InSIGHT’s four embedded sensors help detect obstables and human presence within a certain proximity.

ADSC software engineers Vignesh Ramkrishnan and Wasif Khaja began working on the project in August 2014 after Singapore’s Exploit Technologies (the commercialization branch of A*STAR) issued a challenge for researchers to develop ideas that would enhance the lives of people – the Intelligent Wellness Design Thinking Challenge. Ramkrishnan and Khaja received S$10,000 in funding, which was used for consultation with industrial designers and for creating a 3-D printed mock-up eyewear prototype. Ramkrishnan and Khaja are now working on creating a functional prototype that demonstrates all the features of InSIGHT.

InSIGHT uses four embedded sensors – ultrasound, thermal, microphone and a camera – to detect objects, as well as vibrating units that provide feedback to the wearer about the location of an obstacle or person. The localized vibrations correspond to the direction and position of the obstacle.

“There was an immersion event, as part of the program, where we had a chance to interact with disabled people and understand their everyday challenges,” Ramkrishnan said. “We learned that colliding with obstacles was a common problem faced by the blind and we hope our solution could make it easier for them.”

ADSC software engineer Vignesh Ramkrishnan demonstrates InSIGHT.

While the technology isn’t directly tied to an ADSC research project, Ramkrishnan and Khaja’s work at ADSC has equipped them with expertise in the fields of obstacle sensing using sensors and object recognition from an RGB image.

They were recently awarded the Highest Social Impact Award at A*STAR’s annual technology exhibition, Media Exploits, competing against over 10 other teams who participated in the Intelligent Wellness Design Thinking Challenge. Awards were also given to the most novel technology and the one with the highest market potential.

Media Exploits is a place for regional researchers to showcase their interactive digital media technology in Singapore. The exhibit featured over 50 exhibition booths highlighting research in the areas of media processing, wearables and sensors, intelligent wellness, games, animation and more.

ADSC researchers had two booths showcasing their technologies – InSIGHT and 3D mobile sensing. Additionally, four other companies featured ADSC technology: Image Science (ADSC’s fashion match technology); ESP Group (ADSC’s ARISE team); Basilo Labs (ADSC’s Magic Touch research); and CrowdRadar (ADSC’s crowd density analysis and prediction research).

The College of Engineering has announced that ten faculty members have been named Donald Biggar Willett Scholars for 2015, including ADSC’s Deming Chen (ECE). Others honored are Daniel Bodony (AE), Yann Chemla (Physics), Sascha Hilgenfeldt (MechSE), Harrison Kim (ISE), Xiuling Li (ECE), Yanfeng Ouyang (CEE), Saurabh Sinha (CS), Dallas Trinkle (MatSE), and Tao Xie (CS). The recognition is targeted for faculty members who, at a relatively early stage in their careers, are excelling in their contributions to the University of Illinois.

Daniel Bodony, a Blue Waters Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering, is a lead principal investigator for the Department of Energy Center for Exascale Simulation of Plasma-Coupled Combustion that is developing a multiphysics computational fluid dynamics code and software tools that use exascale-class computers. He uses Blue Waters to study the noise pollution caused by commercial and military aircraft in order to improve near-airport community conditions and reduce hearing damage and related health care costs. An Illinois faculty member since 2006, he has held affiliate positions with Computational Science and Engineering, the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and the Parallel Computing Institute. Bodony earned an NSF CAREER Award in 2012, and that year was named a Tau Beta Pi Eminent Engineer. He is regularly included on the campuswide list of Teachers Ranked as Excellent, and was named the Aerospace Engineering Teacher of the Year in 2008, 2010 and 2012.

Yann Chemla is an associate professor in physics and a member of the Experimental Biological Physics Research faculty. His broad area of interest is in understanding the mechanism by which molecular machines operate, and specifically, the process of mechano-chemical conversion. His research group works on all facets of research in this area: design and construction of instrumentation, development of biological systems for single-molecule manipulation, and quantitative analysis and modeling of collected data. Chemla, who joined the Department of Physics in 2007, is a member of the Center for the Physics of Living Cells and has been recognized with a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, and a Center for Advanced Study appointment at Illinois. He has also appeared on the list of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Students.

