INSPIRE: Illinois-Sweden Program for Educational and Research Exchange

The Illinois-Sweden Program for Educational and Research Exchange (INSPIRE) is an educational alliance between the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm University, and Karolinska Institutet.

About INSPIRE

INSPIRE was established in 2012 as a collaborative venture of the university, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm University, and Karolinska Institutet on the foundational pillars of education, research, and service. The success of the collaboration is measured by the impact on its stakeholders, principally, students and faculty at each institution and state, commercial, and civic societies of the State of Illinois and Sweden. As such, the alliance provides a model for global leadership in higher education, research collaboration, and civic engagement. The alliance also serves as the pilot project for the university in terms of a coordinated approach to international engagement.

Activities of INSPIRE include collaborative research symposia, reciprocal student and faculty exchange programs, shared course development, research collaboration, innovative cross-institutional research centers, university/industry partnerships, and funding opportunities for university faculty.

In recognition of INSPIRE's strategic, comprehensive, and innovative international partnership efforts, the program was awarded the Andrew Heiskell Awards for Innovation in International Education in the International Partnerships category by the Institute of International Education in January 2016.

INSPIRE Archive

Joint Publications

Follow the links below to read joint publications by INSPIRE-affiliated faculty from the program's founding in 2012 through 2016.

  • Dong, Y., Keating, K.M., Khetani, R.S., Fields, C., Inskeep, W.P., Sanford, R.A., Yau, P.M., Imai, B.S., Hernandez, A..G., Wright, C., Srivastava, V., Weber, J., Bulone, V., Cann, I.K.O., Guang, S., and Fouke, B.W., "Survival Strategies of Low-Diversity Filamentous Microbial Mats within High-Temperature, Dysoxic and Turbulent Environments of Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park, USA," in press, The ISME Journal, 2015.
  • Chan, A.P.O., Kvorning, T., Ryu, S., Fradkin, E., "Effective hydrodynamic field theory and condensation picture of topological insulators," Physical Review B, 93(15), 155122, 2016.
  • Srivastava, V., Weber, J.R., Malm, E., Fouke, B.W., Bulone, V., "Proteomic analysis of a poplar cell suspension culture suggests a major role of protein S-acylation in diverse cellular processes," Frontiers in Plant Science, 7, 477, 2016.
  • Katselis, D., Rojas, C.R., Godoy, B.I., Aguero, J.C., "On experiment design for single carrier and multicarrier systems," 2015 European Control Conference, ECC 2015
    7330794, pp. 1772-1777, 2015.
  • Panahandeh, G., Hutchinson, S., Händel, P., Jansson, M., "Planar-Based Visual Inertial Navigation: Observability Analysis and Motion Estimation," in press Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems: Theory and Applications, 2015.
  • Katselis, D., Rojas, C.R., "Application-oriented estimator selection," IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 22(4), 6926736, pp. 489-493, 2015.
  • Bogart, T., Haase, C., Hering, M., Lorenz, B., Nill, B, Paffenholz, A., Rote, G., Santos, F., Schenck, H., "Finitely many smooth d-polytopes with n lattice points," Israel Journal of Mathematics, 207 (1), pp. 301-329, 2015.
  • Mohammadiha, N., Smaragdis, P., Panahandeh, G., Doclo, S., "A state-space approach to dynamic nonnegative matrix factorization," IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 63 (4), 6996052, pp. 949-959, 2015.
  • Strain, I.N., Wu, Q., Pourrahimi, A.M., Hedenqvist, M.S., Olsson, R.T., Andersson, R.L., "Electrospinning of recycled PET to generate tough mesomorphic fibre membranes for smoke filtration," Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 3 (4), pp. 1632-1640, 2015.
  • Bassyouni, F., Elhalwany, N., Abdel Rehim, M., Neyfeh, M., "Advances and new technologies applied in controlled drug delivery system," Research on Chemical Intermediates, 41 (4), pp. 2165-2200, 2015.
  • Katselis, D., Rojas, C.R., Godoy, B.I., Agüero, J.C., Beck, C.L., "On the end-performance metric estimator selection," Automatica, 58, pp. 22-27, 2015.
  • Von Ballmoos, C., Gonska, N., Lachmann, P., Gennis, R.B., Ädelroth, P., Brzezinski, P., "Mutation of a single residue in the ba3 oxidase specifically impairs protonation of the pump site," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112 (11), pp. 3397-3402, 2015.
  • Katselis, D., Rojas, C.R., Beck, C.L., "Estimator selection: End-performance metric aspects," Proceedings of the American Control Conference, 7172026, pp. 4430-4435, 2015.
  • Trkulja, C.L., Jansson, E.T., Jardemark, K., Orwar, O., "Probing structure and function of ion channels using limited proteolysis and microfluidics," Journal of the American Chemical Society, 136 (42), pp. 14875-14882, 2014.
  • Ahn, Y.O., Mahinthichaichan, P., Lee, H.J., Ouyang, H., Kaluka, D., Yeh, S.-R., Arjona, D., Rousseau, D.L., Tajkhorshid, E., Ädelroth, P., Gennis, R.B., "Conformational coupling between the active site and residues within the KC-channel of the Vibrio cholerae cbb3-type (C-family) oxygen reductase," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111 (42), pp. E4419-E4428, 2014.
  • Messina, L., Nastar, M., Garnier, T., Domain, C., Olsson, P., "Exact ab initio transport coefficients in bcc Fe-X (X=Cr, Cu, Mn, Ni, P, Si) dilute alloys," Physical Review B - Condensed Matter and Materials Physics, 90 (10), 104203, 2014.
  • Kozlowski, T., Wysocki, A., Gajev, I., Xu, Y., Downar, T., Ivanov, K., Magedanz, J., Hardgrove, M., March-Leuba, J., Hudson, N., Ma, W., "Analysis of the OECD/NRC Oskarshamn-2 BWR stability benchmark," Annals of Nuclear Energy, 67, pp. 4-12, 2014.
  • Hadjicostis, C.N., Charalambous, T., "Average consensus in the presence of delays in directed graph topologies," IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 59 (3), 6571230, pp. 763-768, 2014.
  • Charalambous, T., Hadjicostis, C.N., Johansson, M., "Distributed minimum-time weight balancing over digraphs," Proceedings of ISCCSP 2014 - 2014 6th International Symposium on Communications, Control and Signal Processing, 6877847, pp. 190-193, 2014.
  • Hualde, J.I. & Riad, T., "Word accent and intonation in Baltic," In Campbell, Gibbon & Hirst, eds., Speech prosody 7, 668-672, 2014.
  • Matafonov, A., Leung, P.Y., Gailani, A.E., Grach, S.L., Puy, C., Cheng, Qa, Sun, M.-F., McCarty, O.J.T., Tucker, E.I., Kataoka, H., Renné, T., Morrissey, J.H., Gruber, A., Gailani, D., "Factor XII inhibition reduces thrombus formation in a primate thrombosis model," Blood, 123(110, pp. 1739-1746, 2014.
  • Teixeira, A., Dán, G., Sandberg, H., Berthier, R., Bobba, R.B., Valdes, A., "Security of smart distribution grids: Data integrity attacks on integrated volt/VAR control and countermeasures," Proceedings of the American Control Conference, art. no. 6859265, pp. 4372-4378, 2014.
  • Farokhi, F., Teixeira, A.M.H., Langbort, C., "Gaussian cheap talk game with quadratic cost functions: When herding between strategic senders is a virtue," Proceedings of the American Control Conference, art. no. 6859123, pp. 2267-2272, 2014.
  • Svahn, E., Faxén, K., Gennis, R.B., Brzezinski, P., "Proton pumping by an inactive structural variant of cytochrome c oxidase," Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, 140, pp. 6-11, 2014.
  • Peltonen, J., Ma, W., Kozlowski, T., "Effective Spatial Mapping for Coupled Code Analysis of Thermal-Hydraulics/Neutron-Kinetics of Bioling Water Reactors," Annals of Nuclear Energy, 63, pp. 461-485, 2014.
  • Gajev, I., Ma., W., Kozlowski, T., "Sensitivity analysis of input uncertain parameters on BWR stability using TRACE/PARCS," Annals of Nuclear Energy, 67, 49-58, 2014.
  • Mörtberg, U., Haas, J., Zetterberg, A., Franklin, J.P., Jonsson, D., Deal, B., "Urban ecosystems and sustainable urban development-analysing and assessing interacting systems in the Stockholm region," Urban Ecosystems, 16(4), 763-782, 2013.
