uiuc computer science essay

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Undergraduate Admissions

Deadline Update: We want to ensure anyone applying for federal financial aid has enough time to make an informed decision regarding their college choice! For this reason, we're extending our enrollment decision deadline to May 15.

Writing Prompts for First-Year Applicants

Following are our writing prompts for first-year students applying for fall 2024 admission. Writing prompts for fall 2024 will be announced in August.

Major-Specific Prompts

You'll answer two to three prompts as part of your application. The questions you'll answer will depend on whether you're applying to a major or to our undeclared program , and if you've selected a second choice . Each response should be approximately 150 words . If you're applying through Common App, you'll find our major-specific writing prompts in the "Writing" tab of our supplemental questions after adding us as one of your colleges.

If You're Applying to a Major :

• Explain, in detail, an experience you've had in the past 3 to 4 years related to your first-choice major. This can be an experience from an extracurricular activity, in a class you've taken, or through something else.
• Describe your personal and/or career goals after graduating from UIUC and how your selected first-choice major will help you achieve them.

If You're Applying to Our Undeclared Program in the Division of General Studies:

• What are your academic interests? Please include 2-3 majors you're considering at Illinois and why.
• What are your future career or academic goals? You may include courses you took in high school and how these impacted your goals.

If You've Selected a Second-Choice Major (Including Undeclared ):

• Please explain your interest in your second-choice major or your overall academic or career goals.

Essay Prompts

You'll also answer one essay prompt as part of your application. Prompts are the same whether you apply through myIllini or the Common App. Select and answer the prompt of your choice from the full list found on the Common App website . Your essay response can be anywhere from 250 to 650 words total.

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UIUC Supplemental Essays 2023-24 – Prompts and Advice

September 13, 2023

The University of Illinois — Urbana Champaign is one of the top public universities in the entire United States. Top-ranked computer science, engineering, and business programs, in particular, attract an endless stream of high-caliber applicants from around the globe. Great grades and test scores will put aspiring members of the Fighting Illini on strong footing. However, you are also required to address 2-3 UIUC supplemental essay prompts.

 (Want to learn more about How to Get Into UIUC? Visit our blog entitled:  How to Get Into the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign: Admissions Data and Strategies  for all of the most recent admissions data as well as tips for gaining acceptance.)

Let’s dive right in and begin examining the 2023-24 UIUC supplemental essays. Two important notes:

• You will be addressing 2-3 of these essays, depending on which category you fall into.
• Each response is a max of 150 words.

UIUC Supplemental Essays: If You’re Applying to a Major:

1) explain, in detail, an experience you’ve had in the past 3 to 4 years related to your first-choice major. this can be an experience from an extracurricular activity, in a class you’ve taken, or through something else..

UIUC is not necessarily asking you to write about the in-class or extracurricular experience which led to you earning the most prestigious awards or holding the highest position of leadership. The university is going to see all of your accomplishments in the Honors and Activities sections of the Common App. As such, you want to ask yourself two main questions:

1) Which experience best illustrates my passion and commitment to my first choice major?

2) Which experience is closest to my heart and most representative of my unique passions?

Pick the option that will allow you to deliver additional detail that may be memorable to the admissions reader. Start this process by asking yourself, “What is the most interesting and consequential moment that I have experienced in a classroom setting or in my extracurricular activities?” If you can identify one clear-cut moment, that is likely the activity worth sharing with the UIUC admissions staff.

2) Describe your personal and/or career goals after graduating from UIUC and how your selected first-choice major will help you achieve them.

This prompt shares some of the same elements of a traditional “Why Us?” essay, but UIUC is particularly interested in hearing about why the curriculum in your desired academic department is attractive to you—not so much about your love for the football team or the beautiful campus. Below are some quick tips for writing an essay that will help your admissions cause:

• Cite specific academic programs , professors ,  research opportunities , internship/externship programs ,  study abroad programs ,  student-run organizations , etc.
• State why your chosen program is the perfect fit for you  and why you are the perfect fit for it.
• Offer insight into your future personal/academic/career goals. It’s okay if you’re not 100% sure what you want to do at age 25 (most teens are not). Feel free to speculate based on your current mindset and interests.

In summary, you’ll want to dedicate time to researching more about your prospective college/department and what makes it truly world-class. The more specific you can get here, the better your UIUC essays will be!

UIUC Supplemental Essays: If You’re Applying to Our Undeclared Program in the Division of General Studies:

1) what are your academic interests please include 2-3 majors you’re considering at illinois and why..

Your strengths will likely be evident from other data points (AP scores, classroom grades, SAT/ACT results, etc.). Therefore we recommend focusing the bulk of your response on your specific academic interests that relate to your major of choice.

Whether it’s a general love for math/science or literature or a specific interest in aerospace engineering or 19th century French novels, use this opportunity to share what makes you tick, the ideas that keep you up at night, and what subject inspires you to dream big. What topic makes you read books and online content until your eyes bleed? Share the manner in which you relentlessly pursue knowledge. Whether it’s falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about the nature of time or consuming thousands of hours of podcasts on game theory, this is a chance to illustrate the ways in which you are an obsessive learner with an endless thirst for information. The admissions reader should emerge from reading this essay with the sense that you are a sincerely curious young person with a strong intellectual drive.

Finally, be sure to connect these interests to 2-3 majors at Illinois and support your reasoning with school-specific offerings and resources, like academic departments , courses , research initiatives , etc.

2) What are your future career or academic goals? You may include courses you took in high school and how these impacted your goals.

Note that this question is a bit different than the one asked of students with a firm first-choice major. We recommend providing a straightforward answer here. If you are Undeclared, you may not have a firm idea of your academic goals, but you can use your current academic interests (the ones explored in the question above) as well as past academic experiences to guide your answer. Similarly, your career intentions may be relatively unformed. Use this space to share academic/career areas that may be of interest. Don’t sweat it if your plans are still in a nascent stage. This is normal for a 17 or 18-year-old, and UIUC will understand.

UIUC Supplemental Essays: If You’ve Selected a Second-Choice Major (Including Undeclared):

Please explain your interest in your second-choice major or your overall academic or career goals..

See answer #1 for those selecting a major. You are essentially repeating this process for a different field. However, you probably don’t want to have two completely unrelated majors/career goals. For example, if your first choice was business and your second choice was economics, it’s easy to explain the relationship. If the fields are more disparate (e.g. Dance & Chemical Engineering, be sure to provide a thorough explanation.

How important are the essays at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign?

UIUC only labels two factors as being “very important” to the admissions process. Those factors are: the rigor of your high school coursework and your GPA. The essays are “important” to the application review. In fact, the essays are rated as being of equal importance to test scores, extracurricular activities, and talent/ability.

Want Personalized Essay Assistance?

If you are interested in working with one of College Transitions’ experienced and knowledgeable essay coaches as you craft your UIUC supplemental essays, we encourage you to  get a quote  today.

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How to Write the UIUC Essays 2022-2023

Located in the vast cornfields of east-central Illinois, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is widely renowned as one of the country’s most influential public research universities. In fact, it has ranked first in National Science Foundation award funding for six consecutive years.

Many sources consider UIUC one of the top 50 universities in the world, and some have even ranked its engineering school in the top five worldwide.

