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IT Excellence at Illinois: News

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  • It displays the photo of Professor Yurii Vlasov

    Prof. Yurii Vlasov Elected to National Academy of Engineering

    Yurii A Vlasov, Founder Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He is recognized for his contributions to the development and commercialization of silicon photonics for optical data communications.

  • Professor Josep Torrellas Receives DARPA PERFECT Award

    A project led by Illinois computer science professor Josep Torrellas has been chosen to receive $2.8 million from DARPA to explore how to improve power-efficiency in embedded computer systems.

  • Stephani Wins NASA Early Career Faculty Award

    MechSE assistant professor Kelly Stephani was selected as one of eight recipients for the NASA Early Career Faculty Award. Funded by the Space Technology Research Grants Program, the ECF awards grants to accredited U.S. universities on behalf of outstanding faculty researchers early in their careers.

  • $1M Mellon Grant

    A four-year, $1 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will help University of Illinois humanities scholars identify digital publishing options and produce new publications that will best disseminate their research.

  • Cunningham Named Distinguished Lecturer For IEEE Photonics Society

    Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering Brian T Cunningham has been named as a distinguished lecturer by the IEEE Photonics Society Distinguished Lecturer Program. Cunningham is also the director of the Micro + Nanotechnology Laboratory. This program was designed to honor excellent speakers who have made technical, industrial, or entrepreneurial contributions to the field of photonics and to enhance the technical programs of the IEEE Photonics Society chapters. Chapters may request distinguished lecturers to present at chapter meetings, chapter-related events or technically co-sponsored conferences organized by a chapter.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • [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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Visually-impaired Sculptor Creates Braille Math Tools

    Sheila Schneider, the first legally blind student to major in sculpture in art and design at Illinois, is creating a series of small sculptures with mathematical equations imprinted on them in Braille that will be used to help children with visual impairments learn mathematics.

  • Cunningham's Team Wins Grant to Turn Smartphones into Biodetectors

    Professors Brian Cunningham, Steven Lumetta, and John Dallesasse have won a $300,000 National Science Foundation grant to work further on their research into turning smartphones into biodetectors that rival lab machines.

  • Through Data Visualization, Binge Provides an Easier Online Search Method

    Ishaan Kansal, a computer science student at the University of Illinois, is creating an app that will supply access to news stories from various sources and perspectives on topics of the user's choice, and he is finding the app fills a strong need for the millennial demographic.

  • Illinois CS professors Deepak Vasisht (left) and Gagandeep Singh (right)

    Collaborative Work Pairs Wireless Networking, Machine Learning Experts to Improve Upon 5G, 6G Performance

    Two years ago, Illinois Computer Science professors Deepak Vasisht and Gagandeep Singh along with first-year PhD student Zikun Liu began collaborating to solve a critical bottleneck hindering the performance of 5G/6G wireless systems. Concretely, they focused on MIMO – or multiple-input and multiple-output – which is a method for multiplying the capacity of a radio link using multiple transmission and receiving antennas to exploit multipath propagation. MIMO is an essential component for 5G, because of its ability to improve the quality of service and support multiple data streams simultaneously. However, for real-world MIMO deployments, there remains a critical bottleneck – estimating the downlink wireless channel from each antenna on the base station to every client device.

  • Headshot of Elahe Soltanaghai

    Soltanaghai's 'Millimetro' Delivers a Low Power, High Accuracy Tag that Can Improve Applications Ranging from Autonomous Driving to the Metaverse

    Beginning in 2020, before joining Illinois CS, first-year professor Elahe Soltanaghai overcame several challenges to continue researching and developing Millimetro as a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. The product introduces what she describes as “an ultra-low-power tag” developed “in the context of autonomous driving to efficiently localize roadside infrastructure such as lane markers and road signs, even if obscured from view, where visual sensing fails.”

  • [Image ID: Several banks of supercomputers in a white room, captured at a dramatic angle. End ID]

    Srikant Uses World's Most Advanced Supercomputers to Combat COVID-19

    Illinois ECE Professor Rayadurgam Srikant, Fredric G. and Elizabeth H. Nearing Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is working with the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute to find ways to slow down the spread of COVID-19.

  • Coding Illini Claim Championship Title at SC14

    The Coding Illini triumphed over the Korean team in the final match at SC'14 held in New Orleans in November 2014. The team donated the grand prize $26,000 to the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

  • It displays the photo of the heat shield (left) and back shell (right) comprise the aeroshell for NASA's Mars 2020 mission.