Deming Chen has been an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering since 2011. He is also a research associate professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, an affiliate associate professor in computer science and an Advanced Digital Sciences Center faculty member. His current research interests include system-level and high-level synthesis, nano-systems design and nano-centric CAD techniques, GPU optimization, reconfigurable computing, hardware/software co-design, hardware security, and computational biology. In the recent years, he is also actively involved with other research directions, such as computational genomics, hardware security, and computation in the Smart Grid. In 2014, he received an IBM Faculty Award for his contributions to the areas high performance computing, synthesis, architecture and design space exploration. In addition to numerous Best Paper awards, Chen has received an NSF CAREER Award and has been included on the list of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Students.

Sascha Hilgenfeldt, an associate professor of mechanical science and engineering, conducts theoretical and experimental research on the interfacial structure and dynamical evolution of foam and soft condensed matter. Working with colleagues in the biological sciences, he has created a functional equation that describes how living cells pack together to create fruit fly eyes. The model helps researchers understand how adhesion energy changes the shape of the eye and allows them to study how such molecules develop and function during embryo development. His group is currently testing whether this model can be applied to different kinds of tissues, which could lead to advances in regenerative medicine. An Illinois faculty member since 2008, Hilgenfeldt’s research has important implications for drug delivery, gene therapy, and cell diagnostics, as well as generally enhancing the understanding of the mechanics of life.

Harrison Kim is an associate professor of industrial and enterprise systems engineering and the director of the Enterprise Systems Optimization Laboratory at Illinois. In his research, supported by the National Science Foundation and several key manufacturers, Kim and his colleagues have developed an optimization model to maximize total life-cycle profit from selling new products and remanufactured products. It optimizes both the initial design and design upgrades at the end-of-life stage and also provides corresponding production strategies, including production quantities and take-back rate. The model is extended to a multi-objective model that maximizes both economic profit and environmental-impact saving. Kim has received numerous recognitions including an NSF CAREER Award, Dean’s Award in Excellence in Research, and a Best Paper Award in ASME Design for Manufacturing and Life Cycle Conference. He joined the Illinois faculty in 2005.

Xiuling Li is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering with affiliate appointments in mechanical science and engineering, materials science and engineering, the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, and the Beckman Institute. Her research group at the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory is currently focused on several areas: semiconductor nanowires, strain-induced self-rolled-up membranes, and metal-assisted chemical etching. Since joining the faculty in 2007, her work has been recognized with an ONR Young Investigator Program Award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and as a Center for Advanced Study Fellow at Illinois.

Yanfeng Ouyang is an associate professor and the Paul F. Kent Endowed Faculty Scholar in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His research focuses mainly on developing strategic, tactical, and operational models and solution methods for problems that arise in the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary areas of transportation systems, operations management, network optimization, and logistics systems planning. His research portfolio covers a combination of theoretical research on complex engineering systems and real‐world applications that address high‐priority societal needs, for example, renewable energy systems, food supply chains and sensor networks. He joined the CEE faculty in 2005, and he is also affiliated with the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering and the Computational Science and Engineering program. His honors include an NSF CAREER Award, a High Impact Project Award from the Illinois Department of Transportation, the Engineering Council Outstanding Advising Award, a Xerox Award for Faculty Research. He has been recognized on the Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students ten times.

An associate professor of computer science and an affiliate member of the Institute for Genomic Biology, Saurabh Sinha is concerned with computational approaches to problems in molecular biology, especially gene regulation in metazoan genomes. His work looks to understand how sequences involved in gene regulation have evolved, and how such evolutionary dynamics may inform the discovery of novel regulatory sequences. Sinha is a principal investigator at the Center of Excellence for Big Data Computing, an Illinois-Mayo Clinic joint project focusing on the rapidly growing body of genomic and transcriptomic data produced by genome-wide, high-throughput experimental technologies. An affiliate of the Department of Entomology and the Biophysics program, Sinha has also been recognized with the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research from the College of Engineering.

Dallas Trinkle joined the faculty of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in 2006. The main focus of his research is on structural materials—impacting energy efficiency by improving processing capabilities of lighter materials or improving high temperature properties for materials in energy production. His group studies both properties of defects in materials and chemical effects on mechanical properties of advanced structural metals, such as plasticity, phase transformations, and solidification. He has been recognized with an NSF CAREER Award, the AIME Robert Lansing Hardy Award, three 3M Untenured Faculty Research Awards, and the Xerox Award for Faculty Research from the College of Engineering.