Boasting over 24 million items in its library collection, it’s no secret that UIUC is an intellectual powerhouse. On top of that, it’s also a haven for sports lovers. UIUC was one of the founding members of the Big Ten Conference, a tradition that has remained strong, as evidenced by its 21 NCAA teams.

We at CollegeVine are here to give you numerous tips on how to tackle your UIUC essays! Want to know your chances at UIUC? Calculate your chances for free right now.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Supplemental Essay Prompts

All major applicants.

Prompt 1: If you’re applying to a major: Explain, in detail, an experience you’ve had in the past 3 to 4 years related to your first-choice major. This can be an experience from an extracurricular activity, in a class you’ve taken, or through something else. (150 words)

Prompt 2: If you’re applying to a major: Describe your personal and/or career goals after graduating from UIUC and how your selected first-choice major will help you achieve them. (150 words)

All Undeclared Program Applicants

Prompt 1: If you’re applying to Our Undeclared Program: What are your academic interests and strengths? You may also include any majors you are considering. (150 words)

Prompt 2: If you’re applying to Our Undeclared Program: What are your future academic or career goals? (150 words)

All Applicants With Second-Choice Major (Including Undeclared)

If you’ve selected a second-choice major (including undeclared): please explain your interest in your second-choice major or your overall academic or career goals. (150 words), all major applicants, prompt 1 , explain, in detail, an experience you’ve had in the past 3 to 4 years related to your first-choice major. this can be an experience from an extracurricular activity, in a class you’ve taken, or through something else. (150 words).

At first glance, this prompt seems pretty straightforward, and there isn’t much space for extraneous storytelling. 

However, what gives this prompt its difficulty is the necessity of going above and beyond. Not only do you need to identify the experiences that shaped your interest in your selected major, but you need to provide deeper reflections as to why those experiences impacted you in the way they did. 

For that reason, it’s not enough to simply list the experiences that led you to your chosen major. For example, you shouldn’t just say, “I first discovered my passion for film in English class, when I had to write a take home essay about the movie adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray . I furthered my interest in film by making my own home documentary alongside a couple friends. I also started volunteering at a local arthouse cinema to understand a more commercial perspective on film…”

Rather, it’s better to go deeper with a given example and provide insights into what motivates your passions. Instead of simply listing experiences related to film, you might instead say, “My English teacher assigned our class a take-home essay, where we analyzed the movie adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray . Looking at the movie through a closer lens gave me a deeper appreciation for the small decisions directors make and the big impacts they can have…” 

The admissions readers at UIUC want to see that you have the necessary experiences under your belt to thrive in your chosen course of study, and they also want to see that you will be passionate and motivated while doing so! Make sure to show them both your experiences and your deeper insights about those experiences, and you’ll have a strong essay on your hands. 

All Major Applicants, Prompt 2 

Describe your personal and/or career goals after graduating from uiuc and how your selected first-choice major will help you achieve them. (150 words).

The trick to this prompt is making sure you convey a clear personal or career goal, while also relating your intended course of study to that goal. 

Thus, you should acknowledge the following main points while answering this prompt: 

• What are your future personal or career goals? 
• How will your chosen major help contribute towards those goals? 

Let’s address each of these points separately. 

1. What are your future personal and/or career goals?

The prompt plainly states that your response needs to identify your future personal or career goals. If you have a clear idea of what your goals are, that will make this part easy. In that situation, you would have presumably chosen a course of study that will serve as a stepping stone towards your longer-term ambitions. 

On the other hand, UIUC knows that your interests will change over the next four years, and that nothing is set in stone. If you’re uncertain about your career goals, it’s also okay to identify a few possible career paths that interest you. Another option is to discuss the type of work you wish to do (e.g. helping deliver aid to marginalized communities) as opposed to the specific career title.

Keep in mind that UIUC gives you the option of specifying your personal goals as well, and not just your career goals. This is a wording change from the 2021-2022 cycle, so it’s certainly intentional. Your personal goals should still be related to your major, but don’t have to be as career-focused. For instance, some solid personal goals to mention would be things like becoming a stronger public speaker, learning to program in a certain coding language, doing research on a specific topic, or writing a novel. 

As long as you can make a compelling case as to how your chosen major relates to your future ambitions, you will be in good shape for this essay. 

2. How will your chosen major help contribute towards those goals?

Once you have identified your personal or career goals, you also need to indicate what aspects of your chosen course of study will help you achieve those goals. 

This will mean both speaking about your major in broad terms, as well as identifying some features of UIUC’s course of study that serve you particularly well. This is not a “why UIUC” essay, so showing depth of research is not the top priority, but it will strengthen your response nonetheless. 

While this essay does not require personal reflections in the way that many other college essays do, it is still important for your voice to come through in deeper analyses that show you understand the significance of your major-goal combination at a deeper level. 

To accomplish this, make sure you are always stating why a particular aspect of your intended major serves your goals. For instance, it is not enough to say, “I hope to be a lawyer for the United Nations, so I want to take the course Governing Globalizations.” You might instead write, “Courses such as Governing Globalizations, which explore the historical, moral, socio-economic, and political dimensions of an emerging global society, will provide me with the interdisciplinary background to thrive as an international lawyer.” 

All Undeclared Program Applicants, Prompt 1

If you’re applying to our undeclared program: what are your academic interests and strengths you may also include any majors you are considering. (150 words).

This prompt is similar to the one above about how your past experiences relate to your intended major; it’s just a more open-ended version.  However, you still want to ground your interest in specific examples or experiences, rather than talking about your interests in a broad way (anyone can do that, so you want to connect it to who you are). It’s also best to limit your selection to 2-3 interests/strengths, as you only have 150 words. Otherwise, you may appear too unfocused.

For example, say you’re interested in creative writing and political science. You might share how you wrote a collection of short poems based on your family’s immigration experience, and how you found it a great way to reflect on those experiences. You may describe how fulfilling it was when the poems were published in a local magazine and strangers reached out to tell you how much they resonated with them. For political science, you have just started exploring the field after taking AP Government, and may be interested in immigration policy, but are trying to decide between that and your more creative endeavors.

One distinction here is that you do not necessarily have to discuss a potential major at all , if you don’t want to. You can simply focus on some of the topics you’re interested in or have a talent for. On the other hand, if you do want to allude to potential majors, that will also work just fine.

It’s okay to talk about the reasons you’re undecided (and you should), but make sure to avoid self-deprecating language that might indicate that being undecided is a weakness. For instance, don’t say, “I want to major in math, but [insert self-doubt].” Instead, it will be better to frame things positively, where you talk about the things you love about your potential subjects. 

All Undeclared Program Applicants, Prompt 2 

If you’re applying to our undeclared program: what are your future academic or career goals (150 words).

As above, this prompt shares some similarity with the corresponding prompt for applicants who have decided on a major. However, rather than relating your chosen major to your intended career, this prompt gives you even more liberty. You can discuss your future academic or career goals, and furthermore, you don’t have to relate your course of study to your intended career if you don’t wish to do so. 

Regarding career goals, much of the same advice applies. If you know you want to be a computational social scientist, but you don’t know which degree will best help you get there, that’s perfectly fine. You can just discuss the joys of gaining social insights from large-scale network and content analysis. In general, feel free to simply discuss what jobs or careers you hope to one day pursue, and make sure your passion shines through. 

