Computer Science

MS in Computational Analysis and Public Policy (MSCAPP) Celebrates Five Years

April 06, 2020

A new feature from the Harris School of Public Policy looks at the first five years of the Masters of Science in Computational Analysis and Public Policy (CAPP), offered jointly by Harris and the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science.

Student Videos Showcase Outputs of New Inclusive Technology Course

April 02, 2020

The new UChicago CS course Inclusive Technology: Design for Underserved and Marginalized Communities used the tools of human-computer interaction — including psychology, design, ethics, and computer science — to create accessible tools that diminish rather than deepen existing inequities.

UChicago Joins New Academic/Industry Consortium to Accelerate AI Innovation

March 26, 2020

UChicago CS joined the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, a new research consortium that will accelerate artificial intelligence innovation and advance its benefits for business, government, and society, including a call for research on using computational approaches to battle COVID-19.

Leading CS Ed Conference Features Five Papers from UChicago CANON Research Group

March 25, 2020

Five papers from the Computing for ANyONe (CANON) Lab led by Associate Professor Diana Franklin were featured at SIGCSE, the world's largest conference for researchers and educators studying new ways of improving computer science curricula and instruction.

Undergrad Part of Winning Hackathon Team at Top Sports Analytics Conference

March 24, 2020

Read how undergraduate Arnav Prasad applied skills acquired in UChicago CS courses to win a hackathon at the world's leading sports analytics conference and help the UChicago men's basketball team and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Research by PhD Student Pranav Gokhale and EPiQC Wins IBM Q Best Paper

March 20, 2020

A new approach for using a quantum computer to realize a near-term “killer app” for the technology, created by UChicago CS graduate student Pranav Gokhale and the Enabling Practical-Scale Quantum Computing (EPiQC) team. received first prize in the 2019 IBM Q Best Paper Award competition.

An Automated Menu for LHC Data and the Search for Dark Matter

March 18, 2020

With a Center for Data and Computing Discovery Grant, physicist David Miller and computer scientist Yuxin Chen hope to build a "self-driving" system for selecting and analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Regional Nuclear Conflict Would Trigger Global Food Shortages, Finds UChicago/NASA Postdoc

March 16, 2020

A new study combining climate, agriculture and economic models finds that the repercussions of a regional nuclear conflict would extend around the world, producing a decade of global cooling and a severe decline in crop production that would compromise global food security.

“Meet a UChicagoan” Series Features Borja Sotomayor

March 03, 2020

From geeky t-shirts to squirrel cams to Hack Night, Borja Sotomayor is a familiar figure to many on the UChicago campus. A new edition of Meet a UChicagoan profiles the senior lecturer and director of the Master's Program in Computer Science, and speaks with him about why he loves the university and working with students.

CS Education Expert Diana Franklin Promoted to Associate Professor

February 27, 2020

Diana Franklin, a leading researcher and creator of computer science curricula, was promoted to Associate Professor at the UChicago Department of Computer Science. Franklin has developed new approaches for teaching computer science concepts to students from pre-kindergarten through college and studied the effectiveness of these curricula in diverse and underrepresented populations.

New York Times Features UChicago CS Wearable Jammer Project

February 14, 2020

A project by UChicago CS research groups SAND Lab and the Human Computer Integration Lab to develop a wearable microphone jammer to protect user privacy near smart devices was featured in the New York Times technology section.

Ancient Language Processing: Teaching Computers to Read Cuneiform Tablets

February 13, 2020

A CDAC-funded collaboration between researchers from the UChicago Oriental Institute and the Department of Computer Science applies modern computer vision approaches to read ancient cuneiform tablets.

NeurIPS Paper by Asst. Prof. Eric Jonas Delegates Spectroscopy to the Machines

February 04, 2020

PhD Student Huiying Li Named 2020 Facebook Fellow

January 29, 2020

UChicago Postdoc Co-Authors Study on Feeding 10 Billion Without Wrecking the Planet

January 20, 2020

A study including UChicago CS postdoctoral researcher Jonas Jägermeyr deploys computer modeling and simulation to suggest a comprehensive solution for feeding 10 billion people within our planet’s environmental boundaries.

