GradFest 2026 Schedule

Thursday, March 26

3:00 - 5:00 p.m. | Check-in | Gates Dell Complex Building (GDC)
Please allow time to complete GradFest registration.

3:00 - 4:45 p.m. | Faculty Meetings | Scheduled meetings with faculty in GDC

Students will receive a personalized schedule with individual faculty meetings.

5:00 - 7:00 p.m. | Welcome Reception & Dinner | GDC Atrium
GradFest participants and student hosts

Friday, March 27

8:00 - 9:00 a.m. | Late Check In & Breakfast | GDC Atrium

9:00 - 12:00 p.m. | Faculty Research Area Presentations | Avaya Auditorium (POB 2.302) & POB 2.402

Time	Avaya Auditorium (POB 2.302)	POB 2.402
9:00-9:25 a.m.	Elias Stengel-Eskin NLP at UT Austin
9:25-9:30 a.m.	Break 1
9:30-9:55 a.m.	George Pavlakos Perceiving Humans in 4D	Volkan Isler Robotic Sensor Networks
9:55-10:00 a.m.	Break 2
10:00-10:25 a.m.	Scott Aaronson Quantum computing & AI alignment	Justin Hart Moving Robots from Factories and Warehouses and Into Homes and Offices
10:25-10:30 a.m.	Break 3
10:30-10:55 a.m.		Sujay Sanghavi Diffusion Language Models
10:55-11:00 a.m.	Break 4
11:00-11:25 a.m.	Noah Golowich Theoretical foundations for AI	Shravan Narayan Don’t Get Owned by Your Dependencies: How To Protect Software From Exploitable Libraries
11:25-11:30 a.m.	Break 5
11:30-11:55 a.m.	Joydeep Biswas Robots Without Boundaries: Embracing the Unseen and Tackling Novel Tasks	Vijay Chidambaram Research at the UT Systems and Storage Lab

12:00 - 12:50 p.m. | Lunch with Faculty Members | GDC Atrium

1:00 - 2:50 p.m. | Faculty Meetings (or break) | Scheduled meetings with faculty.

Students will receive a personalized schedule with individual faculty meetings.

3:00 - 4:00 p.m. | Research Area Meet & Greets | Various Locations in GDC

Research Area	Location	Faculty Members
BCB	GDC 5th Floor North: Imaging, Neuroscience, Graphics, Geometry Processing, Big Data, Statistical Machine Learning	Etienne Vouga (unavailable), Chandrajit Bajaj (unavailable), Qiang Liu (unavailable); Lab reps: Shubham Bhardawaj, Trung Nguyen, Ashwin Vinod
Arch	Lab for Advanced Systems Research (LASR): GDC 6th Floor North	Keshav Pingali, Warren Hunt (unavailable), Chris Rossbach (unavailable)
CV/GV	Computer Vision: GDC 4th Floor South	Philipp Krähenbühl, George Pavlakos (unavailable), Kristen Grauman (unavailable), Qixing Huang (unavailable)
OS/Databases	GDC 6th Floor North UT Data Systems Lab: GDC 6.516 (Dixin Tang) Vijay Chidambaram: GDC 6.436 Al Mok (GDC 6.512)	Emmett Witchel, Vijay Chidambaram, Dixin Tang, Al Mok
NLP	Natural Language Processing: GDC 3rd Floor South	Yizhong Wang, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Ray Mooney (unavailable), David Harwath (unavailable)
OS/DS/N	GDS 6th Floor South LDOS/InfraAI: 6.702 labspace Aditya Akella, Venkat Arun, Daehyeok Kim	Aditya Akella, Venkat Arun, Daehyeok Kim
FM/PLI	GDC 5th Floor South Programming Languages	Swarat Chaudhuri, Isil Dillig (unavailable)
Robotics	Meet in GDC Atrium. We will walk guests over to AHG. Demos	Peter Stone, Justin Hart, Volkan Isler, Yuke Zhu, Brad Knox, Joydeep Biswas, Roberto Martin-Martin (available unto 3:30)
TCS	Algorithms and Computational Theory: GDC 4th Floor North Quantum Information Science Meet & Greet - GDC 4.516 Scott Aaronson & Nick Hunter-Jones	Scott Aaronson, Shuchi Chawla, Anna Gal, Dana Moshkovitz, Eric Price, David Wu, David Zuckerman, Kevin Tian, William Kretschmer, Nick Hunter-Jones, Noah Golowich, Adam Klivans (unavailable), Greg Plaxton (unavailable), Vijaya Ramachandran (unavailable, Brent Waters (unavailable)

5:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. | Bull Session & Friday Night Dinner | Austin Saengerrunde Halle & Bowling Alley

6:00-6:30 p.m. | Bull Session

Learn more about the student experience at this students-only session @ Saengerrunde Halle.

7:00 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. | Bus Tour of Austin
Optional bus tour of the city.

TOUR SCHEDULES

All scheduled tours will meet in the GDC Atrium. You may attend any session that fits your schedule.

Robotics – Anna Hiss Gymnasium Tours:
Thursday, 3/26 3PM
Thursday, 3/26 4PM
Friday, 3/27 1PM
Friday, 3/27 2PM

Computer Science – GDC Building Tours:
Thursday, 3/26 3PM
Thursday, 3/26 3:30PM
Friday, 3/27 1PM
Friday, 3/27 1:30PM