On the other hand, if you are unsure of your specific career path, you can speak about the type of work you hope to do. For instance, “Although I do not yet know my specific career path, I am certain it will be somewhere in the realm of environmental justice. I am excited by the prospects of participating in food justice programs at urban farms, as well as lobbying for public land preservation alike. I hope to ground myself in further environmental justice experiences by…” 

Similarly, maybe you know you wish to pursue a certain academic opportunity, although you do not yet know where it will lead you. It is okay to talk about opportunities at UIUC and postgraduate alike. For instance, maybe you really want to be a Fulbright scholar one day. Tell the admissions readers all about it! 

This prompt might be difficult for you because it is so open-ended. One piece of advice that might help is to simply ground it in yourself, your own narrative, and your own value system. Although this essay does not center a personal narrative in the way your Common App essay will, relating your future plans with your core values is helpful both because it gives the essay cohesion, and because it shows you are introspective. Strong personal reflections are great for demonstrating maturity and self-awareness. 

All Applicants With Second Choice Major (Including Undeclared)

This prompt is similar to the previous one about your first-choice major, so you should approach it in largely the same manner. The only nuance is that you don’t necessarily have to relate your second-choice major to any personal or career goals, if you don’t want to (though it’s always helpful to!). 

It’s still important to ground this essay in meaningful experiences with this field. Since the essay asks about your interest in this major, it can be easy to simply write all the reasons you love the major without actually sharing more about who you are. You want to avoid that! For example, anyone could write an essay about why environmental science is so great and important, but only you can discuss how the river in your hometown was polluted by a garment factory, or how fulfilling it was to teach kids at the elementary school how to compost. 

After explaining your interest, make sure to share how this second-choice major relates to your future goals. Since it’s a second-choice major, you may not have as concrete of an answer, and that’s okay, but UIUC still wants to know how you might make an impact with this major should you study it. For the hypothetical student interested in environmental science, they may want to work in environmental policy to prevent pollution, or become a teacher so that the younger generation learns to love and care for the earth.

Where to Get Your University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Essays Edited 

Do you want feedback on your UIUC essays? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free  Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. 

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools.  Find the right advisor for you  to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

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Uiuc computer science supplement anonymous, explain your interest in the major you selected and describe how you have recently explored or developed this interest inside and/or outside the classroom. you may also explain how this major relates to your future career goals. if you're applying to the division of general studies, explain your academic interests and strengths or your future career goals. you may include any majors or areas of study you're currently considering. limit your response to 300 to 400 words..

My interest in computer science was kindled after a basketball game in my freshman year. After the game, my father, who had been taking stats on the sideline in his notebook, contended that I had scored 21 points, yet I was absolutely certain I had scored 24. Convinced that he had made an error in his tallying, I resolved to find a better way to take statistics than the traditional pen and paper.

I decided to create a basketball statistics analysis application, but having never programmed before, I was unsure where to start. I began to explore programming, browsing the selection of books on my father’s bookshelf. After a few weeks of learning the principles of Visual Basic, I began to write my statistics utility, working on weekends and before school. The result was the Stat Master, an application which provides an interface to input and analyze basketball statistics more reliably.

Since then, I have pursued my interest in computer science inside and outside the classroom. From AP Computer Science in school, to my ongoing projects, including an application which uses basketball team characteristics to design a personalized offensive scheme, I have continued to delve into the fundamentals of software.

Despite my interest in...

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Apply Like a Pro to UIUC: Examples of Major-Specific College Application Questions

If you’ve made it here, chances are you’ve reached one of the more daunting parts of college applications: the written questions.

There are two ways you can apply to UIUC: the Common App and UIUC’s own application, myIllini. In this blog, we’ll instead focus on something they both have in common: the major-specific questions .

As part of your application, you’ll have to respond to two to three major-specific prompts about why you picked your intended major(s) , each with a word limit of 150. Sound difficult? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!

Disclaimer: Does something seem funny about the “majors” we’ve chosen to write about? Listening to Music is a great hobby, and while you may learn about DNA Analysis in some of your classes, the majors we’ve written about are imaginary! We did this so we could show you how to best structure your responses and have a little bit of fun. Okay, okay, fun might be somewhat of a subjective term in this case. Hey, at least we’re trying.

Prompt 1: Explain, in detail, an experience you’ve had in the past 3 to 4 years related to your first-choice major. This can be an experience from an extracurricular activity, in a class you’ve taken, or through something else.

Example 1: Music Listening Major

I played the triangle for four years in my high school band, and through that was exposed to genres of music I would’ve otherwise never heard. Playing the triangle was fulfilling, but I wanted to create a space specifically for listening to music. During my sophomore year, I formed a club for music listeners called “Hear There Everywhere” and have served as the president ever since. As president, I organized meetings, held outreach events to engage new members, and implemented a Playlist Friday program, where teachers play personalized playlists created by the club on Friday afternoons. I’ve always had a passion for listening to music and “Hear There Everywhere” has given me a platform to share the benefits with others. From my experiences in high school, I know the Music Listening major at UIUC is the perfect fit for me.

Example 2: DNA Analysis Major

My high school biology teacher taught me the importance of curiosity, creativity, and integrity in scientific endeavors. She inspired me to continue taking science classes throughout high school to learn as much as I could. By the start of senior year, I knew I wanted to work in a science field, but it was a trip to a forensics lab last summer that helped me decide I want to specialize in DNA Analysis. On the trip, the first place we visited was the DNA lab, where I was able to speak to the lab technician about different techniques for analyzing DNA samples. He showed me the equipment and explained how proper analysis is vital in crime investigations. After witnessing biology used in this manner, I am certain I want to pursue a career in forensics, starting with studying DNA Analysis at UIUC.

Prompt 2: Describe your personal and/or career goals after graduating from UIUC and how your selected first-choice major will help you achieve them.

Listening to music has been a passion of mine since I was very young, and I want to share that passion with others. Through the Music Listening major, I hope to build a foundation of knowledge that will support me as I pursue a career as a professional music listener. As a professional listener, I want to become a strong voice within the field that not only pushes the boundaries of what types of music are listened to, but also advocates for the inclusion of listening as an important part of the music industry. Listening is a severely underrepresented piece of the music community, and my main career goal is to bring more recognition to music listeners everywhere. Not many Music Listening programs exist, so by taking part in this major I hope to establish my voice in the movement of change sweeping the music industry.

DNA Analysis is one of the most important branches of forensics science. By choosing this major, I will learn hands-on skills that will help me find a job in a DNA lab. My ultimate career goal is to use the power of biology to help other people, and I want to do that by engaging in research and analysis to improve DNA handling in crime investigations. With this major, not only will I learn the physical techniques being used, I will also gain knowledge of the ethics behind DNA analysis and storage. Learning about the moral debate occurring in the field from professors engaging in everyday research will make me a well-rounded scientist. I want to make forensics a more equitable field, and I believe the combination of hard science and ethics taught through the DNA Analysis major will help me accomplish this goal.

See, that wasn’t so bad! We hope these major-specific college application questions seem a little bit clearer now, and you have a better idea of what to write when you sit down to craft your own responses.

Overall, the key to effective major-specific college application questions is to be clear, be concise, and to always be yourself. Happy writing!

UIUC Admissions

We're here for you as you prepare for college. Whether you're looking for guidance on the college search process or have questions about Illinois, we hope our blogs will help!

55 comments

Haha I can’t say I wouldn’t have at least considered ‘Music Listening’ as my major if it wasn’t an imaginary one.

