IT Excellence at Illinois: News

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ECE researchers part of $25 million grid-integration technology consortium

Dec 13, 2021 10:45 am60 views

Illinois ECE Professor Alejandro Dominguez-Garcia and Research Engineer Olaolu Ajala are part of a $25 million Department of Energy-funded consortium that is addressing the reliability challenges involved in integrating more solar and wind energy onto the nation’s electric grid. The Universal Interoperability for Grid-Forming Inverters (UNIFI) consortium brings together leading researchers from more than 40 university, industry, and utility organizations to evaluate and design grid-forming inverter solutions that will enable the seamless integration of inverter-based renewable resources while ensuring the grid’s stability and reliability.
Kolla Receives NSF CAREER Award to Investigate NP-Hard Problems

Apr 13, 2016 8:00 am45 views

CS Assistant Professor Alexandra Kolla recently received a prestigious young faculty NSF CAREER award to better understand the limitations of approximation algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Also known as NP-hard, these types of problems are nearly impossible to solve quickly.
Atlas Wang Recognized By Chinese Government, Baidu, and Illinois

Sep 16, 2016 8:00 am40 views

ECE PhD student Zhangyang Wang won a Baidu Research Award, a Chinese government award for outstanding graduates abroad, the Thomas and Margaret Huang award for graduate research, and the Illinois graduate college’s dissertation completion fellowship. The awards recognized accomplishments ranging from his excellent academic record to his research into deep learning and computer vision.
ECE Alumni Lead Major Expansion of Epiworks In Champaign

Jan 23, 2017 8:00 am39 views

The II-VI EpiWorks Division of II‐VI Incorporated, founded by ECE ILLINOIS alumni Quesnell Hartmann (PhD '98) and David Ahmari (PhD '98), announced that it is breaking ground on a state-of-the-art production facility in Champaign, Illinois.
Joe Bradley and Team Awarded Nearly $3.5 Million to Develop Pathway for Underrepresented Students in NSF STEM Innovation Program

Mar 13, 2020 1:45 pm37 views

Joe Bradley, clinical assistant professor in Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a member of a team who received almost $3.5 million to research and evaluate ways to develop infrastructure that improves diversity and inclusion in STEM entrepreneurship.
$7.5M DOD MURI award to explore creation of qubits based on Majorana zero modes

Apr 18, 2022 11:15 am35 views

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.
New children's book on botanical farming features AI-generated art

Mar 2, 2022 11:45 am34 views

The potential for creating artworks with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) has been attracting increasing interest. In February, CSL predoctoral scholar Alayt Issak and her advisor, Lav Varshney, published a children’s book on which they collaborated, Young McDonald Had a Botanical Farm, whose illustrations were created by Issak using AI tools.
UIUC faculty sweep 2021 MICRO Test of Time Awards

Nov 5, 2021 1:00 pm33 views

The University of Illinois swept the MICRO 2021 Test of Time Awards this year, with UIUC faculty authoring both of two papers that were recognized this year. CSL’s Nam Sung Kim and Rakesh Kumar received the award, presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which “recognizes the most influential papers published in prior sessions of the International Symposium on Microarchitecture, each of whom have had significant impact in the field,” according to the SIGMICRO website. Each year, the award is given to 1-3 influential MICRO papers whose influence is still felt 18-22 years after its initial publication.
Experiments Show that a Few Self-Driving Cars Can Dramatically Improve Traffic Flow

Nov 15, 2017 8:00 am33 views

"Our experiments show that with as few as 5 percent of vehicles being automated and carefully controlled, we can eliminate stop-and-go waves caused by human driving behavior," said Daniel B. Work, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a lead researcher in the study.
Alumnus Nanavati leads team ensuring seamless communication with newest and most powerful space telescope

Jan 31, 2022 11:45 am30 views

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.
Ilie Wins NSF Career Award for Geospace Research

Feb 7, 2020 2:15 pm28 views

Illinois ECE Professor Raluca Ilie was recently awarded the NSF CAREER award to develop an improved understanding of the Earth-space environment or geospace. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the NSF's most prestigious awards to support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models and lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Undergraduate Research Experience Leads to Job Opportunities at Sandia National Labs

