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IT Excellence at Illinois: News

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  • 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.

  • Graphene: The more you bend it, the softer it gets

    New research by engineers at the University of Illinois combines atomic-scale experimentation with computer modeling to determine how much energy it takes to bend multilayer graphene – a question that has eluded scientists since graphene was first isolated. The findings are reported in the journal Nature Materials.

  • [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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Visiting Student Xiaoyan Xiong Discovers Revolutionary X-Parameter Modeling Method

    During her time at UIUC, Xiong and her advisers discovered a method to model the X-Parameter, which is a mathematical representation of nonlinearity in frequency domain in microwave devices and systems. Their findings are revolutionary because X-parameters would have to be regenerated every time the input signal arbitrarily changed, and this is no longer necessary with their new model.

  • Varshney Featured in "The Age of A.I.," a Youtube Originals Series

    Illinois ECE Assistant Professor Lav R Varshney is featured in a new YouTube Originals series “The Age of A.I.”  Varshney shares his expertise as the episode explores using artificial intelligence to build a better human.  Hosted by Robert Downey Jr., the episode investigates augmenting human abilities with A.I. and our reliance on A.I. to make decisions for us.

  • 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.

  • Raginsky Receives Career Award to Apply Information Theory to Machine Learning Problems

    ECE Assistant Professor Maxim Raginsky, a researcher in the Coordinated Science Lab, has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to develop an information-theoretic approach to machine learning problems that involve multiple resource-constrained learning agents in a large network.

  • Fiona Kalensky Combines Tech and Health Care in Startup

    Understanding the technology has been key in Kalensky's role with Therapalz. She was involved in the development of their prototype: a stuffed animal retrofitted with a constant heartbeat that can also detect touch and respond to it with a vibration or a purr. Their product is meant to be an alternative to medication or to companion animal therapy, which can be costly.

  • By Providing Proper Risk Assessment, Steady Mobile App Hopes to Prevent Falls Common in Older Adults

    Sosnoff is leading a startup designed to evaluate seniors for fall risk using mobile health technology - with the hopes of preventing falls before they occur.

  • New Tools Available to Mine World's Largest Digital Repository of Books

    [T]he HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) announced the availability of data mining and analytics tools for the HathiTrust Digital Library, a collection of digital texts from over 70 research libraries around the world. The new tools provide a much-needed entry point to large-scale analysis of HathiTrusts contents. Indiana University and the University of Illinois are the founding partners of the HTRC.

  • Illinois Design Students Create Virtual Reality Scenarios for Those Soon to Be Released from Prison

    Graphic design and industrial design students at the University of Illinois created immersive reality scenarios to help people who are soon to be released from prison learn how to navigate public transportation, pay at the pump at a gas station or order from a digital kiosk at a fast-food restaurant.

  • Padua Named Recipient of 2015 IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Award

    CS Professor David Padua has been named the recipient of the 2015 IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Memorial Award.

  • CS Student Amanda Sopkin Awarded Google Scholarship

    Amanda Sopkin, a senior in computer science, has been awarded a Google Generation Scholarship for University Students. Sopkin is one of only 15 recipients from across the United States to earn the award, which is given to students from underrepresented backgrounds in computer science.

  • New plasma technique provides cleaner surfaces in computer-chip making

    A group from the Center for Plasma-Material Interactions has gained a patent on a non-contact method that uses plasma to clean very small dust and contamination particles from surfaces in the making of computer chips.

  • Slate Safe Designed to Help Safeguard Package Delivery

    A startup called Slate Safe, featuring ECE ILLINOIS students and students from Purdue University is tackling the problem of stolen packages.

  • Charles Sing Received NSF CAREER Award

    Charles E. Sing, Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois, received a 2017 National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his proposal, "Developing the design rules of charge sequence to inform polymer self-assembly."

  • Başar, Yuksel Author Book on Networked Control Systems

    Professor Tamer Başar and alumnus Serdar Yuksel (MSEE '03, PhD '06) have written a book titled Stochastic Networked Control Systems (Birkhauser). This vanguard work addresses both the stabilization and optimization of networked control systems, which have inherent stochasticity caused by communication constraints.

  • Headshot of Tarek Abdelzaher in front of brick building

    Smartphone Motion Sensors could be used to listen to your phone conversations

    Track this: A relatively simple device in your smartphone that counts steps, among other things, also has the capacity to be used as a listening device, according to researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

  • Twidale, Takazawa Speak on Social and Collaborative Information Seeking

    Professor Michael Twidale and doctoral candidate Aiko Takazawa spoke on May 14 at the Workshop on Social and Collaborative Information Seeking hosted by the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at Rutgers University.

