Illinois Tech Headliners

IRS requiring facial scans

“There are a few states, Illinois being one of them, that have laws governing biometric data, but, again, there is no comprehensive federal law. So what governs what this company does with your data? It's going to be their contract, their terms of service….You read your contract with them, it says there’s a disclaimer of warranties. It says we are providing our services as is. That’s worse than most products that you buy, where you have a 30-day warranty.”

—Professor of Law Nancy Kim discussing, on Chicago television station WGN 9, the potential legal issues of the IRS requiring facial scans by a third-party company to access the agency’s online tax services


Neutrinos

“This is pretty basic info that we know about all of the other Standard Model particles—even the Higgs boson, which was only first measured a few years ago! We know that they have mass, since we’ve been able to measure neutrino flavor-changing behavior, which is determined by the difference in the neutrino masses, but we don’t know the absolute scale of those masses.”

—Associate Professor of Physics Bryce Littlejohn providing context, in Newsweek, about why scientists know little about how much neutrinos weigh


“In some cases it is still safe to drive. In some cases it can be very close to a dangerous situation, and engineering science sometimes cannot tell the cutoff line.”

—Professor of Civil and Architecture Engineering Gongkang Fu discussing the concern, on Chicago television station ABC 7, surrounding the thousands of Illinois bridges that have been deemed “structurally deficient”