  • Mohammadiha, N., Smaragdis, P., Leijon, A., "Simultaneous noise classification and reduction using a priori learned models," Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, art. no. 6661951, 2013.
  • Dani, A., Panahandeh, G., Chung, S.-J., Hutchinson, S., "Image moments for higher-level feature based navigation," Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, art. no. 6696413, pp. 602-609, 2013.
  • Panahandeh, G., Jansson, M., Hutchinson, S., "IMU-camera data fusion: Horizontal plane observation with explicit outlier rejection," Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation, art. no.6817890, 2013.
  • Dán, G., Lui, K.-S., Tabassum, R., Zhu, Q., Nahrstedt, K., "SELINDA: A secure, scalable and light-weight data collection protocol for smart grids," Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications, SmartGridComm, art. no. 6688004, pp. 480-485, 2013.
  • Vukovic, O., Dán, G., Bobba, R.B., "Confidentiality-preserving obfuscation for cloud-based power system contingency analysis," Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications, SmartGridComm, art. no. 6687996, pp. 432-437, 2013.
  • Seim, A.L., Parente, S.L., "Democracy as a middle ground: A unified theory of development and political regimes," European Economic Review, 64, pp. 35-56, 2013.
  • Buyukdegirmenci, V.T., Nategh, S., Magill, M.P., Krein, P.T., "A fast and flexible analytical approach for thermal modeling of a linear stator structure," Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Electric Machines and Drives Conference, IEMDC 2013, art. no. 6556184, pp. 793-800, 2013.
  • Smirnova, I., Chang, H.-Y., Von Ballmoos, C., Ädelroth, P., Gennis, R.B., Brzezinski, P., "Single mutations that redirect internal proton transfer in the ba 3 oxidase from thermus thermophilu," Biochemistry, 52(40), 7022-7030, 2013.
  • Bassyouni, F., ElHalwany, N., Abdel Rehim, M., Neyfeh, M., "Advances and new technologies applied in controlled drug delivery system," to appear Research on Chemical Intermediates, pp. 1-36, 2013.
  • Buyukdegirmenci, V.T., Magill, M.P., Nategh, S., Krein, P.T., "Development of closed-form solutions for fast thermal modeling of rotating electric machinery," Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Electric Machines and Drives Conference, IEMDC 2013, art. no. 6556189, pp. 832-838, 2013.
  • Salm E., Duarte, C., Jokilaakso, N., Reddy, B. Jr., Dorvel, B., Bashir, R., "Integrated 'Lab-on-a-Transistor' with Droplets-in-Air for Parallel Nanoliter Reactions," Micro and Nanotechnology Lab.
  • Mohammadiha, N., Smaragdis, P., Leijon, A., "Supervised and Unsupervised Speech Enhancement Using Nonnegative Matrix Factorization," IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 21(10), art. no. 2270369 , pp. 2140-2151, 2013.
  • Mohammadiha, N., Smaragdis, P., Leijon, A. "Prediction based filtering and smoothing to exploit temporal dependencies in NMF," Proceedings of the ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, art. no. 6637773, pp. 873-877, 2013.
  • Farokhi, F., Langbort, C., Johansson, K.H., "Decentralized disturbance accommodation with limited plant model information," SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, 51 (2), pp. 1543-1573, 2013.
  • Jokilaakso, N., Salm, E., Chen, A., Millet, L., Guevara, C.D., Dorvel, B., Reddy, B., Karlstrom, A.E., Chen, Y., Ji, H., Sooryakumar, R., Bashir, R., "Ultra-localized single cell electroporation using silicon nanowires," Lab on a Chip - Miniaturisation for Chemistry and Biology, 13 (3), pp. 336-339, 2013.
  • Farokhi, F., Langbort, C., Johansson, K.H., "Optimal structured static state-feedback control design with limited model information for fully-actuated systems," Automatica, 49 (2), pp. 326-337, 2013.
  • Sriver, R.L., Huber, M., Chafik, L., "Excitation of equatorial Kelvin and Yanai waves by tropical cyclones in an ocean general circulation mode," Earth System Dynamics, 4(1), 1-10, 2013.
  • Gajev, I., Ma, W., Kozlowski, T., "Space-time convergence analysis on BWR stability using TRACE/PARCS," Annals of Nuclear Energy, 51, pp. 295-306, 2013.
  • Mohammadiha, N., Smaragdis, P., Leijon, A., "Low-Artifact Source Separation Using Probabilistic Latent Component Analysis," IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, 2013.
  • Johansson, A.-L., Carlsson, J., Högbom, M., Hosler, J.P., Gennis, R.B., Brzezinski, P., "Proton uptake and pKa changes in the uncoupled Asn139Cys variant of cytochrome c oxidase," Biochemistry, 52 (5), pp. 827-836, 2013.
  • Johansson, A.-L., Högbom, M., Carlsson, J., Gennis, R.B., Brzezinski, P., "Role of aspartate 132 at the orifice of a proton pathway in cytochrome c oxidase," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(22), 8912-8917, 2013.
  • Li, H., Dán, G., Nahrstedt, K., "FADEC: Fast Authentication for Dynamic Electric Vehicle Charging," Computer Science Research and Tech Report, IDEALS, 2013.
  • O'Reilly, C.J., Alenius, E., Efraimsson, G., Bodony, D.J., "Aero-acoustic simulations of an orifice plate mounted in a low-Mach-number ducted flow," 18th AIAA/CEAS Aeroacoustics Conference (33rd AIAA Aeroacoustics Conference), 2012.
  • Silveira, A., Scanavini, D., Boquist, S., Ericsson, C.-G., Hellénius, M.-L., Leander, K., De Faire, U., Öhrvik, J., Woodhams, B., Morrissey, J.H., Hamsten, A., "Relationships of plasma factor VIIa-antithrombin complexes to manifest and future cardiovascular disease," Thrombosis Research, 130 (2), pp. 221-225, 2012.
  • Qin, M.P., Leinaas, J.M., Ryu, S., Ardonne, E., Xiang, T., Lee, D.-H., "Quantum torus chain," Physical Review B - Condensed Matter and Materials Physics, 86 (13), art. no. 134430, 2012.
  • Gajev, I., Kozlowski, T., Ma, W., "Space-time convergence study based on OECD Ringhals-1 Stability Benchmark," Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, 106, pp. 984-987, 2012.
  • Vargas, E., Yarov-Yarovoy, V., Khalili-Araghi, F., Catterall, W.A., Klein, M.L., Tarek, M., Lindahl, E., Schulten, K., Perozo, E., Bezanilla, F., Roux, B., "An emerging consensus on voltage-dependent gating from computational modeling and molecular dynamics simulations," Journal of General Physiology, 140 (6), pp. 587-594, 2012.
  • Farokhi, F., Langbort, C., Johansson, K.H., "Optimal disturbance accommodation with limited model information," Proceedings of the American Control Conference, art. no. 6315488, pp. 4757-4764, 2012.
  • Stanković, M.S., Johansson, K.H., Stipanović, D.M., "Distributed seeking of nash equilibria with applications to mobile sensor networks," IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 57 (4), art. no. 6069543, pp. 904-919, 2012.
  • Näsvik Öjemyr, L., Von Ballmoos, C., Gennis, R.B., Sligar, S.G., Brzezinski, P., "Reconstitution of respiratory oxidases in membrane nanodiscs for investigation of proton-coupled electron transfer," FEBS Letters, 586 (5), pp. 640-645, 2012.
  • O'Reilly, C.J., Alenius, E., Efraimsson, G., Bodony, D.J., "Numerical simulation of flow-induced sound generation from an orifice in a low mach number ducted flow," 17th AIAA/CEAS Aeroacoustics Conference 2011 (32nd AIAA Aeroacoustics Conference), 2011.
  • Stanković, M.S., Stanković, S.S., Stipanović, D.M., "Decentralized identification for errors-in-variables systems based on a consensus algorithm," Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, art. no. 6161186, pp. 2951-2956, 2011.
  • Cui, Y., Fung, K.H., Xu, J., Yi, J., He, S., Fang, N.X., "Exciting multiple plasmonic resonances by a double-layered metallic nanostructure," Journal of the Optical Society of America B: Optical Physics, 28 (11), pp. 2827-2832, 2011.
  • Farokhi, F., Langbort, C., Johansson, K.H., "Control design with limited model information," Proceedings of the American Control Conference, art. no. 5991495, pp. 4697-4704, 2011.
  • Stanković, S.S., Stanković, M.S., Stipanović, D.M., "Decentralized parameter estimation by consensus based stochastic approximation, " IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 56 (3), art. no. 5580011, pp. 531-543, 2011.
  • Nordmark, A., Dankowicz, H., Champneys, A., "Friction-induced reverse chatter in rigid-body mechanisms with impacts," IMA Journal of Applied Mathematics (Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications), 76 (1), pp. 85-119, 2011.

