Luke Taylor: Names in the news

Dec. 20—Welcome to "Illini Insider," your regular dose of University of Illinois news from beat writer Luke Taylor. Fresh out of college himself, he's always looking for story tips, photo ideas and social media mentions. Email him at ltaylor@news-gazette.com and he'll give chase.

Just a few of the folks at UI who have made headlines lately:

The first Robotics Medal at the first MassRobotics Women in Robotics Gala went to NANCY AMATO, the head of the Computer Science Department over at Grainger. It's the first award specifically meant to recognize women in the field and it came with a nice $50,000 from sponsor Amazon Robotics. Amato was selected for her research on the algorithmic foundations of motion planning, computational biology, computational geometry, and parallel computing. (If you just said "What?", you're not alone. Her work involves a lot of complex data analysis and math!)

On a similar note, the Society of Women Engineers recognized bioengineering professor REBECCA RECK with an Emerging Engineering Educator Award. She was chosen for her work both in and out of the classroom, including involvement in groups like SWE. Reck said this is an incentive to keep it up and continue leading by example for other women in her field.

Business Insider ran a full feature on English and information sciences professor TED UNDERWOOD, calling him "America's Greatest AI Visionary." This was inspired by Underwood's work to get ChatGPT to measure fictional time in novels. He designed a prompt that got the program to "read" through passages and determine how much time the author was depicting, allowing for some interesting analysis on writing trends. Underwood has more ideas on how generative AI can be used for literature analysis and thus analysis on humans themselves.