News: Faculty

Phys.org article reviews a paper describing the most distant black hole ever seen in X-rays, on which Astro Asst. Prof. Irina Zhuravleva is an author.

In an AI Business article, CS Asst. Prof. Chenhao Tan says that “being made to model human thought processes is critical for developing AI systems that can be tailored to human needs and preferences so that they can effectively assist humans towards their goals.”

In a Newsweek article, GeoSci Prof. David Keith discusses his research on solar geoengineering, saying that it is "at best a weak supplement to what we must do to cut emissions," rather than a climate solution in and of itself, adding that the risks of solar geoengineering must be weighed against the risks of continued warming without it.

New York Times article highlights CS Prof. Ben Zhao's "Nightshade," a tool that aims to “poison” A.I. models by allowing artists to upload their images with code intended to mislead A.I. art generators.

Computer Science Assistant Professor Ken Nakagaki and a group of undergraduate students from the University of Chicago displayed three research prototypes at this year’s Ars Electronica Festival. The work played off of the festival’s theme, “Who Owns the Truth?”.

Science article discusses the scientific debate around the universe's rate of expansion, with quotes from UChicago research fellow Tanvi Karwal.

Researchers from the Department of Computer Science have created a side-channel attack that identifies how easily hackers could guess a user's passwords or credit card numbers by listening to the audio of a SmartTV. The work has been recognized by Samsung, and the group is now featured in the Samsung Hall of Fame for Smart TV, Audio, and Displays.

For years, if you asked the people working to create new pharmaceutical drugs what they wished for, at the top of their lists would be a way to easily replace a carbon atom with a nitrogen atom in a molecule. But two studies from chemists at the University of Chicago, published in Science and Nature, offer two new methods to address this wish. The findings could make it easier to develop new drugs.

The National Science Foundation has awarded $3.7 million to the University of Chicago for the first year of a grant that may provide up to $21.4 million for the final designs for a next-generation set of telescopes to map the light from the earliest moments of the universe—the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Climate scientist Tiffany Shaw will study whether climate predictions were right, for the right reasons.

In a Scientific American article, CS Prof. Ben Zhao discusses the ways that data, though it may be meant for private use, can end up in public training sets for AI.

In an MIT Technology Review article, CS Prof. Ben Zhao discusses his new tool "Nightshade," which messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models. 

New UChicago, Field Museum study finds lunar crystals formed at least 4.46 billion years ago.

In an interview with APS News, Kolb urges physicists to combat scientific illiteracy and discusses the Big Bang, parallel universes, and the need for public outreach.

The Norman F. Ramsey Prize recognizes outstanding accomplishments in the two fields of Norman Ramsey: atomic, molecular, and optical physics; and precision tests of fundamental laws and symmetries. DeMille, along with Gerald Gabrielse (Northwestern), and John M. Doyle (Harvard), earned the prize “for pioneering work in molecular physics, cooling, and spectroscopy that has profoundly advanced the search for the electric dipole moment of the electron, and for placing stringent constraints on modifications to the Standard Model in a tabletop experiment.”