Activities

The sections below highlight INSPIRE activities that have taken place since the program's founding in 2012 through 2016.

2016

  • In May 2016, Prof. Mara Wade of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature will visit Prof. Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre in the SU Department of Baltic Languages, Finnish, and German to expand on existing INSPIRE connections, partially initiated during Prof. Nivre's October 2012 visit to the Urbana campus. She will give two invited lectures on "The Emblem Book as album amicorum," (as part of the "Day of Literature" event at Stockholm’s University on May 25) and "Using Emblematica Online for Research in Early Modern Studies".
  • On March 11, 2016, during the Institute of International Education's Best Practices Conference 2016 at the University of California, Davis, INSPIRE and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will receive the 2016 Andrew Heiskell Award for Innovation in International Education in the category of International Partnerships.
  • In June 2016, the Department of Speech and Hearing Science and the Divisions of Audiology and Speech and Language Pathology at Karolinska Institutet organized a one-day symposium in Urbana, including some 26 staff and students from Stockholm. The event featured research presentations by Illinois and KI faculty, a graduate student poster session, and panel sessions, and was followed by a second day of clinic open houses. It aimed to further strengthen the partnership between these institutions, as well as the existing student exchange program.
  • In September 2016, Prof. Yoram Bresler of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering served as opponent at a PhD dissertation defense on Bayesian methods for sparse and low-rank matrix problems in the KTH School of Electrical Engineering.
  • Michael S. Moore, Charles R. Walgreen, Jr., University Chair, University of Illinois; Professor of Law, Professor in the Center for Advanced Study, and Co-Director of the Program in Law and Philosophy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign., Oct. 7-8, 2016 – Paper to the Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Criminal Law’s Person-III, University of Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden.
  • The effects of financial derivatives on analyst coverage decisions. 23rd Annual Conference of the Multinational Finance Society, Stockholm University Business School, Stockholm, Sweden. June 28, 2016.MICHAEL P. DONOHOE Assistant Professor of Accountancy.

