News: Faculty

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.”

The moon’s surface formed at least 40 million years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study of an ancient crystal embedded in rock collected by Apollo 17 astronauts. Washington Post article features GeoSci alumna Jennika Greer and professor Philipp Heck.

Prof. Ben Zhao discusses in Scientific American article how AI models are often trained using information not intended for the public, such as medical images.

New Scientist highlighted the work of former Dept. of the Geophysical Sciences PhD student and postdoc James Franke on shifting agricultural regions under climate change (with Prof. Liz Moyer), and Moyer was quoted.

A qualitative research study conducted by faculty and students at the University of Chicago and University of Maryland revealed key tensions and breakdowns in the sociotechnical infrastructure of emergency remote learning that contributed to elementary school children’s privacy and data being compromised.

In Arizona Daily Sun article, Geophysical Sciences Prof. Noboru Nakamura says that "when the jet stream meanders, it creates a heat dome, a pool of very warm air under this displaced jet stream...it's almost like a warm blanket."

MarkTechPost article highlights UChicago researchers' SWE-bench framework, which focuses on real-world software engineering issues, like patch generation and complex context reasoning, offering a more realistic and comprehensive evaluation for enhancing language models with software engineering capabilities.