Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Bruce Adams
CEDAR project aims to reduce LLM hallucinations
Large Language Models (LLMs) offer analysts opportunities to improve the efficiency and quality of their work. They also carry substantial risks of error and vulnerability. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Analysis Office, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has described the examination of Language Model threats and vulnerabilities as high-payoff research.
Laude Institute selects SREGym for Slingshot program
The project develops a benchmarking system for designing, developing, and evaluating AI agents for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) on high-stakes infrastructure work. It was selected by the Slingshots program from Laude Institute among 14 projects from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and CMU. Laude Institute is an organization focused on accelerating and funding impactful work in CS and AI.
CS professor Heng Ji makes
Photo Credit: IJCAI Heng Ji at the IJCAI 2025 conference. More than 6,000 conference attendees witnessed Ji's talk, a Siebel School of Computing and Data Science professor in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ji also participated in the panel "Advancing Our Reach: Do's, Don'ts, and Lessons Learned in Interdisciplinary Research".
2025 Siebel School of Computing and Data Science new faculty members
Eighteen new faculty members will join the faculty of the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They are joining a group of accomplished researchers and educators working at the forefront of computing innovation and education. Fourteen will join the school for the Fall 2025 semester, one will begin in January 2026, two will start in Fall 2026 and one in Fall 2027.
NSF awards $1.1M to CS professors Gupta and Vasisht to transform short video delivery
Chances are you’ve watched a short video online. That dunk in the basketball game, a tour POV video from your favorite singer, an island filled with cats in Japan, or instructions on changing the string cartridge on your lawn trimmer – are all examples of a unique form of communication. When you watch one, you find yourself directed to more.
Meta sponsors multi-domain and multi-task learning research by CS professor Han Zhao
With the increasing number of AI models, trustworthy machine learning must, by necessity, include the accurate transfer of shared data across domains, as well as the optimal performance of tasks assigned to it. Meta has sponsored academic research by assistant computer science professor Han Zhao from The Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
MCS Chicago student and iCAN alumnus Preston Firestone authors LLMs conference paper
"It was impressive that Preston led this work as an MCS student with a non-traditional background in computing.” That’s what Siebel School of Computing and Data Science in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign associate professor Sasa Misailovic said when asked about Preston Firestone and UTF-8 Plumbing: Byte-level Tokenizers Unavoidably Enable LLMs to Generate Ill-formed UTF-8 paper’s acceptance at the upcoming 2025 Conference on Language Modeling...
CS professor Alawini uses AI to help students learn
What motivated Abdussalam Alawini,computer science teaching associate professor from the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, to integrate generative AI into his teaching? Photo Credit: University of Illinois / Holly Birch Photography His ability to teach a skill and track students at a scale of nearly 500 students per class. Alawini recalls that he didn't easily see what they were doing.
CS professors Ramnatthan Alagappan and Aishwarya Ganesan receive grant supporting research in shared logs
Latencies, the time lag between the entry of input and the generation of an output from a system, are crucial to many online interactions. Although they are utilized widely and have been the subject of research for years, all existing shared logs currently suffer from high latencies. Shared logs are at the heart of many modern applications. Every cloud provider today offers a shared log service, and others provide the shared log functionality. Many hyperscalers use shared-log services for metadata.
CS professor Han Zhao wins two NSF awards: CAREER and CISE CORE
Han Zhao, assistant computer science professor at Siebel School of Computing and Data Science in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is the recipient of two NSF awards. “Needless to say,” he notes, “I was thrilled to hear the good news from my NSF program directors, especially during these challenging times. I am thankful to all the unwavering support and guidance offered from the school, my mentors, and my colleagues.
Teaching robots with generated video
How do you teach a robot to do something like watering a plant or ironing a shirt? Computer science professor Svetlana Lazebnik and Ph.D. student Shivansh Patel from The Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign say that “traditionally, we must perform laborious, task-specific demonstrations to collect data to teach robots.
CS professors featured in News-Gazette series on AI
“Artificial intelligence is everywhere…” So begins a News-Gazette ($) "Illini Insider" series on artificial intelligence, featuring interviews with a collection of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty and alumni to gather their predictions for the future impact of AI in their respective areas of expertise.