2015

  • In November 2015, Dr. Radosveta Dimitrova, a postdoctoral researcher in the SU Department of Psychology visited Prof. Gail Ferguson in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies in support of collaborative research and as a guest lecturer in a graduate-level seminar.
  • In August 2015, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was awarded an $18.5M National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center on Power Optimization for Electro-Thermal Systems, as the lead institution in a collaboration with three other US research institutions and two international partners, including KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The Center was officially launched on October 15 at a ceremony including NSF Director France Córdova and members of the Illinois congressional delegation.
  • PhD student Ale Pålsson from the SU Department of History is visiting Illinois during Fall 2015 to complete his dissertation work on the Swedish-Caribbean colony St. Barthélemy.
  • The Department of Ethnology at SU and the CHAMP/Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management and Policy organized an international conference on Heritage of Death: Landscapes, Sentiment and Practice at Stockholm University on September 10-11, 2015. The collaboration builds on an ongoing partnership between CHAMP and the recently formed Critical Heritage Studies Network at SU.
  • Prof. Peter Händel and Dr. Isaac Skog of the KTH Department of Signal Processing visited Urbana in August 2015 for an informal workshop with Prof. Romit Roy Choudhury's research group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering to explore opportunities for collaboration in the area of driver analytics and behavior monitoring.
  • Prof. Anna Kukekova of the Department of Animal Sciences presented a lecture on Genetic complexity of a simple behavioral pattern during the 7th European Congress on Mammalogy at SU in August 2015.
  • In Summer 2015, the KTH course Elements of the Back-end of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle: Geological Storage of Nuclear Spent Fuel again featured lectures by Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering Adjunct Prof. William Roy and Prof. Tomasz Kozlowski, as well as participation by seven NPRE students, who were enrolled in NPRE 498 Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage in Bedrock during Spring 2015, taught by Prof. Roy.
  • During a July, 2015, visit by Chancellor Phyllis Wise, Vice Provost for International Affairs and Global Strategies Reitumetse Obakeng Mabokela, Associate Chancellor for Corporate and International Relations Pradeep Khanna, and Director of Illinois Strategic International Partnerships Tim Barnes to the INSPIRE partners in Stockholm, the Phase I accomplishments of the partnership were reviewed. In meetings with President Peter Gudmundsson of KTH Royal Institute of Technology and President Astrid Söderbergh Widding of Stockholm University, the transnational alliance was reaffirmed and a process of identifying objectives for Phase II was initiated.
  • As part of his sabbatical, Prof. Daniel Bodony of the Department of Aerospace Engineering visited collaborators in the KTH Department of Mechanics for two months in late Spring 2015.
  • Prof. Ulla Mörtberg of the KTH Department of Land and Water Resources Engineering presented the paper Integrating ecosystem services in urban energy trajectories, co-authored with Brian Deal, Vladimir Cvetkovic, Berit Balfors, Juan Azcarate, Jan Haas and Xi Pang, at the Biennial International Workshop Advances in Energy Studies (BIWAES) in May 2015 in Stockholm, Sweden.
  • In May 2015, as part of his collaboration with Prof. Olov Engwall in the KTH Department of Speech, Music, and Hearing, Prof. Ryan Shosted of the Department of Linguistics visited the SU Department of Linguistics and the KTH School of Computer Science and Communication and presented lectures on Imaging speech and imagining the possibilities.
  • Tim Schmidt-Eisenlohr, then-Professor in the Department of Economics, gave a brown bag lecture titled "Learning and the Value of Relationships in International Trade" in the SU Department of Economics in May 2015.
  • In May 2015, Prof. Numa Markee of the Department of Linguistics visited the SU Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, where he co-lectured with Silvia Kunitz on Documenting multimodal language learning behavior over time: A conversation analytic perspective on planning, and served as an external opponent at a PhD defense.
  • In May 2015, Prof. Laura DeThorne of the Department of Speech and Hearing Science served as external opponent at a PhD defense in the Division of Speech and Language Pathology at Karolinska Institutet.
  • Prof. Angelia Nedich of the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering served as external opponent during the dissertation defense of a PhD student of Prof. Mikael Johansson of the KTH Department of Automatic Control in April 2015.
  • Dr. Manuel Welsch, deputy director at the division of Energy Systems Analysis at KTH was an invited speaker at the conference Power Africa: Promises, Potentials, Pitfalls, and Possible Alternatives, organized by the Center for African Studies, and held on the Urbana campus in March 2015.
  • In February 2015, the 2014 Nordberg INSPIRE Scholar-in-Residence Awardee, with partial support from a donation to INSPIRE from H. Gerald Nordberg, Jr. and Linda Nordberg, Prof. Boris Shapiro of the Department of Mathematics at Stockholm University, visited the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Mathematics at the invitation of Profs. Yuliy Baryshnikov and Hal Schenck. During this visit, Prof. Shapiro delivered a series of talks and interacted with faculty and graduate students on the topic of applied topology.
  • As part of his collaboration with Prof. Ülo Langel of the SU Department of Neurochemistry, Prof. Dipanjan Pan of the Department of Bioengineering visited SU in February 2015 and lectured on Translational Nanomedicine from Drug Discovery to In vivo Application.
  • Three of the ten Illinois Gilman scholars, announced in January 2014, were students participating in exchange programs with the INSPIRE partners, specifically with KTH in Mechanical Engineering and with SU in Biochemistry and Psychology.

2014

  • A September 2014 workshop on opportunities for joint engagement in agriculture, global health, information technology, energy, and water in Africa, co-sponsored by the Center for African Studies and the European Union Center, features presentations by Drs. Zeinab Nour Eddine Tag-Eldeen, Peter Nilsson, Karoline Beronius, Yifang Ban, Gunaratna Kuttuva Rajarao, and Yohannes Kiros from KTH, and Alex Winter-Nelson, Ian Brooks, Gregory Damhorst, Barry Pittendrigh, George Gross, Prosper Panumpabi, and Joanna Shisler from Illinois.
  • Starting in the 2014/15 academic year, the partnership between RailTEC and the KTH Railway Group includes opportunities for enrollment by Illinois students in three online courses offered at KTH.
  • In October 2014, a workshop on Heritage Language Speakers in Society and Education was organized by the SU Department of Language Education. Plenary speakers included Profs. Silvina Montrul, Melissa Bowles, and Jill Jegerski of the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, Prof. Liv Thorstensson Davila in the College of Education, Prof. Tania Ionin of the Department of Linguistics.
  • As part of the EU-funded EPiGRAM project, Illinois is joining KTH and four other European institutions in organizing the Exascale Applications and Software Conference in Stockholm in April 2014. Prof. William Gropp of the Department of Computer Science and Director of the Parallel Computing Institute joins Prof. Erwin Laure in the School of Computer Science and Communication at KTH on the EASC 2014 steering group.