  • Parameswaran Aims for Algorithms that would Add Perspective to the Voices from the Crowd

    Professor Aditya Parameswaran plans to use an award from the U.S. Army Research Office’s Young Investigator Program to develop techniques to refine crowd-sourced data by considering the personal perspectives that influence those answers.

  • TapDance Circumvents Censorship via ISP, Not Proxy Servers

    Associate Professor Nikita Borisov has been stealthily fighting for internet freedom as part of a team of engineers and researchers from the University of Illinois, Michigan, and Raytheon BBN Technologies. At the 2017 USENIX Security conference, the team announced the successful implementation of TapDance, a next-generation experimental technique called refraction networking, or decoy routing.

  • Wang Shares Smart Home Privacy, Inclusive Privacy at NSF Meeting

    Associate Professor Yang Wang will share his work at the National Science Foundation (NSF) Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) Principal Investigators' Meeting, which will be held on October 28-29 in Washington, D.C. He will share his research from two SaTC-funded projects.

  • Three airplanes sit in the desert, with many more grounded planes in the distance behind them.

    ARI awarded REMADE grant to recycle aerospace scrap

    Ever wonder what happens to aircrafts at the end of their useful life? They are sent to aircraft graveyards. The Arizona desert is home to several aircraft graveyards. Planes that are no longer in operation are parked there.  The Applied Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is hoping to give these planes a new lease on life by recycling the aluminum alloys (principally the high-end AA7075) that are used to build these planes. 

  • Xiang Ren's Dissertation Recognized with SIGKDD Dissertation Award

    Dr. Xiang Ren says the methodology proposed in his dissertation has led to his current work with his students at USC and with collaborators at Illinois, Stanford and elsewhere on a much broader set of techniques for information extraction and text mining. And systems they have developed have been adopted by a number of companies and institutions.

  • Parameswaran, Peng Win NSF Career Awards

    CS Assistant Professors Aditya Parameswaran and Jian Peng have each received a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support their research. Given by the NSF's Faculty Early Career Development Program, these awards recognize junior faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education.

  • Headshot of Associate Professor Jingrui He

    He receives grant to improve performance of deep learning models

    Associate Professor Jingrui He has been awarded a two-year, $149,921 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve the performance of deep learning models. For her project, "Weakly Supervised Graph Neural Networks," she will focus on the lack of labeled data in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a deep learning method designed to perform inference on data described by graphs.

  • Orange block letters "EEG" over an image of EEG signals

    Carle Illinois Machine Learning System for EEG Analysis Wins IEEE Honors

    A new machine learning system developed by a Carle Illinois College of Medicine student could unlock the vast amounts of untapped data found in a common neurological test. The team recently won ‘best paper’ honors at the 2021 IEEE Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology Symposium for their publication describing the new system to analyze and classify data from patient EEG tests for use by both clinicians treating patients and researchers seeking out new discoveries.

  • 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. 

  • illustration of a key with quantum threads eminating from it

    Former MatSE postdoc Young Min Song develops novel silk-based digital security device

    The global hike in consumerism comes with its own share of problems—counterfeit goods and cyberattacks. Although digital security systems help us combat many of these adverse situations, hundreds of security breaches occur every single year. Former MatSE at Illinois postdoc and current Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology professor Young Min Song created a physical unclonable function made of silk fibers to ease authenticity efforts.

  • Solomonik Wins Householder Prize

    Assistant Professor Edgar Solomonik was one of two winners of the Householder Prize XX, announced in June at the Householder Symposia in Virginia. The 27-year-old joins a short list of people who have received the prize since it was first awarded in 1971.

  • [Image ID: four people stand casually in a workshop, behind a large cyllindrical device which they are showing off. Out of this cyllinder emerge tubes and wires, and the outside is covered in a white substance. End ID]

    New Understanding of Condensation Could Lead to Better Power Plant Condenser, De-icing Materials

    For decades, it’s been understood that water repellency is needed for surfaces to shed condensation buildup – like the droplets of water that form in power plant condensers to reduce pressure. New research shows that the necessity of water repellency is unclear and that the slipperiness between the droplets and solid surface appears to be more critical to the clearing of condensation. This development has implications for the costs associated with power generation and technologies like de-icing surfaces for power lines and aircraft.

