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IT Excellence at Illinois: News

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  • New Imaging System Could Lead to Breakthroughs in Nanomedicine

    A $300,000 grant from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust has made possible the purchase of a high-sensitivity live animal imaging system for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The new system will primarily be used by campus researchers in the area of nanomedicine.

  • Graphic Figure with "Individual Social Activity" on the y axis and "Time" on the x axis. Instead of a graph, there are 3 graphics. The first depicting three susceptabile (green) individuals inside a house while above three more indivudals labeled S are dancing with an infected (I) individual. An arrow links one of the dancing S individuals to the house. In the second pannel, similar set up to the first but only 2 S individuals are in the house while 2 S, 1 R (recovered/removed), and 2 I individuals are dancing. An upward arrow links the house to one of the infected individuals. In the last panel, 2 individuals are in the house, one S and the other R while 2 S, 2 R, and 1 I dance above. A green upward arrow links the house to the infected individual while a blue downward arrow links an R individual to the house.

    New model accurately describes COVID-19 waves and plateaus: adding random nature of social activity to traditional model, graphs match waves and plateaus of regional U.S. data

    A team of scientists has developed an epidemiological model that encompasses the randomness and dynamic variability of individual social interactions, as well as individual differences in the size of social networks. The team reports that this newly accounted-for random dynamic factor will always produce waves or plateaus of infections—like those seen throughout the pandemic—whether or not the model also accounts for individuals’ changing their social behavior based on knowledge of current infection rates. The new model, which builds on the team’s earlier findings published in April of this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is validated against empirical data taken from four U.S. regions prior to the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines. The model further tells us that COVID-19 may be here to stay—it shows a clear path for it to become endemic in the global population, much like the common cold or the flu.

  • Tiny Laser Gives Big Boost to High Speed Data Transmission

    Professor Milton Feng demonstrated a tiny, fast device along with postdoctoral researcher Fei Tan, graduate students Mong-Kai Wu and Michael Liu, and Nick Holonyak Jr., who is an emeritus professor. The device is a new laser technology developed at the University of Illinois that transmits error-free data over fiber optic networks at a blazing fast 40 gigabits per second – the fastest in the United States. The team published its results in the journal IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

  • Kumar Awarded Best Student Paper at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition

    Kumar won the IAPR Piero Zamperoni award for his paper titled Generalized Radial Alignment Constraint for Camera Calibration.

  • Eden's Team Demonstrates First Laser to Generate Laser Beams with Fractal Pattern

    Intel Alumni Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering J. Gary Eden's research team has demonstrated the first laser to generate laser beams having a fractal pattern.

  • It displays the photo of Illinois ECE Professor Naresh R Shanbhag

    Making AI Robust and Bringing It to the Edge

    Enhancing so-called edge devices, such as cell phones, smart watches, and other IoT devices, with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities is a major goal for researchers in both industry and academia. These devices generate huge volumes of sensory data from their built-in sensors in the form of cameras, microphones, gyroscopes, and other technology. Processing all this data is challenging due to the limited computational resources and constrained energy supply of edge devices. A team led by Illinois ECE Professor Naresh R Shanbhag, Jack S. Kilby Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is working to improve the energy efficiency and functionality of these devices.

  • 'Shot in the Dark' Provides a Path Toward Collaborative Research That Better Predicts COVID-19 Severity

    The radiologist for DuPage Medical Group only knew Forsyth as a leading expert in Artificial Intelligence. Their lack of a relationship didn't undo the excitement he had to form a collaborative research effort, though. His goal was to guide medical imaging in a new direction, one that could offset a few growing trends in this country’s healthcare system.

  • Iyer Helps Develop Tools to Aid in Alzheimer's Diagnosis and Prognosis

    A team of researchers, led by Illinois ECE Professor Ravishankar K Iyer, George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor of Engineering, is working to create tools that could help improve the diagnosis of the illness and produce more accurate prognoses.