Assistant Professor Lorenzo Orecchia Receives NSF CAREER Award

January 14, 2020

UChicago CS assistant professor Lorenzo Orecchia received the NSF CAREER award, the prestigious honor supporting early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education.

EPiQC Researchers Simulate 61-Bit Quantum Computer With Data Compression

January 13, 2020

Researchers at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory significantly reduced the gap between quantum computers and simulators by using data compression and a large supercomputer to conduct a 61-qubit simulations of a quantum search algorithm.

Chien Group Receives Best Paper at Workshop on Serverless Computing

January 09, 2020

Research by UChicago CS graduate students Hai Duc Nguyen, Chaojie Zhang, Zhujun Xiao, and Professor Andrew Chien received the Best Paper award at the Fifth International Workshop on Serverless Computing.

Meet Kartik Singhal, Computer Science Student

January 07, 2020

CDAC Announces Autumn 2019 Discovery Grant Projects

January 06, 2020

The Center for Data and Computing announced its Autumn 2019 class of Discovery Grants, funding eight projects and one convening that bridge disciplines and push forward the frontiers of data science and artificial intelligence.

Stuart A. Kurtz Receives Named Professorship

January 02, 2020

Kurtz was named the George and Elizabeth Yovovich Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the College, among 22 UChicago faculty receiving named or distinguished service titles in late 2019.

CS Associate Member Monisha Ghosh Named FCC Chief Technology Officer

December 23, 2019

Monisha Ghosh, an associate member of the Department of Computer Science and Research Professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, was named Chief Technology Officer of the Federal Communications Commission.

New Assistant Professor Raul Castro Fernandez Creates Tools for Data Discovery

December 18, 2019

New UChicago CS assistant professor Raul Castro Fernandez builds tools to make data discovery easier for all, creating systems that help users and organizations locate the data they need, combine data across different formats, and process it for use in predictive analytics, machine learning, and other applications.

New Assistant Professor Lorenzo Orecchia Brings New Algorithms to Machine Learning and Graph Networks

December 10, 2019

Lorenzo Orecchia, an assistant professor of computer science who joined UChicago CS this fall, draws upon first order methods, the mathematical family that includes gradient descent and similar approaches, to create more powerful algorithms for the future of artificial intelligence, distributed computing, logistics, and other advanced computational tasks.

UChicago Startup Tharzen Demystifies Website Content Management

December 06, 2019

Tharzen, a new startup co-founded by UChicago CS postdoctoral researcher Mikael Mayer, provides tools for businesses to edit and update their websites, and will compete as a finalist in Polsky's George Schultz Innovation Fund competition.

Dark Patterns: UChicago/Princeton Research Reveals the Dirty Tricks of Online Shopping

November 26, 2019

A first-of-its kind survey found that “dark patterns” on shopping websites were startlingly common — appearing on more than 1 out of 10 sites and used frequently by many of the most popular online merchants. The work, co-authored by UChicago CS Assistant Professor Marshini Chetty, has been covered in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

New Concurrency Bug Approach From Shan Lu’s Group Wins Best Paper at SOSP

November 21, 2019

A paper from Prof. Shan Lu's group at UChicago CS with co-authors from Microsoft Research and University of California, Berkeley, revealed a new approach that captured thousands of concurrency bugs and won the Best Paper award at the prestigious ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) conference.

New Asst. Prof. Bill Fefferman Blazes Theory Path for Future of Quantum Computing

November 18, 2019

Fefferman, a new assistant professor in the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science, develops theoretical methods for assessing 'quantum supremacy' and controlling the noise of near-term quantum computers, helping to realize the potential for simulating quantum mechanical systems in physics, chemistry, and materials science.

UChicago Research Finds External Attackers Can Use IoT Devices as Motion Sensors

November 12, 2019

A new study from UChicago CS researchers finds that external attackers can use inexpensive technology to turn ambient wi-fi signals into motion detectors, monitoring activity inside a building without being detected themselves. The research, led by Professors Heather Zheng and Ben Zhao and accepted for the Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) symposium in February, reveals the technique of these attacks as well as potential defenses.

