Funding
The group works closely with a small number of industrial partners with whom we have identified common interests and goals. If your company would like to become an industrial partner, please contact us directly.
We also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of private and governmental sponsors. Research grants and gifts include the following.
DARPA
- “Modeling and Measuring Scientific Creativity,” 2024–2025
National Science Foundation
- “GCR: Synthetic Neurocomputers for Cognitive Information Processing,” 2022–2027
- “I-Corps Hub: Great Lakes Region,” 2022–2026
- “Expeditions: Mind in Vitro — Computing with Living Neurons,” 2022–2029
- “Center for Research on Programmable Plant Systems (CROPPS),” 2021–2025
- “Pushing the Boundaries of Classical and Quantum Information Processing Toward Enhanced Security and Energy-Efficient Reliability,” 2021–2024
- “Efficient Strategies for Pandemic Monitoring and Recovery,” 2020–2023
- “Foundations of Belief Sharing in Human-Machine Systems,” 2017–2021
- “Towards an Information Theory of Attention,” 2016–2018
- “Towards an Interoperable Food Data Ontology,” 2016
- “Matching Non-Native Transcribers to the Distinctive Features of the Language Transcribed,” 2015–2017
National Security Agency (via Brookhaven National Laboratory)
- “Q System,” 2025–present
IBM
- “AI for Code,” 2023–2024
- “Discovery Accelerator Institute,” 2021–
- “Illinois Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C3SR),” 2016–2021
- “Toward Cognitive Systems for Scientific Discovery (IBM Faculty Award),” 2014
Zhejiang University–University of Illinois Institute (ZJUI)
- “Center for Heterogeneously Integrated Brain Inspired Computing (HYBRID),” 2023–2028
- “Center for Pathogen Diagnostics,” 2020–2025
- “Universal Compression of Deep Networks at the Information-Theoretic Limit,” 2018–2019
ARPA-E
- “Rapid AI based Dissection of Ashes using Raman and XRF Spectroscopy (RADAR X),” 2021–2023
USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture
- “Building Resilience to Shocks and Disruptions: Creating Sustainable and Equitable Local and Regional Food Systems in the US Midwest Region and Beyond,” 2023–2027
- “Neuronal Basis of Feeding Behavior in a Plant-parasitic Nematode,” 2021–2025
- “Comparative Connectome of the Soybean Cyst Nematode and Establishment of an Online Anatomical Atlas,” 2018–2019
Department of Energy
- “Pathways towards Energy-Efficient Quantum Computing,” 2026–2027
- “Objective-Driven Data Reduction for Scientific Workflows,” 2021–2024
Army Research Laboratory
- “Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT),” 2021–2023
Discovery Partners Institute (University of Illinois)
- “AI-Aided Co-Creation Platforms to Enhance Human Wellbeing,” 2021–2022
Office of the Vice Chancellor (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
- “Social Music Curation, Exploration, and Co-Creativity for Anti-Racist Teaching in K-12 Classrooms and Community Groups via Inclusive Artificial Intelligence,” 2021–2022
Meta (Facebook)
- “Smart Concrete for FB Data Centers II,” 2021–2022
- “Smart Concrete for FB Data Centers,” 2019–2020
- “AI Tools for Localized Concrete Formulation,” 2019
Interstellar Initiative (New York Academy of Sciences and AMED, Japan)
- “Age-dependent Trajectory of Exosomal Protein Distribution in Healthy Aging and Alzheimer’s Pathology,” 2020–2021
NVIDIA
- “AI-Aided Music Co-Creation Platform to Enhance Human Wellbeing,” 2022
- “Neuroscience Discovery with Deep Learning,” 2021
SRC/DARPA
- “Systems on Nanoscale Information fabriCs (SONIC) Center,” 2014–2017
- “Energy Efficient Image Storage and Compression with RRAM Arrays,” 2017
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
- “Compression of Structural, Cartographic, and Multimodal Cell Data,” 2018–2019
FACE Foundation (Thomas Jefferson Fund)
- “Reliable Artificial Intelligence on Energy-Efficient Hardware,” 2018–2020
Air Force STTR
- “UMIMMI: Universal Multivariate Information Measures for Multisensor Inference (Phase I),” 2016–2017
- “UMIMMI: Universal Multivariate Information Measures for Multisensor Inference (Phase II),” 2017–2019
Center for Digital Agriculture
- “Virtual Farming Networks for Smallholders through Digital Communities of Trust,” 2019–2020
General Dynamics Corporation
- “Human Gesture Analysis Recognition and Computer Vision Assistance for Tactical Environments,” 2019
National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office (Singapore)
- “Crowdsourcing, Choice Modelling, and Prediction for Healthy Eating,” 2019–2020
Siebel Energy Institute
- “Incentives, Choices, and Analytics for Electric Vehicle Fleets in Jointly Managing Urban Traffic and the Smart Grid,” 2017
Illinois Proof-of-Concept Award
- “Machine Learning for Nanopore Bio-Detection,” 2016–2017
Los Alamos National Laboratory
- “Computational Creativity for Materials,” 2016
Illinois Learning Sciences Design Initiative
- “Investigating the Neural Correlates of Learning in Cognitive Training,” 2015
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (New Frontiers Initiative)
- “Information Lattices for Interpretable Knowledge Discovery and Nearest-Neighbor Classification,” 2021
Amazon
- “Grounded Language Learning and Multimodal Equivariance,” 2021–2022
National Academy of Medicine (QuickFire Challenge)
- “Decoding age-dependent trajectory of exosomal protein in healthy aging and Alzheimer’s pathology,” 2023
VinUni–Illinois Smart Health Center (VISHC)
- “From Causal Understanding of Healthy Longevity to Smart Health,” 2024–2032
Grainger College of Engineering (Strategic Instructional Innovations Program)
- “Artificially Successful? Investigating and Responding to Generative AI’s Capability to Solve Course Assignments,” 2025–2026
Institute for Government and Public Affairs (University of Illinois System)
- “Policy for Responsible AI Research, Innovation, and Education (PRAIRIE): Empowering Illinois’ Educational Institutions and Incumbent Workforce in the Age of Generative AI,” 2025–2027
Project names and dates follow the research grants and gifts listed in the CV updated July 7, 2026.