Illinois Engineering

While much of the rhetoric around climate change centers on extreme events such as floods or droughts, today’s guest Praveen Kumar, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois, contends frequency and intensity of non-extreme or everyday precipitation events are changing and having a noticeable effect on the ecosystem.

Continuing the series on "Why Cancer Research Needs Engineering," Kesh Kesavadas, Director of the Health Care Engineering Systems Center and professor of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discusses robotic surgery and its impact on treating cancer patients.

What will the doctor's office of the future look like? In our continuing series on Why Cancer Research Needs Engineering, Stephen Boppart, Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and Director of Imaging at Illinois, foresees more engineering and technology integrated into the doctor-patient relationship.

This year alone in this country 600,000 people will die from the disease and 1.6 million will be newly diagnosed. In the fight to win, a new generation of researchers will use engineering to advance prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Rohit Bhargava, a pioneer in the field of digital molecular biology, a professor in bionengineering at the University of Illinois and a founding director of the Cancer Center of Illinois joins the program.

Creating a vaccine typically takes a lot of trial and error and testing. However, with machine learning and data-driven modeling, physicians can have a leg up in targeting specific vaccines. Since 2010, Andrew Ferguson, now an assistant professor of materials, science, and engineering at the University of Illinois, has applied statistical mechanical tools to develop data-driven models of HIV viral fitness landscapes for computational vaccine design. This is another way that technology is making health care more personalized.

The anti-infammatory drugs of tomorrow may look a lot different than the ones we are used to as Professor Aditi Das explains. Her research focuses on understanding how fatty acids, in particular Omega 3 fatty acids, get converted into anti-inflammatory lipids signaling molecules by epoxygenases. Through a grant from the National Institute of Health, she is leading a research team on a discovery of novel endocannabinoid epoxides that are anti-inflammatory.

Natural disasters put a strain on the infrastructure of those areas affected, from power, to water, to utilities. As victims seek emergency assistance and friends and family reach out to their loved ones, cell towers and 911 lines reach capacity and beyond, leaving it difficult to call for help. Chao Zhang introduces listeners to TrioVecEvent, which is demonstrating how geo-tagged Tweet streams can help locate those in most need of help.

Startup Autonomic Energy Systems, winner of the 2017 Cozad New Venture Competition, has developed technology which would extend the life of your cellphone battery while preventing fires from those lithium ion batteries. Co-founder Tony Griffin shares details on the technology and talks about the future of cellphone batteries.

As graphene's popularity grows as an advanced "wonder" material, the speed and quality at which it can be manufactured will be paramount. Sung Woo Nam and his team of researchers have developed a cleaner and more environmentally friendly method to manufacture the material using using carbonated water. He shares his findings and discusses the promising future of graphene.

Professor Deming Chen and his team of researchers are developing technology which allows security cameras to detect sounds of distress (such as gun shots, screaming, cry for help)and immediately notify law enforcement.

If you are all familiar with the Egyptian Pyramids, then you are no doubt aware of what an engineering marvel they are. Consider that they were built around 2500 BC, the largest stands 449 feet tall, weighs 6.5 million tons and covers 13 acres. But exactly how were they built? University of Illinois alumnus Stephen Blakely has studied its construction extensively and has formed a theory, the use of an Egyptian pulley

David Forsyth couldn’t image 30 years ago that his career in academia would involve standing in front of a moving driverless vehicle with a traffic cone on his head. However, this spring that’s what the South African born professor of computer science did as part his University of Illinois class on artificial intelligence. He talks about how the future of programming autonomous vehicles.

Cast 21 is revolutionizing the future of bone mobilizations. Instead of a traditional cast of cloth and plaster for a fracture in an arm or leg, the company has introduced a brace with a netted structure. It is breathable and washable and allows for easy access to the area for cleaning. Ashley Moy, Cast 21 CEO and recent Illinois graduate in bioengineering, joins the program to discuss the progress of the start-up.

It has been predicted that all the world's data, if stored on DNA, could fit into a trunk of a car. Olgica Milenkovic, and her team received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate how to encode data in a manner suitable for portable and robust DNA-based data storage systems. Joining Olgica on the podcast are Ryan Gabrys and Houssein Yazdi.

Fullstack is an immersive software engineering school or "coding bootcamp" in lower Manhattan and Chicago. Seeing that coding is a skill with increasing career applications, David Yang and Nimit Maru founded Fullstack in 2012 through a collaboration at Y Combinator. David and Nimit met on the first day of freshman orientation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After graduating in 2004 with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering, they have joined forces on at least five startups and worked together at Yahoo.

Terry Howerton is the founder and CEO of TechNexus, a Chicago-based venture development firm building a new, collaborative model for leading corporations to engage and extract value from the global entrepreneurial ecosystem. A lifelong entrepreneur, Terry talks about Chicago as an incubator for tech talent and companies

Personify uses the most advanced technologies in computer vision and machine learning to develop awesome immersive experiences involving video. CEO and co-founder of Personify, Sanjay has grown Personify from 5 people at the University of Illinois to a global team of more than 30 technologists and innovators, with dozens of partnerships and relationships with companies like Intel, SAP, and Lenovo.

Mani Golparvar Fard, CEO of Reconstruct, and his team at the University of Illinois has developed a sophisticated construction monitoring systems, which takes videos and photos using drones and a web-based platform, which continuously reconstructs and visualizes reality directly within 4D BIM, measures progress and productivity, and analyzes risk for delay.

Mayank Kale, is building the startup Invoq Health to develop a new way to deploy high- tech data collection, retention and analysis solutions intuitively in low tech environments - enabling the adoption of important population and health management applications in under served markets of India and Africa. Mayank holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Divey Gulati founded Ship Bob, Inc., to help small businesses give customers Amazon-level logistics. Gulati as both bachelor's degree in computer engineering and an MBA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.