Making AI a Medicinal Chemist and Material Scientist
The scientists who synthesize drugs have a lot of raw material to choose from. “It turns out that if you look at about 35 atoms, which is about the size of a drug,” says Martin Burke, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Literature, Arts & Sciences, May and Ving Lee Professor for Chemical Innovation, and Professor of Chemistry, “there are theoretically 10 to the 60th power possible small molecules.” “The goal is not to make all of them.
CS professors Kang, Mendis and Zhang receive Google Junior Faculty Awards
Google has inaugurated the ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award, and CS professors Daniel Kang, Charith Mendis and Minjia Zhang from The Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have each received awards. Google created the nomination-based award to recognize the significance and promise of the work being undertaken by young faculty members.
CS professors Mendis and Zhang receive Google Junior Faculty Awards
Google has inaugurated the ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award, and CS professors Charith Mendis and Minjia Zhang have each received awards. Google created the nomination-based award to recognize the significance and promise of the work being undertaken by young faculty members. Mendis was noted for his research in ML Compiler Optimization, while Zhang has been awarded for his work in Highly Efficient ML Systems.
CS professor and CDA director John Reid panelist at Congressional briefing
CS professor and Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) director John Reid from The Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign joined a panel of experts on June 25, 2025 to report on “Catalyzing U.S. AgTech Innovation: Opportunities for the Federal Government” at a Congressional briefing supported by representative Nikki Budzinski (IL-13). The report was part of a study sponsored by the Triple Helix Institute.
CS professor Koustuv Saha receives Adamic-Glance Distinguished Early Career Award at AAI ICWSM
CS professor Koustuv Saha from The Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was awarded the Adamic-Glance Distinguished Early Career Award by AAAI ICWSM, June 23-26, 2025, Copenhagen, Denmark.
CS professor Yongjoo Park receives NSF CAREER Award
Contemporary data science systems are fragile. Data scientists use dozens of libraries at a time. A single bug in any of them can destroy hours or days of computation. This is well known, but no principled mechanisms have been created to address it. Put simply, it’s not so easy, or nearly impossible, to restore past states in existing data science frameworks.
CS professor Eshwar Chandrasekharan receives NSF CAREER Award
Which works better when moderating online behavior: the carrot or the stick? CS professor Eshwar Chandrasekharan is a recipient of an NSF CAREER grant for his work developing new methods to support community-determined behavior norms in online communities consistent with the goal of helping communities reward behaviors that serve the community's goals.
NSF GRFP recognizes thirteen CS students for 2025
Photo Credit: N. Sitharaman The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced the recipients of the 2025 Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). This prestigious Fellowship was awarded to nine University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science students, who were named fellows, and four received honorable mention.
NSF renews Illinois-led Molecule Maker Lab Institute for five years
The NSF has renewed funding for the Molecule Maker Lab Institute (MMLI) for an additional five years with a $15 million grant. MMLI is an AI Institute for Molecular Discovery, Synthesis Strategy, and Manufacturing MMLI led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. Humin Zhao, Steven L. Miller Chair Professor, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is director of the MMLI executive commitee.
Doorbot debuts at ICRA
Photo Credit: Holly Birch Photography CS professor Wenzhen Yuan presented "Doorbot: Closed-Loop Task Planning and Manipulation for Door Opening in the Wild with Haptic Feedback" at ICRA 2025 in Atlanta, GA. Members of the Illinois Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science RoboTouch Lab, consisting of undergraduate Zhi Wang from Tsinghua University, Illinois CS PhD student Yuchen Mo, and incoming Illinois PhD student Shengmiao Jin, all contributed.
Capital One and University of Illinois Launch ASKS Center
Capital One and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are pleased to announce the launch of the Center for Generative AI Safety, Knowledge Systems, and Cybersecurity (ASKS). ASKS has a mission focused on advancing the state of the art while addressing the challenges and opportunities of Generative Artificial Intelligence Models (GAIMs) in today’s quickly evolving world.
CS professors Sarita Adve and Shenlong Wang collaborate with Meta research to improve XR graphics
Our vision is for comfortable use throughout the day, just like my glasses. I don't think about my glasses on my face. I wear them all day long. I need them all day long, and that's where we want to go with our vision. Sarita Adve Creating rich, immersive experiences on all-day-wear extended reality (XR) devices is a challenging engineering task. Constraints on power usage prompted by thermal dissipation and battery life are barriers.
CS student team wins the ICPC North American Championship
On May 26th, Ippatsu, a team from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, participated in the International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC)North American Championship in Orlando, FL. There were 52 teams from Canada and the United States at the event. Teams were allowed to bring one twenty-five-page team reference document with them to the competition as their sole technical resource. The 2024 ICPC North America regional contests were organized into eleven regional contests.