Tao Xie, an associate professor in computer science, joined the Illinois faculty in 2013. Before then, he was an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. His research interests are in software engineering, with a focus on software testing, program analysis, and software analytics. He leads the Automated Software Engineering Research Group and is a member of the Programming Languages, Formal Methods, and Software Engineering (PL-FM-SE) area at Illinois.

The current Donald Biggar Willett Scholars in the College of Engineering at Illinois:

  • Tarek Abdelzaher, CS
  • Joanna Austin, AE
  • Daniel Bodony, AE
  • Ximing Cai, CEE
  • Ioannis Chasiotis, AE
  • Yann Chemla, Physics
  • Deming Chen, ECE
  • Jianjun Cheng, MatSE
  • Brian DeMarco, Physics
  • Sascha Hilgenfeldt, MechSE
  • Elizabeth Hsaio-Wecksler, MechSE
  • Harrison Kim, ISE
  • Xiuling Li, ECE
  • Olgica Milenkovic, ECE
  • Angelia Nedich, ISE
  • Yanfeng Ouyang, CEE
  • Matthias Grosse-Perdekamp, Physics
  • Moonsub Shim, MatSE
  • Saurabh Sinha, CS
  • Dallas Trinkle, MatSE
  • Tao Xie, CS
  • Chengxiang Zhai, CS

The Willett Research Initiatives in Engineering funds term professorships, undergraduate and graduate student research, and related research activity. It honors the memory of Donald Biggar Willett (1897-1981) who attended the University of Illinois from 1916-1921. Mr. Willett left the University before graduation, just a few credits short of completing his coursework in civil engineering. He started his career as a partner in the family business, Suburban Coal and Supply Company, and later, worked as a self-employed bookkeeper and tax preparer. In 1994, his widow, Elizabeth Marie Willett, willed her entire estate to the College of Engineering, which established the Willett Research Initiatives Fund.

Klara Nahrstedt is the new Director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory, according to an announcement today from College of Engineering Dean Andreas Cangellaris.

Nahrstedt, the Ralph M. and Catherine V. Fisher Professor in the Department of Computer Science, has served as acting director of CSL since 2013. Her appointment is effective Feb. 16, 2015, pending approval by the University’s Board of Trustees.

“I think Professor Nahrstedt is the right person to lead CSL to the next level,” explained College of Engineering Dean Andreas Cangellaris. “She is an exceptional scholar with an international reputation and a substantial record of administrative and leadership experiences. As CSL’s acting director since July 2013, she has developed a bold vision for the institution’s role in tackling some of the most pressing interdisciplinary societal challenges.”

As Director, Nahrstedt will be responsible for helming a research lab that oversaw $53 million in expenditures in 2014 and provides administrative support to major research units such as the Information Trust Institute, the Parallel Computing Institute, and the Advanced Digital Sciences Center, an Illinois research center in Singapore.

Under her leadership, CSL is opening new research and office space in the CSL Studio. She has assisted in launching new initiatives on the creation and correlation of data building blocks for new materials and device fabrication, is fostering computational genomics and health IT initiatives, and is planning more new investments in the areas of the Internet of Things, machine learning, robotics, smart cities, smart cyber-physical infrastructures and more.

Nahrstedt, who joined the Illinois faculty in 1995, is a leading researcher in multimedia systems. Her fundamental work on energy-efficient dynamic soft-real-time CPU scheduling for mobile multimedia devices, and development of first energy-efficient OS for mobile multimedia devices, GRACE-OS, has been widely recognized in academia and industry.

In the field of 3D tele-immersive systems and networking, Nahrstedt was the first to develop a multi-view 3D video adaptation framework for bandwidth management and view-casting protocols for multi-view 3D video. She developed new metrics for 3D immersive video and the first comprehensive framework based on sound theoretical underpinnings for Quality of Experience in Distributed Interactive Multimedia Environments.

Nahrstedt received her BA in mathematics (1984) and a MSc degree (1985) in numerical analysis from Humboldt University, Berlin. She was a research scientist in the Institute for Informatik in Berlin until 1990. In 1995, she received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Computer and Information Science. She was twice elected chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia. She is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. Her honors include the 2009 Humboldt Fellow Research Award, the 2012 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, the 2013 ACM Fellow recognition, and induction into the German National Academy of Sciences in 2014.

Nahrstedt replaces previous director William H. Sanders, who was appointed Head of Illinois’ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in August 2014.

