Engineering News

After attending Illinois for two years, Rohit Kalyanpur dropped out of school to start Optivolt Labs. Though still nascent, Optivolt has figured out a way to provide efficient power transfer systems, solar developer and simulation tools, and cloud-based APIs to enable fleets of machines to self-charge in ambient light. Think e-scooters, electric vehicles, drones, sensors and other connected devices.

Teams from the University of Missouri and the U. of I. will look for ways to stop hackers from building personal profiles from the information they find in public data sources. The engineering and computer science experts will study existing techniques for protecting private information in online databases and develop better ways to thwart cyberthieves. The four-year project is funded by a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Machine learning could boost multimessenger astronomy by automating crucial early phases of discovery, winnowing potential signals from torrents of noise-filled data. “This is like a tsunami,” says Eliu Huerta, an astrophysicist and artificial intelligence researcher at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois. “People realize that for the big data we have (coming) in the future, we can no longer rely on what we have been doing in the past.”