  • 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.

  • 3D rendering of metasurface design -- curved mesh like surface

    Researchers explore wireless charging of pacemakers, internal medical devices via wearable metasurface

    Some of the organs in your body could malfunction quite a bit without ruining your life—but your heart isn't one of them: if it has problems, effective treatments are critical. Medical devices, such as pacemakers, can prevent a person's heartbeat from becoming too slow, or correct an irregular heartbeat. Unfortunately, the devices’ batteries don't last forever, meaning that surgery is eventually needed to replace either the device or its batteries.

  • Bashir to Receive 2018 BMES Pritzker Distinguished Lecture Award

    Professor Rashid Bashir has been selected to receive the 2018 Robert A. Pritzker Distinguished Lecture Award, the Biomedical Engineering Society's (BMES) premier recognition for outstanding achievements and leadership in the science and practice of biomedical engineering.

  • CS @ Illinois Professor Receives R&D 100 Award for Simulation Software

    Paul Fischer, a UIUC professor, and his research colleague Misun Min at the DOE's Argonne National Laboratory recently earned an R&D 100 Award, which recognize top technologies of the year. Known as the "Oscars of Invention," the awards are organized by R&D Magazine.

  • Liu's Mobosens Team Creates Award-Winning Smart Phone Water Sensor

    Gang Logan Liu , an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering (ECE), and his research team have developed MoboSens, a low-cost, smartphone-based sensor that allows users to test water quality by detecting nitrate concentration.

  • Computer Science Students Creating "Pandora for Fashion"

    Lei, who is pursuing a master's degree with CS @ ILLINOIS, along with fellow CS graduate student Gong Chen and creative lead Liz Li, a recent Illinois advertising graduate, will soon roll out an app called StylePuzzle, which helps make informed suggestions as to what to wear each day.

  • Alumnus Michael Daly Honored for Pioneering High-Frequency Radio Signal Research

    Michael Daly (BSEE '07, MSEE '08, PhD '12) was honored with the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition (ASN RDA) 2015 Dr. Delores M. Etter Top Scientists and Engineers of the Year Award in the Emergent Investigator category last month at the Pentagon for his breakthrough developments in HF signal propagation, including the significant addition of direction-finding capability.

  • Lu Develops Gene Circuit Design Strategy to Advance Synthetic Biology

    Professor Lu and his graduate students constructed an integrated modeling framework for quantitatively describing and predicting gene circuit behaviors. Using Escherichia coli (E. coli) as a model host, the framework consists of a coarse-grained but mechanistic description of host physiology that involves dynamic resource partitioning, multi-layered circuit-host coupling, and a detailed kinetic module of exogenous circuits.

  • Roy Choudhury Receives SIGMOBILE RockStar Award

    CS @ ILLINOIS alumnus and current ECE Associate Professor Romit Roy Choudhury (PhD CS '06) was recently awarded the 2015 ACM SIGMOBILE RockStar Award in recognition of "significant contributions, early in his career, to mobile sensing and wireless networking, with an emphasis on location and cross-layer protocols." He will be presented the award in September at the 2015 ACM Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom) in Paris.

  • Headshot of Professor Elahe Soltanaghai in front of brick building

    Soltanaghai is ready to build off of N2Women's Rising Stars recognition

    First year Illinois CS faculty member, Elahe Soltanaghai, likes to emphasize the word “rising” when speaking about her inclusion as one of the 10 women in N2Women’s Rising Stars in Computer Networking and Communications list this fall. 

  • CSL Professors Research Group Testing, Statistical Analysis of Covid-19

    Most of the United States has become fairly intimately acquainted with COVID-19 testing – be it by spit, nasal swab, or blood. While this type of individual work has been effective in identifying cases, CSL professors Venugopal Veeravalli and Lav Varshney are seeking to improve the efficiency of these tests and determine how to quickly detect changes in the distribution of disease prevalence data through their research project, "Efficient Strategies for Pandemic Monitoring and Recovery."

  • Lightweight Power Converter for Future Electric Aircrafts Garners Top Prize for ECE Researchers

    ECE ILLINOIS researchers are making advancements in inverter designs for light-weight mobile systems such as aircraft and electric vehicles. In addition to mobile systems their work has potential to enable light-weight utility inverters which will reduce the cost of renewable energy installations.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.