6/24/2025 Sudhir Gowda and Jonathan Makela
Written by Sudhir Gowda and Jonathan Makela
The recent 2025 Illinois Scholars Undergraduate Research (ISUR) Expo featured student research projects from across The Grainger College of Engineering, including nine projects from IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute Undergraduate Research Experience (IIDAI URE) participants conducted throughout the 2024-2025 academic year. These students presented research spanning AI, machine learning, climate science, and computing architecture, including Yuhao Cheng and Tong Li's work on reinforcement learning for web automation, Edward Dzieza's framework for secure multi-FPGA sharing of LLMs, and Dhanish Natarajan and Samuel Gerstein's research on bring together multipole climate models through using neural networks.
Other IIDAI URE contributions included geospatial data analysis by Davis Zhang, open-source hardware design datasets by Shalini Sivakumar and Xing Zhao, and optimization techniques for machine learning applications by Krish Patel and Vishesh Prasad. Marissa Lanz presented work on an open-source FPGA SmartNIC, Aryan Gupta and David Fu trained various LLMs to produce Ansible playbooks, while Pranav Penmatcha introduced a novel model framework for multi-modal and hyper spectral geospatial data.
We extend our thanks to the faculty sponsors who guided these projects: Professors Vikram Adve, Deming Chen, Minh Do, Jingrui He, Sasa Misailovic, Deepak Vasisht, Yuxiong Wang, Han Zhao, and ChengXiang Zhai, as well as David Grove and Hendrik Hamann from IBM Research. We also appreciate the graduate mentors whose guidance and support were essential to the students' progress. The students' work exemplifies the productive partnership between IBM and Illinois, highlighting the effective workforce development and research innovation enabled by this collaboration.