SIAM Journal on Computing names CS professor Chandra Chekuri editor-in-chief
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) has named Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign CS professor Chandra Chekuri editor-in-chief of SIAM Journal of Computing.
CS professor Wenzhen Yuan named IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award winner
Photo Credit: Holly Birch Photography CS professor Wenzhen Yuan was awarded the IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award at the May 19-23, 2025, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) conference in Atlanta, GA. The Robotics and Automation Society is the most important international professional organization for roboticists. Yuan's areas of research interest include tactile sensing and its application in robot perception and manipulation, soft robotics, and haptics.
RIP: Duncan H. Lawrie, Jr. emiritus professor and CS department chair from 1990-1996
Duncan H. Lawrie, emeritus professor of computer science and former department chair, died on Nov. 26, 2024 at age 81. He received a BS from Purdue University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1966. Lawrie obtained an MS in computer science in 1969 and his PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1973 PhD with David Kuck as his advisor. He joined the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign engineering faculty in 1990.
CS faculty and staff recognized by campus and college for teaching, research and advising
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science faculty and staff consistently contribute to student experience, leadership in teaching, and research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In April, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and The Grainger College of Engineering honored faculty and staff from the school for their excellence in the classroom, research labs, and as advisors.
CS faculty recognized by campus and college for teaching and research
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science faculty consistently contribute to leadership in teaching and research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2025, the university and Grainger College of Engineering honored CS faculty members for their excellence in classrooms and research labs in two public events. Campus awards Sharifa Sultana 2025 Illinois International Sheth Distinguished Faculty Award for International Achievement. Celebration of Teaching Excellence, Tue.
Twelve CS grad students recognized in 2025 GRFP cohort
Photo Credit: N. Sitharaman The NSF has announced the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) class. Seven University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computer and Data Science students were named fellows, and five received honorable mention. Illinois Siebel School winners were Dai Hung Che, a ’24 CS alum entering the CS MS program in Fall 2024, Daniel Feng, Ayush Khot, Benjamin Kim, (Math and CS major) Jeffrey Liu, John Wu and Andy Zhou.
CS professor Josep Torrellas group's papers impact cloud computing and draw acclaim
Data centers running Large Language Models (LLMs) consume substantial energy as they require many computing resources to provide service to their billions of users. At the same time, their execution is unsafe, as attackers sharing the cloud with LLMs can steal secret information.
Illinois alum, entrepreneur and philanthropist Vilas Dhar Visits the College
For someone who advises the UN and US government, meets the Pope, and manages a multi-million-dollar foundation, Vilas Dhar says his “preferred way” to be introduced is as “a small-town boy from Urbana with some curiosity about the world.” Vilas Dhar is an Illinois native, a University High School graduate, and a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Grainger College of Engineering alumnus with a dual bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering and computer science.
CS + X Professional Development Day with Chicago Public Schools at Google Chicago
On Monday, March 31, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider and Karle Flanagan spent the day in Chicago for the second annual event in collaboration with the Discovery Partners Institute (DPI) and Chicago Public Schools (CPS), a CS + X professional development day focused on Data Science with CPS educators.
CS and Math student Annie Zeng receives 2025 Goldwater Scholarship
Annie Zeng, an undergraduate pursuing degrees in computer science at The Grainger College of Engineering and mathematics in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, is one of four students from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to receive a 2025 Goldwater Scholarship. The Goldwater Scholarship is the preeminent undergraduate award in the field of the sciences, engineering, and mathematics.
CS PhD student Hajara-Yasmin Isa chosen for 2025 Graduate Image of Research Exhibition
CS PhD student Hajara Yasmin Isa is a finalist in the 2025 Graduate Image of Research Exhibition with her entry Caged Resistance. The annual exhibition, a collaboration between the Graduate College and the University Library's Media Commons, invites students to engage creatively with their research by visualizing and articulating the importance and impact of the research experience for themselves and others.
CS professors' mentoring project receives Chancellor’s Research Program funding
The Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science professors Yael Gertner and Brad Solomon and CS PhD student Kathleen Isenegger are part of a project team that has received $74,599 as part of the 2025-2026 Chancellor’s Research Program.