“CSL is a premier research institution that has impacted the real world for more than 60 years with its scientific achievements,” she said. “I am excited for this opportunity to collaborate with many of the Illinois’ top researchers and to help design a pathway to continue advancing disciplinary and interdisciplinary breakthroughs in the future.”

The Straits Times recently published an article highlighting the annual Media Exploits event in Singapore that happened on November 4. The annual event is organized by Exploit Technologies to showcase technologies and bring together entrepreneurs, investors and researchers. ADSC had two booths featuring its technology, including inSIGHT (as mentioned in the article) and 3D mobile sensing. ADSC also had four other companies showcasing their technologies, including Image Science (ADSC’s Fashion Match), ESP Group (demonstrating technology from the ARISE research group), Basilo Labs (ADSC’s Magic Touch) and CrowdRadar (ADSC’s crowd density analysis and prediction research).

Big focus on devices for the disabled at A*Star’s Media Exploits technology conference

It looks just like a pair of sunglasses but it would actually help the blind avoid dangers. Called inSIGHT, the glasses will be a device that the blind or visually impaired can wear to help them detect obstacles hanging from above.

“Blind people use a walking stick to move about but this detects only obstacles on the floor,” said computer vision engineer Vignesh Ramkrishnan, one of three researchers from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) involved in the project …

View the rest of The Straits Times article or ADSC’s Facebook page for more photos.

ADSC’s AutoScout technology, which performs automated analysis of video, was featured in a clip during the October 4, 2014 Illinois vs. Purdue football game. AutoScout was developed at ADSC under the guidance of Illinois Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Narendra Ahuja. AutoScout, Inc. is now a startup company located in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Research Park and is developing automated computational algorithms suitable for the automated analysis of football video. Automated tasks include video editing and automated semantic analysis of game footage and statistic extraction. Algorithms include estimating camera location and motion, tracking player movements on the field, and understanding player actions. This will ultimately lead to automated inferences, and thus assist in the development of team strategies.

In medicine and other fields, the growing use of evidence-based practices has saved money and improved performance by using data to inform decision-making. But in academic institutions leaders have been slower to adapt to data-driven decision making.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is partnering with Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore to develop higher education’s next crop of leaders into more ethical and evidence-based decision-makers. With a $2.7 million grant, Illinois is collaborating with NTU to conduct research, develop curricula, provide guidance and create tools to train current and future executives of major research universities as part of a new NTU academy focusing on leadership, expected to launch next year.

“It’s getting harder and harder to find good candidates for the critical front-line chair and dean positions at colleges and research universities around the world,” said C.K. Gunsalus, principal investigator and director of Illinois’ National Center for Professional & Research Ethics (NCPRE), which is home to the project. “Our goal is to help NTU develop leaders who are prepared to deal with complex issues, drawing on evidence-based practices.”These days, academic leaders face new challenges of ethical leadership, from increased scrutiny on research methodologies and results to increasingly diverse and international student populations. In all of these areas, integrity, modeling and sensitivity to diverse value systems have become even greater imperatives of leadership, says Gunsalus.

As part of the collaboration, NCPRE Illinois will partner with NTU to jointly develop the framework for the academy. Researchers will create new curricula that will develop leaders focused on institutional integrity and data-driven practices. They will also provide guidance on the development, structure and programming of the academy and continue their work on environmental factors influencing decision-making, especially cross-culturally and in Asia. Part of that work seeks to establish critical factors in supporting high-quality innovation and research with integrity in research universities.

In addition, Illinois will host an Illinois-NTU leadership conference to explore the research university of the future. The partnership also will help create a version of SOuRCe, a tool that enables universities to measure empirically the climate of research integrity in academic organizations, which would apply specifically to Asian colleges and universities.

NTU Professor Angela Goh, Associate Provost (Faculty Affairs) said, “NTU is proud to have Illinois as a partner in this new initiative in academic leadership. There is enormous potential and need for such leadership preparation to keep up with the fast pace of growth in Asian universities.”

Illinois researchers include Gunsalus and Nicholas Burbules, the Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership.

“Illinois has a strong reputation for promoting ethical, empirically based leadership,” said Gunsalus, a leading thought expert in the field and “The College Administrator’s Survival Guide” author. “It’s an honor to be able to partner with NTU as they prepare administrators to lead in the 21st century and beyond.”