  • In May 2014, Prof. Stephen Downie presented an invited talk on the Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis: Prototyping Project to the KTH Sound and Music Computing Lab. During the same visit, Downie's PhD student Kahyun Choi presented a talk on a Cross-cultural Exploration of K-Pop Moods and Genres.
  • During Spring 2014, Prof. John Stallmeyer of the Department of Architecture collaborated with Charlie Gullström and Ori Merom of the KTH School of Architecture and the Built Environment in the creation of a Mediated Studio course on the influence of information and communication technology in future architecture and urbanism. The Illinois and KTH students enrolled in the course collaborated through internet-based conferencing as well as in person meetings during visits to Stockholm and Urbana.
  • In March 2014, Prof. Mei-Po Kwan of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science is visiting the SU Department of Human Geography and giving a seminar on Geovisualization and Geocomputation of Human Activities in Space-Time.
  • Between March 10 and May 7, Donald Haring, head instructor of American Sign Language in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science will be visiting the SU Department of Linguistics as instructor in an introductory course on American Sign Language. The exchange is an element in a collaborative project led by Prof. Matthew Dye at Illinois and Prof. Johanna Mesch at Stockholm University. Indeed, Mats Jonsson, Deaf Swedish Sign Language (SSL) instructor from SU will be visiting Illinois for 8 weeks during the spring 2014 semester, as an instructor in the 4-hour elective Intro to Swedish Sign Language (SHS 390) as well as in an evening class to local Deaf communities.
  • In March, Prof. Joanna Shisler of the Department of Microbiology and the Safe Global Water Institute visited KTH to discuss opportunities for collaborative international research projects in eastern Africa.
  • As a result of INSPIRE, the Innovation Immersion Program, created by Robert Valli, Director of Illinois Business Consulting, was expanded last year to include KTH, Technion, National University of Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University of Singapore and is a prominent element in KTH's development strategy. Robert Valli is a keynote speaker on the topic of the Innovation Immersion Program at a EU-funded thematic forum on Partnerships for Innovation and Socio-economic Impact: The Entrepreneurial University, held on the KTH campus March 19-20. View a YouTube video about the March 2013 IIP trip to Israel.
  • In 2014, two undergraduate students were the recipients of the 2014 Nordberg INSPIRE Student Scholar Award, a $2,500 scholarship funded by H. Gerald Nordberg, Jr. and Linda Nordberg in support of a study-abroad experience at an INSPIRE partner institution. Amanda Steelman, a Mechanical Science and Engineering junior, joined two other undergraduates from the same program on an exchange with the School of Industrial Engineering and Management at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, with a focus on energy and sustainability. Lisa Feldman, a Marketing junior, spent the spring 2014 semester on an exchange with the Stockholm Business School at Stockholm University.
  • In April, Dr. Matthias Frihammar of the SU Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies is one of two keynote speakers at the CHAMP annual conference where he will speak on "Skogskyrkogården, the Forest Cemetery: Controversies surrounding this UNESCO World Heritage Site in Stockholm, Sweden."
  • By initiative of Prof. Anita Say Chan of the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, a faculty-led program abroad on Food Networks: Media, Technology & Sustainability (MACS 364) is offered from mid-March through end of May, including a week-long visit to Stockholm.
  • Four students from Stockholm University are spending the spring 2014 semester in the College of Law, as part of a targeted exchange.
  • A new exchange agreement has been entered between the Department of Speech and Hearing Science and the Karolinska Institutet (KI) Divisions of Audiology and Speech and Language Pathology for student exchange to begin in fall 2014. Profs. Laura Segebart DeThorne and Karen Kirk visited KI in September, 2014, to explore opportunities for research exchange. During their visit, Prof. DeThorne gave two lectures to speech-language pathology students and a research seminar on Supporting Communicative Competence: Children with Autism & the Importance of Flexible Multimodality, while Prof. Kirk gave one lecture to speech-language pathology and audiology students and a research seminar on Evaluating multimodal sentence recognition by adults or children with hearing loss.
  • Issue No. 1 of volume 26 of the prestigious quarterly Film History, an international journal published by Indiana University Press, contains the article "Marketing Rebellion: The Chinese Revolution Reconsidered," by Kim Fahlstedt of the SU Department of Media Studies, a result of his collaboration with Prof. Ramona Curry of the Department of English.
  • Prof. Ramona Curry of the Department of English has been awarded the Fulbright-Uppsala University Distinguished Chair in American Studies for the period January through June 2015. The position will allow her to teach at Uppsala, and continue her ongoing collaboration with Prof. Jan Olsson and Dr. Marina Dahlquist of the SU Department of Media Studies. In 2013, Prof. Curry's collaboration with Stockholm University supported a semester-long visit to Illinois by Kim Fahlstedt. An immediate outcome of this collaboration is a 2014 essay published in the prestigious quarterly Film History, which features Mr. Fahlstedt's research on American cinema in relation to Chinese immigrants/citizens in San Francisco in the first quarter of the 1900s.
  • As part of an exploratory research visit in May to Stockholm University, Prof. Elizabeth Lowe McCoy, Director of the Center for Translation Studies, will give a seminar on The Future of Translation Studies at the Institute for Interpreting and Translation Studies.
  • As part of an ongoing engagement with Arctic studies, including the course Environment and Society in a Changing Arctic, a multi-institutional research group including Dr. Dag Avango of the KTH Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment and Prof. Anna Westerståhl Stenport of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures have received a three-year award from the Nordic Centre for Spatial Development to conduct field-work at three different locations in the Nordic Arctic for a comparaitive study of the legacy of mining.
  • In May 2014, Profs. Michael Twidale and Catherine Blake of the School of Information Sciences visited the SU Department of Computer and System Science, where they presented seminars on Collaborative Data Analytics and Towards Agile Research. The visit was a continuation of an ongoing exchange and research partnership with Prof. Preben Hansen, GSLIS research fellow for AY 13/14 and 14/15.
  • Among the main organizers of a Nobel Symposium on New forms of matter: topological insulators and superconductors, held in Stockholm in June 2014 were Eddy Ardonne, Thors-Hans Hansson, and Anders Karlhede from the SU Department of Physics and Eduardo Fradkin and Dale Van Harlingen from the Illinois Department of Physics.
  • Hosted by Prof. Pieter Vermeulen of the SU Department of English, Prof. Michael Rothberg and Jessica Young of the Department of English gave presentations on Holocaust memory and migration and digital remembrance, respectively, at a workshop on Global Memories and World Literatures, held in August 2014 as a mechanism for exploring opportunities for deeper exchange with Illinois.
  • A delegation from the SU Department of History visited the Illinois Department of History in October 2014 to explore opportunities for research collaboration and exchange.
  • A Swedish delegation from academia and industry, organized under the umbrella of Production2030, visited the Urbana campus in November 2014 to explore research strengths in the area of digital manufacturing and big data.

