattery suitable for large-scale on-chip integration with microelectronic devices.

  • 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.

  • It displays the photo of Illinois ECE professors Kiruba Sivasubramaniam Haran

    Carle Illinois Welcomes Haran and Oelze

    Eight faculty from The Grainger College of Engineering have joined Carle Illinois College of Medicine with Health Innovation Professor appointments including Illinois ECE professors Kiruba Sivasubramaniam Haran and Michael L Oelze. The new faculty deliver on Carle Illinois’ strategy to leverage the University of Illinois’ exceptional faculty to serve as agents of change in medical education, innovation, and research at the world’s first engineering-based college of medicine.

  • person in a lab coat (only legs visible) sticking ruler into a chunk of wet concrete.

    Artificial intelligence produces a recipe for lower-carbon concrete

    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.

  • Milos Gligoric Receives ACM SIGSOFT Dissertation Award

    Dr. Milos Gligoric (PhD CS '15) is the 2016 recipient of the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. The award recognizes excellent research in the field of software engineering. 

  • Bringing Ancient Technology into the Light

    Assistant Professor Gang Logan Liu has used ancient Roman nanotechnology to create a highly sensitive, low-cost biosensor.

  • Professor Wen-mei Hwu Extends GPU Principles in General Parallel Computing Applications

    The computations of modern hardware are so complex that it requires multiple processors to parallelize the task that is being performed. According to an article from Built In, Nvidia approached ECE ILLINOIS Professor Wen-mei Hwu, AMD Jerry Sanders Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering, to help extend their designs with GPUs into general parallel computing applications.

  • Comberiate wins EPEPS Best Student Paper Award

    Thomas Comberiate won the Best Student Paper Award at EPEPS 2013, the conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems.

  • Angrave Completes Teaching First MOOC on Developing Android Apps

    CS Professor Lawrence Angrave recently completed teaching the first MOOC on developing apps for the Android platform.

  • Lu Wins 2018 Sigmetrics Test-Of-Time Award

    ECE ILLINOIS Associate Professor Yi Lu was awarded the 2018 ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award for her group's work "Counter braids: a novel counter architecture for per-flow measurement." Her team, including Sarang Dharmapurikar from Nuova Systems, Inc, and Andrea Montanari, Balaji Prabhakar, and Abdul Kabbani, all from Stanford University, was recognized for their influential performance evaluation paper whose impact is still felt 10 years after its initial publication. Lu now conducts research at the Coordinated Science Lab.

  • From left to right, head shots of Quinn Dombrowski, Dena Strong, and Zoe LeBlanc

    iSchool Alumni play instrumental role in saving Ukrainian cultural heritage online

    As the tragic scenes of war in the Ukraine unfold on TV, computer, and cellphone screens across the world, people wonder what they can do to help the besieged country. iSchool alumni are among those working to make a difference by capturing Ukrainian museum and library websites, digital exhibits, text corpora, and open access publications in order to preserve Ukraine's cultural heritage. Quinn Dombrowski (MS/LIS '09), academic technology specialist in the Library and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University, is co-organizing the initiative Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) with Anna Kijas of Tufts University and Sebastian Majstorovic of the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage.

  • Headshot of Julia Hockenmaier

    Natural Language Processing

    Natural language processing represents an emerging opportunity for AI researchers looking to improve the construction industry — and industry in general. Professor Julia Hockenmaier,  an NLP expert and Grainger Engineer since 2007,  explains how natural language processing will impact construction and other fields.

  • VeriFlow Aims to Verify Application-Defined Networks in Real Time

    Researchers at the Ocean Cluster for Experimental Architectures in Networks (OCEAN) lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) hope to address concerns of networks shaped on the fly by applications

  • Donuts, Math, and Superdense Teleportation of Quantum Information

    A research team led by physicist Paul Kwiat of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has made great strides by realizing "superdense teleportation". This new protocol, developed by coauthor physicist Herbert Bernstein of Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, effectively reduces the resources and effort required to teleport quantum information, while at the same time improving the reliability of the information transfer.

  • This picture is displayed as professor Sheldon H. Jacobson

    Election Analytics Website Presents Perfect Merger of Computer and Social Science

    Since 2008, Illinois CS professor Sheldon H. Jacobson has worked with students to create, develop and publish the Election Analytics @ Illinois website. Over those 12 years, there have been many great reasons for Jacobson to continue the project.

