News Bureau

The campus is starting to feel the pinch of the state budget impasse.

Five years ago, with a Fulbright Fellowship funding his summer study in Malta, U. of I. architecture professor Mir Ali agreed to assist the Malta Environmental and Planning Authority and the University of Malta in determining whether more skyscrapers should be built in the tiny island nation. As one of the most densely populated countries in the world, Malta consists of a group of islands, the largest of which is the "rock" just off the toe of Italy. The Republic of Malta's government had received close to 50 proposals from developers wanting to build high-rise office buildings, hotels and condominiums.

Faculty members teaching six Grand Challenge Experience courses this fall say they've enjoyed opening students' eyes to the unnoticed connections of a research campus, and they hope it leads to a new way of engaging student participation and thinking.

The heavy-lifting phase is just beginning, but members of the committee leading the search for a permanent chancellor say identifying the best candidate will take the strength of the entire campus.

The Indian Graduate Students Association sponsored Diwali on the Quad on Nov. 13 as the kickoff for the celebration of the traditional Hindu “festival of lights.”

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. That H.G. Wells' intelligence was rivaled only by his appetite for women has never been a secret.

Local representatives of the Illinois Coalition to Invest in Higher Education used a Feb. 22 press conference at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center to illustrate the plight of students and communities facing uncertainty over the state budget impasse.

The annual summary of committee members on the Urbana-Champaign campus can be viewed online. In an effort to provide the most accurate information, Inside Illinois has compiled a list of URLs for units that appoint committees.

The university's top administrators covered a wide variety of topics at the Urbana-Champaign Senate-sponsored annual meeting of the faculty, held Oct. 26 in the Illini Union Ballroom.

The Urbana-Champaign community will join the U. of I. campus community in January to celebrate the legacy of legendary civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Clarence Shelley, a former dean of students and associate vice chancellor, will receive the Chancellor's Medallion today for his 33 years of exemplary service to the University of Illinois and the Champaign-Urbana community.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Innovative architectural projects will be featured in two new exhibitions on view Feb. 3-25 at I space, the Chicago gallery of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Jeff Moore will serve as the interim director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology; Paul Ellinger became the new vice provost for budget and resource planning; Katherine Galvin will join the Office of the Chancellor as an associate chancellor.

The settlement agreement between the University of Illinois and Steven Salaita was approved by the U. of I. Board of Trustees at its Nov. 12 meeting in Chicago.

The University of Illinois contributes $13.9 billion in annual income to the state’s economy – and a 19.3 percent return on the public’s investment – through spending by its campuses, employees and students and the increased earning power of its graduates, according to a new economic impact study released Oct. 21.