Professors Shan Lu and Heather Zheng Named ACM Distinguished Members

November 06, 2019

Professor Shan Lu and Neubauer Professor Heather Zheng, were among 62 people named as Distinguished Members by the Association for Computing Machinery in 2019. The selection recognizes significant achievements in the computing field, and both Lu and Zheng were honored for outstanding scientific contributions to computing.

Steve Tuecke (1967 - 2019)

November 04, 2019

Prof. Diana Franklin Part of $4 Million Collaboration to Combine English, Computational Literacy

October 31, 2019

A $4 million grant from the Department of Education funded a collaboration between the University of California, Irvine, University of Chicago, and public schools in Santa Ana, San Francisco, and Chicago to develop, pilot, and implement a new curriculum that combines computer and English literacy.

Prof. Nick Feamster Discusses Facebook Content Moderation on Chicago Tonight

October 29, 2019

Professor Nick Feamster joined WTTW’s Chicago Tonight to talk about the whether the government should regulate how social media platforms moderate content on their sites, and the technical challenges for companies like Facebook and Twitter in monitoring and removing offensive or misleading content.

New UChicago CS Asst. Prof. Yuxin Chen Turns AI Into an Active Learner and Teacher

October 24, 2019

New Assistant Professor Yuxin Chen specializes in "interactive machine learning," the development of AI systems that continually seek out new data to further improve their performance. Chen has applied this approach in collaborations with computational biologists, neuroscientists, mechanical engineers, and physicists, developing new theories and algorithms for discovery and analysis.

Cosmos Boekell Comes Full Circle to Lead CS Instructional Laboratory (CSIL)

October 23, 2019

Cosmos Boekell, the new director of the Computer Science Instructional Laboratory (CSIL), returns to the department 20 years after serving as a CSIL tutor, with big plans for expanding the laboratory's offerings and collaboration with neighbors in the Media Arts, Data and Design Center.

Prof. Ian Foster Named SC Distinguished Scientist Fellow by Department of Energy

October 17, 2019

UChicago CS Professor Ian Foster was named a named a 2019 SC Distinguished Scientist Fellow for “pioneering work in distributed and high-performance computing with fundamental and long-lasting impacts on both computer science as a discipline and the practice of computing across the Office of Science.”

Department of Energy XLab Event Features Prof. Rebecca Willett on Foundations of AI

October 16, 2019

Rebecca Willett, Professor of Statistics and Computer Science at the University of Chicago, delivered a keynote on AI foundations at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Innovation XLab Artificial Intelligence Summit, a two-day event featuring speakers, panels, and demonstrations about using AI in healthcare, national security, transportation, and many other areas.

Shan Lu Promoted to Professor of UChicago Computer Science

October 11, 2019

Shan Lu’s research focuses on software reliability and efficiency, particularly detecting, diagnosing, and fixing functional and performance bugs in large software systems. Since arriving at UChicago in 2014, Lu has won multiple best paper awards at prestigious computer science conferences, served on a number of program committees, and currently serves as the Chair of ACM-SIGOPS — the international special interest group on operating systems.

UChicago-Developed Compiler Makes Quantum Computers 2x Faster

October 10, 2019

A new paper from researchers at UChicago CS and EPiQC introduces a technique for compiling highly-optimized quantum instructions that can be executed on near-term hardware.

New Bioinformatics Hub at UChicago Enables Next-Gen Infectious Disease Research

October 04, 2019

A $43 million contract from NIH will fund the new Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center (BV-BRC), based at the University of Chicago and co-led by UChicago CS Professor Rick Stevens. The big data resource combines two independent efforts at UChicago and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) into a common infrastructure that will support richer scientific data and more powerful analytic tools.

How AI Could Change Science

October 01, 2019

A UChicago News feature surveys artificial intelligence research at the university and its partner laboratories, including projects from UChicago CS faculty Rebecca Willett, Ian Foster, Michael Maire, and Yuxin Chen, and Center for Data and Computing projects in synthetic biology, computer perception, and astrophysics.

Five UChicago CS Students Honored as 2020 Siebel Scholars

September 25, 2019

UChicago CS graduate students Camilo Arias Martelo, Mingzhe Hao, Jonathan Tan, Kevin Yuanshun Yao, and Yuliana Zamora are among the 93 members of the 2020 class of Siebel Scholars. The prestigious program, which picks students from a select group of graduate schools for business, computer science, energy science and bioengineering, has chosen 13 UChicago CS students in the last 3 years.

