Faculty

05/06/2011 - In a bid to help understand the way that the human brain malfunctions to cause mental illness scientists have caused a computer system to lose its mind and claim responsibilty for a terrorist bombing. The team at the University of Texas and Yale University, including Professor Risto Miikkulainen and grad student Uli Grasemann, were looking to how the human brain is affected with schizophrenia by simulating a hypothesis that excessive dopamine in the brain can cause “exaggerated salience”, whereby the brain is learning from things it shouldn’t.

05/04/2011 - Professor Chandrajit Bajaj received a 2011-12 Moncrief Grand Challenge Faculty Award to pursue his project on three-dimensional imaging at the molecular level of therapeutic drug targets. He was among seven University of Texas at Austin researchers selected for the award who are confronting what the scientific community has defined as this century's grand challenges in drug design, environmental sustainability and improved oil recovery. The awards range up to $60,000 for a semester.

05/03/2011 - The Department of Computer Science (UTCS) congratulates Professor Mike Walfish, winner of a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation. The CAREER awards recognize promising young faculty and supports their research with five years of funding.

04/20/2011 - A new partnership between researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University has been created to help improve teaching and learning through educational innovation and technology.

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.

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.

11/08/2010 - On Monday, November 8, 2010, UTCS held the annual Visions of Computing Lecture, a lecture series honoring UTCS faculty accomplishments.

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.

05/03/2010 - UTCS professor Tandy Warnow has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for developing algorithms that enable an accounting of 3.5 billion years of evolutionary relationships. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation describes these awards as “intended for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”

02/23/2010 - The University of Texas at Austin is part of a $25 million, multi-university center established by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that will study evolution in action in natural and virtual settings.