Thanks for the tips and examples. It helped write the first few words of my essay…which is always the most difficult part.

Us too! You’re very welcome, and we’re glad our examples helped. Hope you have a great year, Ashvin!

I think you have a typo lol “My ultimate career goal is to us the power of biology to help other people,” I’m pretty sure “us” should be “use”

I still think this was very helpful though. 🙂

Oops! Great catch, Violet, and thanks for letting us know so we could fix it. We’re glad the information was helpful to you, typo notwithstanding!

Extremely helpful blog, especially provoking more thought into the ‘why’ and ‘so what’ aspects of choosing a particular area of study….thanks for posting these examples.

Thanks, Jahnavi; we’re so glad you found it helpful!

the guides were pretty helpful. Hope to be in UIUC next year 🙂

We’re glad that you found the info helpful, Syed, and we’re excited that you’re interested in UIUC! If you have any questions throughout the application process, don’t hesitate to contact us .

Those examples quite help me a lot. These days, I have been unable to get a handle on the essays of majors when applying for the ea of uiuc. After reading these examples, I feel I have found the inspiration. Thank you very much!

This was helpful! But for me personally, there wasn’t a singular event that led me to choose my major but rather multiple experiences over a long period of time. Is it acceptable to write about multiple experiences instead of just one?

Really appreciate the samples as they provide us with some foundation and expectation as to what information we should include within the short word limit!

That music listening major is reaaaaaaly inspiring, and DNA analysis one is helpful too, lol. Thanks a lot, I was surprised when I saw this, you college instruct us to answer!

We’re glad they helped, Kylin! Any questions as you work on your application, don’t hesitate to reach out .

Hi Allison! No, we don’t want a list of things that led to your interest in the major. Even if you’ve had multiple experiences over a long period of time, we’re looking for a more in-depth, detailed description of one of those experiences that helped draw you to that area of study. We hope this helps! Any other questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to our office .

Thanks Eshwar, we’re glad they help! And if you have any questions as you work on your application, don’t hesitate to reach out to our office .

We’re glad you found the examples helpful, Haoyu, thank you!

HI! Your examples are cool! I just wonder whether two questions shall better be related or not?

Thanks for the examples! I have a question: are you looking for experiences that explain why we decided to choose the area of study and major we chose, or is it more towards an experience that demonstrates the steps we’ve taken in our area of study? Both?

Hi Jeremy, and thanks for reaching out! Your major-specific responses help us understand why you’ve chosen that specific major and also allow us to ensure that the major will be a good foundation to achieving your goals after graduation. We hope this helps! If you have additional questions as you work, don’t hesitate to contact us directly .

Thanks, Haoyu! Your major-specific responses help us understand why you’ve chosen that specific major and also allow us to ensure that the major will be a good foundation to achieving your goals after graduation. We hope this helps! If you have more questions as you work, don’t hesitate to contact us directly .

Great examples!! I finally have an idea of what information to add in such a limited space 🙂

Thank you for the tips and examples.

Thanks, Prithvi! We’re so glad you found them helpful.

Hello, thanks for your nice and clear answers. I am using Common App (not myIllini) and I have 2 questions(I am EA applicant). The prompts #1 and #2 above are not in the Commpn App, and I see there are 2 other questions as shown below instead.

So my questions are: (1) to where and by when do we have to submit the essays for the 2 prompts above? (2) The following 2 questions look like optional but I want to write an essay for #1. I do not think I am relevant to #2 though (I have a good GPA and no drop record) so I am wondering if it is ok to enter briefly like: Not Available (for the #2 below)

2 UIUC Questions on Common App:

#1. Academic Challenges Explain any challenges (outside of COVID-related) you have faced throughout your academic career, including the dates or timeline below.

#2. If you have a low grade or a drop in grades that you have not already explained, do so below.

Thanks for reaching out, Tom! The academic challenges questions are optional. Once you click “Continue” on that page of the application, you’ll move to the academics section, where you’ll select your intended major and possible second choice. After that section, the two major-specific writing prompts will display for you to write your response. We hope this helps! If you have additional questions, don’t hesitate to contact us directly .

Thank you so much for writing this blog. I was stuck on where to begin but these example essays made it very clear how to craft my essays and show my goals.

Hope I can be there at UIUC next year:)

Thank you for this information. I hope I get into UIUC next year!!

Thank you so much for this information! I feel a lot more prepared for writing my supplemental after this!

Thanks for the essay examples, it was extremely helpful. Looking forward to finishing my application 🙂

These examples are super helpful! Thank you so much.

I noticed that both of the academic challenge and grade drop explanation questions are optional. I don’t have a lot to fill out because I already used the Common App additional info sections for that.

If I leave these blank or shallow for UIUC, will it impact my application and admissions consideration at all? Or, is it truly just an area to express extra info if necessary?

Hi Ethan, yes, in not fully answering the major-specific questions, it could negatively impact your consideration. You’re welcome to use the same or similar information that you included in your Common App essay or additional information sections. We hope this helps. If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to contact us directly .

Thanks for the example!

I think you have a couple of typos in your examples.

“share the benefits with other” I think it should be “others” instead.

“my main career goal is to bring more recognition to musics listeners” I think it should be “music” instead.

Indeed we did, so we’ve made some edits. Thank you for catching them, Pranav!

Thank you so much for the great examples! It really helps provide me with a solid start and understanding of how to approach essays! Much less daunting than expected!

This is really helpful .Thank you!

Thanks so much, Advaith; we’re glad the examples helped!

Thanks, Aayush; we’re so glad you found the examples helpful!

Thank you for these examples! My mind was scrambled while thinking of what to write!

I wanted to say that this blog and the comments are both very helpful. I was going to contact the admissions office regarding these questions (like how specific the responses they need to be, how many things we could talk about, etc.), but this blog cleared most of my doubts. Thank you for posting these examples!!

This was a very great helpful blog. I am a senior in high school and just submitting my apps and this gave me an idea of how to do the essays for UIUC Thanks so much.

Thank you! I have an idea of what it should sound like now. What would you suggest if I’ve already covered the information a question asks for in the personal statement?

Thank you so much for this guide, it made the writing process significantly easier!

Is the second prompt more of a “Why UIUC” prompt? As in, do we write details about why we want to attend UIUC or details about why we want to do CS?

Thanks so much for the examples, super helpful with starting off the supplemental essays!

These are some great examples and they helped me a lot with writing my own which was pretty intimidating at first! Y’all were also funny with the music listening major— I wish!!

HI Arnav! For the second prompt, it’s more about you and less bout UIUC; we’re more interested in what you want to do with a degree in CS. We hope this helps!

Hi Shrujana, we’re glad the examples helped! If you’ve already covered the information a question asks for within your personal statement, some options could be to provide a different experience in your major-specific answer, elaborate more fully in the personal statement, or choose a different question for your personal statement. Whatever makes the most sense to you and will give our admissions counselors the most helpful information!

Hi UIUC Admissions, I am planning on listing “undeclared” on my major because I am interested in a few different areas such as Business and Psychology. Can you provide an example for someone who is not sure what they want to major in?

Thanks for the suggestion, Melissa. Although we won’t be able to do this in time for this year, we’ll see what’s possible for future years!

you the goat fr

Hey UIUC, I am so thankful for this content put out! This got me through my drafting sessions and now I am ready to submit my application. Looking forward to become a fighting Illini next year :))

AHH you do amazing work UIUC admissions blog! Thank you!