UChicago CS Authors Present Impressive Five Papers at SIGCOMM 2019

September 24, 2019

More than 15 percent of the papers at the prestigious SIGCOMM conference this year in Beijing included at least one UChicago CS co-author. Research presented at the meeting included new insights on video streaming, cloud performance, security, and scaling, and the quality of experience for web users, and featured high-profile collaborations with industry partners such as Microsoft, Alibaba, and VMware.

Pedro Lopes’ Laboratory Featured in UChicago Magazine

September 20, 2019

Which UChicagoCS laboratory looks like "If Stanley Kubrick and Ed Wood had teamed up to imagine the year 2019"? If you guessed the Human Computer Integration lab of assistant professor Pedro Lopes, you're correct. In the new issue of the University of Chicago magazine, writer Maureen Searcy visits Lopes and his students to learn about playing air theremin, stretchable computer circuits, using smell to make virtual reality more realistic, and a multitude of other projects putting the science in science fiction.

Intel Research Awards Go To Two UChicagoCS Faculty for Video Analytics, “Serverless” Cloud Projects

September 16, 2019

Two UChicago CS faculty received research awards from Intel to study new approaches for analyzing video data and advance cloud computing resources to support real-time applications. Sanjay Krishnan will use the Intel grant to create a new general-purpose system for storing, processing, and applying computer vision tools on video data. Andrew Chien's project studies how serverless cloud computing can be improved to better serve the real-time demands of edge computing applications such as video monitoring, traffic control, sensors and other novel “Internet of Things” applications.

Security, Online Speech, and A Better Web For All: Prof. Nick Feamster Joins UChicago CS

September 09, 2019

As the internet has become ubiquitous, the staple computer science subdomain of networking has grown dramatically beyond its origins in electrical engineering, crossing over with other CS areas such as security and machine learning and branching out into policy and the social sciences. It’s this interdisciplinary perspective and broad impact that makes Nick Feamster passionate about networking, and that attracted him the University of Chicago, where he joined this summer as a Neubauer Professor of Computer Science and The College and faculty director of the Center for Data and Computing.

Department of Energy Awards Prof. Fred Chong $2.25 Million for Quantum Computing Research

September 06, 2019

A new $60.7 million round of funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for quantum computing and networking included two awards to the research group of Fred Chong, Seymour Goodman Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Chong’s team will join multi-institutional projects led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University, receiving $1.125 million for their role in each collaboration.

New Assistant Professor Marshini Chetty Empowers Internet Users Through HCI

August 29, 2019

Even as we find countless new ways of using the internet, it sometimes feels like the internet is using us. With the multidisciplinary toolbox of human-computer interaction, new UChicago CS faculty member Marshini Chetty wants to even the scales, studying how people use the internet and developing new tools to empower them with information and control.

Researcher John Paparrizos Wins ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Distinction

August 22, 2019

While time series are a very common format for data from scientific collaborations, the internet, and sensors, researchers still lack the standards needed to automate their analysis. As a PhD student at Columbia University and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, John Paparrizos has worked to address this challenge. At this month’s 2019 ACM SIGKDD conference in Alaska, Paparrizos’ thesis, “Fast, Scalable, and Accurate Algorithms for Time-Series Analysis,” received an Honorable Mention for KDD’s Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Prof. Nick Feamster’s Research Drives Wall Street Journal Investigation of Streaming Video

August 20, 2019

Over three-quarters of today’s internet traffic comes from streaming video, a number that is only projected to rise over time. To meet this demand, internet service providers offer consumers faster data speeds at premium prices, with gigabit-per-second tiers available in some areas. But do these pricier plans actually improve the quality of video streaming? A Wall Street Journal investigation, published August 20th, answered this question with the help of UChicago Professor Nick Feamster, in a collaboration that both informs consumers and advances science.