  • Image Formation and Processing Group Dominates International Contest

    A team from the Image Formation and Processing (IFP) Group housed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Beckman Institute has won the first place in all three human parsing tracks in the Look Into Person (LIP) Challenge organized at the 2018 International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

  • Molecules for the Masses: App Puts Chemistry at the Tips of Users' Fingers

    The Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group (TCBG) at the Beckman Institute worked with scientist Theo Gray to create an app that brings molecules to life in a handheld device.

  • Student-Made Chip Can Detect Concussions in Athletes

    A student startup has developed a chip, embedded in helmets or mouthguards, that can detect concussions in athletes right after they suffer collisions.

  • Chen and Collaborators Receive Best Paper Award at ICCAD

    Professor Deming Chen, along with his graduate students and colleagues from Intel and Ohio State University, recently received the William J. McCalla Best Paper Award at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design.

  • Liang Contributes to Super-Fast MRI Technique That Captures Dynamic Vocal Movement

    Professor Zhi-Pei Liang has helped develop a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that allows for viewing dynamic images of vocal movement at 100 frames per second - a speed far more advanced than any other in the world.

  • Mellon Foundation Supports CIRSS Research on Linked Open Data, Digitized Special Collections

    The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been awarded a new research grant by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to explore the benefits for users of linked open data (LOD) for digitized library special collections. Timothy Cole (MS '89), mathematics librarian in the University Library and coordinator for library applications within the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), will serve as principal investigator.

  • Built In Chicago Features Alumni's Autonomous Robot Friend For Cats

    Built In Chicago shone a spotlight on a team of ECE ILLINOIS alumni who created autonomous robot-mouse friends for cats.

  • Library a Hathi Trust Proxy

    The Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is now a HathiTrust-designated Proxy and will provide special access to in-copyright materials found within HathiTrust to those on campus with a print disability.

  • Students Conduct Zero Gravity Experiment via NASA Program

    The Moon Goons, an interdisciplinary team of Illinois students that included three ECE seniors, experienced zero-gravity through the Microgravity University program at Johnson Space Center while conducting an experiment entitled "autonomous and adaptive docking in variable gravity." The goal was to fly the drone in zero gravity and have it dock on a landing station using magnets to induce eddy currents, causing the drone to brake.

  • photonic chip surface, geometric patten with dark ovals next to groups of 3 bright lines.

    New photonic chip for isolating light may be key to miniaturizing quantum devices

    Light offers an irreplaceable way to interact with our universe. It can travel across galactic distances and collide with our atmosphere, creating a shower of particles that tell a story of past astronomical events. Here on earth, controlling light lets us send data from one side of the planet to the other. Given its broad utility, it’s no surprise that light plays a critical role in enabling 21st century quantum information applications.

  • It displays the photo of ECE Students Nanjie You

    Illinois ECE Graduate Student Develops New Method To Quantify QCE In Optical Fibers

    Illinois ECE graduate student Nanjie Yu and his advisor Illinois ECE Assistant Professor Peter D Dragic recently developed a new method to quantify the quantum conversion efficiency (QCE) in optical fibers.  Their research was recently published in the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology.

  • Clockwise right to left: Donald Ort, Stephen Long, Arend van der Zande, Axel Hoffman, Atul Jain, Ed Diener

    Six Illinois scientists rank among world's most influential

    CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Six faculty members at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have been named to the 2021 Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list. The list recognizes researchers who demonstrated significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. Their names are drawn from the publications that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science citation index.

  • Text: ICAI -- Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence

    Kindratenko Named Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation at NCSA

    The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is pleased to announce the appointment of Illinois ECE Adjunct Associate Professor Volodymyr Kindratenko as Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation (CAII). In this new role, he will be responsible for providing the overall leadership, oversight, and management of the center, including developing partnerships and projects at regional and national levels, and overseeing day-to-day operations. Dr. Kindratenko will also be fostering and actively participating in a vigorous research program, with responsibilities for which he is especially adept thanks to his prior experience.

  • Headshot of Associate Professor Dong Wang

    New Project to help scientists mitigate risks of environmental pollutants

    In addition to killing insects and weeds, pesticides can be toxic to the environment and harmful to human health. A new project led by Associate Professor Dong Wang and Huichun Zhang, Frank H. Neff Professor of Civil Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, will help scientists mitigate the environmental and ecological risks of pollutants such as pesticides and develop remediation strategies for cleaner water, soil, and air. The researchers have received a three-year, $402,773 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for their project, "Machine Learning Modeling for the Reactivity of Organic Contaminants in Engineered and Natural Environments."

