Artificial Intelligence Revs Up Evolution’s Clock (Audio)

Hyenas mobbing a lion

Photo credit: Stephanie Dloniak

10/14/2020 - Evolutionary biologists never have enough time. Some of the most mysterious behaviors in the animal kingdom—like parenting—evolved over thousands of years, if not longer. Human lifespans are just too short to sit and observe such complex behaviors evolve. But computer scientists are beginning to offer clues by using artificial intelligence to simulate the life and death of thousands of generations of animals in a matter of hours or days. It's called computational evolution. Read More

Mobile Robotics Lab Reaches Milestone in Campus-Scale Autonomous Navigation

The UT Campus-Jackal (left) and the UT Campus-Husky (right)

The UT Campus-Jackal (left) and the UT Campus-Husky (right)

10/06/2020 - A group of Texas Computer Science (TXCS) researchers from the Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory (AMRL) comprising Joydeep Biswas, Sadegh Rabiee, Jarrett Holtz, Kavan Sikand, Max Svetlik, and John Bachman (UMass Amherst) have reached an incredible milestone in their research: deploying an autonomous robot that autonomously navigates on the campus-scale, resilient to everyday changes and varying conditions.  Read More

Predictive Science Research Gets Major Boost Thanks to the Department of Energy

Predictive science is crucial to the prediction and modeling of extreme weather. This is a visualization of predicted storm surge on the Louisiana coast caused by Hurricane Laura, the Category 4 Atlantic hurricane that struck Texan shores earlier this year. Credit: Computational Hydraulics Group, Oden Institute.

10/05/2020 - Source: College of Natural Sciences Many of the decisions we make are now guided by computational simulations, from designing new spacecraft to predicting the spread of a pandemic. But it's not enough for a simulation model to just issue predictions. A decision-maker needs to know just how much those predictions can be trusted. Read More

TXCS Alumna Barbara Jones Creates Tech Company Prioritizing a Diverse Work Environment

TXCS alumna Barbara Jones
09/14/2020 - Barbara Jones is no stranger to perseverance: the Texas Computer Science (TXCS) alumna, who graduated from the university in 1998, earned her degree at a time where “there were probably four Black people in the whole computer science department.” With over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, Jones has witnessed massive shifts in how the world grapples with diversity, new technologies, and how businesses operate. Read More

Students Across Programs Create Website to Encourage People to Eat Local

08/31/2020 - As COVID-19 continues to have a devastating effect on communities and economies, many people are wondering: How can I help? Beyond volunteering and direct monetary donations, there is a push for more people to eat from local restaurants. As the Restaurant Performance Index (RPI) decreases, it’s crucial for community-conscious people to support their neighborhood eateries and help keep these businesses afloat. Read More

TXCS Research Team Wins 2020 PointNav Challenge

Illustration of a room and all of the items in it as obstacles to navigate around.
08/31/2020 - A team comprising Texas Computer Science (TXCS) Ph.D. student Santhosh Ramakrishnan, postdoctoral researcher Ziad Al-Halah, and TXCS Professor Kristen Grauman recently won first place in the 2020 Habitat visual navigation challenge held at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). Read More

UT Austin Selected as Home of National AI Institute Focused on Machine Learning

Image from Philipp Krähenbühl's Object Detection Research
08/26/2020 - The National Science Foundation has selected The University of Texas at Austin to lead NSF AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning, bolstering the university’s existing strengths in this emerging field. Machine learning is the technology that drives AI systems, enabling them to acquire knowledge and make predictions in complex environments. This technology has the potential to transform everything from transportation to entertainment to health care. Read More

TXCS Students Help Build App to Aid UT Community As They Return to Campus

08/24/2020 - As students, faculty, and staff prepare to return to campus for the fall semester, a key concern is making the university as safe as possible and properly tracking health data to prevent outbreaks. An interdisciplinary team of researchers and students, including Texas Computer Science (TXCS) undergraduate students Rohit Neppali, Anshul Modh, Viren Velacheri, and Ph.D. student Anibal Heinsfeld, developed the Protect Texas Together app to help track and mitigate the spread of COVID-19 on the Forty Acres. Read More

TXCS Professor Keshav Pingali Named Member of Academia Europaea

Keshav Pingali
08/06/2020 - Texas Computer Science (TXCS) Professor Keshav Pingali has been elected as a foreign member of the Academia Europaea, an internationally-recognized organization dedicated to advancing scholarship across the world. Read More

TXCS Researchers Explore How Artificial Agents Collaborate on a Shared Task

08/05/2020 - There’s an (albeit cliché) saying that says that two heads are better than one. Unsurprisingly, this idiom extends to artificial agents. In the field of AI, researchers have been working to understand how to make independent agents, who may have different goals, work together in an environment to complete a shared task. Read More

TXCS Researchers Win Best Paper Awards at Evolutionary Computation Conferences

black laptop computer turned on with code on screen
07/28/2020 - Texas Computer Science (TXCS) is proud to announce that two research teams have received awards at preeminent evolutionary computation conferences. Read More

UT Austin to Partner in New NSF Quantum Computing Institute

Illustration credit: Nicolle R. Fuller/National Science Foundation

07/22/2020 - Original story by Marc G Airhart, College of Natural Sciences Read More