New Asst. Prof. Eric Jonas Brings Machine Learning to Scientific Measurement

August 07, 2019

Machine learning often enters scientific experiments in the final chapter, analyzing large data sources to extract meaningful signals or create a predictive model. Eric Jonas wants the approach to play a much earlier and more proactive role: guiding how scientists collect information about the world, from telescopes scanning the cosmos to microscopes looking inside cells to detectors tracking the spray of subatomic particles.

EPiQC “Ask Me Anything” Session Brings Quantum to Quora

August 05, 2019

When people hear the term “quantum computing,” they usually have questions. So Quora, the social platform where experts answer user-submitted questions, was the perfect setting for an informational session led by researchers from the Enabling Practical-Scale Quantum Computing (EPiQC) collaboration. On July 31st, EPiQC lead PI Fred Chong, the Seymour Goodman Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and colleagues Margaret Martonosi of Princeton and Peter Shor of MIT answered 18 questions on the current status of the quantum computing race and the future of this breakthrough technology.

Prof. Blase Ur Provides Data Breach Protection Advice on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight

August 01, 2019

Capital One Financial, one of the largest American credit card companies, is the latest company to announce a significant data breach, potentially opening up millions of its customers to fraud. WTTW's Chicago Tonight news show invited Assistant Professor Blase Ur to discuss the incident and what people can do to protect themselves from misuse of their private information.

How One UChicago CS Alum Uses Technology to Tackle Inequality

August 01, 2019

As part of the "Meet a UChicagoan" series focusing on the people who make UChicago a distinct intellectual community, University of Chicago News featured Devshi Mehrotra, who graduated in June 2019 with a joint bachelor’s and master’s in computer science. Through compileHer, the student group she founded to introduce middle school girls to technology, and work with the Cook County Public Defender's Office and the UChicago Institute of Politics, Mehrotra has enthusiastically looked for ways to combine CS with public service.

UChicago Jumpstarts Collaborations with National Labs in AI, Quantum

July 29, 2019

A University of Chicago program supporting promising projects with Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the emerging fields of artificial intelligence and quantum science announced $400,000 in seed grants. The projects, which include UChicago CS faculty Rebecca Willett, Ian Foster, Michael Maire, and Yuxin Chen, will tackle big questions in neuroscience, climate science, cosmological physics and quantum networking.

CNBC Features Prof. Ben Zhao on Promise and Dangers of AI

July 23, 2019

The business world has its eye on artificial intelligence, given the immense potential of the approach to create new economic opportunities and disrupt virtually every industry. So when financial news network CNBC came to Chicago earlier this month for an event on “Investing in the Future of Work,” they called upon a local expert to help explain the current state and uncertain path of AI — UChicago CS Neubauer Professor Ben Zhao.

Argonne Team Breaks Record for Globus Data Movement

July 19, 2019

Globus, the UChicago initiative and leading research data management service, announced the largest single file transfer in its history: a team led by Argonne National Laboratory scientists moved 2.9 petabytes of data as part of a research project involving three of the largest cosmological simulations to date.

Eight New Faculty Members Join UChicago CS for 2019-20 Academic Year

July 15, 2019

The Department of Computer Science is excited to welcome eight new faculty members who will join the University of Chicago this summer and fall. These new scholars come to UChicago CS from institutions such as Princeton, MIT, Caltech, and UC Berkeley, and bring expertise and experience in networking, privacy, human-computer interaction, machine learning, quantum computing, data discovery, research data management and many other topics.

UChicago Workshop Highlights Internet of Things Potential for Cities, Army Installations

July 11, 2019

A June workshop co-organized by the University of Chicago and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, focused on what IoT technologies can do for tomorrow’s cities and military installations. By convening armed services scientists and staff with researchers from UChicago CS, Argonne National Laboratory, and other universities, the two-day event focused on opportunities for new collaborations that can help bring those smart city applications closer to reality.

Associate Professor Henry Hoffmann Receives Presidential Early Career Award

July 09, 2019

Henry Hoffmann, an associate professor in UChicago CS, is one of this year’s recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the White House announced. Awarded since 1996, PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government to outstanding scientists and engineers who are beginning their independent research careers and who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology. Hoffmann’s research group focuses on self-aware and adaptive computing systems that find the optimal balance between performance and energy consumption.

