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.

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?

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Nick Holonyak Jr., a professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois and the inventor of the first visible-light LED, and Illinois alumni George Craford and Russell Dupuis, who studied under Holonyak, were among five innovators honored by the National Academy of Engineering, which administers the $500,000 prize sponsored by Draper Laboratory.

Assistant Professor Songbin Gong won the DARPA Young Faculty Award for a concept that aims to make chips much more efficient by completely replacing the transistor with a new computing systems technology.

Led by faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a multi-university research team has received $30 million to launch the Systems On Nanoscale Information fabriCs (SONIC) Center.

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.

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.

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.

Physics Illinois alumnus M. George Craford has been selected for the IEEE Edison Medal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

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.

Professor Catherine Blake and Jodi A. Flaws, professor of comparative biosciences at the University of Illinois, have developed an automated approach that moves beyond the retrieval of relevant literature to the extraction step of the information synthesis process. In a recent study of cell death and proliferation—two fundamental hallmarks of cancer—they demonstrate how simply counting the number of outcomes shows a very different picture than focusing on how key outcomes have changed.

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.

Physics Professor Jon Thaler is a member of the team building the 3200-megapixel LSST camera, which will image billions of remote galaxies too faint to be studied previously...

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

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

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.

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.

ECE ILLINOIS professor Can Bayram was awarded with the Turkish American Scientists & Scholars Association (TASSA) Young Scholar Award which recognizes the accomplishments of young Turkish American scholars across the world

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

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.

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.

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.

CS Professor Dan Roth was named a 2013 Fellow of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL). He was recognized for "significant contributions to machine learning and inference in natural language processing."

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.