  • ECE Illinois Research Wins at CS MANTECH

    ECE ILLINOIS researchers took home three top awards at the Compound Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology (CS MANTECH) 2018 conference.

  • Left to right: Srilakshmi Pattabiraman, Yamuna Phal, and Mei-Yun Lin

    ECE PhD students among top researches invited to 2021 MIT EECS Rising Stars Workshop

    Illinois ECE doctoral researchers Mei-Yun Lin, Srilakshmi Pattabiraman, and Yamuna Phal were among the 89 invited young women engineers and computer scientists worldwide who participated in the MIT EECS Rising Stars 2021 academic workshop held virtually October 14-15. For its ninth year, Rising Stars provided graduate students and post-docs with historically marginalized or underrepresented genders with opportunities for mentoring and practical information they need to launch and sustain a successful academic career in electrical engineering, computer science, and artificial intelligence and decision-making.

  • Park to Introduce Robotic Flying Squirrels

    Illinois researcher Hae-Won Park was awarded a Robotics Fast Track contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to design a hybrid robot that can glide, land, and walk.

  • Yutian Lei Wins Prize for Paper at IEEE COMPEL Workshop

    Graduate student Yutian Lei won the award for best paper at the 2014 IEEE Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics, or COMPEL. Lei’s publication, co-written with former graduate student Ryan May and Assistant Professor Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, explored their research into switched-capacitor power converters.

  • Meng Honored with ANS Radiation Science and Technology Award

    Professor Ling-Jian Meng was selected as the 2018 winner of the American Nuclear Society Radiation Science and Technology Award.

  • ECE Alumni Lead Major Expansion of Epiworks In Champaign

    The II-VI EpiWorks Division of II‐VI Incorporated, founded by ECE ILLINOIS alumni Quesnell Hartmann (PhD '98) and David Ahmari (PhD '98), announced that it is breaking ground on a state-of-the-art production facility in Champaign, Illinois.

  • Nam Sung Kim Elected to MICRO Hall of Fame

    Nam Sung Kim, CSL associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been inducted into the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) Hall of Fame, an honor given to outstanding researchers who have consistently contributed to MICRO with high-impact research by ACM SIGMICRO, ACM’s Special Interest Group on Microarchitecture.

  • The Holy Grail: Automatic Speech Recognition for Low-Resource Languages

    Preethi Jyothi, a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow, is working towards creating technology that can help with the development of ASR software for any language spoken anywhere in the world.

  • Varshney and Bai Awarded Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange Paper Award

    Bai and Varshney collaborated with New York University Professor Rumi Chunara to analyze data from location-sharing social platform Foursquare.

  • Linwei Xin Wins Two Best Paper Awards at INFORMS Conference

    Assistant Professor Linwei Xin's paper, "Asymptotic optimality of Tailored Base-Surge policies in dual-sourcing inventory systems," recently won two prizes at the recent INFORMS Annual Meeting: the first place prize in the 2015 George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition and the second place prize in the 2015 Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) Paper Competition.

  • Gaurav Bahl Awarded a 2017 Director of Research Early Career Grant

    Through his project, "Engineering nonreciprocal acoustic materials and microwave systems through phonon-assisted directional coupling," Bahl will experimentally develop techniques for engineering new forms of wave propagation by means of engineered time-varying materials.

  • center CAPSat modual disapearing into bright blue sky and clouds. Lower right, white robotic arm releasing the modulal

    Self-annealing photon detector brings global quantum internet one step closer to feasibility

    On Tuesday, October 12, at 6 a.m. CDT, a quantum communications experiment was launched into low orbit around Earth from the International Space Station (ISS). A collaborative experiment of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Waterloo, CAPSat (Cool Annealing Payload Satellite) contains single-photon detectors, which can be used as receivers for unhackable quantum communications.

  • Yue Cui (left) and Huck Beng Chew (right)

    New method to predict stress at atomic scale

    The amount of stress a material can withstand before it cracks is critical information when designing aircraft, spacecraft, and other structures. Aerospace engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign used machine learning for the first time to predict stress in copper at the atomic scale.