Coordinated Science Laboratory at Illinois

09/04/2026

Working on a technology with real commercial potential? The InstaRecon Innovation Scholarship funds one ECE grad student annually to build and demo it. This could be you.

Deadline is September 30. Committee decisions are by October 15.

APPLICATION LINK: https://csl.illinois.edu/events/instarecon-scholarship

08/25/2026

Xinbo Wu, a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, had a paper accepted to ICML, one of the top artificial intelligence conferences, for research modeling AI “jailbreak” attacks as a game between an attacker and defender.

Xinbo Wu, a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, had a paper accepted to ICML, one of the top artificial intelligence conferences, for research modeling AI “jailbreak” attacks as a game betw...

08/21/2026

One of Open AI's advanced models broke out of a locked-down "sandbox" test and attacked Hugging Face. Professor Gang Wang commented on the incident and said people are underestimating what AI can do.

One of OpenAI's most advanced models broke out of a locked-down test and attacked another company's website—reviving fears that AI systems are slipping beyond their creators' control.

08/05/2026

Faculty and students from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, shared two innovative approaches to engineering education at the 2026 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference, highlighting new teaching methods designed to better prepare students for engineering careers.

Two innovative approaches to engineering education were presented at the 2026 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference, highlighting new teaching methods designed to better prepare students for engineering careers.

07/16/2026

Please join us in welcoming professor Naresh Shanbhag as CSL's 12th Director! A CSL researcher since 1995 and the Jack S. Kilby Professor of ECE, Naresh has spent decades pushing the boundaries of energy-efficient computing. Today, he takes the helm — we can't wait to see where he leads CSL next.

07/15/2026

Innovative solar technologies with the potential to improve lives and accelerate the clean energy transition earned top recognition in this year's ECE 443 LEDs and Solar Cells course.

Every spring, the ECE 443 LEDs and Solar Cells course enables students to address a grand societal challenge by applying what they’ve learned to create a project. The class explores energy conversion devices to enable energy-efficient and scalable light emitting diodes and solar cells as solutio...

07/09/2026

Solar farms and EV chargers all rely on inverters to feed power into the grid — and those inverters are a growing cyberattack surface. Researchers at the Grainger College of Engineering's Information Trust Institute are part of a $4.2M DOE-funded project (led by Georgia Tech) to find and fix these vulnerabilities before attackers do. Their work: testing real exploits against physical equipment in ITI's cyber-physical testbed, then feeding what they learn into AI-assisted attack-graph modeling. As David Emmerich puts it, "If the power goes out, that's not just a utility problem, that's a you and me problem too."

Read how Illinois is helping secure the grid's edge:

Securing the Grid's Edge: Grainger's role in protecting distributed energy resources

07/07/2026

For decades, the architecture of computer numerical control (CNC), which is used for controlling machine tools in manufacturing, has barely changed. But Placid Ferreira’s group has now developed a fundamentally new approach in which much of the computational work is done in the cloud, opening up a vast range of opportunities to improve machine tools’ capabilities.

For decades, the architecture of computer numerical control (CNC), which is used for controlling machine tools in manufacturing, has barely changed. But Placid Ferreira’s group has now developed a fundamentally new approach in which much of the computational work is done in the cloud, opening up a...

06/11/2026

"The fact that Amazon is using this in the real world is “remarkable,” says CS prof. Brighten Godfrey. Godfrey co-authored a seminal 2012 paper on random network graphs, which he says are a “mind-bending problem to solve, in general.”

The tech giant says a breakthrough in data center networking has dramatically accelerated the flow of information through its massive cloud infrastructure.

06/09/2026

CSL professor Rakesh Kumar wrote an op-ed featured in Fortune discussing the AI economy.
https://fortune.com/2026/05/30/ai-chip-token-bubble-economy-nvidia-microsoft-hyperscalers-2/