Saturday Engineering for Everyone

In this talk, Chad Orzel describes how quantum physics manifests in the kind of situations you regularly encounter in the course of getting up and getting ready to face the day.

ECE Assistant Professor Saurabh Gupta is working on building robots that can intelligently interact with the physical world around them. While we have artificial intelligence systems that can pass the bar exam, today’s robots are nowhere close to the physical intelligence of even 5-year olds. In this talk, we will discuss why programming robots is hard and what we can do about it.

Modern devices can reproduce stunning visual graphics and life-like audio, but did you know that there are new displays that can recreate the sense of touch?

Professor Lara Waldrop will discuss her NASA research project, The Carruthers Geocorona Project. The name honors Dr. George R. Carruthers, a prominent, three-time Illinois alumnus. As one of the first African American men to earn a doctorate in astrophysics, Dr. George R. Carruthers is known as a trailblazer. He invented the camera that took the first images of space, significantly improving our understanding of space and earth science.

Emerging applications such as smart cities, autonomous vehicles, or smart metaverse all rely on embedded systems that are engaging with the physical environment through sensors. Recent advances in wireless technologies present new promising possibilities to harness the wireless infrastructure in and around buildings and cities to act as a non-intrusive sensing platform. 

Card skimmers are small devices that can fit on top of real card readers at self-service terminals such as gas pumps or ATMs. They easily blend in with the machine, making them hard to spot. Associate Professor Kirill Levchenko and graduate student Maxwell Bland are part of a team of computer scientists who developed an app enabling state and federal inspectors to detect card skimmers installed in gas pumps or ATMs.

In this lecture, we'll talk about some chips our lab has developed that are built on plastic – they can roll, they can bend, and they may cost less than a penny. We are using these chips to enable new applications and hit new benchmarks in cost, performance, and energy efficiency.

Professor Dallesasse will present the history and applications of the transistor, key advances in transistor technology and the potential uses and benefits of newer applications including light-emitting transistors and the transistor-injected quantum cascade laser.

Virtual Reality provides a disruptive platform for teaching and learning, in an immersive, realistic and, most importantly, interactive three-dimensional environment. 

Increasing workloads of deep learning problems and a slowdown in transistor scaling progress have fueled interest in energy-efficient analog hardware accelerators in recent years.

Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have returned their gaze to the natural world to develop a camera inspired by the mantis shrimp that can visualize cancer cells during surgery.

Assistant Professor Girish Chowdhary, Donald Biggar Willet Faculty Fellow of agricultural and biological engineering (ABE) and computer science (CS), has spent years developing robotic technology to improve on traditional farming practices. He is now leading an effort to improve farming practices even more by making it autonomous through artificial intelligence.

Prof. Waldrop's research explores the properties and behavior of the atmospheric boundary region that protects our habitable environment from outer space and sustains our technological infrastructure.

Rashid Bashir, a Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering and the dean of the Grainger College of Engineering at Illinois, will discuss his research into simple-to-use COVID-19 testing that doesn't require processing at a lab.

Prof. Allen is proposing an innovative approach to desalination that uses thermodynamics to separate ocean-water into potable water and salt.