Engineering in the News July 2012

Excerpts from Illinois in the News, a daily service provided by the University of Illinois News Bureau. This collection of July excerpts focuses on engineering topics and faculty contacted for their expertise by print and broadcast reporters around the world.

CHICAGO AS HIGH-TECH HUB
Chicago Tribune (July 31) -- Mayor Rahm Emanuel is seeking to turn Chicago into a high-tech hub that will attract engineering graduates from area universities. This is a goal shared by local startups, including Braintree, which is seeking to build deeper connections with schools such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

ULTRASMALL LASER
IEEE Spectrum (July 2012) -- A new type of ultrasmall laser could bring optical communications onto computer chips, breaking a bottleneck that limits computing speed. Assembling the device required transfer printing, a technique developed by John Rogers, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

WOMEN OF COLOR IN CS
Colorlines (July 31) -- Article hightlights the Black Girls Code, an Oakland-based non-profit educational initiative to introduce girls of color to the world of computers and technology. These days, just one in ten people working in science and tech fields are women of color. Kamilah Taylor, a software engineer at LinkedIn, got her masters in computer science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said she wasn’t completely sure, but was confident she was one of the only black female software engineers at the company. 

"NANOHAIR" SENSORS
Physics World (July 30) -- A team of South Korean researchers has produced a simple, highly sensitive and flexible sensor based on the intermolecular forces between “nanohairs.” The device was fabricated as a synthetic equivalent to human skin. Various research groups have made progress in “epidermal electronics” using a variety of methods. U. of I. engineering professor John Rogers’ group, for example, has used a transfer-printing method to cut individual silicon chiplets to micrometer size and attach them to a flexible substrate, allowing the researchers to create wireless heart-rate monitors that stick to the skin like temporary tattoos using only Van der Waals forces.

INTERNATIONAL STUDENT TUITION
Columbus Dispatch (July 29) -- Starting this fall, Ohio State will begin charging new foreign undergrads an extra $1,000 on top of out-of-state tuition and fees. The money generated from the new fee will be funneled back into academic and support services for international students, as well as scholarships for American students at Ohio State to study abroad. Two years ago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign added a similar funding mechanism.

PAVEMENT SUSTAINABILITY
News-Gazette (July 28) - Pavement sustainability was the primary topic discussed during a visit by Illinois Department of Transportation Secretary Ann Schneider to the University's Advanced Transportation Research and Engineering Laboratory in Rantoul. "One of the things that really fascinated me ... is that they're now looking at using swine waste as a potential binder in asphalt," Schneider said.

ChemE ALUMNUS SHINES
Argonne National Laboratory (July 27) -- Feature article about Fikile Brushett, an Illinois alumnus (ChemE) and a director’s postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, one would hardly guess that he is already two years out of graduate school and about to start a faculty position at MIT.

FAIR PLAY AND SPORTS TECHNOLOGY
Phys Org.com (Douglas, Isle of Man, July 27) -- Rayvon Fouché, a U. of I. history professor and a research professor in the university’s Information Trust Institute, says it isn’t easy to define fair play in sport in a high-tech age. One reason is that we’re stuck on a notion of “fair play” that is not what sport is about, says Fouché, who is working on a book about sport technology and the future of athletic competition. We also haven’t decided what we want sport to be in light of rapid technological advancements. “In sport, there’s very little incentive to play fair, and there are huge incentives to try to get an advantage,” says Fouché, a former elite-level amateur cyclist.

COMPUTING HISTORY
Time (July 25) -- Netscape commercialized the ideas that Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina came up with in Mosaic, created when Andreessen was a student at Illinois and worked with Bina at its National Center for Supercomputing Applications, a joint venture of the school, the state of Illinois and the federal government.

REBUILDING WETLANDS
New Scientist (July 22) -- The destructive floods along the Mississippi river last year helped create new land in the delta. Generating more land there in the future could help protect New Orleans and the surrounding area from rising sea levels. A team of civil engineers and geologists from the University of Illinois, in collaboration with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, saw in the spillway opening a chance to study how much sand flowed from the river into the spillway wetlands. Also: Discovery News (July 23), EPonline (July 23), PhysOrg.com (Douglas, Isle of Man, July 25), Science Codex (San Jose, Calif., July 25), The New York Times (July 25), e! Science News (Quebec City, July 25), ScienceBlog (July 26), Science360 (National Science Foundation; Washington, D.C., July 26) Editor’s note: The article is among those listed under “latest news.”

