4/15/2026 Cassandra Smith
Jim Rehg, a professor within The Grainger College of Engineering's Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, along with his laboratory, received a grant from the Laude Institute through their Moonshot competition.
Written by Cassandra Smith
125 proposals were submitted by more than 600 researchers across 47 leading institutions in the United States and Canada.
URBANA, IL. -- Jim Rehg, a professor within The Grainger College of Engineering’s Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, along with his laboratory, is helping frontline health-care workers expand the treatments they are authorized to provide.
They are doing this using I2Care, a novel artificial intelligence-powered eXtended Reality (XR) system. It creates a care team of on-site and virtual providers that interact seamlessly to improve patient outcomes. The team submitted I2Care to the Laude Institute’s Moonshot competition and was awarded a $100,000 grant.
“We are delighted to participate in the Laude Moonshot program and leverage U. of I.’s expertise in immersive computing, AI-based health analytics and engineering-based health care to develop novel solutions that promise to remove barriers to health-care access across the state of Illinois and the nation,” said Rehg.
Laude Institute backs computer science researchers turning research into real-world impact, according to Laude officials. “We combine grantmaking with hands-on support to help researchers make breakthroughs faster and get them into people’s hands, from early-stage ideas to open-source projects and multi-year labs.’ Their Moonshots competition is based on answering one question: How should AI be used to solve humanity’s hardest problems?
The applicant pool of 125 proposals included Field Medalists, Turing Award winners, Nobel laureates and MacArthur Fellows — and not all of them made the cut. Of those applicants, eight winning teams were selected across four categories: accelerating scientific discovery, advancing health care, strengthening civic discourse and enabling workforce reskilling. Each team received $250,000. Four runners-up each received a $200,000 grant. Thirteen honorable mentions each received a $100,000 grant. In total, 25 teams were recognized and funded.
This program is chaired by Dave Patterson, founding board chair of Laude Institute, whose research philosophy at UC Berkeley helped create RISC, RAID, Spark and RISC-V — technologies that underpin modern computing. The selection committee included Nobel laureate John Jumper, Turing Award winner John Hennessy, Jeff Dean and others across academia, industry and the application domains the program addresses. Patterson said it is the best selection committee he has been part of in 50 years.