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IT Excellence at Illinois: News
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  • Yutian Lei Wins Prize for Paper at IEEE COMPEL Workshop

    Dec 12, 2014 8:00 am7 views

    Graduate student Yutian Lei won the award for best paper at the 2014 IEEE Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics, or COMPEL. Lei’s publication, co-written with former graduate student Ryan May and Assistant Professor Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, explored their research into switched-capacitor power converters.

  • You Can Run, But Can You Hide?

    Jan 16, 2019 8:00 am0 views

    Fitness enthusiasts have embraced mobile apps to track their workouts. Using GPS on a mobile phone, it is easier than ever to not only determine how far a run is, but also to log the exact route. Sharing workouts has also become popular, thanks to sites like Strava and Garmin Connect. It gives runners accountability and a sense of community, and the sites often include leaderboards. Like most social media outlets, its users have the option of who gets to see that information.

  • Yoon Receives Padovani Scholarship

    Apr 6, 2015 8:00 am0 views

    CS graduate student Man-Ki Yoon received the Roberto Padovani Scholarship from Qualcomm.

  • Yoon Receives Intel PhD Fellowship

    Nov 19, 2014 8:00 am2 views

    CS graduate student Man-Ki Yoon was one of the recipients of a 2014 Intel PhD Fellowship. Yoon received the fellowship to support work on his dissertation "Secure Multicore Architecture for Embedded Systems," which he is completing under the direction of CS Professor Lui Sha and Illinois ITI Research Scientist Sibin Mohan.

  • Yoon and Abdi Taghi Abad Receive Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships to Secure Embedded Systems

    Jul 15, 2013 8:00 am0 views

    Two Illinois computer science PhD students are studying ways to improve the security of these real-time embedded systems and were recently selected for the prestigious Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QInF).

  • Yang Donates $1 Million to Support Innovative, Bold Ideas

    Apr 18, 2013 12:45 am0 views

    The Andrew T. Yang Research Award has been established thanks to a $1 million donation by alumnus Andrew T. Yang. The award is intended to encourage ECE graduate students to pursue bold ideas that will have the potential for commercialization. Yang is a serial entrepreneur and currently serves as vice president and general manager for ANSYS.

  • XSEDE Brings Advanced Resources and Expertise to Nation's Scientists and Engineers

    Jul 28, 2011 8:00 am0 views

    The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment will be the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world...

  • Xiuling Li Awarded Patent for Novel Semiconductor Nanowire Growth Method

    Dec 19, 2014 8:00 am2 views

    Li was awarded a patent for a new way of growing nanowires made of the materials she believes will replace silicon at the nanoscale.

  • Xie Recognized as Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator

    Mar 22, 2017 8:00 am0 views

    CS Associate Professor and Willett Faculty Scholar Tao Xie was recently honored with a Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award.

  • Xiang Ren's Dissertation Recognized with SIGKDD Dissertation Award

    Dec 10, 2018 8:00 am4 views

    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.

  • World's fastest quantum random-number generator

    May 17, 2010 8:00 am0 views

    Ever since humans discovered gambling, people have sought improved means of generating random numbersunpredictable outcomes based on a physical process such as coin flipping, dice throwing, or wheel spinning. But such methods are both too slow and too unreliable for modern applications requiring random numbers.

  • Wong Honored as ACM Fellow for Electronic Design Automation Contributions

    May 25, 2018 8:00 am0 views

    Martin D. F. Wong was named as a Fellow of the ACM "for contributions to the algorithmic aspects of electronic design automation (EDA)."

  • Wolske Participates in Digital Skills Event

    Oct 21, 2016 8:00 am0 views

    Martin Wolske, senior research scientist and lecturer, participated in the event, "Digital Skills: A Gateway to Opportunity," on June 13 at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago. The event was hosted by Chicago Public Library (CPL) and Digital Promise, a nonprofit that works to improve opportunities to learn by encouraging innovation in education. Wolske participated in the event as a representative of the Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI).

