Cavanagh sees AI as “a tool that can allow humans more time to bring our creative, critical, and emotional contributions to music.” Althea Dotzour

Since becoming director of the Mead Witter School of Music in 2023, Dan Cavanagh has kept one eye on the past — maintaining the school’s excellence in classical music and jazz — and one eye on the future. He wants to equip students with the tools they’ll need to thrive in the modern world, including a grasp of rapidly changing technology. Artificial intelligence is transforming music, just as it’s transforming the rest of the world, and every last violist and tuba player needs to understand it. Cavanagh, an award-winning composer and pianist, acknowledges AI’s benefits while passionately defending people’s role in the musicmaking process: the “human-to-human connection.”

What’s the upside of artificial intelligence in music?
Generating and recording music is now possible for a wider range of people who don’t have musical training. Computers can generate interesting chord progressions or write a whole pop song and play it back to you. But there’s something you’ll never fully get without a human being involved. We want our students to understand how to use these tools without losing sight of the ultimate goal, which is making music to connect with other human beings.

Are you worried that AI might make human musicians obsolete?
I think AI is something we have to understand and adapt to. When calculators came in, it was a similar conversation: oh, this is going to ruin people’s ability to do math, the world is ending, and humans are going away. Well, that’s not what happened. As we all know now, a calculator is a tool. And I’m optimistic that generative AI in music will be a tool — in the mixing and mastering process of music production, for example. It’s a tool that can allow humans more time to bring our creative, critical, and emotional contributions to music.

Can you give me an example of the human-to-human connection in music?
A few months after I came to UW–Madison, I went to our Wind Ensemble concert, which featured a work for wind ensemble and soprano voice by the brilliant composer Caroline Shaw. And I got the chills in a way that I never do with sound that comes from an electronic speaker. There’s something about the humans in the room, and the people you’re sitting next to while listening to the concert, and the people’s faces on stage, and the emotion they’re putting into the music. This represents only a small part of the way that music makes us human and distinguishes us from other life forms.

Hahn and Wiederhoeft participated in a cutting-edge clinical trial at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. Photo courtesy of Shawn Wiederhoeft and Meagan Hahn

Madison native Shawn Wiederhoeft works as a video game developer and maintains an active lifestyle. He’s healthy today thanks in large part to a new kidney he received in 2020 from his sister, Meagan Hahn. Because he and his sister chose to participate in a cutting-edge clinical trial at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, he’s also able to live without antirejection medications.

With no daily meds and only occasional medical checkups, Wiederhoeft says he sometimes almost forgets he’s the recipient of a kidney transplant. “I have to consciously remind myself that there’s a third kidney in here,” he says.

Wiederhoeft’s remarkable journey from serious illness to a medication-free recovery is one of a growing number of success stories reported by an international team led by UW–Madison surgery professor Dixon Kaufman, who directs the UW Health Transplant Center. The team evaluated the effectiveness and safety of a protocol that transplants certain stem cells from the kidney donor — in addition to an organ — to the transplant recipient.

These stem cells are injected into the recipient several days after transplantation and take up residence in bone marrow, where they divide and multiply into immune cells that share the genes of the donated organ. The goal is to keep the recipient’s immune system from attacking the new organ, which it would otherwise recognize as a threat.

“This procedure doesn’t replace the immune system, but it complements it with around 5 to 10 percent of the immune system being from the donor,” says Kaufman.

In doing so, the new method removes the need for costly antirejection medications that severely suppress the recipient’s immune system, carrying a host of lifelong side effects.

“Getting [the patients] back on the road to living a happy and fulfilling life is really what this is all about,” Kaufman says.

An abuser who has access to another person’s phone for even a few minutes can set up automation routines that share location or texting information, enabling them to control a phone, take unauthorized videos, and impersonate their partners. Jaime Espinoza

After identifying vulnerabilities in popular apps that can make it easy for an abuser to stalk individuals with little risk of detection, a team of UW–Madison engineers and computer scientists are developing an online service to find this covert abuse on digital devices.

The team has students to thank for the discovery. Rahul Chatterjee MS’15, an assistant professor of computer sciences, and his research group operate the Madison Tech Clinic, an initiative staffed by volunteer UW students and faculty to aid survivors of domestic and intimate partner violence and other technology-facilitated abuse.

