By Michael Sweeney “How do we give members an opportunity to learn and grow and still get that professional experience they need?” Eshan Velidandla, a sophomore in Information Science + Data Science, asked himself when laying the groundwork for a new data science-focused club. Now president of the Data Science Development Group or DSDG, Velidandla […]
Category: AI
Reading Between the Brain Waves: Inside a Scientist’s Work on Mobility and Aging
By Sasha Zvenigorodsky Dr. Manuel Hernandez is a researcher and Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, focused on the interaction of movement, cognition, and physiological signals in aging and neurological disease. He told us how his lab leverages novel technologies and data analytics techniques to study mobility and advance earlier intervention across […]
38 video clips, 2,000 image frames, 22,000 pig instances, and a hopeful future for livestock. This is the PigLife data set, under AIFARMS, one of the AI research institutes supported by the National Science Foundation and the USDA. It’s a first-of-its-kind benchmark made to train computer vision (CV) systems on pig tracking, furnishing the agricultural […]
2026 Datathon Winners Predict Call Center Activity Using No AI
Understanding the data completely— a skill becoming more and more important with AI— along with storytelling and simplicity differentiated the winners of this year’s Statistics Datathon. By Michael Sweeney The 10th anniversary of the Illinois Statistics Datathon is in the books. Nearly 600 students across more than 200 teams hailing from the Department of Statistics, the […]
Illini to the Final Four… of Brackets
*UPDATE*: After a crushing Illini loss and the end to the men’s college basketball season UIUC BracketOdds’ top bracket in this set, #15,458,212 outscored all ESPN brackets, correctly predicting 57 of the 63 games and scoring 1,840 points! This year, users submitted a record 26,567,887 men’s basketball brackets on ESPN. While the initially they generated […]
Against the Grain: Dr. Salah Issa on Innovating Ag Safety
By Sasha Zvenigorodsky As a researcher in the Agricultural Engineering department and Extension specialist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Salah Issa has spent over a decade advancing agricultural safety. Here, Salah shares how his work blends research, hands-on training, and emerging technologies like machine learning (ML) to prevent injuries on farms. Dr. […]
When Robots Meet Horseradish: A Ph.D. Student’s Mission Toward Sustainable Solutions for Small-Scale Farming
By Sasha Zvenigorodsky Key Takeaways Illinois may be famous for being the land of Lincoln and home of “Da Bears,” but few are familiar with one of its lesser known claims to fame, which lies underground. The commercial cultivation of horseradish in Southern Illinois took root in the 1850s, when German immigrant farmers discovered that the […]
2025 Ashby Prize in Computational Science Hackathon Winners streamline CRISPR Screening with AI
By Michael Sweeney *Results listed at the bottom CRISPR-Cas systems have revolutionized biology by allowing researchers to investigate how genes function. However, running CRISPR screens can exceed $10,000 per experiment and take months. Following a weekend of intense computation, the winners of this year’s Ashby Prize Hackathon made a step toward a smoother, less expensive […]
Weathering the Storm: An Atmospheric Scientist on Technology, Disruption, and Dedication
By Michael Sweeney As an assistant professor of climate, meteorology, and atmospheric sciences, and leader of the Climate Modeling, Prediction, and Applications research group (C-MPA), Dr. Gan Zhang is dedicated to investigating weather extremes and their impacts using a wide range of datasets and machine learning tools. In this article, Zhang shares his experiences and […]
Making Campus Data Work: A Conversation with Maryalice Wu
By Francie Fink As Director of Data Analytics at the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL) at the University of Illinois, Dr. Maryalice Wu brings years of experience in survey design, student success research, and statistical consulting. In this conversation, she discusses how she got started, what data analytics means in an academic […]