  • Wolske Asserts 'Radical Reconsideration' of Digital Literacy in New Article

    Mar 3, 2017 8:00 am0 views

    Martin Wolske, senior research scientist and lecturer, takes a critical look at digital literacy for the twenty-first century in his paper, "A Radical Reconsideration of Digital Literacy." The article was published in the Summer 2016 issue of Information for Social Change.

  • With Online Games, High School Students Learn How to Rein in Disease Outbreaks

    Oct 10, 2016 8:00 am0 views

    High school students investigate Ebola-like outbreaks and administer vaccines through Outbreak!, a new summer course at Illinois that uses online games to encourage critical thinking about fighting infectious diseases.

  • With Amelia, Booking a Flight Is as Simple as Having a Conversation

    Sep 28, 2016 8:00 am0 views

    Over time, society has become accustomed to natural language technologies like Siri and Google Now, which allow users to conversationally ask a question and get a verbal response from a device. Amelia, a University of Illinois startup, is applying similar technology to booking enterprise travel, a sizeable market where, in 2015, 455 million business flights were taken in the United States alone.

  • Wit, Grit, and a Supercomputer Yield Chemical Structure of HIV Capsid

    Jun 10, 2013 8:00 am0 views

    In the first major project to utilize Blue Waters, University of Illinois researchers report that they have determined the precise chemical structure of the HIV capsid, a protein shell that protects the viruss genetic material and is a key to its virulence. The capsid has become an attractive target for the development of new antiretroviral drugs. The report appears in the journalNature.

  • Wireless Monitoring Promises Safer Railroad Bridges

    Oct 11, 2013 8:00 am0 views

    In a new project for the Federal Railroad Administration led by Professor Bill Spencer, two CEE research centers, the Smart Structures Technology Laboratory (SSTL) and the Rail Transportation and Engineering Center (RailTEC) are working together to develop a portable, cost-effective and practical wireless structural health monitoring system for railroad bridges in North America.

  • Two men in a room of early broadcasting equipment. One sitting holding a script near a microphone and the other standing near a machine adjusting dials.

    WILL at 100: Looking Back on A Century of Broadcasting

    Jan 12, 2022 10:00 am0 views

    URBANA – 2022 marks the 100-year anniversary of WILL-AM, the oldest component of Illinois Public Media. The University of Illinois launched the station at a time when the idea of using radio to reach a mass audience was new and cutting edge. There was no FM radio or TV, no internet or social media. The first trans-Atlantic telephone call was five years away.

  • Will a Machine Pick Your Next Medication?

    Apr 6, 2018 8:00 am0 views

    Deep computer analysis may unveil new patterns that could bolster your health care provider's ability to prescribe precise therapies, make a diagnosis, recommend a clinical trial or even predict your risk of disease.

  • White Selected for ASC Outstanding Research Award

    Sep 26, 2014 8:00 am0 views

    Aerospace Engineering at Illinois Prof. Scott R. White has been chosen for the 2014 American Society for Composites (ASC) Outstanding Research Award.

  • White Named SES Fellow

    Jan 27, 2017 8:00 am1 views

    Aerospace Engineering at Illinois Prof. Scott White has been selected as a Fellow of the international Society of Engineering Science.

  • Water Compresses Under a High Gradient Electric Field

    Mar 29, 2019 8:00 am0 views

    In this study, Aksimentiev and Wilson set out to develop a computational model that would allow them to control the speed of transport of DNA through a graphene nanopore. They knew that increasing the applied electric field should increase the speed of transport by the same multiple, but when they increased the field tenfold, the DNA was completely blocked from passing through the hole.

  • Warnow Part of Study Using DNA Sequences to Examine Key Events in Plant Evolution

    Oct 29, 2014 8:00 am0 views

    Warnow and her student Siavash Mirarab developed new methods for analyzing the massive datasets used in the project. "The datasets we were analyzing in this study were too big and too challenging for existing statistical methods to handle, so we developed approaches with better accuracy," Warnow said.

  • Warnow Elected 2017 International Society for Computational Biology Fellow

    Aug 7, 2017 8:00 am0 views

    Tandy Warnow, a University of Illinois Founder Professor of Engineering, was among the eight scientists recently elected as 2017 Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) for outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics.