May 3, 2021 9:45 pm26 views

ECE juniors Alyssa Bradshaw and Adia Radecka, who are members of an all-undergraduate engineering research team, recently presented their work on biocompatible actuators at RoboSoft 2021, a major IEEE international conference on soft robotics.
ECE PhD students among top researches invited to 2021 MIT EECS Rising Stars Workshop

Nov 10, 2021 12:45 pm26 views

Illinois ECE doctoral researchers Mei-Yun Lin, Srilakshmi Pattabiraman, and Yamuna Phal were among the 89 invited young women engineers and computer scientists worldwide who participated in the MIT EECS Rising Stars 2021 academic workshop held virtually October 14-15. For its ninth year, Rising Stars provided graduate students and post-docs with historically marginalized or underrepresented genders with opportunities for mentoring and practical information they need to launch and sustain a successful academic career in electrical engineering, computer science, and artificial intelligence and decision-making.
Hoiem and Lazebnik Receive Sloan Research Fellowships

Mar 29, 2013 6:30 am24 views

Two computer science professors have been selected to receive 2013 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Professors Derek Hoiem and Svetlana Lazebnik are among 126 early career scientists and researchers from 50 colleges and universities who have been honored with a two-year fellowship.
Microsoft and University of Illinois Launch Accessibility Lighthouse Program

Nov 14, 2018 8:00 am24 views

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is partnering with Microsoft on a new program to promote digitally accessible classrooms, encourage the creation and use of accessible software, and provide a pipeline to careers in technology for Illinois students who have autism.
Yutian Lei Wins Prize for Paper at IEEE COMPEL Workshop

Dec 12, 2014 8:00 am24 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.
Park to Introduce Robotic Flying Squirrels

Dec 9, 2016 8:00 am23 views

Illinois researcher Hae-Won Park was awarded a Robotics Fast Track contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to design a hybrid robot that can glide, land, and walk.
Waldrop Leads $75 Million NASA Mission to Investigate Earth's Atmosphere

Dec 16, 2020 8:30 pm23 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.
CSL Professor Creates Robotic Avatar for Hands-Free Medical Care

Mar 30, 2020 12:15 pm22 views

In James Cameron’s blockbuster movie “Avatar,” humans explored a new planet without ever leaving their lounge chairs on Earth. CSL’s Kris Hauser and his team are creating a new type of avatar that could provide a similar ability to health care workers, who could treat patients remotely during a pandemic like the current COVID-19 crisis.
Milos Gligoric Receives ACM SIGSOFT Dissertation Award

Aug 1, 2016 8:00 am22 views

Dr. Milos Gligoric (PhD CS '15) is the 2016 recipient of the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. The award recognizes excellent research in the field of software engineering.
Bringing Ancient Technology into the Light

Nov 6, 2013 8:00 am22 views

Assistant Professor Gang Logan Liu has used ancient Roman nanotechnology to create a highly sensitive, low-cost biosensor.
Method for diagnosing PIR sensor failures could cut back unnecessary smart building expenses

Apr 8, 2022 3:00 pm21 views

You've probably used an automatic paper towel dispenser before, or walked into a room and the lights turned on automatically. That's because of Passive Infra-Red (PIR) sensors. You also more than likely know the frustration of waving your hands inside of a room that suddenly goes dark or standing in front of an automatic door that refuses to open. The sensor failed. But the question is why, and can it be fixed, or does it need to be replaced?
Ramamurthy Named a 2014 KPCB Fellow

Jul 25, 2014 8:00 am21 views

CS sophomore Raj Ramamurthy has been selected as a 2014 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) Engineering Fellow. KPCB is an established venture capital firm located in Menlo Park, California. This year, KPCB chose 55 students as fellows, out of a field of 2,500 applicants from more than 200 universities.
Cunningham Leads Team to Create Fast, Cheap, and Accessible Covid-19 Antibody Test

