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IT Excellence at Illinois: News

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  • It displays the photo of Illinois CS professor Kris Hauser

    $10M Ana Avatar Xprize Names Hauser's Project a Semifinalist for Worldwide Robotics Competition

    Illinois CS professor Kris Hauser’s team of graduate students will continue working toward the $10M ANA Avatar XPRIZE – a large-scale global incentive competition – after earning one of 38 semifinalist selections.

  • $10 Million Jump Simulation Center Coming to New College of Medicine

    A $10 million gift will launch the Jump Simulation Center in Urbana and help train a new type of doctor uniquely equipped to transform healthcare.

  • $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.

  • $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.

  • $20 Million Award will Fund Resilience Research Center for Five More Years

    The Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has renewed a cooperative agreement that funds the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning. Originally established with a $20 million award in 2015, the center will receive an additional $20 million in support over the next five years. Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) professor Paolo Gardoni (above) will continue to serve as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Illinois) campus principal investigator.

  • 3-D Imaging Provides Window into Living Cells, No Dye Required

    A team of University of Illinois researchers, led by ECE Associate Professor Gabriel Popescu, published their results in the journal Nature Photonics. A new imaging technique uses conventional microscopes and white light to create high-resolution, three-dimensional images of cells and their internal structures. The images are a composite of many cross-sectional images captured by a microscope. Then, a computer uses the theoretical model and compiles the images into a coherent three-dimensional rendering.

  • 3D Pop-Up Silicon Structures: New Process Transforms Planar Materials into 3D Microarchitectures

    In the cover feature article of Science, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign describe a unique process for geometrically transforming two dimensional (2D) micro/nanostructures into extended 3D layouts by exploiting mechanics principles similar to those found in children’s ‘pop-up’ books.

  • 3-D Printed Sugar Scaffolds Offer Sweet Solution for Tissue Engineering, Device Manufacturing

    UIUC engineers built a 3-D printer that offers a sweet solution to making detailed structures that commercial 3-D printers can't: Rather than a layer-upon-layer solid shell, it produces a delicate network of thin ribbons of hardened isomalt, the type of sugar alcohol used to make throat lozenges.

  • 3-D Printing Could Lead to Tiny Medical Implants, Electronics, Robots, More

    For the first time, a research team from Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign demonstrated the ability to 3-D-print a battery.

  • 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.

  • $87 million multi-institutional grant will help Illinois advance bioindustrial manufacturing

    An $87 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense matched by more than $187 million in non-federal cost-share will fund collaborative efforts by a team of private and public entities, including the University of Illinois, to advance sustainable and reliable bioindustrial manufacturing technologies.

  • Abbas Recognized for Two Important Papers on Decision-Making

    Two papers co-authored by Ali E. Abbas, the Art Davis Faculty Scholar and associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, were recently recognized by the Decision Analysis Society at the INFORMS annual conference. The papers challenge the current state of the art making for tradeoffs in multi-objective decision problems.

  • Abbaszadeh's Imaging Work Aims at Assisting Robotic Neurosurgery

    Dr. Shiva Abbaszadeh is collaborating with colleagues at Stanford University and in China to develop imaging, depth sensing, and machine learning techniques to aid physicians performing robotic neurosurgery on mice.

  • Headshot of Tarek Abdelzaher in front of brick building

    Abdelzaher Leading $5.8M DARPA effort to understand how people respond to influence messaging

    There’s no end to the variety of bizarre rumors circulating about COVID-19 vaccines: recipients’ bodies become magnetized, perhaps, or connected to 5G signals. Many assume that such tales are cooked up by eccentrics, but some of the rumor-mongering has more sinister origins. In August 2021, for example, Facebook uncovered a huge, Russia-based anti-vaccination campaign, in which hundreds of fake accounts were working in coordination to spread the belief that people who received the AstraZeneca vaccine were being tainted by injected chimpanzee tissue. Such misinformation campaigns have become a worrisome feature of the modern threat landscape, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has just awarded $5.8 million to a team, led by CSL’s Tarek Abdelzaher, that will work to characterize how different foreign populations respond to influence campaigns as a first step towards development of effective countermeasures.

  • A map of the United States with different gradients of red in each state, displaying predicted cases.

    Abdelzaher Repurposing Social Networking Models to Predict COVID Spread Under Different Social Distancing Policies

    Since the COVID-19 epidemic began, there has been plenty of opportunity to observe how a vast array of truths, half-truths, and falsehoods can flare up and spread like wildfire across social media, swirl around, and just as quickly get buried and forgotten. It could serve as a fascinating case study for CSL and computer science professor Tarek Abdelzaher, who for years has studied how information propagates through social media.

  • A Bright Idea: Tiny Injectable LEDs Help Neuroscientists Study the Brain

    Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Washington University in St. Louis have developed ultrathin, flexible optoelectronic devices including LEDs the size of individual neurons that are lighting the way for neuroscientists in the field of optogenetics and beyond.