  • University of Illinois researchers lead three new NSF-funded centers for innovation

    The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign leads/co-leads three new centers of innovation funded through the National Science Foundation's Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (I/UCRC) program.

  • Student Solar Startup Revamped, from Phones to Drones

    After a turbulent year of roadblocks and opportunities, the startup is now moving its business in the direction of improving battery life in drones.

  • Four Grad Students Won IEEE APEC Best Presentation Awards

    Enver Candan, Christopher Brandon Barth, Andrew R Stillwell, and Thomas Peter Foulkes, all ECE ILLINOIS graduate students advised by Assistant Professor Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, won best presentation awards at the 2017 IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference (APEC).

  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Central to New, $320-million Digital Lab for Manufacturing

    The Digital Lab for Manufacturing is an applied research institute that will develop digital manufacturing technologies and commercialize these technologies with key industries. These technologies will be used to make everything from consumer products to heavy machinery to equipment for the military. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s world-renowned National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) are central to the Digital Lab for Manufacturing. Professor William King from Illinois’ Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering is the Digital Lab’s principal investigator and will serve as its Chief Technical Officer.

  • Professors Receive Grant to Develop Protocols to Preserve Cyber Anonymity

    Professors Pramod Viswanath and Sewoong Oh are investigating protocols to guarantee privacy and anonymity online, especially in applications that demand it, such as cryptocurrency transactions including Bitcoin and online platforms that guarantee user anonymity for whistleblowing and other applications.

  • Movement Analysis App Detects Level of Lung Disease

    A team of University of Illinois researchers would like to help millions of COPD patients better manage their health. Under the direction of CS and Medical Information Science Professor Bruce Schatz, the team is developing mobile technology that can accurately monitor COPD patients’ symptoms through a smartphone that they carry in their pocket.

  • Transistor and Laser Development to Assist in High-Speed Wireless Communication

    In two recent papers, published in the Journal of Applied Physics, Feng--along with Holonyak and graduate researchers Junyi Qiu and Curtis Wang--have established the principles of operation for tunneling modulation of a quantum well transistor laser with current amplification and optical output via intra-cavity photon-assisted tunneling.

  • Sinha Receives $1 Million NIH Grant to Model Gene Regulation

    Sinha received a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to begin a four-year project titled "Quantitative Modeling of Sequence-to-Expression Relationship." The focus of the project will be gene regulation—understanding how genes are turned on or off in a particular cell at specific times as an organism develops.

  • [Image ID: A close up of the PathTracker, a blue plastic box with a black clip attached to the top. End ID]

    Bashir and Cunningham Develop Inexpensive, Portable Detector that Identifies Pathogens in Minutes

    Most viral test kits rely on labor- and time-intensive laboratory preparation and analysis techniques; for example, tests for the novel coronavirus can take days to detect the virus from nasal swabs. Led by Illinois ECE Professors Rashid Bashir, Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering, and Brian T Cunningham, Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering, researchers have now demonstrated an inexpensive yet sensitive smartphone-based testing device for viral and bacterial pathogens that takes about 30 minutes to complete. The roughly $50 smartphone accessory could reduce the pressure on testing laboratories during a pandemic such as COVID-19.

  • Electronic Device Performance Enhanced with New Transistor Encasing Method

    Professor Joseph Lyding and graduate student Jae Won Do led a research team to develop a new method of soldering gaps between carbon nanotubes, a new type of transistor.

  • Caccamo Honored with Humboldt Foundation Professorship

    Professor Marco Caccamo has been awarded a prestigious professorship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and he plans to use the 5 million Euro prize to set up a new interdisciplinary institute to apply his expertise in real-time embedded computing to smart factories, autonomous vehicles and other areas.