2013

  • Prof. Fredrik Gröndahl of the Department of Sustainable development, Environmental science and Engineering at KTH presented a seminar on the sustainable use of algae biomass for a Swedish bio-based economy in February 2013, during a visit to the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center.
  • In March 2013, Prof. Anita Say Chan of the Department of Media and Cinema Studies is presenting a seminar on "Hacking Digital Universalism: ICT4D and Technological Vanguards at the Periphery" during her visit to the Media Technology and Interaction Design (MID) group at KTH. Prof. Say Chan's visit follows a week-long stay of a MID Ph.D. student on the Urbana campus. Prof. Say Chan is also a co-investigator with Prof. Leif Dahlberg from MID on a four-year proposal to the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education, building on a SEK 150k initiation grant from this agency awarded to Dahlberg and Prof. Angharad Valdivia in 2011.
  • Prof. Barbro Blehr and Dr. Lars Kaijser of the SU Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies, visited the Urbana campus in early March 2013, to explore the Museum Studies program at Illinois.
  • Matilda Hanson, news editor at the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, visited Illinois as a guest of the European Union Center and INSPIRE in February, as part of a three-month fellowship from the CSIS Transatlantic Media Fellowship program.
  • Effective Summer 2013, GLBL 386/ESE 386/SCAN 386 Arctic Environment & Society is an official 6 credit hours course offered in collaboration with KTH. The course provides an interdisciplinary study of the European Arctic for science and non-science students, including an historical survey of the relationship between its environment and societies with the goal of understanding current and possible future conditions, in light of climate change. The course takes place in Scandinavia and includes a field site component in the Arctic. Junior standing or consent of instructor.
  • In February 2013, Prof. Jan Andersson and Sandra Fagerlund from the Faculty of Law at SU visited the Illinois College of Law to build on identified opportunities for student exchange and other forms of collaboration.
  • A semester-long visit by a Ph.D. student from the Department of Media Studies at SU to Prof. Ramona Curry of the Department of English included a seminar on February 15 on the search for a documentary style newsreel of the 1912 Chinese Revolution. Prof. Curry also hosts Prof. Jan Olsson and Dr. Marina Dahlquist of the Department of Media Studies at SU during a visit in March 2013.
  • In July 2013, the University of Illinois Press published Exporting Perilous Pauline - a volume edited by Marina Dahlquist of the Department of Media Studies at SU.
  • In March 2013, Prof. Clifford Singer kicks off instruction in NPRE498 Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Bedrock, to be followed by one or two additional intensive weeks of study at KTH, including a visit to the Äspö underground waste storage laboratory near the Oskarshamn nuclear facility in southern Sweden.
  • Prof. György Dán from the School of Electrical Engineering and the ACCESS Linnaeus Centre at KTH continues his stay as a Fulbright visiting researcher in the Department of Computer Science through April 2013. He will be housed in the Information Trust Institute where he will collaborate with Prof. Klara Nahrstedt and other ITI researchers within the DoE funded TCIPG project.
  • Sponsored by grants from the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation and the European Union Center, the Scandinavian Studies program is hosting Dr. Dag Avango of the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH as a visiting scholar in April 2013. Dr. Avango is the recipient of a research grant from the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat for the Svalbard field component of the 2013 iteration of the course Environment and Society in a Changing Arctic.
  • During a month-long visit, in the second half of the Spring 2013 semester, Prof. Sebastian Stichel, Director of the KTH Railway Group, will collaborate with Conrad Ruppert and Prof. Chris Barkan of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as instructor in CEE598 Rail Vehicle Dynamics, a 2 credit hour special topics class offered for the first time as a result of the INSPIRE partnership.
  • A PhD student of Prof. Arne Leijon of the KTH Department of Electrical Engineering visited Prof. Paris Smaragdis beginning in October 2012 and through the 2013 spring semester. Their joint research on sound processing and speech technology has resulted in two publications.
  • In mid-February, an administrative delegation from KTH, including Eva Malmström-Jonsson, Vice-President and Professor of Coating Technology, Stefan Östlund, Dean of Electrical Engineering and INSPIRE Faculty Liaison, Erica Buck, International Coordinator, Ulrika Ljungman, Head of KTH Business Liaison, and Johan Blaus, Business Coordinator, visited the Urbana campus to further develop educational and research exchange between the institutions, with emphasis also on opportunities for public engagement and outreach.
  • During March 2013, the Illinois Student International Academic Affairs/Study Abroad Office is advertising for a Visiting Assistant Director for Curriculum Integration to facilitate curricular integration of learning abroad experiences into selected undergraduate programs, by liaising between key faculty and advising staff in targeted departments at Illinois and their counterparts at designated international partner institutions.
  • In 2013, the U.S. student Fulbright program awarded a fully funded research opportunity to Joseph Weber, an undergraduate research assistant of Prof. Bruce Fouke of the Department of Geology. During his stay at KTH in fall 2013, Mr. Weber will study tools for characterization of cell-membrane proteins in the research group of Prof. Vincent Bulone of the Division of Glycoscience.
  • In April 2013, Prof. Juhee Kim, formerly of the Division of Nutritional Sciences presented the paper A case study: Nutrition and Physical Activity Environments of Public Childcare Centers in Korea, Sweden, and U.S., including co-authors Liselotte Schäfer Elinder, Deepa Singhru, Linnea Olsson, and Sven Bremberg of the Department of Public Health Sciences at Karolinska Institutet at the 2013 Experimental Biology conference.
  • Prof. Gul Agha of the Department of Computer Science is visting KTH as a dissertation defense opponent in March 2013. During his visit, he is also giving a keynote presentation at the KTH Security and Concurrency Workshop organized by the School of Computer Science and Communication.
  • Silvia Kunitz, who earned her PhD from the Illinois Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese in 2013 was selected for one of 25 international postdoctoral fellows announced by SU as part of a major investment in international exchange and relations, and joined the Stockholm University Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism in August 2013.
  • Together with an American Sign Language (ASL) instructor and an ASL interpreter, Prof. Matthew Dye of the Department of Speech and Hearing Science is visiting collaborators in the Department of Linguistics at SU, as well as faculty and staff of the Division of Speech and Language Pathology at KI, in March 2013 to explore opportunities for faculty and student exchange, specifically the development of online courses in ASL and collaborative courses on Language and Culture of Deaf Communities. Prof. Dye returned to Stockholm in June 2013 and gave a seminar on "Cognitive control, selective attention, and development: harnessing compensatory neuroplasticity."
  • In April 2013, Prof. Gordon Hutner of the Department of English is hosting an Author's Roundtable at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory featuring Prof. Stefan Helgesson of the Department of English at SU.
  • In March 2013, Prof. Imad Al-Qadi of the Illinois Center for Transportatation was appointed affiliate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at KTH.
  • On April 29-30, 2013, Maryam Hansson Edalat, Research Liaison Officer and Deputy Director, and Elisabet Idermark, Senior Advisor for International Affairs, both from SU, are visiting the Urbana campus to promote and disseminate information regarding the development of successful Marie Curie Mobility Fellowship applications for Illinois researchers who wish to undertake research at one of the INSPIRE partners or who wish to host a researcher from one of the INSPIRE partners.
  • In April, 2013, Johan Blaus, Project Manager at KTH Business Liaison, and Karin Ekdahl Wästberg, Unit Director in the Division of Elder Care at the City of Stockholm, attended the 2013 Illinois Governor's Conference on Affordable Housing at the UIC Forum in Chicago. A session on Bringing International Sustainable Housing Models to Illinois, organized by Kate Brown of the Building Research Council, featured presentations on key Swedish sustainable multifamly housing projects with suggestions for incorporating these into Illinois affordable housing projects. Together with a representative from the City of Chicago Aging Office and a local architect, Blaus and Ekdahl Wästberg also visited Senior Housing Developments in Chicago.
  • Prof. José Ignacio Hualde of the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese gave a phonology colloquium titled "Individual differences and conventionalization in sound change" in May 2013, in the Special Doctoral Programme in Language and Linguistics at Stockholm University.
  • Gustav Caetano-Anolies of the Department of Crop Sciences gave an astrobiology seminar in the Stockholm University Astrobiology Centre in early May 2013 on "the emergence of molecular structure and function and the rise of genetics."
  • In late Spring and Summer 2013, Prof. Geir Dullerud of the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering conducted a 4-month research sabbatical in the Automatic Control Laboratory at KTH. His research activities, which included close interactions with the groups of Profs. Karl Henrik Johansson and Mikael Johansson, focused on game theory and decentralized control, distributed convex optimization, and security for cyberphysical systems.
