A digest of Illinois Computer Science faculty, alumni, and students who are featured in the media.
The Daily Illini -- The GPA visualization site was created by Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, professor in Grainger, and a team of students. In a brief foreword on the GPA visualization site, Fagen-Ulmschneider explains his role in and motivation towards creating this resource. “For as long as grades have existed, I have not met a student who wasn’t at least a little interested in how ‘hard’ a course was,” Fagen-Ulmschneider said.
Ars Technica -- Bright graphics, a touchscreen, a speech synthesizer, messaging apps, games, and educational software—no, it's not your kid's iPad. This is the mid-1970s, and you're using PLATO. Far from its comparatively primitive contemporaries of teletypes and punch cards, PLATO was something else entirely. If you were fortunate enough to be near the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) around a half-century ago, you just might have gotten a chance to build the future.
Fortune -- So now that governments are pledging hundreds of billions of dollars to shore up their chip supply chains, will we see another chip shortage in the future? The unfortunate answer is: Yes, we will, writes Illinois CS affiliate faculty member Rakesh Kumar. Chip shortages result from a mismatch between supply and demand that cannot be addressed quickly either by chip manufacturers by scaling up production or by markets by adapting to the chip production profile. The challenge of resolving the two isn’t going away—and may even grow in size.
Teach Talk Listen Learn -- Professors Karle Flanagan and Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider spin their tale of rapid course development, co-teaching, iterative course design, big ideas with manageable steps, and tearing down the garden walls. The project in discussion, Data Science Discovery, is available on the open internet and ready for you to explore!
New Scientist -- The popular chatbot, which is based on a large language model (LLM), was released by OpenAI in November 2022 and has since become a useful tool in many industries. But its ability to quickly produce personalised content can also be turned to criminal purposes, such as phishing emails, which impersonate popular services to gain users’ passwords or extract money, says Daniel Kang at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues.
WGN Radio -- Sheldon Jacobson, professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, joins John Williams to talk about his recent Tribune Op-ed where he suggests that a good way to improve airport security is to offer TSA PreCheck for free.
The Daily Illini -- Vikram Adve, professor in (Computer Science), said ChatGPT offers multiple positives and negatives. “We are in such an early stage,” Adve said. “It’s really premature to hit the panic button. I think that the important thing that (people) need to do right now is to think hard about how to leverage the strengths of ChatGPT and put it to good use while circumventing some of the negatives.”
Directions Magazine -- I-GUIDE — the Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment — is confronting this critical vulnerability by creating a computing environment that supports scientific integration and discovery. Based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and led by Illinois CS affiliate faculty member Dr. Shaowen Wang, professor of geography and geographic information science, I-GUIDE is a collaboration between 11 institutions and multiple scientific and engineering disciplines.
UIUC Talk Show -- In this episode of the UIUC Talkshow, (Indranil) Gupta shares his experience as the host of the Immigrant Computer Scientists podcast, an exploration of the personal stories of distinguished Computer Scientists from academia and industry, who immigrated from their home countries to the US. Dr. Gupta also discusses his passion for music and his admiration for his parents, as well as his insights on teaching and the future of education.
AgFunder News -- At the tail-end of 2022, investment platform Foodshot Global unveiled the winners of its Groundbreaker Prize that recognizes scientists developing tools for more productive, sustainable farming. University of Illinois professor Kaiyu Guan was among those winners. Pulling from a vast skillset that includes plant physiology, biogeochemistry, supercomputing, process-based modeling and machine learning, Guan has spent years integrating novel sensing and modeling technologies to bring better field insights to farmers.