Faculty members, academic professionals retire

Over the past decade, the World Wide Web has become a ubiquitous presence and a multi-billion-dollar industry, according to analysts. And one catalyst for the Web's explosive growth came from the UI's Urbana campus. Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser made available to the public at large, was developed by a software development group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Although the Internet had been in existence for many years when Mosaic debuted in 1993, Mosaic helped it evolve into an information superhighway by sparking the public's interest in exploring this new frontier. "NCSA became part of Internet history when it released Mosaic and the general public began to discover the Web," said NCSA Director Dan Reed. "Today's browsers still depend on that original bit of ingenuity." In the early 1990s, the network of computers that made up the Internet and the data they contained were largely the realm of universities, information technology professionals and the military. Simply locating and accessing information on the system could be a daunting task for nontechnical people who lacked proficiency with Unix software. "It was the dark ages," said Michelle Butler, technical program manager at NCSA and one of the many staff and students connected with the Mosaic project. "You couldn't get to any information out there at all. There was no way to search it or list where things were at. There was no common spot to get data from or a common format for data. There was no reason for the regular person to use their home computer to access the Internet because there was nothing out there for them." The prototype for Mosaic was developed during 1992 by a group of NCSA staff and students who were intrigued by two recent developments in computing: the hypertext protocol, a system of electronic links for structuring and displaying documents, and a program called the World Wide Web, a system for linking computer systems and sharing documents over the Internet that was developed in 1989 by a software engineer at CERN, the European Particle Physics Research Laboratory, in Switzerland. The NCSA team visualized greater potential applications for these mechanisms and incorporated them into a software program that was given the name Mosaic. When Mosaic made its 1993 debut, it opened up the Internet for nontechnical consumers by simplifying access. Users did not need to be proficient with a slew of cumbersome, single-purpose applications; even neophytes could "surf" Internet pages with relative ease, thanks to hyperlinks - electronic links that allowed users to jump between documents and parts of documents. Behind the scenes, Mosaic could interface with protocols such as FTP, Gopher and Telnet to find and retrieve information. Files Mosaic could not handle internally, such as sound files and JPEG images, were automatically routed to external players or viewers. But perhaps what really sparked the public's imagination was Mosaic's graphical capabilities, which delivered full-color images, sound and textual formatting, adding exciting dimensions to Internet materials. Once users discovered that perusing documents in cyberspace could be fun and relatively easy, more people started getting interested in using the Internet and the number of Web pages available began to multiply exponentially. Businesses also began taking notice of the Internet and its potential as a marketplace and advertising medium. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the scripting language Mosaic used to create the graphical and textual effects, started becoming the standard protocol for Web pages. Until that time, users often encountered problems loading and viewing pages when the coding was incompatible with their browsers. "Mosaic actually evolved the entire Internet," Butler said. Although other browsers existed at the time, Mosaic was the first widely distributed product. Noncommercial users could download it free from the NCSA site. The X (Unix) platform version was released in April 1993, and versions for Windows and Macintosh followed in December, providing the browser to users with all sizes of computer systems. Within a year of Mosaic's release, the NCSA Web site recorded more than a million downloads, and that number doubled again by 1995, with new users acquiring the popular browser at the rate of 70,000 per month. "We couldn't keep the server up to hand this code out fast enough," Butler said. In 1994, NCSA began transferring Mosaic to the commercial sector via Spyglass Inc., and licensing agreements with more than 100 software development companies, including Microsoft, which incorporated it into Internet Explorer. Although NCSA no longer supports Mosaic, documentation and information are still available in the archives on NCSA's site. The 10th anniversary of Mosaic's release will be commemorated April 29 with a symposium featuring a panel discussion by several computing experts, who will talk about Mosaic's impact and the future of computing.

Kelly Tu, an assistant professor of human development and family studies in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, is among the new faculty members to be featured in our New Faces feature. Inside Illinois continues its tradition of introducing some of the new faculty members on campus and will feature one new colleague each week during the fall semester. 

Redesigned i-cards provide new look, improved features

Undergraduate education at Illinois is in the process of a new experiment. This semester marked the start of a multiyear pilot designed to analyze what general education is and what role it serves on a research campus such as the University of Illinois.

Susan Burton, a nationally recognized advocate for restoring civil and human rights to formerly incarcerated women, will discuss her new book and the challenges of re-entering society after prison at an event Tuesday, May 15,  in Champaign.

Recently retired and long-serving staff employees will be honored at the 2015 Staff Service Recognition Banquet Nov. 5 at the I Hotel and Conference Center. The program will honor 110 employees who retired between Sept. 1, 2014, and Aug. 31, 2015. In addition employess will be honored for service completed during that time.

Chalk one up for the pedestrians after Illinois lawmakers last year changed the state's crosswalk law, forcing motorists to stop - not just yield - if a walker has already entered a crosswalk.

The University of Illinois system appreciates and welcomes the bipartisan effort in Springfield to provide partial, stopgap funding for the state’s public universities, which have been forced to manage through the first 10 months of fiscal year 2016 with no state appropriation.

Krannert Art Museum will act on its multiyear commitment to transform galleries and other public spaces by renovating four main-floor galleries this summer. As a result, the museum will close to the public after the final day of its spring semester exhibition calendar, May 15.