  • Marc Andreessen Receives Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering

    CS @ ILLINOIS alumnus Marc Andreessen (BS CS 94) was named one of the inaugural recipients of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. According to the prize website, the prize is intended to recognize and celebrate outstanding advances in engineering that have changed the world.

  • Five Illinois Faculty Members Named Sloan Research Fellows

    Five University of Illinois faculty members received the 2016 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

  • ECE Faculty and Students Will Help Build NASAs Next Space Weather Satellite

    Three faculty members from the Department of Electrical and Computer EngineeringFarzad Kamalabadi, Jonathan J. Makela, and Gary Swensonare part of a multi-institutional team that will design, build, and operate NASAs next heliophysics satellite mission, the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON).

  • Project Will Help Researchers Explore Big Data in Hathitrust Digitized Library

    Illinois English professor Ted Underwood wants to know how the language describing male and female characters in works of fiction has changed since the late eighteenth century. He's using data mining tools to gather information from thousands of books to answer that question.

  • Osuagwu's Research with iCub Robot Focuses on Language Learning

    Bert is an iCub robot that is learning language in the way a human child does. Beckman's Language Acquisition and Robotics Group is teaching Bert language by continually exposing it to chatter, and letting it automatically learn communication rules.

  • Sanders Wins IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Technical Field Award

    ECE Department Head William H. Sanders has received the 2016 IEEE Technical Field Award, Innovation in Societal Infrastructure, for his revolutionary work concerning the cybersecurity of the power grid.

  • Transistor Laser Research Aims to Push Modulation Speeds into THZ Range

    ECE Professor Milton Feng recently received a $657,000 grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) to enhance the modulation speed performance of the transistor laser, a novel 3-terminal device that he and ECE colleague Nick Holonyak Jr. invented in 2004.

  • Chowdhary Wins Best Paper Award for Crop Counting Robot

    Led by Professor Girish Chowdhary, a team of Illinois researchers developed a robot to find these proverbial needles in the haystack was recognized by the best systems paper award at Robotics: Science and Systems, the preeminent robotics conference held last week in Pittsburgh.

  • Powered Prosthetic Devices Help Amputees Walk Naturally

    ECE PhD student Navid Aghasadeghi uses control theory to help advance prosthetic limbs for lower-limb amputees.

  • Parallel Bars

    "The Economist" 6/2/2011: Parallel programming, once an obscure niche, is the focus of increasing interest as "multicore" chips proliferate...

  • Nano Piano's Lullaby Could Mean Storage Breakthrough

    Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated the first-ever recording of optically encoded audio onto a non-magnetic plasmonic nanostructure, opening the door to multiple uses in informational processing and archival storage.

  • Heeren Receives Teacher of the Year Award

    CS Senior Lecturer Cinda Heeren has been named the recipient of the 2015 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Illinois-Indiana Section Teacher of the Year Award.

  • Researchers Improve Performance of III-V Nanowire Solar Cells on Graphene

    Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have achieved new levels of performance for seed-free and substrate-free arrays of nanowires from class of materials called III-V (three-five) directly on graphene. These compound semiconductors hold particular promise for applications involving light, such as solar cells or lasers.

  • Engineering at Illinois Launches Program to "Fundamentally Redefine the Role of Faculty in Innovation."

    Engineering at Illinois' new Faculty Entrepreneurial Fellows program will "fundamentally redefine the role of faculty in innovation," Cangellaris says. A group of passionate alumni are supporting the program, the first of its kind in a U.S. engineering program.

  • Hassanieh Receives NSF CAREER Award

    Haitham Hassanieh was awarded a 5-year, $550,000 NSF CAREER Award to address the challenges mmWave bands bring, in order to take full advantage of these high frequency spectrums.

  • Illinois Biophysicists Measure Mechanism That Determines Fate of Living Cells

    New tension gauge tether (TGT) laboratory method developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has broad applications for research into stem cells, cancer, infectious disease, and immunology.

  • Cell Phone Software Creates New Possibilities for Precision Medicine

    In a study published in Telemedicine and e-Health, Dr. Bruce Schatz and his coauthors described their latest step forward--a demonstration that the new version of their software can be used to monitor a patient's status while they perform everyday tasks outside of the hospital.