STUDENT EXPERIENCE
Chicago Tribune (July 24) -- Success in college, says U. of I. engineering major Oscar To, “is possible without ever having to work with other people.” So it’s no wonder employers prefer the student who supplements academics with internships that get him off campus and into the “real world” where he must interact with humans. “I’m learning how to work with people from around the world, delegate and get answers,” To said of his internship at Caterpillar Inc. in Peoria, Ill., where he reviews vendors’ new technologies.

CS STUDENT CREATES FACEBOOK FEATURE
Wired (London, July 20) -- Matthew Dierker, a sophomore in computer and a summer intern for Facebook, is working on a feature that already has been vetted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Dierker is on a team that’s working on making Facebook games better and more engaging for users.

MEDICAL CYBERSECURITY
R & D Magazine (July 20) -- Medical devices save countless lives, and increasingly functions such as data storage and wireless communication allow for individualized patient care and other advances. But after their recent study, an interdisciplinary team of medical researchers and computer scientists warn that federal regulators need to improve how they track security and privacy problems in medical devices. The fundamental problem is vulnerabilities in medical devices, not the FDA's slow handling of them, adds Carl Gunter at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of the Strategic Healthcare IT Advanced Research Projects on Security (SHARPS) group that issued the report.

COMPUTER SCIENCE
Medical Xpress (Douglas, Isle of Man, July 19) -- A new study warns that federal regulators need to improve how they track security and privacy problems in medical devices. Commenting on the report, U. of I. computer science professor Carl Gunter says the fundamental problem is vulnerabilities in medical devices, not the FDA's slow handling of them. “Of course, in an ideal world, devices would be free of security and privacy vulnerabilities, so it wouldn't matter if the announcement process is slow. But the technical obstacles are significant and FDA surveillance will be a key line of defense.”

LITHIUM PROBLEM
Science News (Washington, D.C., July 19) -- The universe is lacking in lithium — and instead of solving what’s known as the “lithium problem,” a new study makes it even more complicated. The work, published in the July 13 Physical Review Letters, suggests that some small black holes could be acting as lithium factories. “This makes the lithium problem worse,” says astrophysicist Brian Fields of the U. of I. “But it could point to more exotic goings-on in the Big Bang.”

RAILWAY ENGINEERING EDUCATION
Progressive Railroading (July) -- Christopher Barkan, director of the Railroad Engineering Program at Illinois is among several experts noting that the lack of emphasis on railroad engineering education at the academic level hurts the industry because it limits the number of engineering students exposed to railroading as a career choice and discourages academic researchers from pursuing railroad-related research.

U of I JOINS COURSERA ONLINE
The New York Times (July 17) -- The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is one of 12 top universities joining with the open, online course company called Coursera to offer web-based courses for free. The partnership puts Illinois at the leading edge of the massive open online course movement. Also: Inside Higher Ed (July 17), The Associated Press (July 17), News-Gazette (Champaign-Urbana, July 17), Bloomberg (July 17), Huffington Post (July 17), Marketwire (July 17), Seattle Times (July 17), BBC News (July 17), Gigaom.com (July 17), WCIA-TV (Champaign, Ill., July 17), The Wall Street Journal (July 17), ASEE FirstBell (July 18), Chicago Tribune (July 17), Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning (July 23). Editor’s note: Numerous media outlets around the world have covered this announcement.

Related articles:
Inside Higher Ed (July 18) -- Despite rumors that the University of Washington would be the first to award credit for success in free online courses, universities remain at an impasse over meaningful recognition of MOOC success.
 
The New York Times (July 17) -- News analysis: Online courses have been around for years, but now big-name colleges and competing software platforms have entered the field, which is evolving with astonishing speed.

Chicago Tribune (July 18) -- The U. of I.’s initial free online courses attracted about 14,000 enrollments on the first day of registration, according to Coursera, the company working with the university on the project. Also: Built In Chicago (blog, July 26).

Huffington Post (July 19) -- The day free online courses at the U. of I. opened for registration, the school says it received thousands of enrollment requests. “Overnight, we have [thousands of] students interested in the University of Illinois courses,” Phyllis Wise, chancellor of the Urbana-Champaign campus, told university trustees at their meeting today, according to the Chicago Tribune.

U of I PHYSICISTS PART OF HIGGS BOSON SEARCH
WILL (July 16) -- Research continues on the Higgs boson—- the elusive subatomic particle that researchers believe was key to the formation of the universe in the Big Bang. For a number of years, U of I researchers have been involved in the data collection segment of the ATLAS experiment—- one of two projects searching for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider operated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research based in Geneva, Switzerland.

