IT Excellence at Illinois: News

On October 19, 2015, the Senate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus approved a University Policy on Open Access to Research Articles. This policy grants the University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise all rights under copyright to the scholarly articles produced by faculty members.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

Professor Bruce Hajek won an achievement award from ACM's research group on performance evaluation, or SIGMETRICS. Hajek researches ways that networks can react and stay reliable in the face of random outage-causing events. He also works on applying game theory to networking and studying peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent.

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. 

Lurking in more than 99% of soybean fields across the Midwest is a worm capable of feeding on and damaging entire crops. Millions of dollars have been spent trying to combat these destructive pests through the development of resistant soybean plants, but after decades of successful use, those solutions have begun to fail. Once again, soybean production is in trouble, and Illinois ECE researchers are being forced back to the drawing board, but this time they are looking to attack the nematode from within.

Five College of Engineering faculty were selected as fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). 

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.

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.

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. 

Assistant Professor Gang Logan Liu has used ancient Roman nanotechnology to create a highly sensitive, low-cost biosensor.

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.

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.

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.

Assistant Professor Liang Gao is developing groundbreaking technology, which will ultimately lead to a new generation of high-speed fluorescence lifetime imagers. Gao will apply this new technology to image action potentials in neuron cells.

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.

New research by engineers at the University of Illinois combines atomic-scale experimentation with computer modeling to determine how much energy it takes to bend multilayer graphene – a question that has eluded scientists since graphene was first isolated. The findings are reported in the journal Nature Materials.

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.

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.

CS Professor David Padua has been named the recipient of the 2015 IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Memorial Award.

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 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.”

Assistant Professor Edgar Solomonik was one of two winners of the Householder Prize XX, announced in June at the Householder Symposia in Virginia. The 27-year-old joins a short list of people who have received the prize since it was first awarded in 1971.

In 2015, AE Professor Marco Panesi received a NASA Early Career Faculty award to study radiation in the back shell of entry capsules. On February 18, 2021, we witnessed his research findings in action as Perseverance landed safely on Mars.

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

[T]he HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) announced the availability of data mining and analytics tools for the HathiTrust Digital Library, a collection of digital texts from over 70 research libraries around the world. The new tools provide a much-needed entry point to large-scale analysis of HathiTrusts contents. Indiana University and the University of Illinois are the founding partners of the HTRC.

ECE Professor Brian Cunningham, his research group, and colleagues at Harvard have developed a biosensor that can measure how much of the HIV virus is present in one's body.

On Tuesday, October 12, at 6 a.m. CDT, a quantum communications experiment was launched into low orbit around Earth from the International Space Station (ISS). A collaborative experiment of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Waterloo, CAPSat (Cool Annealing Payload Satellite) contains single-photon detectors, which can be used as receivers for unhackable quantum communications.

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.

Sometimes, a well-known tool in one field can be repurposed and impact a different field completely unexpectedly. Such is the case for Yang Zhang, who goes by Y Z, an associate professor of nuclear, plasma, and radiological engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and Kevin Wandke, a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. They recently developed and released a hyperplastic materials multiphysics simulation platform, Kraken, based on MOOSE (Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment) from Idaho National Laboratory, for the simulation and control of soft robots. The methods are detailed in their recently published paper “MOOSE-Based Finite Element Hyperelastic Modeling for Soft Robot Simulations.”

Flight schedules that allow for a little carefully designed wiggle room could prevent the frustration of cascading airport delays and cancellations. By focusing on the early phases of flight schedule planning and delays at various scales, researchers have developed models to help create schedules that are less susceptible to delays and easier to fix once disrupted.

ECE ILLINOIS Professor Mark Hasegawa-Johnson and Swanlund Endowed Chair Emeritus Thomas S Huang are a part of a team of researchers led by Daniel Morrow investigating the connection between health literacy and advanced age. Both Huang and Hasegawa-Johnson are affiliated with the Coordinated Science Lab.

Jian-Ming Jin, the Y. T. Lo Endowed Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Director of the Electromagnetics Laboratory and Center for Computational Electromagnetics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Executive Dean of the Zhejiang University-University of Illinois Joint Institute focusing on engineering education, is a 2020 recipient of the University of Michigan ECE Distinguished Educator Award. This award is the highest recognition granted by ECE to its alumni in academia and recognizes those who have made a significant and lasting impact in education.