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

    Nov 8, 2019 12:15 pm4 views

    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.

  • Headshot of Associate Professor Dong Wang on blue background.

    Wang receives grant to integrate AI and human intelligence in disaster scene assessment

    Sep 20, 2021 10:00 am0 views

    In the event of a natural disaster like Hurricane Ida, artificial intelligence (AI) may be used to assess damage, using imagery reports to identify the severity of flooded areas. Using AI in disaster scene assessment has its limitations, however, and input from the people affected is needed, in order to get a better picture. A new project being led by Associate Professor Dong Wang will explore the power of human intelligence to address the failures of existing AI schemes in disaster damage assessment applications and boost the performance of the system. Wang has received a three-year, $499,786 National Science Foundation (NSF) Human-Centered Computing (HCC) grant for his new project, "DeepCrowd: A Crowd-assisted Deep Learning-based Disaster Scene Assessment System with Active Human-AI Interactions."

  • It displays the photo of Lara Waldrop, Illinois ECE Assistant Professor

    Waldrop Leads $75 Million NASA Mission to Investigate Earth's Atmosphere

    Dec 16, 2020 8:30 pm10 views

    Lara Waldrop, Illinois ECE Assistant Professor and Y. T. Lo Fellow in Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been selected by NASA to develop a Solar Terrestrial Probes (STP) Science Mission of Opportunity, budgeted for $75 million.  Her mission, titled “Global Lyman-alpha Imager of the Dynamic Exosphere”, or “GLIDE” for short, was chosen for implementation after a competitive selection process and is expected to be launched in 2025. 

  • Waldrop and Qin Awarded NSF Grant TO Model Hydrogen Atoms in Atmosphere

    Sep 21, 2018 8:00 am0 views

    ECE ILLINOIS Assistant Professor Lara Waldrop, Research Scientist Jianqi Qin, and Richard Hodges from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder were awarded a grant by the NSF for their proposal on modeling hydrogen atoms in the terrestrial atmosphere. Waldrop is also affiliated with CSL.

  • Vitrix Health Takes Home Cozad Grand Prize

    Jul 16, 2018 8:00 am2 views

    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.

  • Viswanath Searches for Solution to Interference in Wireless Networks

    Sep 29, 2014 8:00 am0 views

    Professor Pramod Viswanath was awarded a three-year, $360,000 grant from the Army for his project titled Wireless Networks as Polymatroidal Graphs: Embeddings, Multicommodity Flows, Cuts and Function Computation." This project will address interference in wireless networks and how to manage that interference in a distributed way.

  • Visually-impaired Sculptor Creates Braille Math Tools

    Mar 16, 2010 8:00 am2 views

    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.

  • Harry H. Hilton, an elderly white man with a bald head and glasses, smiles at the camera. He is in front of a whiteboard with writing on it.

    Visualizing Multiple Dimensions for Big-Picture Analysis of Wing Stresses and Performance

    Dec 11, 2019 12:00 pm0 views

    Bending, buckling, twisting, and plunging are just a few of the ways vehicles perform when in flight. Rather than analyzing these and more variables individually, aerospace engineers used a system-of-systems approach to mathematically model the stresses for a big-picture understanding of what’s happening to a portion of a vehicle (a spar) in flight—then used a unique protocol to visualize all of the variables together.

  • Visualizations Show Hurricane Katrina Gaining Power

    Apr 7, 2011 8:00 am0 views

    Data-driven visualizations of 2005's devastating Hurricane Katrina ...

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

    Feb 18, 2015 8:00 am4 views

    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.

  • Vision-Based Positioning Could Help Drones Navigate Urban Environments

    Aug 5, 2016 8:00 am0 views

    In urban areas high-rise buildings may block the line of sight to GPS satellites, causing drop-outs or making the signal completely unavailable. Grace Xingxin Gao and her team are working to overcome those limitations by using vision-based positioning to fill in the gaps when GPS is unavailable.