Investigating How to Make Robots Better Team Members

surgical team in operating room monitoring patient stats
07/17/2020 - Imagine that you are a robot in a hospital: composed of bolts and bits, running on code, and surrounded by humans. It’s your first day on the job, and your task is to help your new human teammates—the hospital’s employees—do their job more effectively and efficiently. Mainly, you’re fetching things. You’ve never met the employees before, and don’t know how they handle their tasks. How do you know when to ask for instructions? At what point does asking too many questions become disruptive? Read More

Power of DNA to Store Information Gets an Upgrade

DNA strand over code
07/15/2020 - Article by Esther R Robards-Forbes | College of Natural Sciences Read More

TXCS Student Creates App to Help Austin’s Black Community

Earl Potts sits on a golden couch at the AfroTech Conference for Black students in computer science
07/09/2020 - Earl Potts, a Texas Computer Science (TXCS) and African and African Diaspora Studies student, created the app “Keep Austin Black” to provide Austinites with an extensive directory of local Black-owned businesses. Though Potts initially started working on the app in October 2019, he went back to working on “Keep Austin Black” as a response to the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests going on throughout the United States.  Read More

TXCS Alumna Finds Passion for Security and Privacy Research

Franzi Roesner, TXCS alumnus, White woman with blonde hair in green button down shirt standing in front of a building smiling
07/07/2020 - Franziska Roesner has spent over 16 years studying and working in the computer science field. Yet she only started studying computer science by pure happenstance. Roesner initially applied only to The University of Texas’ Plan II Honors Program. After realizing that the application required that she choose a backup major, Roesner selected computer science “without really knowing what it was.” Upon learning that she was accepted into both majors, she went to the advising office intending to drop computer science. Read More

BigHPC Texas/Portugal Partnership Forged to Transform Data Science

BigHPC text over background illustrating a sense of speed
06/24/2020 - Note: the original article was written for and published on the Texas Advanced Computing Center website. Authorship credit goes to Faith Singer-Villalobos. Read More

Kristen Grauman Named Finalist in 2020 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists

Kristen Grauman
06/22/2020 - Story by Cason Hunwick for the College of Natural Science's News Page.  University of Texas at Austin computer science researcher Kristen Grauman was selected as a finalist for the 2020 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists. Read More

Pangolin: An Efficient and Flexible Graph Mining System on CPU and GPU

Illustration of a pangolin with line and bar graphs
06/11/2020 - The datasets used by many software applications can be represented as graphs, defined by sets of vertices and edges. These graphs are rich with useful information, and can be used to determine patterns and relationships among the stored data. This process of discovering relevant patterns from graphs is called Graph Pattern Mining (GPM). A team of Texas Computer Science (TXCS) researchers advised by Dr. Keshav Pingali has done groundbreaking work to make GPM programs more efficient and accessible. Read More

TXCS Students Receive University Wide Endowed Presidential Scholarship

Congratulations to the 2020-21 University-wide Endowed Scholarship Winners
06/04/2020 - Texas Computer Science (TXCS) is proud to announce that 19 TXCS students have received the Unrestricted Endowed Presidential Scholarship (UEPS). The scholarship is awarded to exemplary juniors or seniors who have maintained a GPA of 3.75 or higher and have been recommended by a faculty member. Recipients are evaluated on the basis of their scholastic merit, extracurricular involvement, and leadership qualities. 247 UT Austin students earned the award for the 2020-2021 academic year. Read More

Standing Together in the College of Natural Sciences

Standing Together in the College of Natural Sciences, Black Lives Matter
06/02/2020 - A message from Dean Paul Goldbart to the College of Natural Sciences community underscores the need to stand in solidarity and support one another. This post was updated on Tuesday, June 2 to include a statement from the CNS Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Dear College of Natural Sciences community members, Read More

New Online Master’s Degree in Data Science is a First for The University of Texas at Austin

UT Launches New Online Master’s Degree in Data Science
06/01/2020 - In response to high demand for professionals with scientific and technical training to understand and work with massive amounts of data, The University of Texas at Austin is set to launch a new online master’s degree program in data science. Pending final approval by UT System and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the new program will be a collaboration between the Department of Computer Science, ranked among the top 10 programs in the country by U.S. Read More

TXCS Researchers Design Evolutionary Algorithms for Neural Networks

Plot of the activation functions the researchers discovered

Plot of the activation functions the researchers discovered

05/28/2020 - Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly evolving field, with advancements occurring every day. While the idea of an artificial intelligence system may conjure images of an autonomous machine that rattles out facts like a hi-tech encyclopedia, complex AI exists only because a countless number of talented individuals dedicate their time toward refining these systems. Read More

Undergraduate Experience Prepares Alumnus to Launch Startup

Denis Ignatovich (right) and Grant Passmore, co-founders of Imandra

UT alumni Denis Ignatovich (right) and Grant Passmore (left)

05/26/2020 - On August 1, 2012, the global financial services firm Knight Capital, which was at the time the largest trader in U.S. equities, lost $460 million due to a “technology breakdown.” One of their trading servers housed defective code, causing the group irreparable damage. Almost exactly a year later, a Goldman Sachs computer glitch resulted in a number of erroneous trades, resulting in a loss of over $100 million for the company. Read More

TXCS Faculty and Alumni Win Awards at AAMAS

05/21/2020 - The 2020 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMS) was held from May 9-13, and Texas Computer Science (TXCS) Professor Peter Stone and alumnus Kurt Dresner were awarded the IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award for their 2008 paper “A multiagent approach to autonomous intersection management.” In additio Read More

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