    Modeling Radiation Key Component to Landing Safely on Mars

    In 2015, AE Professor Marco Panesi received a NASA Early Career Faculty award to study radiation in the back shell of entry capsules. On February 18, 2021, we witnessed his research findings in action as Perseverance landed safely on Mars.

  • Illinois Alumni Reenvision Online Education

    University of Illinois alumni Dave Paola (BS CS '10) and Roshan Choxi (BS ECE '10) founded Bloc, a company that provides a 12-week program to teach the fundamentals of web design and development. What sets this apart from other online programs is its apprenticeship format.

  • NASA Selects Kamalabadi's Proposal for Small Spacecraft Technology Development

    Professor Farzad Kamalabadi will lead one of nine teams collaborating with NASA on the development of new technologies for small spacecraft. Kamalabadi's proposal, "Milli-Arcsecond (MAS) Imaging with Smallsat-Enabled Super-resolution," will "conduct laboratory testing of novel computational diffractive optical sensing and advanced image processing that makes use of small satellite formation flying to enable extremely high-resolution imaging capability that is otherwise unattainable with conventional approaches."

  • [Image ID: a close up of a cicada's wing. End ID]

    Study Reveals Unique Physical, Chemical Properties of Cicada Wings

    Biological structures sometimes have unique features that engineers would like to copy. For example, many types of insect wings shed water, kill microbes, reflect light in unusual ways and are self-cleaning. While researchers have dissected the physical characteristics that likely contribute to such traits, a new study reveals that the chemical compounds that coat cicada wings also contribute to their ability to repel water and kill microbes.

  • Researchers Use Sound Waves to Advance Optical Communication

    Illinois researchers have demonstrated that sound waves can be used to produce ultraminiature optical diodes that are tiny enough to fit onto a computer chip. These devices, called optical isolators, may help solve major data capacity and system size challenges for photonic integrated circuits, the light-based equivalent of electronic circuits, which are used for computing and communications.

  • It displays the photo of Brendan Harley, Robert W. Schaefer Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

    Harley Earns Clemson Award from the Society For Biomaterials

    The Society For Biomaterials (SFB) has awarded the 2021 Clemson Award for Basic Research to chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Brendan Harley for his advances to regenerate tissues with biomaterials. The award will be presented at the virtual SFB 2021 Annual Meeting held April 20 – 23, 2021.

  • Composite Image with Headshot of Mattia Gazzola on the left and Nancy Amato on the right with an image of a glass-like cube with a stem on a dark table in the middle.

    An NSF Expedition in Computing: Mind in vitro - Computing with Living Neurons

    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.

  • Addressing the Digital Divide through Technology for Development

    Moustafa Ayad will present (via Skype) "Addressing the Digital Divide through Technology for Development" ...

  • Perform Graduate Student Earns IBM PhD Fellowship

    CS graduate student Uttam Thakore has been recognized with the 2017-18 IBM PhD Fellowship award.

  • ECE Student Wins IEEE ECCE Best Paper Award

    ECE ILLINOIS graduate student Zitao Liao (BSEE '15, MSEE in progress) has won the best paper award at the coveted Annual IEEE Energy Conversion Congress & Exposition (ECCE).

  • Headshot of Elyse Rosenbaum

    Center for Advanced Electronics through Machine Learning (CAEML) receives Phase II funding from NSF

    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.  

  • ECE Alumni Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame

    ECE alumni Donald Bitzer (BSEE 55, MSEE 56, PhD 60), Gene Slottow (PhD 64), and Robert Willson (PhD 66) w[ere] inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame on May 1 at the United States Patent and Trademark Office headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. Bitzer, Slottow, and Willson are being recognized for their invention of the flat-panel plasma display, the forerunner of high-definition (HD) flat-panel television monitor.

  • NSF Awards Illinois Funding for a Deep Learning Research Instrument

    Professors Bill Gropp, Roy Campbell, and Jian Peng, with Volodymyr Kindratenko, of the NCSA, were awarded over $2.7 million from the NSF MRI program to build a dedicated research instrument to expand deep learning research.

  • Quantum Simulation Technique Yields Topological Soliton State in SSH Model

    Using atomic quantum-simulation, a team of researchers at UIUC has directly observed the protected boundary state (the topological soliton state) of the topological insulator trans-polyacetylene. The transport properties of this organic polymer are typical of topological insulators and of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model.

  • Researchers Develop Biosensor That Detects HIV Viral Load

    ECE Professor Brian Cunningham, his research group, and colleagues at Harvard have developed a biosensor that can measure how much of the HIV virus is present in one's body.

