UIUC CS Students Create Mobile Learning Apps for Android

Students in professor Klara Nahrstedt’s CS 425 Distributed Systems course had a unique opportunity this semester.  Test their course knowledge by creating distributed applications to help other undergraduate students use them in other classes.

Students in the CS 425 class spent their semester applying their skills in distributed systems to the task of learning to develop distributed applications on top of the Google Android development platform.  The Google phones purchase was sponsored by the Vodafone educational grant. The semester culminated in a head-to-head competition, sponsored by Qualcomm and Vodafone, to see who could create the best learning-focused application.
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Samsung and University of Illinois enter into IP license agreement

The University of Illinois, today announced that it has entered into a license agreement with Samsung Electronics. The patented technology covers the use of deuterium in semiconductor devices and provides a solution to hot-carrier effects, which are known to cause problems with device reliability.

Under the terms of the agreement, Samsung will be able to use the University’s patented technology for semiconductor devices through the lifetime of the patents. Read more

E-waste design competition at Illinois expanding to international event

By Sharita Forrest, Arts Editor | 217-244-1072; slforres@illinois.edu

Of the millions of cutting-edge electronic gadgets exchanged as gifts this holiday season, many soon will become expensive dust collectors as the pace of technological change renders cell phones, computers and other electronic components obsolete almost as quickly as eager consumers can unwrap and learn how to use them.

An estimated 2.5 million tons of electronic products are discarded each year, and devising economical and environmentally responsible methods for managing this e-waste is an issue of growing concern to environmentalists and world leaders. Read more

Ultrathin LEDs create new classes of lighting and display systems

A new process for creating ultrathin, ultrasmall inorganic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and assembling them into large arrays offers new classes of lighting and display systems with interesting properties, such as see-through construction and mechanical flexibility, that would be impossible to achieve with existing technologies. Read more

Synthetic protein mimics structure, function of metalloprotein in nature

Scientists have designed a synthetic protein that is both a structural model and a functional model of a native protein, nitric-oxide reductase.

The designed protein “provides an excellent model system for studying nitric-oxide reductase, and for creating biocatalysts for biotechnological, environmental and pharmaceutical applications,” said University of Illinois chemistry professor Yi Lu, who directed the work. Read more