Babette Hiles, who has led the planning of U. of I. commencement ceremonies for 19 years, doesn't lose sleep worrying about sputtering microphones or collapsing stages.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Many people know that if you bite or break a Wint-O-Green Lifesaver in the dark, you will see a spark of green light. That light is called mechanoluminescence, also known as triboluminescence.

Kevin Leicht is a new professor and the head of the department of sociology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

This year's winter session cohort reached 1,600 students after the number of courses offered was increased from eight to 17 because of last year's interest. The colleges offering winter session courses are Liberal Arts and Sciences, Business, Media and Applied Health Sciences.

Techniques designed to make classroom instruction accessible to students with disabilities can be a rising tide that lifts all boats, according to speakers at the March 4 faculty retreat.

There are very few things in the Illinois Street Residence Halls kitchen that Rhonda Winston doesn't have her hand in. To rephrase, Winston, a kitchen helper since 2001, is an integral part of every dish served to the students of ISRH.

The U. of I system’s long-term strategic plan will leverage the combined academic power of all three campuses to uphold the land-grant principle of “serving the public good,” while continuing to offer students a diversified, world-class liberal arts education.

Campustown lights take on a holiday glow in this time-exposure photo at the intersection of Green and Wright streets. After a short break, business at the U. of I. will resume Jan. 4.  Students return for classes Jan. 19.

Before coming to Illinois, Tim Prunkard, the technical services supervisor at the Nathan M. Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory, had always considered himself a lineman.

Simon Rogers is a new assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

When anthrax became a household name in 2011, even curators of some herbaria were unaware that samples of Bacillus anthracis, the source of anthrax, had been housed in their microfungal collections for more than a hundred years. Recently, a digitization project at the Illinois Natural History Survey at the Prairie Research Institute unearthed the whereabouts of historical samples, including one at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The unearthing of a 100-year-old box in the wall of the Lincoln Hall gateway last month is thrilling to Melvyn Skvarla, a Facilities and Services planner and the university's campus historic preservation officer.

Judy Whittington is one of the first people who new faculty and staff members and students meet in the department of astronomy. She makes them feel welcome and continues to provide support throughout their time at the university.

Sergei Maslov, professor of bioengineering and the Bliss Faculty Scholar in the College of Engineering, is among the new faculty members to be featured in our annual "New Faces" feature. Inside Illinois continues its tradition of introducing some of the new faculty members on campus and will feature one new colleague online each week during the fall semester. 

Senators overwhelmingly approved a resolution Sept. 21 calling for the postponement of a universitywide background check policy set to go into effect Oct. 5.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - After Rodney Howlett graduates from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a master's degree in architecture, he hopes to return to his home base near St. Louis to design churches.

Kimberly Armstrong will serve as the director of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation’s Center for Library Initiatives, effective March 1; Antoinette Burton, a professor of history and the Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, has been named director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, pending the approval of the U. of I. Board of Trustees.

A chapter in the history of the department of nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering is coming to an end with the dismantling of the UI Advanced Teaching Research Isotope General Atomic reactor and demolition of the Nuclear Reactor Building.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Because deterioration to the Alma Mater sculpture is more extensive than an initial inspection of the exterior indicated, the restoration of the 5-ton bronze statue is going to cost more and take longer.

Some say a good elevator mechanic is not seen.

After a pilot test involving a dozen colleges and units, the illinois.edu domain was opened to the general campus community Nov. 1 to begin moving Web site addresses from uiuc.edu to illinois.edu.

The Office of the Provost invites faculty and staff members and students to attend open meetings this month to discuss the budgeting process and actions the campus is taking in response to diminishing state funding.

A new dining experience awaits students who will be eating at Pennsylvania Avenue Residence Halls this coming school year. The kitchens and dining rooms have undergone some physical and operational transformations.

Aaron McCollough, an assistant professor for the university library and the head of scholarly communications and publishing, is among the new faculty members to be included in our New Faces feature.

Assessment is a tool that can be used to measure anything, but according to Jennifer Amos, a professor of bioengineering and this year's Distinguished Teacher-Scholar, it's especially useful in the classroom.