  • Redesigning Household Tech

    Alumnus Nick Ewalt (BS CompE '12) has worked on two innovative home technologies: the Xbox One and Nest Labs smart home sensors. - See more at: http://www.ece.illinois.edu/mediacenter/article.asp?id=7701#sthash.VgWqeVIo.dpuf

  • Senior Design Team Helps Hospital Staff Regulate Bed Angle

    Jacob Avery, Anthony Cao, Noah Durham, Alexander Molnar, and Brennan Sugg, seniors in mechanical science and engineering (MechSE), created a device that not only detects the angle of the head of a hospital bed, but continuously logs its angle and alerts staff whenever the bed has been out of an ideal position for too long. The design and production of this device was part of the MechSE senior design class, ME 470, and was sponsored by Carle Foundation Hospital.

  • Thomas O'Brien's New Algorithm Helps Coach Illini Hockey

    The newest addition to Illini Hockey's coaching staff is an algorithm developed by PhD student and assistant coach Thomas O'Brien to analyze goalies' weaknesses and build practice plans. O'Brien came up with the idea after taking a series of data analysis classes, and slowly started applying more statistics to analyzing his team's performance.

  • Three Illinois Computer Science Faculty Earn NSF Career Awards

    The NSF announced the most recent awards to Ranjitha Kumar, Matus Jan Telgarsky, and Adam Bates.

  • BibApp 1.0 ReleasedCampus Research Gateway and Expert Finder

    The BibApp development team announced the 1.0 release of BibApp, a campus research gateway and expert finder. It matches ...

  • Blue Waters: "A dynamite system"

    Irene Qualters joined the National Science Foundation in December 2009 as a program director in the office of Cyberinfrastructure, with responsibility for the Blue Waters project. She recently talked with Access' Barbara Jewett about Blue Waters, as well as the future of high-performance computing.

  • Vitrix Health Takes Home Cozad Grand Prize

    A startup specializing in affordable medical screening is the big winner in the 19th Annual Cozad New Venture Competition hosted by the University of Illinois Technology Entrepreneur Center.

  • Kathleen Hu Won Illinois Innovation Prize

    In 2016, Hu founded Dibbs, a technology platform and organization to connect excess food at grocery stores to local food pantries.

  • Big Data, Food Sustainability Merge with Startup, Food Origins

    Using existing tools in Big Data science, a team from the University of Illinois is creating a technology which will not only be able to trace the origin of produce to the individual farm, but also pinpoint the exact plot of land on which it was grown.

  • Silver Pen Has the Write Stuff for Flexible Electronics

    University of Illinois engineers have developed a silver-inked rollerball pen capable of writing electrical circuits and interconnects on paper, wood and other surfaces...

  • Dillon Receives CAREER Award to Study Light-Absorbing Photocatalysts

    Shen Dillon, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, has recently received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to provide an improved scientific basis for designing efficient and inexpensive nanostructured visible light absorbing photocatalysts.

  • Student Startup Lumenous Brings Projection Mapping Out of the Arena

    "Projection mapping everywhere." That's the slogan of Lumenous, a startup founded by CS PhD students Brett Jones, Kevin Karsch, and Raj Sodhi.

  • Blake Builds Claim Framework to Analyze and Synthesize Medical Research

    Blake has developed the Claim Framework, a rhetorical structure that captures how scientists make claims and a set of tools that use natural language processing to pull out claims made within the journal articles. By attempting to solve the information problem behind the glut of published scientific data, Blake can reveal where there are uncertainties or gaps in the medical literature, as well as provide a detailed analysis of comparative claims.

  • Through Data Science, Minsker Helping Design and Improve Green Spaces

    Barbara Minsker, Nauman Faculty Scholar and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois, is leading a team of researchers that is developing a novel computational green infrastructure (GI) design framework that integrates storm water management requirements with criteria for ecosystem and human health and wellbeing. The goal is to help urban planners and engineers design effective green infrastructure that has the maximum benefits for their cities.

  • Graduate Students Win Best Paper Awards at 2017 IEEE COMPEL

    Nathan Charles Brooks and Zichao Ye each received a best paper award at the 2017 IEEE Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL) hosted by Stanford University.

  • Klaus Schulten to deliver keynote at NVIDIA's 2010 GPU Technology Conference

    "NVIDIA today announced that two of the world's leading computing visionaries will join NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang as keynote speakers at the second annual GPU Technology Conference. Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign..."

  • Beckman Team Members Score Highest at Image Competition

    Beckman Institute researcher Tom Huang led a team that finished with the top three scores at the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2010...

  • Hovakimyan Named AIAA Fellow

    MechSE professor Naira Hovakimyan was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AAIA) "for pioneering development of technical knowledge in robust adaptive control and its transition to aerospace and commercial applications."