IT Excellence at Illinois: News

Developed at CS @ ILLINOIS as part of a partnership between Coursera and the University of Illinois, two computer science specializations are now available: one in data mining, and one in cloud computing. Already the courses in these specializations have already acquired over 75,000 learners.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a simplified approach to fabricating flat, ultrathin optics. The new approach enables simple etching without the use of acids or hazardous chemical etching agents.

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.

Seven research projects are sharing slightly more than $400,000 in funding through the Jump ARCHES research and development program to address challenges and expand on lessons learned about COVID-19 vaccinations and testing. The Jump ARCHES program is a partnership between OSF HealthCare and the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I) and its College of Medicine in Peoria. Illinois ECE Assistant Professors Subhonmesh Bose and Suma Pallathadka Bhat are two of the recipients of the Jump ARCHES grant.

CS graduate student Siva Kumar Hari has been selected to attend the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in September as one of 200 young researchers in the field of computer science and mathematics.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — As airline ticket sales have soared during the holiday season and the omicron variant causes surges of COVID-19 cases, a new University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign study may help passengers and airlines reduce risk of COVID-19 transmission by optimally seating passengers to minimize potential virus spread.

Big data analytics has endless possibilities in health care, Arjun Prasanna Athreya, a PhD student, advised by ECE ILLINOIS Professor Ravishankar K Iyer, works at the forefront of this precision medicine work with Mayo Clinic.

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.

Health authorities believe COVID-19 spreads by the transmission of respiratory droplets, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends homemade cloth face coverings for use in public spaces. Starting today, Illinois joins many other states in requiring people to wear masks while out. However, initial uncertainty regarding the masks’ effectiveness in reducing exhaled droplets leaves some people unsure or skeptical of their usefulness during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Mechanical science and engineering professor Taher Saif spoke with News Bureau physical sciences editor Lois Yoksoulian about a study that he and his graduate students, Onur Aydin and Bashar Emon, performed on the effectiveness of common household fabrics for use in homemade masks.

Commercial air travel safety could see significant improvements thanks to a breakthrough in aircraft flight control technology from researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A student team, including four ECE ILLINOIS students, that invented a harness for working dogs has won the People's Choice Award at the recent Cornell Cup USA competition.

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.

Professor Martin Gruebele and graduate student Duc Nguyen led a team that is the first to demonstrate imaging of individual nanoparticles at different orientations while in a laser-induced excited state.

NCSA has finalized a new contract with Cray Inc to provide the supercomputer for NSF's Blue Waters project...

ECE ILLINOIS Professor Raluca Ilie is transforming the way her students learn by using virtual reality to help them better understand complex electrical engineering concepts. With the help of students in Illinois Computer Science, she’s running a new virtual reality laboratory that is offering new, interactive, and immersive learning experiences at ECE ILLINOIS, and could open the door to new learning opportunities for students across many disciplines.

CS Assistant Professors Aditya Parameswaran and Jian Peng have each received a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support their research. Given by the NSF's Faculty Early Career Development Program, these awards recognize junior faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education.

Puneet Jain, a PhD student being advised by Professor Romit Roy Choudhury, is working on virtual reality technology that is funded by NSF, Nokia, and Google.

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.

ECE Assistant Professor Can Bayram has developed a new method for making brighter and more efficient green light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Using an industry-standard semiconductor growth technique, Bayram created gallium nitride (GaN) cubic crystals grown on a silicon substrate that are capable of producing powerful green light for advanced solid-state lighting.

The National Science Foundation has given $5 million to establish four regional Big Data Hubs. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will lead the Midwest Big Data Hub.

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.

Joseph Lyding received the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize, a premier honor for his research and development in the field of nanotechnology.

Bioengineering Professor Rashid Bashir's research group is sharing the recipe for the current generation of bio-bots. Their how-to paper was the cover article in Nature Protocols.

With colleagues at several institutions, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign crop sciences professor Stephen Moose will lead the development of a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Research on Programmable Plant Systems. With $25 million in newly announced funding, the center “will create an Internet of Living Things to learn the intimate biological language of plants and their associated organisms.” Moose spoke with News Bureau life sciences editor Diana Yates about this new initiative.

From NatureEdCast: Tim has created and used a new system of media tools that have improved learning in introductory physics...

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced hundreds of millions of people to interact with each other over online videoconferencing systems instead of meeting face-to-face—and no one would deny that tools like Zoom have made the pandemic far easier to cope with. However, such services provide only an unnatural-seeming meeting environment that emphasizes participants’ isolation and potentially leaves them feeling marginalized, unseen, uncomfortable, and less able to focus, resulting in less productive conversations. 

March through May saw a significant increase in deaths over previous years – and not just from COVID-19, says a new study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. When deaths attributed to COVID-19 were removed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention totals, the death rate in several demographics outpaced the same period in 2019, the study found. The timeframe represents the first three months of response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

Bubbles are common in nature and can form when ocean waves break and when raindrops impact surfaces. When bubbles burst, they send tiny jets of water and other materials into the air. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign examines how the interplay between bubble surfaces and water that contains organic materials contributes to the transport of aerosolized organic materials – some of which are linked to the spread of disease or contamination – into the atmosphere.