“Crash Skipping” Strategy for Approximate Computing Receives GLSVLSI Award

July 03, 2019

“Crash Skipping,” a new technique created by UChicago CS graduate Yan Verdeja Herms and assistant professor Yanjing Li for efficient error recovery in approximate computing environments, received the best paper award at the ACM Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI) conference held in May 2019 in Washington DC. The approach, which "skips over" errors that would normally cause an application to crash, holds promise for machine learning, computer vision, data mining and other increasingly popular functions that don’t always require precise accuracy.

Pinpointing Agency and Realism in the Brain During Electrical Muscle Stimulation

June 27, 2019

Even for experienced users of electrical muscle stimulation, the sensation of a machine controlling your body, rather than the other way around, feels unnatural and strange. Something about the experience disrupts people’s sense of agency — the feeling of being in control of one’s actions — which could interfere with the potential of EMS to improve learning, make virtual reality more realistic, and many other applications. In a trio of papers presented at CHI 19 and in the journal Cerebral Cortex, the laboratory of Pedro Lopes explored the nature of agency and where it may reside in the human brain.

Award-Winning ICSE Paper Offers Web Developers a “Panorama” View of Slowdowns and Fixes

June 24, 2019

Website features that look simple on the surface, such as the number of archived emails or a social media sidebar, can actually involve complicated data queries under the hood, which could slow performance to a crawl. To help developers find and fix these slowdowns, University of Chicago CS researchers in the laboratory of Associate Professor Shan Lu created Panorama, an interactive environment that optimizes web applications. A paper on the tool presented last month at the 2019 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) received one of only 11 Distinguished Paper Awards for the conference.

PhD Student Mingzhe Hao Receives UChicago Harper Dissertation Fellowship

June 17, 2019

Mingzhe Hao, a 4th-year PhD student advised by Neubauer Family Assistant Professor Haryadi Gunawi, received a William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship, the highest honor awarded to UChicago graduate students. The fellowship is awarded in the final year of graduate study to help students concentrate on thesis completion. In his thesis work, Hao combines cloud computing, storage systems, and performance to primarily study tail latency, the delays sometimes experienced by users when they are trying to access a web page or request data stored in a cloud system.

CALOREE Balancing: UChicago CS Paper Named IEEE Micro Top Pick

June 06, 2019

A UChicago CS paper that combines machine learning and control theory to both speed up applications and conserve energy was given honorable mention in the 2018 IEEE Micro Top Picks, an annual roundup of the most significant scientific advances in computer architectures. CALOREE, an intelligent resource manager developed by graduated UChicago PhD students Nikita Mishra and Connor Imes with associate professor Hank Hoffmann and John Lafferty of Yale, outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on systems ranging from smartphones to servers.

PhD Student Yuliana Zamora Awarded National Physical Science Consortium Fellowship

June 03, 2019

Second-year PhD student Yuliana Zamora received the the National Physical Science Consortium, which comes with up to six years of funding as well as mentoring and internship opportunities from a government or national laboratory sponsor. The funding supports Zamora's research with advisors Ian Foster and Hank Hoffmann on the interface between power-aware computing, machine learning, and cutting-edge computer architectures.

Quantum Computing + Information Design + NYSCI = Design for Understanding

May 21, 2019

Design for Understanding, a course at Princeton University, partnered with the UChicago-led Enabling Practical-Scale Quantum Computing (EPiQC) collaboration to feature a first-of-its-kind section on quantum computing and information design. A mix of students from the humanities, engineering, social sciences, and computer science created infographics and pitched museum exhibits to the New York Hall of Science, learning how to explain the basic concepts and principles of quantum technology to a general audience.

Google Award to Prof. Andrew Chien Will Explore Regional Optimization for Greener Cloud

May 16, 2019

Google granted a Research Award to a team led by Andrew A Chien, William Eckhardt Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago to study “Optimizing Power Cost and Carbon Footprint for a Distributed Collection of Data Centers." The project dovetails with Chien’s Zero-Carbon Cloud project, which seeks to exploit phenomena in modern power grid markets such as “stranded power” to create carbon-free data centers.