Clinic volunteers discovered some abusers used automation apps, like Apple Shortcuts, to quickly and easily take over digital devices. Because of the nature of these apps, the digital intrusions were difficult for users to detect.

“Because of all of the capabilities of these automation apps, you can do a suite of things that previously would have required more technical sophistication, like installing a spyware app or using a GPS tracker,” says Kassem Fawaz, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. “But now, an abusive partner just needs a little time to set up these capabilities on a device.”

In recent years, tech companies have released an array of automation apps to help simplify digital tasks like automatically turning down a phone’s volume at school or work or setting up routines for smart home devices. On the flip side, an abuser who has access to another person’s phone for even a few minutes can set up automation routines that share location or texting information, enabling them to control a phone, take unauthorized videos, and impersonate their partners.

Chatterjee first posed the issue to students in his seminar course, CS 782: Advanced Computer Security and Privacy. Shirley Zhang PhDx’28 continued the investigation as part of her graduate research in Fawaz’s lab. The researchers developed an AI system to detect shortcuts with the potential for abuse. They then turned this system into an online service people can use to detect malicious activities.

“This project is a strong example of the Wisconsin Idea,” says Chatterjee. “Ultimately, it will give back to the community by providing a tool designed to prevent the abuse of automation apps and help protect survivors.”

Negrut and his collaborators determined that Earth’s gravity pulls down on sand much more strongly than the gravity on Mars or the moon does. Joel Hallberg, College of Engineering

On the moon, the gravitational pull is six times weaker than on Earth. For decades, researchers testing rovers have accounted for that difference in gravity by creating prototypes that are a sixth of the mass of the actual rover. They test these lightweight rovers in deserts, observing how they move across sand to gain insights into how they would perform on the moon. However, this approach overlooked the pull of Earth’s gravity on the desert sand.

Through computer simulation, Dan Negrut, a UW professor of mechanical engineering, and his collaborators determined that Earth’s gravity pulls down on sand much more strongly than the gravity on Mars or the moon does. On Earth, sand is more rigid and supportive, reducing the likelihood it will shift under a vehicle’s wheels. But the moon’s surface is fluffier and therefore shifts more easily. Rovers have less traction, which can hinder their mobility.

The researchers’ discovery resulted from their work on a NASA-funded project to simulate the VIPER rover, which was planned for a lunar mission. The team leveraged Project Chrono, an open-source physics simulation engine developed at UW–Madison in collaboration with scientists from Italy. This software allows researchers to quickly and accurately model complex mechanical systems.

The benefits of this research also extend well beyond NASA and space travel. Chrono has been used by hundreds of organizations to better understand complex mechanical systems, from precision mechanical watches to U.S. Army trucks and tanks operating in off-road conditions.

“It’s rewarding that our research is highly relevant in helping to solve many real-world engineering challenges,” Negrut says. “It’s very unusual in academia to produce a software product at this level.”

The Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Hub will help UW–Madison students, faculty, and staff transform their ideas into real-world impact. Jaime Espinoza

Last fall, the university released a report commissioned by Chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin that outlines a new strategy to boost entrepreneurship at UW–Madison. One outcome of the report is the recently opened Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Hub, which aims to develop new resources and programs to support aspiring business owners.

“UW–Madison has a long legacy of innovation and entrepreneurship, from the discovery and patenting of the blood thinner warfarin to today’s spinoff companies pioneering modern solutions, such as fusion energy,” says Mnookin. By providing the right support and infrastructure for those building new enterprises, she says, “we can create even greater economic growth throughout the state.”

The Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Hub is part of the university’s overall strategy to become a leading destination for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. It will help UW–Madison students, faculty, and staff transform their ideas into real-world impact.

To that end, the Hub will work with university leaders, faculty, staff, partner organizations, and the business community to recruit entrepreneurial individuals, develop entrepreneurial talent, and launch impactful entrepreneurial careers and enterprises.

Althea Dotzour

The seven-story Morgridge Hall opened this semester, bringing the disciplines in the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences (CDIS) under one roof for the first time. CDIS is UW–Madison’s fastest-growing academic unit, and Morgridge Hall provides enough space to double the faculty and meet the demand. Named for UW benefactors John ’55 and Tashia ’55 Morgridge, the building includes spaces for classroom instruction, research, and study, with a design that encourages connection and creativity.