  • Access to Big Data Is Crucial for Credibility of Computational Research Findings, Says Stodden

    Science is being transformed so that massive computation is central to scientific experiments, with scientists using computer code to analyze huge amounts of data. Computational science might be used to study climate change, to simulate the formation of galaxies, for biomolecular modeling or for mining a vast set of data looking for patterns. But, Stodden says, this relatively new form of scientific inquiry has not yet developed standards for communicating the details of how the work was done or for validating results. The lack of such standards is causing a credibility crisis, Stodden says. Her research looks at the "reproducibility" of computational science -- how findings can be verified and an experiment replicated or used as a basis for further research.

  • Achieving Near-Perfect Optical Isolation Using Opto-mechanical Transparency

    Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a new level of optical isolation necessary to advance on-chip optical signal processing

  • It displays the photo of Illinois CS professor Jose Meseguer

    ACM Recognized Meseguer, Tong for Contributions to the Computing Field

    Two Illinois CS faculty recently earned recognition by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, for achievements in computing.

  • Addressing the Digital Divide through Technology for Development

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

  • Left to right: Chenfei Hu wearing a hard hat and standing in a machine shop, headshot of Gabriel Popescu, headshot of Mark Anastasio

    Advanced Imaging, AI distinguish healthy from injured cells

    Beckman researchers use artificial intelligence and advanced imaging to distinguish healthy cells from injured cells. Groundbreaking research from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign can determine the state of a cell without the limitations inherent to some current methods.

  • Advanced Robotic Bat's Flight Characteristics Simulate the Real Thing

    Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Caltech have developed a self-contained robotic bat--dubbed Bat Bot (B2)--with soft, articulated wings that can mimic the key flight mechanisms of biological bats.

  • Adve and Lattner Receive ACM Software System Award

    Computer Science ProfessorVikram Adve, CS alumnus Chris Lattner (MS CS 02, CS PhD 05), and Apple Inc. software engineer Evan Cheng have been named recipients of the ACM Software System Award for their work on LLVM.

  • Adve Named a Fellow of ACM

    CS Professor Vikram Adve has been named a 2014 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In his citation he was recognized "[f]or developing the LLVM compiler and for contributions to parallel computing and software security." He is one of 49 ACM members being recognized this year for their contributions to computing.

  • Adve, Team Awarded $5.6 Million to Streamline Complex Modern Software

    Professor Vikram Adve will lead a five-year, $5.6 million effort to reduce the complexity and size of modern software systems, using his groundbreaking work creating the LLVM compiler infrastructure as part of the project.

  • Diagram labeld: "Figure 1 Concept Image" with figures representing Earth and Mars with parallel lines extending from each. A sinusodial path oscilates between the two lines from left to right marking the stages of the 3 cycles: Insertion -- launch, seperation, Cycler and Archive/Observer; Data Gathering (1+ years per cycle); Mars-Earth transit (~6mo, 1 per cycle): Crosslink (at Mars), Transit, Downlink (at Earth).

    AE Ph.D. student interns at NASA JPL on Pony-Express-inspired project

    Alex Pascarella is working on a mission concept that will retrieve data from Mars more efficiently. It’s called the Solar System Pony Express, named for a postal service that operated in 1860 between the Midwest and the West Coast using relayed horse-mounted riders—only this express uses a network of satellites.

  • Aerial Imaging Technology Provides Diagnostic Tool for Agriculture

    IntelinAir, Inc. utilizes drones and airplanes with advanced imaging to conduct what the company calls an Ag-MRI. With imaging analytics, the technology can conduct a health analysis of a field and provide insights to farmers.

  • A Glucose Meter of a Different Color Provides Continuous Monitoring

    University of Illinois engineers are bringing a touch of color to glucose monitoring. The researchers developed a new continuous glucose monitoring material that changes color as glucose levels fluctuate, and the wavelength shift is so precise that doctors and patients may be able to use it for automatic insulin dosing – something not possible using current point measurements like test strips.

  • Agricultural Robot May Be 'Game Changer' for Crop Growers, Breeders

    A semiautonomous robot may soon be roaming agricultural fields gathering and transmitting real-time data about the growth and development of crops, information that crop breeders--and eventually farmers--can use to identify the genetic traits in plants likely to produce the greatest yields.

  • AI and Probabilistic Modeling Help Identify Epilepsy-Causing Brain Regions

    A team at UIUC and the Mayo Clinic have developed a method with the potential to significantly improve the accuracy and reduce the cost and time needed to identify regions of the brain causing epilepsy.

  • Mohammed El-Kebir

    AI in Cancer Research: Tumor Phylogenetics

    Artificial intelligence is often employed in the field of cancer genomics, where bits of DNA sequencing data must be identified and further analyzed with statistical, evolutional, and probabilistic models. “Off-the-shelf” computing tools are useful for many cancer researchers, but Mohammed El-Kebir, Illinois CS professor and Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) scientist, is taking these AI applications a step further.

  • 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.

  • Aksimentiev interviewed on NPR's EarthSky

    Using the worlds fastest computers to scrutinize DNA, Aleksei Aksimentiev wants to enable future doctors to...

