12/29/2019 Allie Arp, CSL
Written by Allie Arp, CSL
CSL had another great year in 2019. While there were many accomplishments to be proud of, new innovations and medical research were the two most popular topics for our readers. Below is this year’s list of the top five CSL news stories of 2019, based on how many clicks each got on the CSL website.
Starting with #5 CSL professor leads research to improve VR technology, train medical fields
CSL Professor Kesh Kesavadas is working on improving virtual reality in a way that would cut development time in half and allow for realistic training of future medical professionals.
“Most of the current virtual reality technology tends to be fully computer graphics and that takes a very long time,” said Kesavadas Health Care Engineering Systems Center (HCESC) director and Industrial and Systems Engineering professor. “We have a different approach: mixed reality. We mix 360® videos and a limited amount of computer graphics. We merge them and augment the videos.”
Students that get accepted into an engineering program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are some of the best and brightest in the country. Give them a task and they’ll figure out a way to accomplish it. But what if the students didn’t have a task, just room to think and create? That is the idea behind the new startup company Alchemy, created by CSL professor Sanjay Patel.
#3 CSL Professors win MURI Award to build Cyberoctopus
A “cyberoctopus” may sound like a superhero, but it is actually the focus of a multidisciplinary university research initiative (MURI) award led by CSL’s Girish Chowdhary. The project, funded by the Department of Defense (DoD) Office of Naval Research, is looking to advance the frontiers of AI, control, and robotics, by learning from the brain and body of octopuses and other cephalopods.
In January, CSL Assistant Professor Andrew Miller received an email out of the blue from a 17-year-old high school student in Mumbai, India. What resulted was a chain of correspondence that ended with high school senior Aman Ladia spending the summer at CSL as one of the youngest research scholars on campus.
And the #1 story for 2019, CSL researchers develop tools to aid in Alzheimer's diagnosis and prognosis
Alzheimer’s Disease has long stumped the medical community. Even now, researchers aren’t sure how it evolves or who is at risk for developing it. A team of CSL researchers, led by Ravishankar Iyer, is working to create tools that could help improve the diagnosis of the illness and produce more accurate prognoses.
“Alzheimer’s is reaching epidemic proportions,” said Yoga Varatharajah, a CSL graduate student. “There’s no cure and a lot of unknowns in the disease pathology.”