Hahahaha. Very creative! I like the example of music learning as a major. This was very helpful and look forward to applying to UIUC🙂👍

Very helpful information thank you

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Bachelor of Science, Computer Science + Music

CS + Music prepares students for careers in digital audio synthesis production, music and AI, and music application/plug-in design. Additionally, CS + Music students can take courses in music technology and composition.

Talent Requirements for Application

• Personal Statement: Applicants must submit an essay or personal statement (approximately 300-500 words) that includes a summary of academic achievements in music, computer science, and/or related areas, a description of interests and experiences relevant to the degree program, significant accomplishments, and career goals.
• Large files, such as high-resolution videos, should only be included via link to an external site. Smaller files, such as audio and text, can be uploaded directly or via external link.
• Do not upload files in platform-specific formats. Common examples include music notation software files (MuseScore, Finale, Sibelius, Dorico, etc.) and DAW session files (Logic, Ableton, FL Studio, GarageBand, etc). All uploaded items must be in standard text/image/audio/video formats. Examples of valid formats include (but are not necessarily limited to) doc, docx, txt, rtf, pdf, jpg, png, mp3, aiff, wav, mov, and mp4.
• If your application includes code-based projects, you may upload the code files directly, or link to an external site where the project is hosted, such as GitHub. In either case, the applicant is strongly encouraged to include a short video or set of image files that document the code project in action.
• Interview: Applicants will participate in a short interview with members of the Composition, Theory & Technology faculty. Interview topics may include the applicant’s academic background, educational interests, and professional goals. Applicants will also have the opportunity to ask questions.

Start your application  

Learn more about the university application and get started now.

Submit a portfolio  

Instructions on how to submit your portfolio.

CS+ Music Inter-College Transfer  

Inter-college transfer requirements for current University of Illinois students interested in applying to the CS+ Music degree

About Bachelor of Science, Computer Science & Music

This degree will prepare students for advanced study at the graduate level for many existing programs on music and audio technology, as well as equip them with the proper skills to successfully join and lead a vibrant workforce community centered around the creation and distribution of entertainment media through constantly evolving technological platforms. The CS + Music curriculum provides a broad knowledge of the theory, design, and application of computer systems integrated with the theory, history, and application of music. The curriculum is formed around courses in music, mathematics, science, and computation. Strong math and science skills are strongly recommended for student success in this program.

Prospective Students are welcome to visit the CS+Music Discord server to connect with current students and ask questions about the program.

Degree Requirements  

Learn more about the degree requirements for the Bachelor of Science, Computer Science & Music by visiting the academic catalog.

Performance Opportunities  

Learn more about performance opportunities

Composition, Theory & Music Technology faculty

Heinrich Taube  

Eli Fieldsteel  

Stephen Taylor  

Interest in Computer Science - UIUC Undergrad Essay

fshaikh 2 / 1   Nov 23, 2015   #1 Hi, I am an international student applying to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am having difficulties in ending the essay and keeping it within the word limit. Please help me figure out any grammatical errors and any comments on how to improve my essay further.Constructive criticism would be much appreciated. Thank you! Explain your interest in the major you selected. Describe an experience related to that area of study, what first introduced you to this field, and/or your future career goals. Limit your response to 300-400 words. Lying in my bed at night I was thinking about a specific experience that I had regarding to computer science. Some instance where I've achieved greatness in the field. Pondering upon the dilemma for day and night I realized that it was not my achievements that counted but my passion in the field. My introduction to gaming began when I was three years old. My dad had got a computer home with a bunch of Kellogg's games for me to explore. From then onwards I graduated to other consoles and every day in my house you would hear the same dialogue playing on repeat. "The whole day you've been sitting in one place and playing that stupid game. This is not the time to play. Go study!" "Five minutes mum, I promise", was a response that always followed as I proceeded to continue my journey through the 18th Century Nassau in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag or avoided the brain eating zombies in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 only to know that I'd be immersed in it for a few more hours. I'm proud to admit that I am an avid gamer since video games have been a huge part of my life, cheering me at times of stressful academic work. The beautiful graphics, fluid physics and alluring game-play was enough to take my mind off work and send me into a state of nirvana. My love story with computers started when I was 10 years old. At my primary school I was taught the `programming language Logo. It was basically a triangular shape called a "turtle" that we had full control over. Simple commands like "fd 10" would make the turtle move 10 units forward in a straight line! This fascination fueled my desire to expand my knowledge and go out my way to learn the basics of HTML. To my dismay, computer science was not offered in 11th grade as a subject. But that didn't deter me from veering away from my passion. In my free time I would read articles about computers and try to teach my self the basics of Java and Python in order to keep my desire for computers burning. I realized that programming in those languages was not anyone's cup of tea, by dismantling my problems into smaller ones I was able to overcome my ambivalence towards Java. Majoring in Computer Science in UIUC will open many doors of opportunity for me to contribute to the gaming industry and open many more in the field of research such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) which I'd like to spend countless number of hours researching into, starting from undergraduate itself. I believe that the sufficient facilities and the holistic environment help me succeed in my big dreams and aspirations.

OP fshaikh 2 / 1   Nov 26, 2015   #6 Well I revised my whole essay and wrote another one based on the feedback provided. Is the revised version better? Any help would be appreciated Right from my early days at school I was drawn towards the mathematical world. From algebra to permutations and combinations to just sitting around and solving mathematical problems, the world of numbers and logic has always fascinated me. As I thought where I can apply my passion for numbers, one field clearly stood out - Computer Science. I was first introduced to computers when I was 10 years old. At my primary school I was taught the `programming language Logo. It was basically a triangular shape called a "turtle" that we had full control over. Simple commands like "fd10" would make the turtle move 10 units forward in a straight line. Later, my dad bought me a computer of my own on which I spend hours playing video games. I was fascinated by beautiful graphics and designing that goes into making a computer game. Not only I was fascinated, I also wanted to know the inner workings of the games. To this end, I started to learn computer languages. I started with learning HTML and quickly graduated to Java. People would approach me looking for answers to their computer programming problems, I felt honored that they valued my opinion. As the word got out that I am good with websites, people started approaching me for freelancing work. I designed the websites for several neighborhood businesses helping them grow their business. It gave me immense satisfaction to see that my passion for programming not only helped me make some pocket money and learn, but also helped the community. At UIUC I want to learn Artificial Intelligence, especially computer vision, object recognition, spatial understanding and scene interpretation. I believe that with several companies working on driver-less cars, the technology would be ready to go mainstream by the time I graduate and having deep knowledge in this field will help me in contributing more towards this field. I look forward to a fruitful and exciting career in the arena of computer science and its applications and sincerely hope that I will be provided an opportunity to study CS at UIUC.

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University of illinois to revamp computer science department, a $50 million donation from an alumnus will establish the siebel school of computing and data science, which will be housed in a new building and likely include new classes and degree programs..

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Announces the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

The Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, housed within The Grainger College of Engineering, marks a significant milestone in the university's commitment to excellence in interdisciplinary education and groundbreaking research.

Newswise — The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign announces the establishment of the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, made possible by a transformative $50 million gift from Thomas M. Siebel. This cornerstone contribution will propel the university's leadership in computing and data science education and research, shaping the future of technology and innovation.

The Siebel School of Computing & Data Science, housed within The Grainger College of Engineering, marks a significant milestone in the university's commitment to excellence in interdisciplinary education and groundbreaking research. With the generous support of Mr. Siebel, the School will pioneer advancements at the intersection of computing and data science, addressing complex challenges and driving innovation across various fields.

Dean Rashid Bashir expressed his gratitude, stating, “The establishment of the Siebel School of Computing & Data Science exemplifies the University of Illinois’s dedication to pushing the boundaries of knowledge and fostering collaborative solutions to global challenges. This transformative gift will empower our faculty and students to lead the next generation of technological advancements, further solidifying our position as a world-renowned institution.”

Thomas M. Siebel, UIUC alumnus and CEO of C3 AI , emphasized the importance of investing in education and research to drive societal impact, saying, “We are thrilled to partner with the University of Illinois to establish the Siebel School of Computing & Data Science. By supporting cutting-edge research and fostering innovation, we hope to empower future generations of leaders in technology and society, driving positive change in our world.”

“At Illinois, the power of interdisciplinary and collaborative work is on full display in the way we approach research activity and educational delivery for computing and data science,” said Chancellor Robert J. Jones . “The establishment of the Siebel School of Computing & Data Science through this generous gift from Mr. Siebel will enable us to continue shaping the future of technology and preparing students for success in a digital world.”

“The tremendous support from Mr. Siebel has provided yet another opportunity for the computing and data science community throughout our campus to thrive,” said Nancy M. Amato , Computer Science Department Head and Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering. “Our students and faculty have already played a part in such exciting developments as the first modern web browser, PayPal, YouTube, Siebel Systems, C3 AI and Yelp. And we will continue pursuing innovation in this field at every turn.

“We are also very proud of providing new and more accessible ways for deserving students to find their path into computing education.”

The new school will focus on further advancing frontiers at the intersections of computing and data science; an effort that is already well established through the university’s deep history of computing innovation. The Siebel School of Computing & Data Science is pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees.

About the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a world-renowned public research university, dedicated to excellence in teaching, research, and public engagement. With a legacy of innovation spanning more than a century, the university continues to push the boundaries of knowledge and make a lasting impact on society.

About Thomas M. Siebel

Mr. Siebel is an alumnus of the University of Illinois-Urbana (BA, MBA, MS) and is the CEO of C3 AI (NYSE: AI), a leading Enterprise AI application software company

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Tech entrepreneur tom siebel gives u of i another $50m to fund data science.

John Pletz is a senior reporter covering technology, aviation and cannabis for Crain’s Chicago Business. He joined Crain's in 2007 and previously covered technology for the American-Statesman in Austin, Texas.

Tom Siebel, one of the most famous tech entrepreneurs to graduate from the University of Illinois, is doubling down on his support of the school’s computer science program as it gears up to handle the next big thing: artificial intelligence.

Siebel, 71, is giving another $50 million to the school, bringing his total donations to $110 million, the university says. The U of I is naming its computer science department the Siebel School of Computing & Data Science. 

The data science pioneer grew up in Chicago and headed to Silicon Valley to launch database-software company Siebel Systems about 30 years ago, eventually selling it to Oracle for $5.8 billion. He also was ahead of the curve on data analytics and artificial intelligence, founding C3.ai, which went public in 2020.

Siebel already has donated millions to fund buildings on the Champaign-Urbana campus, including a computer science center that opened two decades ago and a recently completed multidisciplinary design center .

The new funding will help the U of I, one of the nation’s top-ranked computer science programs, to further rev up its data science efforts and adapt to the massive shift being caused by generative artificial intelligence, the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

“AI is going to transform everything we do,” says Rashid Bashir, dean of the U of I’s Grainger College of Engineering. “We wanted to expand that impact and raise the profile to connect computing and data science.”

Demand for computer science education has been soaring in recent years at the U of I and elsewhere. The computer science program, headed by Nancy Amato, now is the largest major within Grainger, with about 2,200 undergraduates.

“Data science is the underlying theory of technology that fuels all forms of AI,” Siebel says. “There has been a trend in the academy to split off data science out of computer science and engineering. I was always satisfied that was a bad decision. What they’re doing at Illinois, people are going to take note and other universities are going to follow.”  

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Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Title: a survey on visual mamba.

Abstract: State space models (SSMs) with selection mechanisms and hardware-aware architectures, namely Mamba, have recently demonstrated significant promise in long-sequence modeling. Since the self-attention mechanism in transformers has quadratic complexity with image size and increasing computational demands, the researchers are now exploring how to adapt Mamba for computer vision tasks. This paper is the first comprehensive survey aiming to provide an in-depth analysis of Mamba models in the field of computer vision. It begins by exploring the foundational concepts contributing to Mamba's success, including the state space model framework, selection mechanisms, and hardware-aware design. Next, we review these vision mamba models by categorizing them into foundational ones and enhancing them with techniques such as convolution, recurrence, and attention to improve their sophistication. We further delve into the widespread applications of Mamba in vision tasks, which include their use as a backbone in various levels of vision processing. This encompasses general visual tasks, Medical visual tasks (e.g., 2D / 3D segmentation, classification, and image registration, etc.), and Remote Sensing visual tasks. We specially introduce general visual tasks from two levels: High/Mid-level vision (e.g., Object detection, Segmentation, Video classification, etc.) and Low-level vision (e.g., Image super-resolution, Image restoration, Visual generation, etc.). We hope this endeavor will spark additional interest within the community to address current challenges and further apply Mamba models in computer vision.

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Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs .

Illinois CS Papers Earn Top Honors at Conferences

3/25/2022 Aaron Seidlitz, Illinois CS

Topics receiving recognition include Heng Ji's COVID-19 Literature Knowledge Graph Construction, two topics from Josep Torrellas' i-acoma research group and much more.

Written by Aaron Seidlitz, Illinois CS

As Illinois CS research continues to sustain high levels of success, one indicator is that the papers produced here earn best paper awards at some of the most prominent computing conferences.

From the faculty guiding these projects to the students learning what it takes to develop well-regarded research, these honors are representative of the effort and dedication given to research at Illinois CS.

Congratulations to each of the following projects and the authors involved.

Top Pick, IEEE Micro Special Issue

Illinois CS professor Josep Torrellas , and his i-acoma research group , earned two Top Pick selections for the IEEE Micro Special Issue. This selective distinction honors 12 papers out of all the published pieces in the computer architecture research area over the past year.

The two papers honored as a Top Pick include:

• Distributed Data Persistency , co-authored by Torrellas, Illinois ECE professor Jian Huang, as well as Illinois CS students Apostolos Kokolis, Antonis Psistakis, and Benjamin Reidys.
• Maya: Using Formal Control to Obfuscate Power Side Channels , co-authored by Torrellas, Alexander Schwing – Illinois CS affiliate faculty member and professor with Electrical & Computer Engineering – and University of Nevada professor Petros Voulgaris , as well as Raghavendra Pradyumna Pothukuchi, Associate Research Scientist in the Deptartment of Computer Science at Yale University, and Illinois CS student Sweta Yamini Pothukuchi.

The inspiration for “Distributed Data Persistency,” according to Torrellas, comes from three factors that are contributing to major changes coming to data centers.

“First, networking hardware is becoming faster, reducing the inter-node communication latency. Second, new Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) are progressively off-loading more computation from the CPUs. Third, non-volatile memory (NVM) is about to become widely used in datacenters; this memory substantially reduces the cost of making data durable compared to solid-state disks (SSDs),” Torrellas said.

This group calls the combination of two models – the data consistency model and the memory persistency model – the Distributed Data Persistency (DDP), which they believe will be crucial to ensuring correctness and performance of distributed applications – like those developed by Google, Meta, and Amazon.

“Providing an understanding of the interaction between data consistency models and memory persistency models helps programmers of cloud applications and hardware designers,” Torrellas said. “Programmers can now understand the tradeoffs between performance, reliability, programmability, and ease of implementation of different models.

“Hardware designers, additionally, know how to build all these models. We have heard of at least two companies studying our work.”

In regards to “Maya,” Torrellas said this group spent three years on a “revolutionary new idea” that helps offset one of the “most vexing challenges, as we try to protect our cyber infrastructure.”

This problem came down to leaking information through physical channels (power consumption, temperature, and electromagnetic emanations), which attackers measure and use machine learning techniques to predict which programs, passwords, or algorithms are used.

“We thought that rigorous techniques based on control theory might be a good way to obfuscate the power consumed by a program,” Torrellas said. “Our techniques have already been used by other researchers to defend against attacks. Specifically, the attack consisted of having multiple computers connected to the electrical outlets in a given building, and passing information between them through power spikes. Our work neutralized this attack.

“Another impact of our techniques is that more researchers are developing defenses against power attacks.”

“A labor of love” over the last several years has led Illinois CS professor Sarita Adve , and a student research team – including graduate student lead Muhammad Huzaifa – devoted to the Illinois Extended Reality (ILLIXR) testbed and consortium, to a Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC 2021) and now a Top Pick in the IEEE Micro Special Issue.

This paper, entitled “ ILLIXR: Enabling End-to-End Extended Reality Research ,” provided the initial description of the entity’s purpose. It does so, as Adve explained, by providing “the first published power/performance/quality characterization of an end-to-end extended reality system.” Additionally, it “provides a blueprint for the research my group will undertake over the next several years.”

Initially, Adve and this research team grew a bit discouraged after a couple rejections from top conferences. Simultaneously, the group was gaining momentum through more adoption with industry partners. While frustrating, as academic success often correlates to prestigious publications, the group remained steadfast in its belief.

Continued adoption of ILLIXR provided more depth to discuss its success, eventually leading to the IISWC Best Paper recognition.

The Top Pick designation forms the next step in much-deserved recognition of this effort.

“The top picks recognition means a lot. It is a very selective recognition delivered to the top twelve papers from all of computer architecture conferences in the last year – based on novelty and potential for long term impact,” Adve said. “Our paper is unusual in that it describes a new research vision for the architecture and systems community backed by a unique research testbed (the first open source end-to-end XR system), the first published characterizations of power/performance/quality of experience for an end-to-end XR system, and many implications for research for architecture, compiler, systems, and algorithms researchers.”

Best Demo Paper, 2021 North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

A collaborative effort, orchestrated through Illinois CS professor Heng Ji’s team of experts who have worked with her on previous work funded through DARPA, earned the Best Demo Paper at the this year’s North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2021)

The paper, titled “ COVID-19 Literature Knowledge Graph Construction and Drug Repurposing Report Generation ,” helps in the effort to combat COVID-19. As the paper’s abstract notes, “clinicians and scientists need to digest vast amounts of relevant biomedical knowledge in scientific literature to understand the disease mechanism and related biological functions.”

To help in this effort, the paper introduces a “novel and comprehensive knowledge discovery framework, COVID-KG, to extract fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements from scientific literature.”

Ji noted that others have already cited the paper 51 times since June last year.

“Our research provides a way to turn the massive unstructured literature into a structured knowledge graph. COVID-KG starts by reading existing papers to build multimedia knowledge graphs (KGs), in which nodes are entities/concepts and edges represent relations and events involving these entities, as extracted from both text and images. As a result, it can accelerate scientific discovery and build a bridge between the research scientists making use of our framework and clinicians who will ultimately conduct the tests,” said Manling Li, paper co-author and Illinois CS PhD student.

Li also credited another Illinois CS professor and co-author Jiawei Han , whose experience with biomedical projects and knowledge discovery was instrumental to the effort. Also, David Liem of UCLA, many Illinois CS students, and computer vision experts like Shih-Fu Chang all played major roles in this development. Other research partners came from Brandeis University, the University of Washington, Colorado University, DARPA and ARL.

“It was a great pleasure to see many people using COVID KG, as it supports or initiates a lot of downstream tasks – such as drug discovery, mortality prediction, etc.,” Li said. “Such system framework also provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures, and knowledge subgraphs as evidence. It has been downloaded more than 2,000 times. The greatest pleasure comes from seeing how it benefits clinicians, scientists, and researchers in a variety of fields.”

Distinguished Paper Award, ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2022)  

Illinois CS Professor Madhusudan Parthasarathy and student Paul Krogmeier worked together for about the past year and a half on a paper, “ Learning Formulas in Finite Variable Logics ,” that earned a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2022 Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) conference 2022.  

The origin of the work went back to a previous paper of Parthasarathy’s, which he believed could be improved upon. And he felt that working with Krogmeier might just be the key to unlocking the potential, due to his pupil’s interest in machine learning and logic.  This coincided with the professor’s recent interest in exploring synergies between machine learning and program synthesis for building intelligent systems. 

“Humans learn from examples as well as learn to reason effectively in a variety of domains. The intersection of logic and learning is hence a very interesting area that our paper makes fundamental contributes to, but it would be good to see a lot more work in this area,” Parthasarathy said.  

As stated in the paper’s introduction, the two authors “embark on a foundational study of exact learning of logical formulas.” Their belief is that symbolic expressions, “can be easily analyzed and interpreted, which aids downstream applications and makes them easier to communicate to both humans and computers.” 

Parthasarathy shared what he believes to be the most beneficial finding from their work. 

“A clearer understanding of when interpretable learning is possible, and the underlying decision procedure gives the algorithmic structure to build more practical interpretable learning and program synthesis,” he said. 

To not only successfully work through the paper, but for it to earn this distinction at POPL ’22 became a significant achievement for Krogmeier.

“It's encouraging to know the ideas and the presentation of the work are appreciated. I think the paper does a good job presenting a few simple and important ideas rather cleanly. We took care to make it that way, and I hope that any reader finds it pleasant,” Krogmeier said. 

Excellent Paper Award, IEEE journal on Big Data Mining and Analytics

For the past 10 years, Illinois CS professor Hanghang Tong has kept a long-term research connection with a collaborative group from Nanjing University in China. The positive nature of this collaboration across many years allows for insight into several topics, as interest in something new comes up amongst members of the group.

With a strong working background intact, this group provided an award-winning paper entitled “A Brief Review of Network Embedding.” Tong said interest in “network embedding has become one of the most popular topics in graph learning and mining, with tens of – if not hundreds of – new papers each year.”

The resulting paper, Tong said, provides “a clear and concise taxonomy of network embedding, elucidating the key ideas of a few representative works in each category of network embedding methods. It helps the beginner to navigate in this vast and fast-growing field of network embedding.”

Tong and his group found a number of nice surveys already on the topic, but they believed most to focus on completeness or comprehensiveness. This, he said, provides a nice resource for experienced practitioners in the area, but is hard for beginners to fully comprehend.

