July 2021: We won first place at the the international RoboCup 2021 competition in the 3D simulation league with our team UT Austin Villa for the 9th time in 10 years.
November 2019: I was named Executive Director of Sony AI America.
August 2019: My student Josiah Hanna successfully his dissertation on "Data Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Simulated and Off-Policy Data." He will be an assistant professor position in the Computer Science department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison beginning in Fall 2021.
July 2019: We won first place at the the international RoboCup 2019 competition in the 3D simulation league with our team UT Austin Villa for the 8th time in 9 years.
July 2019: I began a 3-year term as President of the International RoboCup Federation.
April 2019: I was honored to be named a 2019 Minnie Stevens Piper Professor.
December 2018: I was elected AAAS Fellow.
July 2018: Shih-Yun Lo, Shiqi Zhang, and I won the Best Robotics Track Paper award at AAMAS 2018.
June 2018: We won first place at the the international RoboCup 2018 competition in the 3D simulation league with our team UT Austin Villa for the 7th time in 8 years. [details]
November 2017: I was elected IEEE Fellow.
August 2017: This year Matthew Hausknecht, Piyush Khandelwal, Katie Genter, and Patrick MacAlpine each received a Ph.D. Jivko Sinapov was hired as a professor at Tufts, and Stefano Albrecht was hired as a professor at the University of Edinburgh. Congratulations to all these LARG alumni!
July 2017: We won first place at the the international RoboCup 2017 competition in the 3D simulation league and third place in the RoboCup@Home Domestic Standard Platform League with our team UT Austin Villa.
September 2016: I published "Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030", the first Study Panel Report of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence. In February 2017 I delivered a lecture about it at an event hosted by the Prime Minister of Finland.
July 2016: We won first place at the the international RoboCup 2016 competition in the 3D simulation league and second place in the Standard Platform League with our team UT Austin Villa. [details]
May 2016: I was very honored to receive the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award.
January 2016: My former student Prof. Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan was included on AI's "10 to watch" list.
September 2015: I co-founded Cogitai, Inc. with Mark Ring and Satinder Singh.
July 2015: We won first place at the the international RoboCup 2015 competition in the 3D simulation league with our team UT Austin Villa. [details]
October 2014: I was inducted into the UT Austin Academy of Distinguished Teachers and thereby given the title "University Distinguished Teaching Professor".
July 2014: We won first place at the the international RoboCup 2014 competition in the 3D simulation league with our team UT Austin Villa. [details]
July 2014: I was program co-chair of the Twenty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
July 2013: We won first place in the Power Trading Agent Competition (PowerTAC) with our new TacTex agent.
July 2013: My former student Dr. Brad Knox was included on AI's "10 to watch" list.
June 2013: I was awarded the Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award. [details]
March 2013: I spoke at TEDxYouth Austin on "Robot Soccer" (14 minute video).
June 2012: We won first place at the the international RoboCup 2012 competition in the Standard Platform League and in the 3D simulation league with our team UT Austin Villa. [details]
January 2012: We officially launched the Gates Building Prediction Market. Sign up now to bid for raffle tickets and help predict the date that our new building will open.
December 2011: The university announced that I will be promoted to Full Professor, effective September 2012. AAAI named me a AAAI Fellow effective July 2012.
July 2011: We won first place at the the international RoboCup 2011 competition in the 3D simulation league with our team UT Austin Villa. [details]
December 2011: Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan and Juhyun Lee both successfully defendeded their dissertations on "Learning Methods for Sequential Decision making with Imperfect Representations" and "Robust Color-based Vision for Mobile Robots" respectively.
July 2011: For the second year in a row, we won first place in both the Trading Agent Competition on Supply Chain Management (TAC SCM) and on Ad Auctions (TAC AA) with our TacTex-2010 agents.
December 2010: Nick Jong successfully defended his dissertation on "Structured Exploration for Reinforcement Learning." [ Thesis code repository, with annotated slides ]
July 2010: We won first place in both the Trading Agent Competition on Supply Chain Management (TAC SCM) and on Ad Auctions (TAC AA) with our TacTex-2010 agents.
April 2010: We repeated as US robot soccer champions by winning the 2010 US Open RoboCup competition with our team standard platform league team, TT-UT Austin Villa. [details and video highlights]
October 2009: Kurt Dresner successfully defended his dissertation on " Autonomous Intersection Management." He was awarded the Bert Kay Dissertation Award by the CS department, the Outstanding Dissertation Award in Math/Engineering/Sciences by the University, and runner up for IFAAMAS Distinguished Dissertation Award. [Project Page]
July 2009: David Pardoe, Doran Chakraborty, and I won first Trading Agent Competition on Ad Auctions with our agent TacTex-2009.
July 2009: Todd Hester, Michael Quinlan and I, along with Mohan Sridharan from Texas Tech, made the semifinals of the Standard Platform League at RoboCup 2009 with our team TT-UT Austin Villa. [details and video highlights]
May 2009: Todd Hester, Michael Quinlan and I, along with Mohan Sridharan from Texas Tech, won the 2009 US Open RoboCup competition with our team TT-UT Austin Villa. [details and video highlights]
This page contains news items that have appeared on this website since it was launched in 2009. For older major events see my Timeline.