  • Virtual School summer courses draw record number of participants

    Sep 22, 2010 8:00 am0 views

    This summer, over 1,000 graduate students and researchers registered for courses offered by the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering...

  • Virtual Reality Course Brings Students to the Forefront of Technology

    Aug 3, 2015 8:00 am0 views

    Virtual reality worlds were created by University of Illinois students in CS 498SL: Virtual Reality. This course was taught in the spring 2015 semester by CS Professor Steven LaValle. In fall 2014 LaValle returned to Illinois following an extended leave during which he served as head scientist at Oculus, developer of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Oculus was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion.

  • Virtual Learning Space

    Mar 25, 2010 8:00 am0 views

    Thanks to NCSA's Image Spatial Data Analysis group, you may one day be able to literally insert yourself into situations even though you are far, far away.

  • Virtual Lab Encourages Creativity, Offers Safe Place to Explore

    Jul 5, 2013 8:00 am0 views

    Welcome to the virtual lab, a digital re-creation of the nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering (NPRE) undergraduate laboratory. The virtual lab is a detailed first-person video game developed to guide freshmen through basic lab setup and procedure, though it soon could provide a training environment for advanced classes in nuclear engineering and beyond.

  • VeriFlow Aims to Verify Application-Defined Networks in Real Time

    Aug 26, 2013 8:00 am6 views

    Researchers at the Ocean Cluster for Experimental Architectures in Networks (OCEAN) lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) hope to address concerns of networks shaped on the fly by applications

  • Vasudevan Wins IEEE Ceda Early Career Award

    Mar 30, 2015 8:00 am0 views

    The IEEE Council of Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) recently presented Vasudevan with the Early Career Award "for outstanding contributions to design verification including assertion generation and coverage analysis."

  • VASUDEVAN TO COLLABORATE WITH SYNOPSYS ON VERIFICATION

    Feb 18, 2013 7:00 am0 views

    ECE Assistant Professor Shobha Vasudevan has begun a collaboration with Synopsys in the area of functional verification. Functional verification is the process of determining that a particular hardware design conforms to its specifications and performs as intended. In concert with this collaboration, Synopsys has entered into a licensing agreement for one of the tools developed by Vasudevan's group, evaluating its potential for commercialization.

  • Vasudevan Receives Best Paper Award for Verification Algorithm

    Aug 1, 2014 8:00 am0 views

    Assistant Professor Shobha Vasudevan and three graduate students received the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on VLSI Design earlier this year.

  • Varshney Working to Neutralize Odors

    Jun 8, 2015 8:00 am0 views

    Imagine a machine that could cancel out any odor, from smelly feet to pungent horseradish. ECE Assistant Professor Lav Varshney is working with his brother, IBM Researcher Kush Varshney, to turn this into reality.

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

    Feb 19, 2020 2:00 pm4 views

    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.

  • Varshney Demonstrates Novel Crowdsourcing Approach

    Jul 16, 2014 8:00 am0 views

    ECE Assistant Professor Lav Varshney and collaborators at Syracuse University have demonstrated an algorithmic solution to crowdsourcing tasks.

  • Varshney and Bai Awarded Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange Paper Award

    Jun 8, 2016 8:00 am5 views

    Bai and Varshney collaborated with New York University Professor Rumi Chunara to analyze data from location-sharing social platform Foursquare.

  • Using High-Performance Computer Modeling, Ertekin Is Discovering New Materials and Energy Sources

    Oct 30, 2013 8:00 am0 views

    Ertekin is using quantum mechanics based modeling and simulation to optimize the performance of materials for thermal transport. She is exploring whether nanostructured materials can be useful for thermal waste recovery, taking the waste heat that is being exhausted into the atmosphere and instead transforming it into electricity.

  • Using 3D X-Rays to Measure Particle Movement Inside Lithium Ion Batteries

    Jun 22, 2018 8:00 am0 views

    Researchers at the University of Illinois applied a technique using 3D X-ray tomography of an electrode to better understand what is happening on the inside of a lithium ion battery and ultimately build batteries with more storage capacity and longer life.