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Elgin Community College sought to end its contract with Flock Safety and began covering the company's surveillance cameras with trash bags and zip ties to stop them recording. According to facilities director Heinrich, unmarked vehicles believed to belong to Flock repeatedly removed the coverings during routine servicing visits, leading to a prolonged standoff between the school and the vendor.
The University of Illinois is highlighting its Master of Computer Science degree, aimed at computing professionals and recent graduates who want deeper expertise in building and adapting AI-driven systems, not just using them. The program is being marketed through IEEE Computer Society as a pathway for advancing computing careers amid rapid industry change.
Rivian reported building 19,751 vehicles and delivering 19,248 in the third quarter, a roughly 45% jump from a year earlier, driven by its first full quarter selling the new R2 SUV launched in June. Full financial results are due October 29. The company expects 20,000-25,000 R2 deliveries by year-end and total 2025 sales of 65,000-70,000 vehicles across its lineup.
Rivian has issued a recall affecting roughly 14 R2 SUVs after discovering that fasteners on the high-voltage battery pack were not properly tightened, a defect that can cause loss of power while driving. The company will repair or replace affected components as needed, and says it has reprogrammed the assembly-line station at its Normal, Illinois plant that caused the under-torqued fasteners. Rivian told NHTSA it knows of no accidents, injuries or fatalities tied to the issue, though some owners reported problems on Reddit and the blog RivianTrackr.
A researcher who builds analytical models for intelligence, foreign-policy and investment work describes applying that same methodology to forecasting the University of Illinois football team's season. Using a model nicknamed 'Hinsley,' he tracks how a recent home loss to Duke lowered the team's projected chances of reaching the College Football Playoff while simultaneously raising confidence in the offensive line and new quarterback.
In a conversation, software pioneer Ray Ozzie described his early exposure to computing at a high school with ARPA-funded terminals and later at the University of Illinois, where daytime coursework meant punch cards but nighttime access to the PLATO system revealed a thriving online community with chat, messaging, and forums decades before the modern internet. He credits this early, informal exposure to networked computing with shaping his later work on collaborative software.
Plaintiffs in Illinois and California have filed a class action lawsuit against Meta, alleging the company intends to incorporate facial recognition technology into its smart glasses products. The suit centers on privacy concerns tied to biometric data collection without proper consent.
A historical piece revisits how Lotus Notes, launched in 1989, offered encryption, rich formatting, read receipts, and app-building tools years before equivalent standards like MIME or PGP existed for email. It traces the software's conceptual origins back to a 1973 University of Illinois project called PLATO Notes, built by a teenage programmer, David Woolley, to replace a chaotic open text file used for campus communication.
Researchers from Meta AI and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign built EvoHarness-RL, a training framework that teaches a small 8-billion-parameter model to decide when to read, update, or consolidate information it gathers from its execution environment during long, multi-step tasks. Rather than following rigid, human-written scripts for tool use, the model learns to manage its own memory and error recovery, reportedly reaching performance comparable to Claude Opus 4.5 on complex agentic workflows.
Researchers from Google and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign tested large language models on variations of the classic Knights and Knaves puzzle, where truth-tellers and liars must be identified from their statements. The models frequently failed when puzzles were slightly altered from familiar training patterns, defaulting to memorized answers instead of reasoning through the new version. A similar pattern showed up on a benchmark called SimpleBench, where humans easily spot subtle twists that trip up even leading AI systems.
Emails obtained through public records requests show that state's attorneys in roughly one-sixth of Illinois counties shared personal details about immigrants facing local charges with federal immigration agents. One case involved Marion County prosecutor John Christeson sending a Homeland Security Investigations agent the birth date, address and court schedule of Rolando Perez Samayoa, a man facing a DUI charge, who was arrested by federal agents weeks later along with his teenage son.
Scientists at Southern Illinois University Carbondale used CRISPR-modified yeast to convert PET plastic and agricultural waste into proteins, fats, and flavor compounds, which were then 3D-printed into cookie shapes called 'µBites.' The team presented the work at the American Chemical Society meeting in Chicago, though the cookies haven't been tasted yet pending university approval.