Advancing our community
LAS influence
The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is filled with accomplished, thoughtful, and dedicated faculty, staff, students, and alumni whose work influences many advancements throughout our community. LAS strives to address the world’s fundamental problems and grand challenges through indispensable research, innovative courses, and an ingrained focus on diversity.
Read on to learn how the College of LAS is advancing our community in Urbana-Champaign and beyond.
Researchers advance first-of-its-kind AI tool for translating life-saving weather warnings across the U.S.
Finding could reduce effort required for time-consuming and critical task
Nearly 69 million people in the United States speak a language other than English at home, yet weather warnings have long been issued almost exclusively in English. A new study documents how the National Weather Service is using artificial intelligence to change that, developing a comprehensive translation program that delivers life-saving forecasts and alerts in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Samoan, French and other languages.
The new multidisciplinary study was led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign climate, meteorology and atmospheric sciences professor Joseph Trujillo-Falcón and NWS scientist Monica Bozeman and is published in the journal Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems.
“Translating weather forecasts has always been a critical, time-consuming task, often added to the plates of bilingual forecasters managing full operational responsibilities, but it provides information for the 68.8 million people who do not speak English at home,” said Trujillo-Falcón, who also leads the ALERTAS lab in partnership with the Department of Communication at Illinois.
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The urgency for accurate and culturally sensitive translation of weather forecasts in the U.S. intensified in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1987, an F4 tornado struck the town of Saragosa, Texas, and 151 of the town’s 183 residents suffered injuries or casualties. The town, which had many Spanish-only speakers, had only one Spanish-language radio station, which did provide the NWS warning; however, the literal translation of the English message failed because the word “warning” has no Spanish equivalent.
940 Feet series
Join LAS professors and students for a stroll on the Quad, and learn more about the influential people advancing our community.
Alumna shares the artistic journey that brought her from Arizona to Paris
“TORNADO” by U of I alum Jennifer Haare (BA, ‘13, English; BA, ‘13, creative writing) and Jackie Furtado is a chronophotographic artwork following a horse running through the desert.
What does the weather mean to you?
As a PhD student in mathematics who focuses on climate-related risk, Yasintorn Wongwoottisaroch thinks about the weather not just in terms of his outfit or commute. To Yasintorn, the weather is a commodity.
Team tracks vegetation recovery from sudden permafrost collapse
In a new study of sudden permafrost collapses, Mark Lara, Zhuoxuan Xia and their colleagues found that vegetative cover returns much more quickly in low-Arctic sites than in high-Arctic and high-elevation sites.
Faculty research
The College of LAS has more than 600 faculty experts working on the world’s fundamental problems and grand challenges. Learn about their work.