During his 46-year Illinois ECE faculty career, William D O'Brien, Jr. has conducted pioneering research that enhances the imaging safety of ultrasound for expectant mothers and their babies. He has also compiled a formidable body of work on applying quantitative ultrasound to diagnosing fatty liver disease and improving the ability to determine the risk of pre-term births. On December 1, 2021, he will receive the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) Silver Medal in Biomedical Acoustics for contributions to ultrasound bioeffects, dosimetry, and quantitative tissue characterization. The Silver Medal is the highest research award in medical and biomedical acoustics conferred by ASA.

Google has awarded Wilson (principal investigator) and Twidale (co-PI) $65,000 to pursue "Understanding Search Literacy and Search Skills Adoption: How People Solve Technical Problems via Search."

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."

iSchool alumna Sarah T. Roberts (PhD '14) will receive a 2018 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for her groundbreaking content moderation research. Awarded every year since 1992, EFF's Pioneer Awards recognize the leaders who are extending freedom and innovation on the electronic frontier.

An Illinois team is helping scientists tune their applications for Blue Waters...

Cancer Center at Illinois and Mount Sinai researchers have developed a low-cost, portable, point-of-care technology capable of diagnosing early-stage liver cancer within 30 minutes. The study, led by Brian Cunningham, Cancer Center at Illinois program leader and professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) postdoctoral fellow Bin Zhao, uses a toaster-sized device comprised of a red LED light, microscope objective, and webcam to detect gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) that attach to target RNA.

Reflecting on his father’s habit of regularly penning newspaper articles, plays, and stories, Illinois ECE  professor Sayan Mitra ascribes his writing to, perhaps, a familial trait. Also inspired by the work of some of his fellow ECE faculty, and taking a detour from his usual research productivity, Mitra used 2019-2020 to finish writing his textbook.

Timothy Cole was selected as the recipient of the 2017 Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology, sponsored by OCLC and the Library and Information Technology Association.

A new machine-learning simulation system developed at the University of Illinois promises cosmologists an expanded suite of galaxy models -- a necessary first step to developing more accurate and relevant insights into the formation of the universe.

Recent progress in the engineering of plasmonic structures has enabled new kinds of nanometer-scale optoelectronic devices as well as high-resolution optical sensing. But until now, there has been a lack of tools for measuring nanometer-scale behavior in plasmonic structures which are needed to understand device performance and to confirm theoretical models. The article describing the research, Near-field infrared absorption of plasmonic semiconductor microparticles studied using atomic force microscope infrared spectroscopy, appears in Applied Physics Letters.

The Information Trust Institute (ITI) at the University of Illinois is offering its Undergraduate Research Internship again this summer, but with the support of a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

University of Illinois researchers led by ECE ILLINOIS alumnus Aadeel Akhtar (MS '16), have developed a control algorithm that regulates current so prosthetic users feel steady sensation, even when the electrodes begin to peel off or when sweat builds up.

ECE ILLINOIS alumnus Sam Glassenberg (BSCompE '02), founder of Level EX, is developing medical applications that could help train doctors on surgical maneuvers before the procedure takes place.

Online technology magazine Motherboard featured Professor Borisov's recent research about a possible method to track smartphone users by analyzing the device's unique motion sensing data. Every smartphone’s unique hardware settings, user specifications, and other personalized information can be used to assemble a unique profile or "fingerprint," and advertisers can use that customized profile to track a smartphone's web activities - a technique called "motion sensor fingerprinting."

Research Assistant Professor Joshua Peschel and his team are developing the next generation of sensing and sense-making tools for green storm water infrastructure as part of an interdisciplinary effort, including personnel from the University of Illinois, Argonne National Laboratory, and the City of Chicago, along with UI LABS’s corporate partners.

CSL associate professor Kris Hauser and MechSE assistant professor João Ramos were recently awarded a three-year NSF grant to investigate the teleoperation of wheeled humanoid robots. “The idea is to study how robots can help people do their jobs better,” Ramos said. “We will try to develop a robot that enables remote manual labor.”

To the average person, solar energy may still seem like the technology of the future, but the most common solar panels are reaching the limits of what they can do. Striving for improvements in efficiency, ECE ILLINOIS Associate Professor Minjoo Lawrence Lee of Holonyak Micro & Nanotechnology Lab is advancing solar technology with an approach described in a new paper recently published in the journal Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells.

ECE ILLINOIS Fox Family Professor Andrew Singer has been awarded an Alexa Innovation Fellowship from Amazon

ABC7 News: "The only team from the United States selected from 550 entries invented a prosthetic arm that is said to be the first affordable device..."

New research from Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois offers new insight into the self-assembly of electrically-active biohybrid materials, which consist of natural peptides linked to synthetic conductive polymers. The results, published recently in ACS Central Science, promise to aid solution-based processing of next-generation optoelectronic materials such as flexible organic semiconductors.

An Illinois ECE student is making a new sanitation device to help decrease exposure to the COVID-19 virus. It’s a UVC sanitation robot named “The Terminator Turbo” that its creator says can provide a highly efficient, effective, and relatively inexpensive sanitation solution for large, high-traffic, high infection-risk areas like hospitals, airports, clinics, schools, and restaurants.