PHYSICS OF THE KNUCKLEBALL
NPR (July 15) -- U. of I. emeritus physics professor Alan Nathan’s research into the nature of the knuckleball was cited in NPR’s Sunday morning sports roundup.

ABOUT HIGH SPEED RAIL
Science Friday (NPR, July 13) -- California lawmakers gave the green light to the first phase of construction of high-speed rail in the state. Does this mean that America is on track for faster, sleeker trains? What potential speed bumps still lie ahead? Railroad engineer Christopher Barkan, a professor and executive director of the Rail Transportation and Engineering Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses the costs, benefits and state of the technology.

ENGINEERING AND THE MORRILL ACT
Today's Engineer (July) -- One hundred and fifty years ago (2 July 1862), President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, landmark legislation that allocated federal lands to each state and U.S. territory to establish and fund an educational institution to provide instruction in the agriculture and mechanical arts, “in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.” The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides one notable example of the contributions made by Land-Grant engineering alumni in the fields of science and engineering.  The University of Illinois boasts 24 Noble Laureates among its alumni and faculty, including IEEE Fellow Jack Kilby, co-developer of the integrated circuit.

HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERFACES
Oxford Student (England, July 13) -- Last year, John Rogers, a professor of materials science at the U. of I., developed components with potential as human-computer interfaces in the areas of medical sensing and even computer gaming.

COOKSTOVES
Environmental Health News (Charlottesville, Va., July 11) -- Cookstove research was originally designed to reduce deforestation, said Tami Bond, an engineering professor at Illinois. Now, she said, “health is really the driver” of clean-stove research. Also: Scientific American (July 11).

MICROSCOPY
Product Design & Development (Rockaway, N.J., July 6) -- A simple new improvement developed by U. of I. electrical and computer engineering professor Joseph Lyding and colleagues could greatly improve microscopic imaging for researchers who study the very small, from cells to computer chips. Also: Nanowerk News (Honolulu, July 6), Phys Org.com (Douglas, Isle of Man, July 6), AZoNano (Warriewood, New South Wales, July 9), The Engineer (London, July 9), Scientific Computing (Rockaway, N.J., July 9).

ADAPTED BICYCLES
Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, N.Y., July 7) -- A program started at the U. of I. in the 1990s to help teach autistic children to ride bikes has spread across the U.S. and Canada.

KEEPING TALENT IN CHICAGO
AMA Access (July) -- Panelists at Techweek noted that while venture capital funding is increasing and there's a bas for software engineering talent in Chicago, keeping software engineers from fleeing to the coasts is still a challenge. One panelist noted: "We have a top-five computer science program at the University of Illinois in (Urbana-) Champaign. Everybody knows this, but the challenge...is getting people here and making them understand Chicago is a great option and they don't have to go to the Valley."

ALUMNUS' START-UP GETS A BOOST
Forbes (July 7) -- After a recent decline in value, Max Levchin's Yelp stock is on the rise. Thanks to Apple’s effort to combat Levchin’s old employer, Google, in the mapping space by offering check ins and reviews, shares of Yelp rose 14% week over week.

DIAGNOSING CANCER
Phys Org.com (Douglas, Isle of Man, July 2) -- A new method to isolate and grow the most dangerous cancer cells could enable new research into how cancer spreads and, ultimately, how to fight it. U. of I. researchers, led by mechanical science and engineering professor Ning Wang, and collaborators in China found that while a traditional culture of cancer cells has only a few capable of starting new tumors, a soft gel is capable of isolating tumor-repopulating cells and promoting the growth and multiplication of these cells in culture. Also: Bioscience Technology (Rockaway, N.J., July 3), e! Science News (Quebec City, July 2), Health Canal (Melbourne, Australia, July 2), News-Medical.net (Sydney, July 3), Scicasts (July 3), Red Orbit.com (Dallas, July 3), NIH (Bethesda, Md., July 6), News Medical (July 3).

MATERIALS
R&D Magazine (Rockaway, N.J., July 3) -- U. of I. researchers, along with a team of collaborators, have recently developed a design that allows electronics to bend and stretch to more than 200 percent of their original size, four times greater than is possible with today’s technology. The key is a combination of a porous polymer and liquid metal. Also: The Engineer (July 11).

ABOUT MICROWAVE OVENS
CNET News (Sydney, July 3) -- Exactly how does a microwave oven work? U. of I. engineering professor Bill Hammack explains. Also: Discover Magazine (July 2).
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If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.