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.
reproof.app
· 2026-09-17
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.
buttondown.com
· 2026-09-09
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.
venturebeat.com
· 2026-08-28
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.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-08-26
GoKawiil