Illinois Innovators

If you are all familiar with the Egyptian Pyramids, then you are no doubt aware of what an engineering marvel they are. Consider that they were built around 2500 BC, the largest stands 449 feet tall, weighs 6.5 million tons and covers 13 acres. But exactly how were they built? University of Illinois alumnus Stephen Blakely has studied its construction extensively and has formed a theory, the use o...

David Forsyth couldn’t image 30 years ago that his career in academia would involve standing in front of a moving driverless vehicle with a traffic cone on his head. However, this spring that’s what the South African born professor of computer science did as part his University of Illinois class on artificial intelligence. He talks about how the future of programming autonomous vehicles.

Cast 21 is revolutionizing the future of bone mobilizations. Instead of a traditional cast of cloth and plaster for a fracture in an arm or leg, the company has introduced a brace with a netted structure. It is breathable and washable and allows for easy access to the area for cleaning. Ashley Moy, Cast 21 CEO and recent Illinois graduate in bioengineering, joins the program to discuss the progres...

It has been predicted that all the world's data, if stored on DNA, could fit into a trunk of a car. Olgica Milenkovic, and her team received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate how to encode data in a manner suitable for portable and robust DNA-based data storage systems. Joining Olgica on the podcast are Ryan Gabrys and Houssein Yazdi.

Fullstack is an immersive software engineering school or "coding bootcamp" in lower Manhattan and Chicago. Seeing that coding is a skill with increasing career applications, David Yang and Nimit Maru founded Fullstack in 2012 through a collaboration at Y Combinator. David and Nimit met on the first day of freshman orientation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After graduating in 2...

Terry Howerton is the founder and CEO of TechNexus, a Chicago-based venture development firm building a new, collaborative model for leading corporations to engage and extract value from the global entrepreneurial ecosystem. A lifelong entrepreneur, Terry talks about Chicago as an incubator for tech talent and companies

Personify uses the most advanced technologies in computer vision and machine learning to develop awesome immersive experiences involving video. CEO and co-founder of Personify, Sanjay has grown Personify from 5 people at the University of Illinois to a global team of more than 30 technologists and innovators, with dozens of partnerships and relationships with companies like Intel, SAP, and Lenovo.

Mani Golparvar Fard, CEO of Reconstruct, and his team at the University of Illinois has developed a sophisticated construction monitoring systems, which takes videos and photos using drones and a web-based platform, which continuously reconstructs and visualizes reality directly within 4D BIM, measures progress and productivity, and analyzes risk for delay.

Mayank Kale, is building the startup Invoq Health to develop a new way to deploy high- tech data collection, retention and analysis solutions intuitively in low tech environments - enabling the adoption of important population and health management applications in under served markets of India and Africa. Mayank holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urban...

Divey Gulati founded Ship Bob, Inc., to help small businesses give customers Amazon-level logistics. Gulati as both bachelor's degree in computer engineering and an MBA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Andrew Miller, a leading voice on Bitcoin and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois, chats about the origins and future of cryptocurrency.