In 2021, the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) celebrated their 70th anniversary with two big events: the Future of Computing Symposium (October 2021) and the AI and Social Responsibility Symposium (March 2022). The CSL is an Interdisciplinary Research Unit (IRU) in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a rich history of scientific and engineering advances. It brings together researchers from computing, communication, control, circuits, and beyond. CSL’s research covers the full computing stack, from circuits and high-performance applications to signal processing, machine learning, security and trust, and computing’s impact on society and the resulting need for social responsibility. The CSL recently released a white […]

Pending funding, the National Institute of Health (NIH) plans to launch the Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI) program. Collaboratively managed by the NIH Common Fund, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, the National Eye Institute, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and the National Library of Medicine, the program seeks to provide comprehensive, high-quality and ethically sourced datasets to catalyze the widespread use of AI in the biomedical and behavioral research communities. AI has the ability to transform the biomedical and behavioral science fields. Possible applications include informing clinical decision making, monitoring and predicting health needs in real time and […]

Ian Foster, former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member and Professor at the University of Chicago and Division Director at Argonne National Laboratory, was just named the 2022 Ken Kennedy award recipient. Presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society (IEEE-CS) the Ken Kennedy Award is an annual honor recognizing contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and community service or mentoring contributions. You can see past award winners here. Foster is recognized for his substantial contributions in accelerating scientific discovery in computational science by establishing innovative, newfangled applications of distributed computing both within supercomputers and over networks. His work […]

The National Science Foundations (NSF) newly established Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) sent out their first quarterly newsletter. The newsletter is intended to update the community on existing investments, new initiatives/funding opportunities, events, job opportunities and more. TIP was established earlier this year to catalyze innovation and research in emerging technologies and encourage collaboration across disciplines and sectors to address pivotal challenges facing our country and maintain our country’s competitive edge in the technology sphere. A couple highlights from this weeks newsletter include: Last week President Biden signed into law the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which officially authorizes the TIP directorate. NSF Regional Innovation Engines, […]

Last month, CCC council member Katie Siek, along with two PhD student collaborators, Zaidat Ibrahim and Alexander Hayes from Indiana University, released an article in the journal The Conversation about public concern regarding the use of period tracking apps.    Recently, many, including researchers and experts, have voiced apprehension over using period tracking applications since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, fearing that state and local governments may attempt to subpoena user’s period data from the owners of these apps. Some have even gone so far as to input false data into these period tracking apps, in the hopes that this “junk data” will confuse the applications’ algorithms, and cause […]

Quantum computing has exploded onto the scene and increasingly gained traction as the computing field moves toward the end of Moore’s Law. Viewed as a next step in improving the speed and efficiency of computing and tackling increasingly intricate problems, quantum computing uses quantum mechanical properties to express and manipulate information as quantum bits or qubits offering large potential speedups with processing. The capabilities and possibilities that quantum computing offers has garnered interest across many disciplines leading to a shortage in the quantum workforce. The University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Chicago Quantum Exchange is working to close this gap with a new Certificate in Quantum […]