CS professors Daniel Kang and Bio Li join Schmidt Sciences AI Safety Science Program
Schmidt Sciences has announced that it has launched a new AI Safety Science program and selected 27 projects that “develop the fundamental science critical to understanding the safety properties of AI systems.” The $10 million program is devoted to foundational research. Two featured projects will be run by faculty from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.
Building the AI Workforce: Now and for the Future
Considering Chicago was once dubbed “The City that Works,” it’s also the perfect location to host a recent event about AI's role in the future workforce. On Friday, February 21, The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Discovery Partners Institute hosted a gathering in downtown Chicago.
CS professor Lingming Zhang selected as ACM Distinguished Member
CS professor Lingming Zhang has been inducted into the 2024 class of ACM Distinguished Members. This year, ACM has named 56 Distinguished Members globally for their impact in the field. All of the 2024 inductees are registered members of the prestigious scholarly society and were selected by their peers for significant technical achievements as well as volunteer service to their professional community.
CS professor Arindam Banerjee named ACM Fellow
ACM has named CS professor Arindam Banerjee a 2024 Fellow. He joins 24 others from universities, corporations, and research centers in Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States selected by their peers for transformative contributions to computing science and technology. Banerjee says, “Being named an ACM Fellow is truly a great honor.
CS undergrad advances in Top Student Visualization contest at BTAA Love Data Week
Sophomore CS major Lauren Hydehas been recognized for her work and named the top student visualization at The University of Illinois Urbana Champaign as part of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) data visualization contest. “I'm honored to have been chosen out of all the students here to showcase my work.” said Hyde. By placing first at U. of I., Hyde will advance to Big Ten contest on Monday, February 10, representing Illinois.
Illinois leads pioneering UAS-mounted canopy penetrating radar technology with NASA funding
Pioneering UAS-Mounted Canopy Penetrating Radar Tech to Predict Wildfires Wildfires are unpredictable and devastating, spreading rapidly and leaving destruction in their wake. Accurately assessing fire risk and predicting wildfire spread is a major challenge, as traditional remote sensing methods struggle to penetrate dense forest canopies and detect the fuel—such as dry vegetation—lying beneath To address this problem, NASA has turned to cutting-edge technology.
CS PhD student Yunze Man receives NVIDIA fellowship
“A key challenge in embodied reasoning or robotics is generalizability — how quickly an AI system can adapt to new, unseen environments without extensive fine-tuning. This is where foundation models truly shine, thanks to their robust generalization capabilities.
CS researchers are applying AI to instruction
The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is known for its research endeavors. However, with a total research expenditure of over $300M, it’s easy to overlook years of high-impact technological advances in educational practices at Illinois. Computer-assisted instruction started in Illinois with the development of PLATO, or Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations, in 1960.
CS professor Billy Moses has received the 2024 SIGHPC Doctoral Dissertation Award
Access to high performance computing (HPC) has become essential for many scientific fields. However, domain experts in chemistry or physics can’t obtain second PhDs in computer science solely to obtain the coding expertise needed to execute parallel computing processes in their research.
CS professor Sariel Har-Peled receives Test of Time Award at SOTC 2024
CS professor Sariel Har-Peled won a Test of Time Award at STOC 2024 for the 2004 paper "On Coresets for 𝑘k-Means and 𝑘k-Median Clustering," written with Soham Mazumdar.The 56th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2024,) sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory, was held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, June 24 - 28, 2024. The paper, published at STOC 2004 was recognized as seminal.
CS STARS program broadens engagement for undergraduate women
Eisha Peyyeti is a senior studying CS, with most of her work at The Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science revolving around the aerospace industry. She is also a member of Illinois Student Ambassadors/Research Scholars (STARS), better known as CS STARS.
CS grad student helps develop quantum-resistant security measures
Benjamin Franklin once compared the value of an ounce of prevention to that of a pound of cure. As quantum computing technology advances rapidly, researchers are investigating security issues that could emerge. One concern is the vulnerability of encryption methods used in current computer systems.
How AI-Powered Machines Could Transform Excavation in Complex Terrains
How can robots dig through sand, soil, rocks, and combinations of these materials to create functional structures? A team from the University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering, led by computer science professor Kris Hauser, aims to answer this question. Backed by a $963,000 NSF grant, the team is leveraging machine learning—specifically graph neural networks (GNNs)—to help robots efficiently predict and navigate terrain interactions.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Bruce
Contact Bruce, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack