University of Chicago Department of Computer Science

Could data centers break our power grid? with Andrew Chien AI demands are straining energy systems and the environment; scientist proposes a more sustainable solution

Data centers are sold as economic engines for local communities. But as AI’s energy demands skyrocket, UChicago computer scientist Andrew Chien discusses the real cost of these massive facilities on the environment and local residents. ms.spr.ly/6017QgLwB

TEI 2026 starts next week at UChicago! Join researchers, designers, artists, and makers March 8–11 in Chicago for the 20th ACM Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction conference. Don't forget to register if you haven't yet. Details and program:

Prescience, a new benchmark from @ai2.bsky.social & UChicago researchers including Prof James Evans (DSI Fac Co-Dir, Novel Intelligence) and Prof Ian Foster (DSI Fac Co-Dir, AI for Climate) evaluates how well we can predict scientific progress.

Learn more 👇

A big milestone for quantum!
Infleqtion is now the first neutral-atom quantum company to go public (NYSE: INFQ), backed by $550M+ in funding.
Its software roots trace to UChicago spinout Super.Tech, founded by alum Pranav Gokhale and Prof. Fred Chong. Read here: infleqtion.com/infleqtion-b...

Aloni Cohen Named Sloan Research Fellow for Work Bridging Law and Computer Science - Department of Computer Science When a computer scientist spends as much time poring over legal documents as lines of code, something interesting is bound to happen. That is certainly the case for Aloni Cohen, Assistant Professor of...

Congrats to UChicago CS faculty member @aloni-bologna.bsky.social, who has been named a 2026 Sloan Research Fellow.
Read more about the ideas shaping the digital age: cs.uchicago.edu/news/aloni-c...

Get entangled with quantum science and tech! Join UChicago and Duke researchers for a family friendly event, with hands-on games, crafts, demos, and short talks on how quantum could transform computing, transit, and medicine. 🎲🌀
📅 Sat, Mar 7, 2026 · 1–4 PM
📍 Harold Washington Library Center

“Computer Chess” on (likely) the only existing 35mm print, plus a post-film Q&A with writer/director Andrew Bujalski and UChicago CS professor & cast member Gordon Kindlmann. 🎬
📍 Doc Films · Year of Games
🔗 tinyurl.com/y6rdb5a7

Early-bird registration for TEI 2026 is open through Feb 11—join the 20th anniversary conference at UChicago with talks at Ida Noyes and demos/art at MSI. Full, studio-only, and demo-only tickets available at tinyurl.com/mv6fbfj4.

Meshes of Midscale Models (M3) Workshop | DSI Workshop Overview There will be a Workshop on the Meshes of Midscale Models (M3) Initiative on January 28, 2026 at the Data Science Institute.  The workshop will cover approaches for building small to midscale AI models over high quality biomedical data that in many cases perform as well or better than today’s much larger frontier […]

Curious about midscale models, data commons, and federated AI? Join the Meshes of Midscale Models (M3) Workshop on Jan 28, 9:00am–3:30pm at the UChicago Data Science Institute. More details and registration at the link:

Don’t forget to join us tomorrow for “Science in the Age of AI” with Associate Prof. Chenhao Tan, featuring AI-driven hypothesis generation, HypoBench, and mechanistic interpretability!
📅 Jan 27, 2026 · 🕓 4:00–5:30 PM CT
📍 William Eckhardt Research Center, Room 401

Hear Associate Prof. Chenhao Tan on how AI can generate new scientific hypotheses, steer “hallucinations” toward creativity, and evaluate research itself, including work on HypoBench and mechanistic interpretability.
📅 Jan 27, 2026
🕓 4:00–5:30 PM CT
📍 William Eckhardt Research Center, Room 401

New interview: Tensormesh CEO, co-founder, and UChicago CS Associate Professor Junchen Jiang on why KV cache—the memory of LLMs—is becoming core inference infrastructure. Watch: http://y2u.be/zHW4Zz... #LLMInference #KVCache

Join us for a webinar! Bogdan Stoica (PhD, UChicago) will share lessons from chairing EuroSys 2025 artifact evaluation and using testbeds like Chameleon to boost reproducibility. Tue Jan 13, 11 AM CT, registration below.
tinyurl.com/k85kk8f4

CS Talk | Jan 21
Lars Bergstrom (Google) on how mobile hardware & operating systems are co-designed—from new CPU features to performance and security advances on ARM (with notes on Intel & RISC-V).
🕒 3–4 PM | 📍 Crerar 390
#UChicago #ComputerScience #Systems

The Griffin Applied Economics Incubator invites submissions for the 2026 AI in the Workplace Conference, May 28 at the Rubenstein Forum. Explore how AI is reshaping work with researchers, frontier labs, & industry leaders. Apply by Feb 15, 2026: https://ow.ly/UMj450XICnb

Five Paths to Lasting Influence: Celebrating Five UChicago CS Test of Time Award Recipients - Department of Computer Science At the heart of every leading computer science department is a key ambition: to produce research that shapes the future long after its debut. This year, the University of Chicago’s Department of Computer Science celebrates an extraordinary distinction: five of its faculty members have received Test of Time Awards from major conferences, each...

We are celebrating 5 UChicago CS faculty members receiving Test of Time Awards this year. From streaming data to adaptive software, their work built the backbone of modern tech.
Congrats to Michael Franklin, Ian Foster, Nick Feamster, Robert Grossman, & Hank Hoffmann! 🚀

Hard to Discover, Harder to Use: The Widespread Failure of Ad Transparency Settings - Department of Computer Science Have you ever seen a strangely specific ad follow you around the internet and wondered why? You dive into your account settings, looking for a way to control what data is being used, only to find a confusing maze of menus, vague descriptions, and options that don’t seem to do what you want....

Ever get lost in ad settings? 🕵️‍♂️
New UChicago CS research by Kevin Bryson confirms US ad transparency tools are "hard to discover, harder to use."
Without regulation, the ad space is a "lawless land" where users have almost no control. 🛑

Constraints on Quantum-Advantage Experiments Due to Noise - Department of Computer Science The original version of this story was published in Physics Magazine We are currently in a fascinating era of quantum computing in which near-term experiments may be able to achieve “quantum advantage” and outperform classical computers at certain tasks. While a conclusive demonstration of quantum advantage will be a watershed moment in the...

Can noise actually make quantum computers easier to simulate?
In a Physics Magazine piece, UChicago CS Prof. Bill Fefferman analyzes research showing that without error correction, high noise kills quantum advantage.
To succeed, we must find the "Goldilocks zone" of qubits.