Jan 22, 2021 1:45 pm20 views

As the numbers of those infected with COVID-19 has continued to climb, the desperate need for a vaccine was apparent. Even now with the invention and administration of several COVID-19 vaccinations, the question remains: How effective are these vaccines? HMNTL students Congnyu Che, Weijing Wang, and Nantao Li, also members of the ECE Nanosensors Group, along with Postdoctoral Researcher Bin Zhao and Illinois ECE Professor Brian T Cunningham have recently been published in Talanta journal for the development of a cost efficient COVID-19 antibody test.
Artificial intelligence produces a recipe for lower-carbon concrete

Apr 29, 2022 11:30 am20 views

Concrete is the most popular building material in the world, and we use between 10 and 30 billion tons each year. But the price of that progress is a cost to the environment: Cement, an essential ingredient in concrete, is responsible for 8 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Enter the power of artificial intelligence. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Meta, and concrete supplier, Ozinga, partnered on discovering better concrete formulas using AI. The early-stage results found the AI-powered formulas reduce the carbon footprint of the concrete by 40% while maintaining strength and durability. Meta tested the formulas on multiple structures at the company’s DeKalb data center, namely the floor slabs of the guardhouse and construction management team’s temporary offices.
Hwu Won CGO Test of Time Award

Sep 17, 2018 8:00 am20 views

Professor Wen-Mei W Hwu won the CGO Test of Time Award, also known as the Most Influential Paper Award, presented by the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, for "Program Optimization Space Pruning for a Multithreaded GPU."
Wang Shares Smart Home Privacy, Inclusive Privacy at NSF Meeting

Nov 8, 2019 12:15 pm20 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.
Jensen Receives CAREER Award to Address Undergrad Mental Health

Dec 18, 2019 2:30 pm20 views

Bioengineering professor Karin Jensen received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for her proposal “Supporting Undergraduate Mental Health by Building a Culture of Wellness in Engineering.”
Banerjee Receives NSF CAREER Award for Work Emulating a Biological Spine in Robots

Feb 3, 2020 9:30 pm19 views

Illinois ECE Assistant Professor Arijit Banerjee recently won the NSF CAREER award for his work with bio-inspired design methods for distributed electromechanical actuators to emulate a biological spine. This prestigious award supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Paris Smaragdis Named IEEE Fellow

Jun 3, 2015 8:00 am19 views

Joint ECE-CS Assistant Professor Paris Smaragdis was named an IEEE fellow, an honor reserved only for select members whose extraordinary accomplishments deem them fitting.
Varshney and Bai Awarded Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange Paper Award

Jun 8, 2016 8:00 am19 views

Bai and Varshney collaborated with New York University Professor Rumi Chunara to analyze data from location-sharing social platform Foursquare.
$1.75M Grant Boosts Ioptics Lab's Ultrafast Bioimgaging Research

Jan 4, 2019 8:00 am18 views

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.
Raginsky Receives Career Award to Apply Information Theory to Machine Learning Problems

Mar 22, 2013 11:30 am18 views

ECE Assistant Professor Maxim Raginsky, a researcher in the Coordinated Science Lab, has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to develop an information-theoretic approach to machine learning problems that involve multiple resource-constrained learning agents in a large network.
Nam Sung Kim Elected to MICRO Hall of Fame

Mar 27, 2017 8:00 am18 views

Nam Sung Kim, CSL associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been inducted into the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) Hall of Fame, an honor given to outstanding researchers who have consistently contributed to MICRO with high-impact research by ACM SIGMICRO, ACM’s Special Interest Group on Microarchitecture.
Fiona Kalensky Combines Tech and Health Care in Startup

Apr 3, 2017 8:00 am18 views

Understanding the technology has been key in Kalensky's role with Therapalz. She was involved in the development of their prototype: a stuffed animal retrofitted with a constant heartbeat that can also detect touch and respond to it with a vibration or a purr. Their product is meant to be an alternative to medication or to companion animal therapy, which can be costly.
Natural Language Processing

Apr 15, 2022 2:30 pm18 views

Natural language processing represents an emerging opportunity for AI researchers looking to improve the construction industry — and industry in general. Professor Julia Hockenmaier, an NLP expert and Grainger Engineer since 2007, explains how natural language processing will impact construction and other fields.
Professor Dusan Stipanovic Creates Robots to Assist Seniors