  • In early June, 2013, Profs. Dan Henningson, Director of the Swedish e-Science Research Centre, and Erwin Laure, Director of the PDC Center for High Performance Computing at KTH, visited the Urbana campus and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to explore best practices in end-used application support.
  • Prof. Carolyn Beck of the Department of Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering completed her research sabbatical in Spring '13 at KTH in the Automatic Control Laboratory, during which she led a research seminar series on Clustering and Aggregation of Graphs and Networks, which was attended by professors, postdocs and graduate students. Interactions with Profs. Bo Wahlberg, Kalle Johansson, and Håkan Hjalmarsson, and visiting Prof. Maria Papadopouli, focused on research problems in model aggregation, learning, and system identification.
  • Two College of Liberal Arts and Sciences undergraduate students spent six weeks during Summer 2013 at KTH and Stockholm University, respectively, as research assistants in a pilot program aimed at providing undergraduate research opportunities at partner universities.
  • Profs. Geir Dullerud of the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering and Carolyn Beck of the Department of Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering spent a four-month sabbatical visiting the KTH
  • An initiative of Prof. Robert Gennis of the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Prof. Peter Brzezinski of the Department of BIochemistry and Biophysics at Stockholm University, a ten-day Ph.D. level course on Membrane Protein Biology and Biotechnology was held at Stockholm University in August 2013. The course included a combination of oral, tutorial, and practical sessions covering the latest findings across topics such as membrane protein function, structure, dynamics and engineering. Illinois speakers included Profs. Robert Gennis, Anthony Crofts, Yi Lu, Huimin Zhao, Christopher Rao, Claudio Grosman, Satish Nair, Emad Tajkhorshid, Taras Pogorelov, Steve Granick, and Mary Kraft, and was attended by 32 graduate students.
  • In May 2013, Dr. Preben Hansen of the Department of Computer and Systems Science at Stockholm University was awarded a two-year Research Fellow position with the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science in support of annual travel to Illinois and knowledge transfer. A visit in September 2013 to the Urbana campus included a seminar on collaborative information seeking. Listen to the audio recording here.
  • Gutgsell Endowed Professor Robert McChesney of the Department of Communication was the keynote speaker at the seventh seminar pf the Nordic Research Network in Journalism Studies held at the Stockholm University Department of Media Studies in May 2013 and is returning to this department as Bonnier Guest Professor during September 2013.
  • Profs. Robert McChesney and Inger Stole of the Department of Communication are the instructors of a PhD-level course on "Internet, media and democracy: a political economy approach," offered in early September 2013 by the Stockholm University Department of Media Studies.
  • A two-day symposium on "Perfectionism and Education - Kant and Cavell on Ethics and Aesthetics in Society", held at the van der Nootska Palace in Stockholm in early September 2013 and organized by Profs. Klas Roth and Martin Gustafsson of the Stockholm University Department of Education included a presentation by Prof. Pradeep Dhillon of the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership.
  • Out of SEK 1M allocated for individual applications in support of transnsational partnerships at Stockholm University for the Spring 2013 application deadline, more than a third was awarded to initiatives with Illinois, including exchange in ethnology, finance, immigration and language policy, physical geography, computer and system science, media studies, and English literature.
  • During Fall 2013 and Spring 2014, Prof. Brian Deal of the Department of Urban & Regional Planning will spend portions of a sabbatical term at KTH, setting up a joint energy course to be offered in Spring 2014. Brian is also coordinating a joint special issue of the International Journal of Sustainable Design addressing comparative approaches to assessing urban sustainability and pairing up authors from Illinois and KTH.
  • Profs. Fredrik Gröndahl and Maria Malmström of the Division of Industrial Ecology at KTH are continuing their collaboration with B.K. Sharma and Rupa Ganguly of the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center on microalgea-based saline wastewater treatment. The Center is hosting a KTH Ph.D. student during the fall semester and will welcome Profs. Gröndahl and Malmström in October for a brief visit.
  • In September 2013, faculty from the KTH Department of Transport Science are participating in a two-day transportation Ph.D. symposium organized by Prof. Imad Al-Qadi of the Illinois Center for Transportation. Together with three KTH PhD students, Profs. Sebastiaan Meijer, Björn Birgisson, Denis Jelagin, and Nils Rydén are presenting work on pavement design and transport logistics research. A third symposium in the series is planned for 2014 at KTH.
  • The President of KTH, Prof. Peter Gudmundsson and a delegation consisting of Profs. Vladimir Cvetkovic, Stefan Östlund, Erik Stenberg, and Margareta Norell Bergendal as well as the coordinator for the KTH Centre for Sustainable Built Environment, Mr. Johan Högström, will represent KTH at the International Conference on Global Urban Challenges: The Role of Research Universities in November, 2013, in Chicago. Among prominent attendees, the conference, organized jointly by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Northwestern University, The University of Chicago, and University of Illinois also features the heads of Koc University in Turkey and of Peking University in China, as well as welcoming remarks by the Mayor of the City of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel.
  • In July 2013, Prof. Angelia Nedich of the Department of Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering gave an invited tutorial lecture in the HYCON2 Workshop on Distributed Optimization in Large Networks and its Applications organized by Prof. Mikael Johanson of the Department of Electrical Engineering at KTH.
  • During a visit to the Stockholm University Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies and Department of Language Education in November 2013, Prof. Silvina Montrul of the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese gave a seminar on her research on Spanish as a heritage language and a seminar on second language acquisition.
  • In November 2013, Profs. Susan Frankenberg and Helaine Silverman of the Department of Anthropology will reciprocate a March 2013 visit by Prof. Barbro Blehr of the Stockholm University Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies and will present lectures on the relationship between museums and media and on geopolitics in the context of the UNESCO World Heritage List in the afternoon on November 11.
  • Visiting Lecturer Heather Greanhalgh-Spencer of the College of Education participated in the conference Re-Imagining Education Relationships: Ethics, Politics, Practices, organized by the Stockholm University Department of Education in early November 2013.
  • Beginning in Spring 2014, eligible juniors and seniors from the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering may participate in an exchange program with KTH in Energy and Sustainability. Students may take as many preapproved courses as they want, but must take a minimum of two energy/sustainability courses. Seniors whose program focuses on energy and sustainability are eligible to be considered for a $2,500 scholarship. Other students may be eligible to receive a $1,000 William R, Miller and Martha L. Behr-Miller scholarship.
  • As part of their collaboration in memory studies, Prof. Michael Rothberg, Director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies hosts Prof. Pieter Vermeulen of the Stockholm University Department of English in October 2013.
  • A two-week visit in September 2013 by Rebecka Segerström and Abhishek Shivakumar of the KTH Department of Energy Technology included meetings with members of the Department of Urban and Regional Studies, the Smart Energy Design Assistance Center, and the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences to explore opportunities for collaboration in the area of climate, land, energy, and water strategies.
  • In early October 2013, Viktor Johanson, Ph.D. student in the Stockholm University Department of Education defended his dissertation Dissonant Voices: Philosophy, Children's Literature, and Perfectionist Education. Dr. Johanson's graduate research was co-advised by Prof. Nicholas Burbules of the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership.
  • In October 2013, Prof. Gul Agha of the Department of Computer Science gave a series of five two-hour, graduate-level credit lectures on Actor Models: Formalisms, Programming Languages, and Implementations in the KTH School of Computer Science and Communication.
  • In November 2013, Prof. Krister Schönström of the Stockholm University Department of Linguistics is visiting Prof. Matthew Dye to continue their ongoing collaboration. Prof. Schönström's visit includes a seminar and planning for 2014 activities, including an online course in the Language and Culture of Deaf Communities.
  • A delegation from the Karolinska Institutet Divisions of Speech and Language Pathology and Audiology, consisting of Anita McAlister, Ellika Schalling, Åsa Skjönsberg, Petra Herrlin, and Karen Gustafsson visited the Department of Speech and Hearing Science in November 2013, to explore opportunities for entering into a study-abroad agreement between the institutions.
  • In November, Prof. Ralph Nuzzo of the Department of Chemistry was appointed Affiliated Professor of the KTH School of Chemical Sciences for the period 11/1/13-10/31/16.

