Two Assistant Profs Win CAREER Awards from National Science Foundation

04/01/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas – Biologist Misha Matz and computer scientist Michael Walfish are among six assistant professors at The University of Texas at Austin who received Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards totaling nearly $3 million from the National Science Foundation. The CAREER awards recognize promising young faculty and supports their research with five years of funding. Read More

Hack U: Yahoo's 24-hour Programming Contest

03/26/2011 - PhoneSlice, a version of the popular mobile game Fruit Ninja, won Yahoo's UT-Austin Hack U contest. Farhad Abasov, Michael Teng, and Michael Akilian created a proxy server to communicate between two iPhones and the Flash application. One iPhone was used to throw the fruit and the other to slice it. Because of the implementation difficulties involved in communicating between an iPhone and Flash and all of the custom technology that they had to build within the 24-hour period, they won the HackU event and took home new iPads. Read More

Explore UT 2011

03/07/2011 - Explore UT, a campus community engagement event held each March, invites the public to experience UT. Thousands of people explored the UTCS program, discovering the fun of computer science, engaging in artificial intelligence, software programming, gaming, graphics and visualization, and chatting with academic advisers. Read More

Sol LeWitt Sculpture to Grace Gates Computer Science Complex

Sol Lewitt Circle with Towers at UT Computer Science Gates Dell Complex
03/04/2011 - Artist Sol LeWitt’s concrete block structure Circle with Towers (2005) will grace the entrance to the new Bill & Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex, currently under construction on the east side of Speedway between 21st and 24th streets. The unveiling of the work will coincide with the opening of the computer science complex in September 2012. Read More

GradFest Open House 2011

02/25/2011 - The Department of Computer Science hosted prospective Ph.D. students at GradFest 2011, a two-day exploration of UTCS research, resources, and community. Over 20 admitted students attended panel discussions, toured labs, and met with faculty one-on-one. Current graduate students hosted the out-of-towners in their own homes for a real look at life as a UTCS grad student. Read More

Computing Classroom in Flawn Academic Center Brings Advanced Scientific Computation and Statistics to Students

02/24/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas — A new computing classroom and learning laboratory in The University of Texas at Austin’s Flawn Academic Center is changing the way that statistics and scientific computing are taught at the university. Read More

The Jeopardy Challenge!

02/16/2011 - Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is the world’s most advanced question-answer system. It uses breakthrough analytics to understand what is being asked, analyze massive amounts of data, and provide the best answer based on the evidence it finds. A core team of 25 IBM programmers developed the system and software. They downloaded information from books, movie scripts, encyclopedias, textbooks, news archives, the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible to Watson’s brain chip, a Power7 processor—primarily designed in Austin. Read More

Three Cheers for Watson

02/14/2011 - Count computer scientists Bruce Porter, Ray Mooney and Ken Barker among those cheering for the machine in the Jeopardy! Challenge, which pits two human Jeopardy! champions against Watson, a computer built by IBM Corp. Watson will take on Ken Jennings, who had the show’s longest winning streak, and Brad Rutter, it’s all-time money winner, in games that will broadcast Feb. 14, 15 and 16. Read More

2011 UTCS University Interscholastic League Contest

02/12/2011 - On Saturday, February 12th, the Computer Science department hosted 158 students from 32 different high schools at the 2nd annual UTCS University Interscholastic League (UIL) Contest. Teams from all over the state traveled to compete in the open format contest. In addition to local Austin area schools, there were entries from Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Waller, Weslaco, Ozona and Palacios. Read More

IBM to collaborate with universities on Watson's QA tech

02/11/2011 - IBM and eight universities from around the world will collaborate on developing the company's Watson supercomputer and the question-answering technology behind it. The University of Texas at Austin Department of Computer Science which will collaborate on automated reasoning and common sense. Read More

2011 Scholarship Lunch

02/02/2011 - The Department of Computer Science (CS) recognized scholarship recipients, scholarship donors, and Friends of Computer Science (FoCS) members with a Scholarship Luncheon at the Alumni Center on February 2, 2011. Read More

Securing the Cloud

01/18/2011 - The future of the Internet could look like this: The bulk of the world’s computing is outsourced to “the cloud”―to massive data centers that house tens or even hundreds of thousands of computers. Rather than doing most of the heavy lifting themselves, our PCs, laptops, tablets and smart phones act like terminals, remotely accessing data centers through the Internet while conserving their processing juice for tasks like rendering HD video and generating concert-quality sound. Read More

Better Animation Through Body Part Recycling

The user is presented with a ribbon of choices for the torso, which are colored according to their distance from the target mesh.

