Media Coverage

Chicago Tribune -- On April 18, a federal court judge ended the federal transportation face mask mandate, deeming it an overstep of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authority, wrote Illinois CS professor Sheldon H. Jacobson. ... But what about Transportation Security Administration officers at airport security checkpoints? How have they fared since the mask mandate ended? Based on the TSA-reported number of cases and active infections through April 18 and the Forbes-reported number of active cases and total number of infections to date through May 2, there were 589 new TSA officer cases over a 14-day period, or an average of around 42 new infections per day. 

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The Register -- As six boffins at three US universities and IBM have found, subversive tweets can make Twitter-based stock prediction a losing proposition. The researchers – Yong Xie and Sanmi Koyejo (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Dakuo Wang (IBM), Pin-Yu Chen (IBM), Jinjun Xiong (State University of New York at Buffalo), Sijia Liu (IBM/Michigan State University) – describe their approach in a paper titled, "A Word is Worth A Thousand Dollars: Adversarial Attack on Tweets Fools Stock Prediction."

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Tom's Hardware -- A team of researchers with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Tel Aviv University, and the University of Washington have demonstrated a world-first Data Memory-Dependent Prefetcher (DMP) vulnerability, dubbed "Augury," that's exclusive to Apple Silicon. If exploited, the vulnerability could allow attackers to siphon off "at rest" data, meaning the data doesn't even need to be accessed by the processing cores to be exposed.

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Smile Politely --  In December 2021, the Blue Waters supercomputing system at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications powered down after 10 years of service. Now, with an award from the National Science Foundation, a new system is taking it's place. When it launches, the Delta system will be "the most performant GPU computing resource in NSF’s portfolio, making it a prime destination for advanced scientific research."

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CNET -- Meta's AI team developed the new concrete formulas in partnership with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There are a vast number of possible formula variations, but AI can be good at drawing conclusions from complex data, for example predicting the shape of proteins the body makes from instructions in DNA. 

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SYFY WIRE -- Bruce Maggs, Brighten Godfrey, and Gregory Laughlin, from Duke University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Yale University respectively, were the principal investigators on a recent paper outlining a microwave-based network which would bring internet latency as close to the speed of light as possible.

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WAND -- The University of Illinois is receiving two major awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF). “It is truly a testament to the amazing accomplishments of faculty, researchers and students that unleashed new innovations that will make our nation leap forward and be in the vanguard of competitiveness,” according to NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. 

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The New York Times -- In a modeling study published in December 2021, researchers, including Illinois CS professor Sheldon H. Jacobson, found that passengers sitting in the same row or one row away from someone who had Covid-19 still had a high risk of being infected through direct respiratory droplets. Wearing a mask reduced the risk of infection by 54 percent.

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The Hill -- The field of human-computer interaction focuses on designing computers systems and interfaces that facilitate productive exchanges. As such, poor designs can lead to degraded performance and in many cases, unintended consequences. The same can be said with how humans interact amongst themselves, resulting in responses that are difficult to anticipate and foresee, writes Illinois CS professor Sheldon Jacobson.

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The Chicago Maroon -- After former president Barack Obama’s appearance on the evening of April 6, the Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy conference, co-hosted at the Rubenstein Forum by UChicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP) and The Atlantic, continued on April 7 and 8. Computer scientists Camille François and Karrie Karahalios joined technology journalist Casey Newton to discuss the role of algorithms in the spread of disinformation. 

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