2012

  • Through the coordination of Kate Brown of the Building Research Council at Illinois, and Amy Rader Olsson of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Architecture and the Built Environment, Research Cluster for Urban Sustainability, an Illinois delegation will visit Stockholm and the Malmö region in the south of Sweden, November 10-18, to evaluate issues coupled to renovation of social housing and also to explore recent innovative examples of creating sustainable multifamily communities. The delegation will include Illinois faculty and staff as well as Executive Directors from the Rockford Housing Authority and the Illinois Housing Development Authority. In conjunction with this visit, the two Offices of Corporate Relations with Olof Westerståhl at Illinois and Ulrika Ljungman at KTH have launched an initiative to showcase Swedish green technologies with a potential fit in Chicago and Illinois. KTH has used the Stockholm Cleantech and Cleantech Scandinavia networks to reach out to Swedish companies with an interest in expanding their markets. These companies have been invited to record movies at KTH, describing their company profile and innovative technologies and products in the area of energy efficient solutions for existing buildings. As a follow-up, technologies that have generated interest from public housing authorities will be demonstrated and then tested in Illinois.
  • Prof. Cedric Langbort in the Department of Aerospace Engineering received a National Science Foundation CAREER award on A Dynamic Game Theoretic Approach to Cyber-Security of Controlled Systems with start date in February 2012. The project describes experimental validation of algorithms on a small-scale SCADA-enabled power grid in Stockholm, enabled through collaboration with KTH.
  • In early September, Prof. Jens Hedlund of the Department of Speech, Music & Hearing at KTH Royal Institute of Technology visited Profs. Jennifer Cole and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson at Illinois to explore research and educational collaboration. Prof. Hedlund's presentation on "Talking with humans and with humanlike machines, given in the Signal Processing Seminar Series at Beckman Institute, provided background and motivation for the long-term goal to create humanlike spoken dialogue systems from a basic research perspective, with examples from the field of humanlike computer and robot component development, as well as studies of human interaction.
  • Prof. Erik Stenberg, Chair of the School of Architecture at KTH Royal Institute of Technology is visiting the Urbana campus between September 28 and October 2. Prof. Stenberg has been teaching studio at the foundation level for the past twelve years and has been instrumental in guiding the KTH School of Architecture through a generational shift towards fiscal stability and into the Architectural Academy — a new network of Swedish architecture schools. Stenberg is also the principal and owner of his own practice focusing on the tectonics of small additions and renovations. During the last decade he has also been engaged in the politics and practice of restructuring the large scale modernist housing areas in Sweden. He has redesigned apartments, organized a housing fair, and started an introductory architecture school in one of Stockholm's largest modernist housing areas.
  • In June 2012, Prof. Imad Al-Qadi of the Department of Civil Engineering co-organized the RILEM 2012 Conference on Cracking in Pavements with Prof. Nicole Kringos of the KTH Department of Transport Science.
  • Prof. Brian Deal of the Department of Urban Planning is heading an Illinois delegation, consisting of Illinois faculty and representatives from the City of Chicago, Department of Planning and Development, for a four-day workshop on sustainable urban development in Stockholm, October 1-4. The visit includes guided tours of innovative housing solutions in several municipalities in the greater Stockholm region and discussions that aim to develop a comparative framework that will benefit planners in Sweden and the US.
  • Prof. Anthony Leggett of the Department of Physics gave the AlbaNova Colloquium at Stockholm University in February 2012 on "Bell's theorem, entanglement, quantum teleportation and all that" during a visit to the KTH Department of Physics.
  • In March 2012, a large delegation from the Department of Linguistics, the Department of Scandinavian Languages, the Department of Language Education, and the Centre for Research on Bilingualism at SU participated in a three-day symposium with faculty from the Department of Linguistics at Illinois on the Urbana campus to explore opportunities for educational and research exchange.
  • Prof. Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, Head of the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at Illinois, is hosting Prof. Per-Olof Wickman and Assistant Professor Jakob Gyllenpalm from the Department of Mathematics and Science Education at SU between September 29 and October 5. Per-Olof. Wickman's research interests focus on understanding teaching and learning processes in science education. Jakob Gyllenpalm researches the role of language in science education with emphasis on issues related to the nature of science and inquiry. He sits on the board of The House of Science, a science education outreach center funded by SU and KTH.
  • In June 2012, Juhee Kim of the presented a seminar on Disparities in early nutrition and child care in the Department of Public Health at Karolinska Institutet.
  • The two-day workshop "User - Public - Audience. Interdisciplinary and Transnational Approaches to Research in Media and Digital Cultures" will be held in Urbana on October 5-6. Hosted by Prof. Angharad Valdivia of the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, the meeting includes faculty from KTH and the Institute for Communications Research at Illinois.
  • A delegation of administrative representatives from the Illinois College of Business, Study Abroad Office, International Programs in Engineering, School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and College of Law will travel with Tim Barnes, the Director of Illinois Strategic International Partnerships, to Stockholm on October 22-25 to coordinate exchange with their counterparts at the INSPIRE partner institutions.
  • Prof. Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre of Stockholm University will be on campus on Monday and Tuesday, October 22 and 23, as part of an international collaboration titled "Early Modern Cosmopolitanisms." Her visit is coordinated by Prof. Mara Wade of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and includes a lecture on "Literary and Cultural Historiography: Telling Early Modern Life Stories from a Gender Perspective," on October 22.
  • In July 2012, Profs. Chris Barkan and Tsung-Chung Kao of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering joined with Prof. Sebastian Stichel of the Department of Aeronautical and Vehicle Engineering at KTH for a visit of several Chinese universities to explore trilateral cooperation outside of the INSPIRE partnership. During the Fall 2012 semester, five students from KTH participated in an online special topics course taught by Prof. Kao on Highspeed Rail Planning.
  • In July 2012, the Graduate College announced the first five recipients of the Clean Energy Education Fellowship. Among the recipients, Pan Haozhi, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning is working on a collaborative research initiative with KTH to ensure that planning decisions are informed by knowledge of the impact on climate and energy use.
  • A colloquium on "The greenhouse effect in our planetary system," organized by the Academy of Athens and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in October 2012, featured an invited presentation by Prof. Donald Wuebbles of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences.
  • Prof. György Dán from the School of Electrical Engineering and the ACCESS Linnaeus Centre at KTH will be a Fulbright visiting researcher hosted by Prof. Klara Nahrstedt at the Department of Computer Science from October 2012 to April 2013. He will be working in the area of Smart Grid communication, investigating efficient and secure solutions to enable trusted Smart Grid networks. He will be housed in the Information Trust Institute where he will collaborate with Prof. Nahrstedt and with other ITI researchers within the DoE funded TCIPG project.
  • In September 2012, Prof. Per Lundqvist of the Department of Energy Technology at KTH visited the Urbana campus to serve as a member of the dissertation committee of a doctoral student from the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering.
  • The 7th International Symposium on Turbo Codes & Iterative Information Processing held in Gothenburg, Sweden, at the end of August, 2012, and co-organized by KTH, featured Profs. Andrew Singer and Olgica Milenkovic of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as a Plenary Speakers.
  • Prof. Philip Krein of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is hosting a Ph.D. student from the Department of Electrical Energy Conversion at KTH for a six-month visit to the Urbana campus.
  • In August 2012, Profs. Dan Work of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Cedric Langbort of the Department of Aerospace Engineering organized the "UIUC-KTH Workshop on Cyber Social Physical Systems: New Perspectives on Transportation Infrastructure Pricing,” at Illinois Center in Chicago, with participation from academia, industry, and city planning offices.
  • A June 2012 visit to Stockholm by Illinois State Representative Naomi Jacobsson included meetings with Stockholm Government officials to learn about Swedish initiatives in sustainable housing and sustainable communities.
  • William Kramer, Blue Waters Project Director at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications gave a keynote lecture at the Swedish e-Science Research Centre Third Annual Meeting in Stockholm in April 2012.
  • In early December 2012, Prof. Paul Selvin of the Department of Physics gave the Applied Physics Seminar at KTH on the use of optical tracking to biomolecules.