ECE Distinguished Colloquium Series

Mike Zafirovski is the Founder, Chairman, and President of The Zaf Group, a family office engaged in operating, investment, and advisory activities. During his corporate career, Mike served as President/CEO at Nortel, Motorola, and five GE businesses. Formerly, Mike was an executive advisor to The Blackstone Group, and served on the boards of Boeing, Stericycle, Apria, Nortel, Motorola, and several Blackstone companies. From 2006 to 2010, Mr. Zafirovski was appointed by the President of the USA to the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC).  

Physics-based simulations play a vital role in many scientific, engineering, and national security domains, including energy infrastructure, atmospheric sciences, and molecular dynamics. 

Electro-optically tunable active metasurfaces that enable dynamic modulation of reflection amplitude, phase, and polarization using resonantly excited materials and phenomena are powerful design elements for meta-imaging and computation. 

Anna Scaglione (M.Sc.'95, Ph.D. '99) is currently a professor in electrical and computer at Cornell Tech, the New York City campus of Cornell University,  Prior to that she held faculty positions at Arizona State University, the University of California at Davis, Cornell University (the first time) and the University of New Mexico.

Juan de Bedout, Ph.D. - Senior Vice President of Aerospace Technology at Raytheon Technologies

Yahya Rahmat-Samii - University of California, Los Angeles, USA

This talk will focus on how modeling at the level of individual detected particles inspires novel processing methods.

This talk discusses information rates in two quantum internet building blocks concerning quantum (conference) key distribution (QKD). 

We live in an age where enormous amount of data is being collected constantly because of smart phones, ubiquitous presence of sensors and the wide-spread use of social media. Useful and cost-effective analysis of this data is the biggest economic driver for the IT industry.

Underwater wireless communications rely on transmission of acoustic waves as electro-magnetic waves propagate only over very short distances.

Illinois ECE Colloquium Series - 2022 Alumni Awards Panel.  We will be joined by four of the 2022 Illinois ECE Alumni Award Recipients.

Lan Yang, Ph. D. - Professor, Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, Washington University (St. Louis)

Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, discusses deep learning models that can find semantically meaningful representations of words, learn to read documents, and answer questions about their content.

Hendrik Hamann, Chief Scientist at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, presents new approaches for scalable spatio-temporal data indexing, processing, and analytics, which accelerate analytical tasks such as AI modeling by orders of magnitudes. The talk includes a series of examples illustrating complex analytics, ML and AI on multi-modal data sets including applications to weather, climate, agriculture, and renewable energy.

Alan Mantooth, Ph.D. - University of Arkansas

Panel of gust speakers addresses the issue of graduate student mental health.

Steve Kang, Ph.D., University of California-Santa Cruz

Kristen Grauman, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin

Presentation by Hatice Altug, Ph.D., Professor, Institute of Bioengineering at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland.

John Rogers, Ph.D., Materials Science & Engineering, Biomedical Engineering & Neurological Surgery, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL describes the key ideas from his research and presents some of the most recent device examples.

Aylin Yener, Ph.D., Roy and Lois Chope Chair in Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Professor of Integrated Systems Engineering, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

P. R. Kumar, University Distinguished Professor, Regents Professor, and College of Engineering Chair in Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. Prof. Kumar is also a Professor Emeritus from ECE and CSL. 

Katsu Yamane, Ph.D., Senior Scientist and Robotics Researcher, Honda Research Institute discusses two related projects: perception of pedestrian avoidance behavior of a mobile robot and modeling of intimate social interactions such as hugging.

In the field of artificial intelligence, a combination of scale in data and model capacity enabled by unsupervised learning has led to major advances in representation learning and statistical generation. In the life sciences, the anticipated growth of sequencing promises unprecedented data on natural sequence diversity. 

In this colloquium, Athol Kemball, Ph.D., Department of Astronomy, discusses recent work in phase calibration and image formation for radio interferometric arrays using new approaches made possible by supercomputing in the petascale era. 

Ensuring universal, affordable and sustainable energy access for everyone is one of the biggest societal changes of our time.

Celebrate the 2020 Illinois ECE alumni award recipients who participated on this panel discussion.  

"Illuminating My Career - From Flash Gordon to Laser Surgery" presented by James J. Wynne, Ph.D. , IBM Research Headquarters, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Hts., NY.

Colloquium: Graduate Student Well-being Informational Seminar | September 10, 2020

This informational seminar will focuses on graduate well-being, including relationships with advisors and peers, recommendations for health, and important resources that are available for students. The featured speaker are:

Thomas Miebach - Thomas is a Clinical Counselor/Crisis Triage Case Manager at the Counseling Center. He oversees the crisis/triage services at the Counseling center, and also serves on Suicide Intervention Team and Suicide Prevention Outreach Team. Thomas coordinates the trauma response services provided to the UIUC campus. Prior to working at the Counseling Center, he worked as a Crisis Clinician providing crisis mental health services to the Champaign-Urbana area.