UIC's robotics team, the Chicago Engineering Design Team (EDT), won the Second Place Caterpillar Autonomous Award at the 2017 NASA Robotic Mining Competition. The competition, held at the Kennedy Space Center, challenged teams to design and build a robot that can dig and collect basaltic regolith simulant and autonomously navigate a simulated Martian terrain—objectives designed to help NASA find innovative ways to excavate well-insulated water ice. Chicago EDT beat 44 teams including Purdue University, Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, and UIUC in its fifth year participating in the competition.Visit chicagoedt.org for more information.

Congratulations to the class of 2017!Engineering graduates received their degrees May 6 from Peter Nelson, PhD, dean of the college, and Karen Colley, PhD, dean of the Graduate College. Trina Roy (MS ’95), Senior Software Developer at Pixar Animation Studios, gave the commencement address. Kevin Lynch, Vice President of Technology at Apple, received an honorary doctorate of engineering, the second in the College’s history, for his contributions to society as one of the world’s preeminent software developers and technology innovators, including leading the software development team for the Apple Watch. Two faculty members were honored for their excellence in teaching: Jamison Szwalek, PhD, clinical assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, recipient of UIC’s Silver Circle Award, and Wenjing Rao,…

Our Engineering Expo will be on Friday, April 21, 2017 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. It will take place at the UIC Forum, 725 W. Roosevelt Road.

L-R Chase Lee, Shawn Kim, Michael Baccia, Daniel Stempniewicz, Daniel Moreno, and Oliver Hui. Photo courtesy of Wes Agresta, Argonne National Laboratory.A team of UIC computer science students won first place at the 2017 Cyber Defense Competition, a contest organized by Argonne National Laboratory that challenged teams to design a secure network and defend it against attackers. The UIC team beat out 15 college teams including the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, and Iowa State University at the event on April 1.

A new iPhone keyboard prototype called BiAffect that can track and predict bipolar mood episodes won the Mood Challenge, a New Venture Program initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study mood using mobile devices. The UIC team, led by Peter Nelson, PhD, dean of the College and professor of computer science, and Alex Leow, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and bioengineering, won semi-final and final rounds to develop their prototype through Apple's open-source platform called ResearchKit and test it among users through Apple's TestFlight app. BiAffect will receive $200,000 to launch publicly in the App Store and help advance bipolar research.Read more in UIC News, or watch on WTTW's Chicago Tonight. 

Photo courtesy of Manual Martinez, Crain's Chicago Business.Over the past ten years, undergraduate enrollment in computer science at UIC's College of Engineering has grown more than the national average. Read Making Room for a Boom at UIC in Crain's Chicago Business.

Miiri Kotche, PhD, clinical associate professor of bioengineering, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award to study medical-device design in Finland at the Helsinki-based VTT Technical Research Center, the largest multidisciplinary research organization in Northern Europe.Kotche is the director of the Medical Accelerator for Devices Laboratory and the Clinical Immersion Program for engineering and design students. She also leads the the Innovation in Medicine Program and the Freshman Engineering Success Program.Read more about her upcoming research here.

A new computing resource called SABER (Shared Analytics and Big-data Enterprise Resource) funded by $1.1 million from the National Science Foundation will support interdisciplinary high-performance computing (HPC) and big-data mining research at UIC.Researchers in nine colleges across campus will utilize the equipment, including Farzad Mashayek (pictured above; right), professor and head of mechanical and industrial engineering and SABER's principal investigator, who uses HPC to study supersonic combustion in the Computational Multiphase Transport Laboratory; Philip S. Yu, professor of computer science and Wexler Chair in Information Technology, who studies big-data mining in e-commerce, health care, social networks, and more in the Big Data and Social Computing Laboratory; and Thomas Royston, professor and head of the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Bioengineering, who…