Research IT News

The Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), a global effort to sequence the genetic code, or genomes, of all 1.5 million known animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species on Earth, officially launched on November 1, 2018. The EBP will ultimately create a new foundation for biology to drive solutions for preserving biodiversity and sustaining human societies. 

Wednesday, Oct. 10

4-11 p.m.

College of Veterinary Medicine

The VetMed Hackathon will seek novel solutions to feline house soiling—the primary reason cats are relinquished to shelters. Open to veterinarians, students from all disciplines, and cat-lovers from the community! The winning team will come up with a cat-friendly and humane solution encouraging felines to eliminate at desired locations. Cash prize of $2,500.

Although the flying car is still a far-off dream for high-tech aficionados, many other technologies from the 20th century’s favorite futuristic cartoon have become a reality. Smartwatches, video calls, holograms that perform, and robotic assistants of all kinds are very real and present in our lives. What facilitates the existence and accessibility of these long-awaited tech advancements? In short, the Internet of Things.

The new, eagerly anticipated Research IT Portal is live! Visit researchit.illinois.edu to use the portal or the Tech Services website to learn more about it.

What makes pathogenic bacteria so persistent? Researchers from the Beckman Instituteat the University of Illinois and the University of Munich (LMU) are using the National Center for Supercomputing Applications' (NCSA) Blue Waters supercomputer to simulate and decipher the physical adhesion mechanism of a widespread pathogen virulence factor.

Epilepsy is the fourth most common human neurological disorder in the world — a disorder characterized by recurrent, unprovoked seizures. According to the Centers for Disease Control, a record number of people in the United States have epilepsy: 3.4 million total, including nearly half a million children. At this time, there’s no known cause or cure, but with the help of NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, researchers like Ivan Soltesz are making progress.

NCSA Faculty Affiliate Laxmikant "Sanjay" Kale was named to the the 2017 class of fellows from the Association for Computing Machinery.

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Stormy weather is perfect for hot tea, warm clothes, and cool science.

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The Carle Illinois College of Medicine in Urbana-Champaign, which will welcome its first class of students in July, bills itself as the first medical doctorate program in the nation designed from inception to integrate engineering with medicine. Its hope is to graduate physician innovators who challenge the status quo and find solutions that reduce costs while improving access to and quality of care.

Read the Chicago Tribune article on the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.

The Bio Imaging Lab at Beckman Institute decreased their processing time from over 260 days to just a few hours by leveraging Amazon Web Services at Illinois, provided by Technology Services. This is their story.

Are you a Graduate Student starting your job search? Handshake, a new service offering at Illinois, can help you get started. With over 200,000 employers nation-wide, it's a fantastic way to get yourself seen.

Read the full story.

Amazon Web Services at Illinois gives students and faculty the opportunity to explore and optimize data analysis.

Thanks to the campus contract between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, both faculty and student researchers have access to Amazon’s cloud computing platform, and they’re already doing amazing things.

Katherine Kendig, a research coordinator and partner with Public Affairs at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), reports that students are capitalizing on the partnership to optimize data analysis in computational genomics research. To learn more about this exciting work,visit https://cloud.illinois.edu.

Are you a Graduate Student starting your job search? Handshake, a new service offering at Illinois, can help you get started. With over 200,000 employers nation-wide, it's a fantastic way to get yourself seen.

Read the full story.

Some campus academic leaders are interested in the possibility that IoT devices could help improve student success efforts, although obviously these efforts raise a number of privacy concerns. Arizona State University has launched a pilot project to see if using IoT to take attendance could help advisers reach out to students.

Read the full story.