CompileHer Capstone Grants Girls Tech Superpowers

May 13, 2019

On a snowy April day, Chicago middle school girls received a crash course in computer science thanks to the UChicago CS student group compileHer and over 100 student and faculty volunteers. The "superpowHer" event themed its day of educational activities with a comic book flair, sending each group of girls on a mission to save their city from a dangerous computer virus. Attendees learned how to query a database, encrypt and decode secret messages, craft an unbreakable password, and many more handy skills, receiving clues along the way that helped them solve the overall story conflict.

What Art and Games Can Teach Science About AI

May 10, 2019

A panel of University of Chicago experts from computer science, the arts, and humanities grappled with a topic that goes beyond technology into philosophy, ethics, and the very meaning of humanity in a world where machines perform more and more tasks once thought exclusively human. Attendees also had the chance to explore some of these weighty issues in a more interactive manner, by play-testing a new card game from Tommy Maranges, a Chicago game designer who co-created the popular Secret Hitler.

Two UChicago CS Students Awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

April 29, 2019

A graduate student researching how to improve computer science education at the grade school level and an undergraduate interested in creating efficient data-intensive software for scientists were the UChicago CS recipients of this year’s prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Jean Salac, a 2nd-year PhD student working with Research Associate Professor and Lecturer Diana Franklin, and Pranav Subramaniam, a 4th-year undergraduate who works with Associate Professor Shan Lu and Assistant Professor Aaron Elmore, were among 16 students from the University of Chicago Physical Sciences Division to receive the honor. The program provides funding support for exceptional students pursuing master’s or doctoral degrees in STEM disciplines.

Computer Scientists Design Method to Close ‘Backdoors’ in AI-based Security Systems

April 24, 2019

EPiQC Students Present Quantum Computing Research at ASPLOS 2019

April 22, 2019

Researchers from the UChicago-led EPiQC collaboration presented two papers at the ASPLOS 2019 conference that promise to improve the speed and performance of today's quantum computers. EPiQC graduate students described a new compiler that utilizes the physics concept of quantum optimal control and a technique that repurposes noise data from quantum hardware to reduce errors in talks at the prestigious systems research gathering in Providence, RI.

Asst. Prof. Junchen Jiang Receives Google Award to Improve Streams for Machines

April 16, 2019

Assistant Professor Junchen Jiang received a Google Faculty Research Award for “Scaling Deep Video Analytics to the Edge,” a project that will use machine learning algorithms to push analytics closer to the source of video data and realize some of the promised benefits of real-time computer vision.

How to Improve the FAIRness of Biomedical Big Data Research

April 15, 2019

Big data research is notoriously hard to reproduce, a key tenet of good, transparent science. A new paper from UChicago CS, Argonne, and Globus researchers shows how low-cost and open-source tools can help improve FAIRness and the quality of data-intensive science.

From Wearable Tech to AI, UChicago Builds Future of Computer Science

April 12, 2019

The University of Chicago Computer Science's new faculty and new home in a transformed John Crerar Library mirrors the new era of computer science. No longer operating in isolation, CS methods are redefining fields as varied as finance, medicine, physics and urban studies.

Center for Data and Computing Announces First Data Discovery Grants

April 11, 2019

The Center for Data and Computing, the new UChicago incubator for new multidisciplinary data science research, announced 11 research projects and an exploratory convening that span nearly every division, department, and professional school on campus, expanding the community of collaborative data science activity.

Prof. Fred Chong Receives Intel Outstanding Researcher Award

April 03, 2019

Fred Chong, the Seymour Goodman Professor of Computer Science at UChicago, received the Outstanding Researcher Award from Intel for his contributions to the field of quantum computing. Chong, who leads the multi-institutional Enabling Practical-scale Quantum Computation (EPiQC) project, was one of four winners in the 2018 class announced last week by the technology company.

Chair Michael Franklin Named One of Chicago Magazine’s “New Power Players”

April 01, 2019

UChicago CS Chair Michael Franklin was named one of Chicago Magazine's "emerging power players" in their annual Who's Got Next list. Franklin highlighted the the new computer science space in the John Crerar Library and the Center for Data and Computing, an incubator for multidisciplinary data science collaboration at the University of Chicago. “I think that’s the way you do impactful computer science research,” he told the magazine. “You work with people who are trying to solve real problems.”

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