May 18, 2016 8:00 am18 views

A group of University researchers, including ISE professor Dusan Stipanovic, have developed a project called ASPIRE (Automation Supporting Prolonged Independent Residence for the Elderly) that aims to create personal robots and drones to assist senior citizens in their homes and perform helpful tasks such as retrieving medications.
Linwei Xin Wins Two Best Paper Awards at INFORMS Conference

Jun 15, 2016 8:00 am18 views

Assistant Professor Linwei Xin's paper, "Asymptotic optimality of Tailored Base-Surge policies in dual-sourcing inventory systems," recently won two prizes at the recent INFORMS Annual Meeting: the first place prize in the 2015 George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition and the second place prize in the 2015 Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) Paper Competition.
Pass the salt: machine learning accelerates molten salt simulations for nuclear power applications

Oct 15, 2021 9:15 am18 views

Researchers used machine learning to perform accelerated simulations of the physico-chemical properties of molten salt FLiNaK. Their framework can help characterize and screen other molten salts and determine which are ideal to use in an advanced nuclear reactor.
High-Performance 3D Microbattery Suitable for Large-Scale On-Chip Integration

Oct 21, 2015 8:00 am18 views

By combining 3D holographic lithography and 2D photolithography, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a high-performance 3D microbattery suitable for large-scale on-chip integration with microelectronic devices.
ECE Illinois Research Wins at CS MANTECH

Oct 31, 2018 8:00 am18 views

ECE ILLINOIS researchers took home three top awards at the Compound Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology (CS MANTECH) 2018 conference.
Xiang Ren's Dissertation Recognized with SIGKDD Dissertation Award

Dec 10, 2018 8:00 am18 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.
Carle Illinois Machine Learning System for EEG Analysis Wins IEEE Honors

Jan 21, 2022 12:00 pm17 views

A new machine learning system developed by a Carle Illinois College of Medicine student could unlock the vast amounts of untapped data found in a common neurological test. The team recently won ‘best paper’ honors at the 2021 IEEE Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology Symposium for their publication describing the new system to analyze and classify data from patient EEG tests for use by both clinicians treating patients and researchers seeking out new discoveries.
Varshney Featured in "The Age of A.I.," a Youtube Originals Series

Feb 19, 2020 2:00 pm17 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.
Angrave Completes Teaching First MOOC on Developing Android Apps

Mar 21, 2014 8:00 am17 views

CS Professor Lawrence Angrave recently completed teaching the first MOOC on developing apps for the Android platform.
CS @ Illinois Professor Receives R&D 100 Award for Simulation Software

Apr 19, 2017 8:00 am17 views

Paul Fischer, a UIUC professor, and his research colleague Misun Min at the DOE's Argonne National Laboratory recently earned an R&D 100 Award, which recognize top technologies of the year. Known as the "Oscars of Invention," the awards are organized by R&D Magazine.
McDonough Interviewed by Ars Technica

Jun 22, 2010 8:00 am17 views

Ars Technica recently interviewed GSLIS Assistant Professor Jerome McDonough about his NDIIPP-funded grant, Preserving Virtual Worlds...
Abdelzaher Leading $5.8M DARPA effort to understand how people respond to influence messaging

Sep 24, 2021 2:15 pm17 views

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.
Başar, Yuksel Author Book on Networked Control Systems

Sep 30, 2013 8:00 am17 views

Professor Tamer Başar and alumnus Serdar Yuksel (MSEE '03, PhD '06) have written a book titled Stochastic Networked Control Systems (Birkhauser). This vanguard work addresses both the stabilization and optimization of networked control systems, which have inherent stochasticity caused by communication constraints.
NSF funds research into computer vision tactics that aspire to pace AI development, democratize new solutions

Oct 13, 2021 12:45 pm17 views

A team of three researchers between Illinois Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering believe that now is the time to use computer vision tactics to help pace the next development in artificial intelligence. The National Science Foundation agrees, which is why this group – led by Fulton Watson Copp Chair in Computer Science David Forsyth – recently earned a $1.2 million grant for the next four years. Fellow CS professor Yuxiong Wang and ECE professor Alexander Schwing join Forsyth on the project, entitled “Creating Knowledge with All-Novel-Class Computer Vision.”

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