Yesterday, July 17th, was World Emoji Day, which in part, means a day that Apple reveals some of the new emojis that will be launched in the near future. One of the new emojis that will be implemented in 2020 includes something that was developed in part by humans at U of I. The bubble tea emoji will be included in the Unicode 13.0 series of emojis — along with others I’m sure you will be thrilled to see on your keyboard soon. This emoji was devloped/proposed by Assistant Professor in Computer Science, Ranjitha Kumar, and three others — a former student Sujay Khandekar (’18 MS CS), and two others.
With all the amazing technological developments launched into the world, it comes as no surprise someone connected to C-U helped make this happen. Sure, it is just an emoji, but there’s an insane amount of research and development that goes into something like this.
Top photo from developers of bubble tea emoji
