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IT Excellence at Illinois: News

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  • 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.

  • 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. 

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Headshots of PhD student Ashish Kashinath (left) and Reserach Assistant Professor Sibin Mohan (right)

    Method for diagnosing PIR sensor failures could cut back unnecessary smart building expenses

    You've probably used an automatic paper towel dispenser before, or walked into a room and the lights turned on automatically. That's because of Passive Infra-Red (PIR) sensors. You also more than likely know the frustration of waving your hands inside of a room that suddenly goes dark or standing in front of an automatic door that refuses to open. The sensor failed. But the question is why, and can it be fixed, or does it need to be replaced?

  • Froeter and Li Research a Jump-Start for Neural Regeneration

    Professor Xiuling Li and graduate student Paul Froeter are the inaugural recipients of the Andrew T. Yang Research Award. They are developing self-rolling microtubes that could guide and expedite the generation of cortical neurons. Once the technology is developed and implemented, functional losses associated with neural damage might be restored.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Bayram and Zhu Receive NSF Career Awards

    The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that ECE ILLINOIS Assistant Professors Can Bayram and Wenjuan Zhu earned 2017 NSF CAREER Awards.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Bayram and Feng Awarded Defense University Research Instrumentation Program Grants

    The Department of Defense has awarded Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) grants to six University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professors - two of whom are Illinois ECE faculty members. Illinois ECE Associate Professor Can Bayramand Research Professor Milton Feng, Nick Holonyak, Jr., Endowed Chair Emeritus in Electrical and Computer Engineering, were among the recipients of the grants. The grants were made to 85 institutions for 2021.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Kumar's Startup Apropose Receives $1.875M in Seed Funding Round

    Apropose, a software startup founded by Assistant Professor Ranjitha Kumar to develop design analytics tools for the web, recently announced that it received $1.875 million in seed financing led by New Enterprise Associates and Andreessen Horowitz, with additional support from Pat Hanrahan (founder, Tableau) and Nick McKeown (founder, Nicira).

  • $1.75M Grant Boosts Ioptics Lab's Ultrafast Bioimgaging Research

    ECE ILLINOIS Assistant Professor Liang Gao's research is improving microscopic imaging, and a new $1.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will give his team a boost as they pursue ultrafast bioimaging and the promise of several fundamental scientific discoveries.

  • Karahalios Brings Social Computing Expertise To DARPA Group Focused On Techs Future

    Professor Karrie Karahalios has been invited to become part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agencys Information Science and Technology Study Group, joining Professor Sarita Adve to give Illinois Computer Science two researchers on the prestigious 30-member panel.

  • 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.

  • Scientists Develop Gentle, Microscopic Hands to Study Tiny, Soft Materials

    Handling very soft, delicate items without damaging them is hard enough with human hands, let alone doing it at the microscopic scale with laboratory instruments. Three new studies show how scientists have honed a technique for handling tiny, soft particles using precisely controlled fluid flows that act as gentle microscopic hands. The technique allows researchers to test the physical limits of these soft particles and the things made from them – ranging from biological tissues to fabric softeners.

  • [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.

  • 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. 

  • [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.

  • 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.

  • $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.

  • Liberzon and Viswanath Named 2013 IEEE Fellows

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

  • Headshot of Eric Chitambar

    Researchers explore potential building blocks for Quantum Internet

    We already have the Internet. You're using it right now to transfer information across a vast network. But there's another network that researchers want to eventually build: a Quantum Internet. A group of researchers -- including the IQUIST’s. CSL’s, and ECE's Eric Chitambar, in connection with the Argonne National Laboratory -- were awarded a grant from the Department of Energy to work on what could be the building blocks to make that idea a reality by experimenting with scalable entanglement distribution in quantum networks along multiple nodes.

  • Illinois LED Pioneers Receive Draper Prize

    Nick Holonyak Jr., a professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois and the inventor of the first visible-light LED, and Illinois alumni George Craford and Russell Dupuis, who studied under Holonyak, were among five innovators honored by the National Academy of Engineering, which administers the $500,000 prize sponsored by Draper Laboratory.

  • 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.

  • Studies Determine What Sounds Draw Human Attention, How Humans Can Pinpoint Them More Quickly

    Professors Mark Hasegawa-Johnson and Thomas Huang devised a way to study what sounds grab human attention, which hadn't been studied previously. The result: humans can now easily sort through hours of recordings, using software called the timeliner, to pick out unusual sounds.

  • 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.

  • [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.