  • Alchemy student team develops key technology for Safer Illinois App

    A large part of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s plan to return to campus this fall has been the Safer Illinois mobile application. Researchers determined that an essential component of the campus’ testing and targeting practices would be contact tracing but wanted to do so in a way that wouldn’t compromise user privacy. Developing this important feature was a complex undertaking with a tight deadline, but several Illinois ECE students were up for the challenge.

  • A Lifetime of Achievement in Real-Time

    Computer Science Professor Tarek Abdelzaher, a Donald Biggar Willett Scholar in the College of Engineering, was named the winner of the 2012 Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award by the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems in December.

  • All Directions Are Not Created Equal for Nanoscale Heat Sources

    Thermal considerations are rapidly becoming one of the most serious design constraints in microelectronics, especially on submicron scale lengths. A study by researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has shown that standard thermal models will lead to the wrong answer in a three-dimensional heat-transfer problem if the dimensions of the heating element are on the order of one micron or smaller.

  • Alleyne honored with Air Force public service award

    CSL Professor Andrew Alleyne was honored this year with the Chief of Staff of the Air Force Exceptional Public Service Award. It is the most prestigious award granted by the U.S. Air Force to non-employee civilians.

  • Alleyne Honored with Control Engineering Practice

    ECE ILLINOIS affiliate Andrew G Alleyne, a MechSE professor, was named the 2018 recipient of the Control Engineering Practice Award from the American Automatic Control Council (AACC).

  • Alumna Helped Develop Summit, IBM's New Supercomputer

    According to a report by CNBC, IBM's new Summit supercomputer runs on 185 miles of high-speed cable, weighs more than a commercial aircraft, spans two tennis courts, and occupies 5,600 square feet of a lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Summit is also currently the world's most powerful supercomputer and it's thanks to ECE ILLINOIS alumna Hillery Hunter (BSEE '99, MS '02, PhD '04) that this supercomputer is capable of running an estimated 200,000 trillion calculations per second with stunning accuracy. At Illinois, Hunter was advised by AMD Jerry Sanders Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering Wen-mei Hwu.

  • Alumna's Dissertation Receives International Recognition

    ECE ILLINOIS alumna Homa Alemzadeh (PhD '16) was awarded the William C. Carter PhD Dissertation Award in Dependability, a prestigious award that is given annually by the IEEE Technical Committee and IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance to one new PhD graduate worldwide who has made significant contribution to the field of dependable computing through her PhD dissertation research.

  • Alumni-Founded Fullstack Academy Offers Cutting-Edge Coding Education

    Fullstack Academy, an immersive software engineering school founded by ECE ILLINOIS alumnus David Yang and CS @ Illinois alumnus Nimit Maru, offers an intensive three-month coding workshop in New York for people from a variety of backgrounds who want to learn coding.

  • Alumni Win ACRL Innovation and Publication Awards

    Two GSLIS alumni have won awards from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). Kimberly Willson-St. Clair (MS '01), along with collegaues at Portland State University, has been selected to receive the 2014 ACRL Instruction Section Innovation Award. Wendy Holliday (MS '02) has received the 2014 ACRL Instruction Section Ilene F. Rockman Publication of the Year Award with co-author Jim Rogers.

  • Alumnus Co-Authors IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper

    ECE ILLINOIS alumnus Saiprasad Ravishankar (PhD '14, MSEE '10) and ECE Illinois professor Yoram Bresler's paper "Learning Sparsifying Transforms," which was published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, has won the IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award for 2016.

  • Alumnus Honored for Excellence in Semiconductor Research

    CE ILLINOIS alumnus Sanjay Banerjee (MSEE '81, PhD '83) has been selected as a recipient of the 2017 University Researcher Award for his excellence in semiconductor research.

  • Alumnus' iPhone app tops "What's Hot"

    Few people can say they've written an iPhone application that's both made it to the top of the charts in iTunes as well as appeared in Apple's "What's Hot" section...

  • Alumnus Mark Hersam Wins MacArthur Foundation's 'Genius Grant'

    Alumnus Mark Hersam (BSEE '96, PhD '00) has been named a fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation: an honor sometimes referred to as the "genius grant." Hersam, a professor and materials scientist at Northwestern University, leads a research group looking into nanomaterials and ways to make them more efficient, inexpensive, and reproducible with the end goal of accelerating the development of nanotechnology applications in our daily lives.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Alumnus Thomas Siebel among 2013 AAAS Fellows

    Computer science alumnus Thomas Siebel joins U of I Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise, and Frederick E. Hoxie, a Swanlund Professor of History at Illinois, as newly elected fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  • Alumnus Wins IEEE Electromagnetics Award for 50 Years of Contributions

    One of the most respected experts in electromagnetics and microwave techniques, ECE ILLINOIS alumnus Tatsuo Itoh (PhD '69) has been honored with the 2018 IEEE Electromagnetics Award for his theoretical and technological contributions to electromagnetic modeling, artificial materials, microwave electronics, and antennas.