“We aimed to provide a clear roadmap, together with a few of the most representative works, to help newcomers quickly enter and navigate this vibrant field,” Tong said.

That the resulting paper earned this distinction from the IEEE journal on Big Data Mining and Analytics became a nice recognition for the co-authors. But, Tong said, “more importantly, it reiterates the power of long-term collaboration, as well as the importance of integrating research and teaching.”

Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, ACM SIGSOFT

Over the six years it took Wing Lam to complete his PhD at Illinois CS, his efforts took two different paths. First, he explored a few different ideas in software engineering, before he focused in on flaky tests – which became the emphasis of his later work and dissertation.

Lam encourages others to use early portions of their doctoral studies to pursue a few different possibilities before narrowing your focus to something that the student and advisor find especially motivating.

It’s hard to argue with the approach, which resulted in Lam’s faculty position with George Mason University’s Department of Computer Science and the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award.

“It is a tremendous opportunity to be honored with this award, as it makes me reflect on the many tiring nights that I spent on the work in my dissertation and on the dissertation text itself,” Lam said.

The dissertation, entitled “ Detecting, Characterizing, And Taming Flaky Tests ,” represents the culmination of Lam’s efforts on flaky tests at Illinois, which dates back to 2019.

“For the topic of my dissertation, I pursued the topic of flaky tests, which are tests that non-deterministically pass or fail on the same code,” Lam said. “I pursued this topic because of how important it is to developers. In recent years, many companies – through research papers (e.g., Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft) and blogs (e.g., Fitbit, Gradle) – highlight the difficulties that developers face when dealing with flaky tests.

“The work in my dissertation proposes techniques to help developers detect, understand, and fix flaky tests.”

His work on flaky tests at Illinois began in 2019 when multiple companies offered him an internship to work on the topic due to some of his undergraduate research experience at the University of Washington.

Lam chose to intern with Microsoft Research that summer, where he focused on automated techniques for debugging flaky tests. This experience later provided a chapter in his dissertation.

Over the years that followed, Lam said his work “helped automatically detect more than 3,000 flaky tests in over 300 open-source projects and fixed more than 1,200 flaky tests in over 170 open-source projects.”

A major milestone included changes to Maven Surefire, the default plugin used to run tests for a popular build system in Java projects. This change is now part of a toolset that is used by over 6.8 million developers worldwide.

“Beyond the technical results, the outcomes of this dissertation also include the involvement of more than 10 excellent undergraduates in research and collaborations with industry,” Lam said. “I am especially thankful to my advisors Tao Xie and Darko Marinov for the complementary lessons that they taught me, and I hope that I can demonstrate the same amount of care to my future students. “I am also thankful for the collaborative culture of the Computer Science department at UIUC, especially the faculty and students in the Programming Languages, Formal Methods, and Software Engineering area.”

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This story was published March 25, 2022.

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Cicadas Are Emerging Now. How Do They Know When to Come Out?

Scientists are making computer models to better understand how the mysterious insects emerge collectively after more than a decade underground.

By Carl Zimmer

Earlier this month, millions of Americans looked up at the sky to witness a total eclipse. Now, another cyclical marvel has arrived, this time at our feet. Trillions of noisy, red-eyed insects called cicadas are emerging from the earth after more than a decade of feeding on tree roots.

The United States is home to 15 cicada broods, and in most years at least one of them emerges. This spring, Brood XIX, known as the Great Southern Brood, and Brood XIII, or the Northern Illinois Brood, are emerging simultaneously.

Cicada watchers have spotted the first insects coming out of the ground, reporting their sightings to apps such as iNaturalist and Cicada Safari . The Great Southern Brood, which emerges across the South and the Midwest every 13 years, has been seen at sites scattered from North Carolina to Georgia. The Northern Illinois Brood, which appears every 17 years in the Midwest, is expected to appear in the next month, as temperatures there warm.

How cicadas manage to rise en masse after spending so long underground remains largely a mystery. “There’s surprisingly little information about cicadas that you’d like to know,” said Raymond Goldstein, a physicist at the University of Cambridge.

Once a brood climbs out of the ground, the cicadas crawl up trees to mate, and the females lay eggs in tree branches. After hatching, the young insects drop to earth and burrow into the soil. Then, each cicada spends the next 13 or 17 years underground before emerging to mate and repeat the cycle.

That means that trillions of insects have to track the passage of time in the soil. It’s possible that they detect annual changes in tree roots. But how can cicadas add up those changes to divine when 13 or 17 years have passed? Scientists cannot say.

Chris Simon, a cicada expert at the University of Connecticut, suspects that some answers will be found in the insects’ DNA. “Is there a consistent difference between something that has a 13-year cycle and a 17-year cycle?” she asked.

Dr. Simon and her colleagues recently sequenced the genome of a cicada for the first time. They caught the insect, which belonged to a brood with a 17-year cycle, in Tennessee in 2021. They hope to sequence the genes of insects from other broods as well, and compare their DNA.

Once cicadas recognize — somehow — that they’ve reached their special year, they need a way to emerge together. Evolutionary biologists have proposed that cicadas come out in vast numbers as a survival strategy. Their enemies, such as birds and parasitic wasps, can attack only a small fraction of them, leaving the rest free to reproduce.

One crucial signal is the temperature of the ground. The soil needs to pass a threshold of about 64 degrees before broods start to appear.

But cicadas cannot surface together simply by sensing the warming soil. An immature cicada that happens to be a couple feet underground will experience cooler temperatures than one just a few inches below the surface. If cicadas paid attention only to the temperature they felt nearby, they would come out in small groups and be quickly wiped out by predators.

Dr. Goldstein and his wife, Adriana Pesci, a mathematician at Cambridge, recently became intrigued by this paradox. “We’re attuned to mysteries,” Dr. Goldstein said.

Working with their Cambridge colleague Robert Jack, Dr. Goldstein and Dr. Pesci created a mathematical model of an underground cicada brood based on observations of real insects. Then, they played with the different variables in their model to get the simulated cicadas to emerge together like real ones.

The scientists speculated that cicadas base their decision to come out not just on the rising temperature of the soil, but also on the actions of neighboring cicadas. The researchers allowed their virtual insects to eavesdrop on each other. If their neighbors were getting noisy as they prepared to climb out of the ground, the insects were more likely to emerge as well.

It turned out that the model worked only if the scientists let the cicadas communicate this way. The combination of temperature and communication caused broods to emerge in a rapid series of bursts — which is exactly what happens in the real world. Each burst included cicadas that were in soil that had not yet reached 64 degrees. Once they left, it took a few days for the soil to warm enough to prompt more cicadas to prepare to leave.

Dr. Goldstein acknowledged that he and his colleagues simply added a hypothetical communication channel to their model to make it work. They have no direct evidence that cicadas actually listen to each other underground.

“Nobody’s ever tried to figure that out,” Dr. Simon said. “It would be very difficult to do.”

As bizarre as cicada emergences may seem, Dr. Goldstein sees them as part of a broader pattern in biology. Many animals, from flocking birds to herds of wildebeests, have to make collective decisions based on noisy, unreliable signals. Even cells in a developing embryo have to coordinate their growth.

“It’s the essence of life,” he said.

Carl Zimmer covers news about science for The Times and writes the Origins column . More about Carl Zimmer