Artificial Intelligence
The study of systems that behave intelligently, artificial intelligence includes several key areas where our faculty are recognized leaders: computer vision, machine listening, natural language processing, and machine learning.
Computer vision systems can understand images and video, for example, building extensive geometric and physical models of cities from video, or warning construction workers about nearby dangers. Natural language processing systems understand written and spoken language; possibilities include automatic translation of text from one language to another, or understanding text on Wikipedia to produce knowledge about the world. Machine listening systems understand audio signals, with applications like listening for crashes at traffic lights, or transcribing polyphonic music automatically. Crucial to modern artificial intelligence, machine learning methods exploit examples in order to adjust systems to work as effectively as possible.
CS Faculty and Their Research Interests
| Nancy Amato | motion planning, robotics, computational biology, computational geometry, animation, CAD, VR |
| Margaret Fleck | computational linguistics, programming language tools |
| David A. Forsyth | computer vision, object recognition, scene understanding |
| Julia Hockenmaier | natural language processing, computational linguistics |
| Kris Hauser | joining fall 2019; robot motion planning and control, semiautonomous robots |
| Derek Hoiem | computer vision, object recognition, spatial understanding, scene interpretation |
| Nan Jiang | reinforcement learning |
| Bo Li | secure machine learning |
| Oluwasanmi Koyejo | machine learning, neuroscience, neuroimaging |
| Steven M. LaValle | robotics, motion planning, and virtual reality |
| Svetlana Lazebnik | computer vision, object recognition, scene interpretation, modeling and organization of large-scale image collections |
| Jian Peng | machine learning and optimization |
| Mark Sammons | natural language processing, textual inference |
| Paris Smaragdis | machine listening, signal processing, music information retrieval, and speech and audio analysis |
| Matus Telgarsky | machine learning theory |
Affiliate Faculty
| Timothy Bretl, Aerospace Engineering | motion planning and control |
| Girish Chowdhary, Agricultural and Biological Engineering | control, autonomy and decision making, vision and LIDAR based perception, GPS denied navigation |
| Roxana Girju, Linguistics | computational linguistics |
| Mani Golparvar-Fard, Civil Engineering | computer vision analytics for building and construction performance monitoring |
| Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Electrical & Computer Engineering | statistical speech technology |
| Seth Hutchinson, Electrical & Computer Engineering | computer vision, robotics |
| Kenton McHenry, NCSA | cyberinfrastructure for digital preservation, auto-curation, and managing unstructured digital collections |
| Alexander Schwing, Electrical & Computer Engineering | machine learing, computer vision |
Adjunct Faculty
| Eyal Amir, Parknav | machine learning, automatic reasoning |
| Dan Roth, University of Pennsylvania | machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation, reasoning |
Artificial Intelligence Research Efforts and Groups
Artificial Intelligence Research News
Amato Participates in National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Panel
October 14, 2019 Amato emphasized that funding for basic AI research in the U.S. has not kept up with demand, but that amazing things are possible with the right resources.
US Robotics Roadmap Reaches New Heights in the Windy City
September 20, 2019 A workshop hosted by Illinois Computer Science will contribute to the next edition of the US Robotics Roadmap.
Illinois CS Adds Eight New Faculty, Broadening Expertise in NLP, Security, Robotics, and More
September 5, 2019 New faculty bring expertise in everything from natural language processing, robotics, and security to biomedical informatics.
The Coming Mass Extinction of Fortune 500 Companies
July 22, 2019Axios -- Tom Siebel, founder of C3.ai, says that this is an existential moment for current Fortune 500 companies that don't move quickly to adapt to the new age of AI and robotics. "We are in a mass extinction event," says Siebel.
AI: An Extinction Event For The Corporate World?
July 21, 2019Forbes -- Back in 1973, Daniel Bell published a pioneering book, called The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Among the many readers was a young Tom Siebel. It’s what inspired him to enroll at the graduate school of engineering at the University of Illinois and get a degree in Computer Science.