A digest of Illinois Computer Science faculty, alumni, and students who are featured in the media.
BBC -- Among those at the forefront of studying the impact of increased technology on the future of farming is Prof Girish Chowdhary, the director of the Distributed Autonomous Systems Laboratory (Daslab) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He says that largely autonomous farms are just over the horizon.
The Hill -- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) order requiring international travelers coming into the U.S. to provide either proof of a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours of traveling or proof of recovery from COVID-19 makes no sense.
South China Morning Post -- Artificial intelligence can be vulnerable to attacks that are invisible to humans but wreak havoc on computer systems. Li Bo, an award-winning scientist, leads a team that works with IBM and financial institutions to defend against cyberattacks.
Dice -- Google hires some people without technical degrees and trains them in-house, noted Nancy Amato, Ph.D., head of the Department of Computer Science and professor of engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Some of this is driven simply by the fact that there’s just not enough workers trained with these skills, so they’re resorting to other ways to try to build that up,” Amato said. She noted that the tech jobs serve as an on-ramp, and the employees may pursue a degree later.
Forbes -- Millennials were shunning plastic and supposedly wary of consumer debt. Affirm's Max Levchin saw a way to repackage buying now and paying later for younger folks—and it’s made him a billionaire.
BBC News -- The use of AI in healthcare isn't meant to replace a doctor, Illinois CS professor Jimeng Sun tells the BBC. It's more about assisting doctors, particularly with tasks that are often tedious or don't directly correlate to patient care.
The Telegraph -- "There's been a 'Buy guns, hoard food' mentality,” says one expert. “There are simply more people carrying guns around these days.”
The News-Gazette -- Sheldon Jacobson understands the allure of filling out an NCAA tournament bracket. And the nine quintillion combinations — that’s 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, to be exact — that are out there in trying to successfully predict the entire 68-team field every March.
Illinois Newsroom -- People who have navigated tough situations in health care often have the best ideas for how to improve the system. The goal of the Carle Illinois College of Medicine Health Make-a-Thon competition is to provide the support that everyday people need to help bring those ideas to life.
U of I senior Ananya Cleetus, one of last year’s winners, says the idea she had for the Health Make-a-Thon came directly from her own experience with mental illness.
A conversation with professor Girish Chowdhary from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and his team at EarthSense. They share about their work in AI robotics, sustainable agriculture, and how to address labor shortages in ag.