Bechtol: “We’re using the whole universe as a laboratory to ask big, open questions about the nature of matter, energy, space, and time.” Courtesy of Keith Bechtol

The first images from a state-of-the-art telescope have been released by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, with an assist from UW–Madison physics professor Keith Bechtol.

“Rubin Observatory is a confluence of technology that allows us to map the universe faster than we’ve ever been able to before,” Bechtol says. “It will catalog more stars, galaxies, and solar system objects during the first year of science operations than all previous telescopes combined.”

Space-based telescopes like Hubble and James Webb typically focus on one spot for a prolonged time. In contrast, the ground-based Rubin Observatory, positioned on a mountaintop in Chile, will quickly scan the sky, taking an image with its 3.2-billion-pixel camera every 40 seconds and collecting 20 terabytes of data each night. It will capture the entire southern hemisphere sky every three nights.

Bechtol has been part of the international collaboration since 2016. He is one of five technical group leaders who are organizing the building, implementation, and testing of the facility. Bechtol and his UW–Madison research group have been key players on a team of thousands of people working toward a fully operating observatory.

“I gather the evidence to show that all components of Rubin Observatory are working together to produce the most detailed time-lapse view of the cosmos ever made,” Bechtol says. “I’ve been responsible for anticipating things that could go wrong and helping to address those challenges, designing observation plans, rehearsing observatory operations, and implementing tests of increasing sophistication as we built the observatory.”

Bechtol and his group will use the data to probe fundamental questions related to dark matter, dark energy, and the early universe.

“We’re using the whole universe as a laboratory to ask big, open questions about the nature of matter, energy, space, and time,” Bechtol says. “What is the universe made of? How did the universe begin? How will it end?”

The UW approach could theoretically apply to any cancer that tends to recur, such as pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma. Jaime Espinoza

Using a newly discovered byproduct of dying cancer cells, UW–Madison researchers are developing personalized vaccines that could help keep aggressive tumors from recurring.

Led by Quanyin Hu, an assistant professor in the UW–Madison School of Pharmacy, the research team has already found success slowing the recurrence of tumors in mouse models of triple negative breast cancer and melanoma. Currently, the long-term prognosis for human patients with these cancers is relatively poor. That’s in part because the diseases have a tendency to recur after the initial treatments to remove the tumors.

The personalized vaccine approach is an extension of the team’s recent discovery of pyroptotic vesicles, which are tiny sacs filled with the remnants of cancer cells when they undergo programmed cell death. Crucially, the remnants in these microscopic sacs include antigens specific to the tumor, along with other molecular bits that can help direct immune cells to find and suppress cancer cells that might remain after a tumor is surgically removed.

Hu and his colleagues engineered these sacs to carry an immune stimulating drug. They then embedded the engineered vesicles into a hydrogel that can be implanted into the space left behind after surgical removal of a tumor.

“Compared to the other approaches, ours shows a much stronger immune response,” says Hu. He notes that the approach could theoretically apply to any cancer that tends to recur, such as pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma.

Several of the mice that received the highest doses of the experimental treatment remained cancer-free throughout the course of the study.

“That’s really exciting,” Hu says, “because we demonstrated that we could essentially cure these mice with no tumor recurrence.”

The UW was rated among the top five schools in the “knowledge breadth” category, reflecting the wide array of fields of study and skill-building opportunities. Althea Dotzour

LinkedIn has rated UW–Madison 50th in the nation — and 10th among public universities — for setting up graduates for long-term career success.

The inaugural rankings are based on LinkedIn’s data on career outcomes, job placement rates, and advancement of alumni, among other things. The popular social media platform focuses on professional networking and career development, connecting individuals with colleagues and employers.

“Graduates of top programs often land jobs sooner, build strong professional networks, and advance into leadership faster,” LinkedIn said.

The UW was rated among the top five schools in the “knowledge breadth” category, reflecting the wide array of fields of study and skill-building opportunities. The leading industries for graduates were technology and internet, higher education, and medical practices.

“This ranking highlights how UW–Madison students are prepared for a complex and ever-changing workforce through the breadth of their educational pursuits on campus,” says Tara Milliken, director for institutional career services strategy in the Office of Academic and Career Success. “We know that employers value the academic preparation our students receive in the classroom and the skills they build on campus and beyond that equip them to be successful in their careers.”