The user is presented with a ribbon of choices for the torso, which are colored according to their distance from the target mesh.

12/21/2010 - For all the power that computers have brought to the process of animation, it remains the human eye that’s the best judge of whether animated things moving in space look real. “People intuitively know exactly what to draw to evoke realism,” says Don Fussell, professor of computer science. “Computers don’t have that luxury.” Read More

Texas, Nation in Need of Computer Scientists

12/14/2010 - Nationwide, computer scientists are in high demand. In Central Texas, high school seniors David Weiser and Alex Smith are ahead of the game when it comes to computers. They’ve developed a new social media website called Webcam Window. Read More

Computer Science Faculty Named 2010 ACM Fellows

12/08/2010 - Computer scientists Lorenzo Alvisi, Michael Dahlin and Raymond Mooney have been named 2010 Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery for their contributions to computer science that have provided fundamental knowledge to the field and generated innovations in industry, commerce, entertainment and education. Read More

Taylor Hall in Legoland

12/07/2010 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRSyVy1fSXA&feature=player_embedded Students and staff from Department of Computer Science constructed a model of Taylor Hall entirely out of Lego’s. Taylor has been demolished to make way for the new Gates Computer Science Complex. Check out the surprise ending to this video. The model is amazing! Read More

UT professor says profiling not effective against terror

11/29/2010 - Racial profiling is a “fundamentally flawed” method of catching terrorists, and is no more effective than random sampling techniques, according to a recent study by a UT computer science professor. Read more at the Daily Texan. Read More

Racial Profiling to Limit Terror Attacks Is Fundamentally Flawed

11/19/2010 - AUSTIN, Texas–Stop using racial profiling, says Professor William Press. He claims that as well as being politically and ethically questionable, racial profiling does no better in helping law enforcement officials in their task of catching terrorists than standard uniform random sampling techniques. This is the topic of a paper publishing in Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association. Read More

The UTCS 2010 Visions of Computing Lecture

A photo of Professor Chandrajit Bajaj
11/08/2010 - On Monday, November 8, 2010, UTCS held the annual Visions of Computing Lecture, a lecture series honoring UTCS faculty accomplishments. Read More

DigCS

Bill & Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex and the Dell Computer Science Hall
10/29/2010 - DigCS celebrated a historic and critical milestone in UTCS's journey to its new home - the groundbreaking for the new Bill & Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex and the Dell Computer Science Hall—with the DigCS Street Fair & Groundbreaking. Read More

The 2010 Edsger W. Dijkstra Memorial Lecture

10/12/2010 - UTCS hosted the inaugural Edsger W. Dijkstra Memorial Lecture on October 12, 2010. UTCS was excited to welcome Sir Tony Hoare, Emeritus Professor at Oxford and Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, as the speaker for this event. This lecture series was made possible by a generous grant from Schlumberger to honor the memory of Edsger W. Dijkstra. Read More

FoCS Career Brunch 2010

09/21/2010 - The 2010 Career Brunch was held in conjunction with the College of Natural Sciences (CNS) Career Expo on September 20, 2010 at the Frank Erwin Center. Read More

Computer Vision - Seeing Anew

Computer Vision
08/04/2010 - Every day—every minute, every second—the world’s computers are amassing visual information at an extraordinary rate. Aspiring Tarantinos are sending their two-minute videos to Youtube in the hopes of going viral. Mom and Dad are uploading their Napa Valley vacation photos to Flickr. Doctors are sending patient MRIs to medical databases, and satellites are scanning the earth for evidence of sinister activity. Read More

Graduate Student's Software Doubles Cell Phone Battery Life

06/29/2010 - UTCS doctorial student, Eric Rozner, has developed software that extends cell phone battery life by changing the way your phone interacts with Wi-Fi routers. Read More

RoboCup 2010: Austin Team shines in International Competition

06/29/2010 - Peter Stone's UT Austin Villa RoboCup team won third place in an international robotic soccer competition in Singapore. The team placed third out of 24 teams in the RoboCup standard platform league, which concentrates on writing software to control Nao mini-humaniod robots. The team also finished 2nd place in the challenge events which tested passing and dribbling skills as well as a demonstration of scientific advances. Earlier this spring, the team won the US Open for the second year in a row. Read More

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