A digest of Illinois Computer Science faculty, alumni, and students who are featured in the media.
The Globe and Mail -- “What concerns us is that a large proportion of these apps also incentivize people to share sensitive information about their whereabouts including where they go on runs, or other exercises, and also where they begin and end those runs,” says Adam Bates, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
MIT News -- A component of computer processors that connects different parts of the chip can be exploited by malicious agents who seek to steal secret information from programs running on the computer, MIT researchers have found. Miles Dai wrote the paper with co-lead author Riccardo Paccagnella, a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Yahoo Finance -- Yahoo Finance reporter Brooke DiPalma explains "shrinkflation" — and how it's making a comeback in 2022. ... I spoke to another expert at the University of Illinois, Sheldon Jacobson. And he called it like a magic show.
Smile Politely -- The biggest obstacle to teaching math and science to deaf and hard-of-hearing students is the lack of signs for technical terms. ASL users and translators must either spell the terms out, significantly hindering classroom instruction, or approximate them with signs from everyday language, increasing the already-large divide between deaf scientists and the rest of their fields.
CIO Dive -- A recent study by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign also found that as more California high school students signed up for computer science classes, enrollment numbers in humanities courses declined.
No-Till Farmer -- Meanwhile, friend and colleague Girish Chowdhary, PhD and Associate Professor in Computer Science as well as Agricultural and Biological Engineering at UIUC, has been focused on AI and robotics and is also chief scientist of the Illinois Autonomous Farm (IAF). The two saw an opportunity to collaborate, and the idea for EarthSense germinated.
MIT Technology Review -- DeepMind says its AlphaFold tool has successfully predicted the structure of nearly all proteins known to science. From today, the Alphabet-owned AI lab is offering its database of over 200 million proteins to anyone for free. “AlphaFold is probably the most major contribution from the AI community to the scientific community,” said Jian Peng, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who specializes in computational biology.
Fortune -- No. 1 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign:
The University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign launched its master’s degree program in data science in the fall of 2016 and it has never required applicants to submit GRE scores. “Around 2015 and 2016, the impact of data science, machine learning, and more generally of data driven computation, was becoming evident,” says Mahesh Viswanathan, a computer science professor and associate head for academics at the University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign.
Fortune -- The CHIPS Act’s one-off package, to be divvied up into piecemeal allocations—private firms and public institutions can apply for federal grants of up to $3 billion to build or expand plants—is insufficient to incentivize chipmakers to shift their supply chains in a major way, Rakesh Kumar, professor in electrical and computer engineering and computer science affiliate faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign told Fortune.
Healthcare IT News -- VinUniversity, a private university in Vietnam, has set up a research centre focused on biotechnology and data science together with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center (VISHC) will "develop affordable and widely accessible smart health technologies to increase the efficiency of healthcare systems and support early diagnostics and treatment."