Research

08/05/2011 - Microsoft Research has selected Assistant Professor Brent Waters as one of eight Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows of 2011.

07/28/2011 - RoboCup Remix from Texas Science on Vimeo. The video footage is from the second half of the championship game in the 3-D Simulation league in RoboCupSoccer 2011. UT Austin Villa won the game, 4-0, over a team from Changzhou Institute of Technology in China. The audio track is “humm ok,” by Gablé (Creative Commons).

07/19/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas—UT Austin Villa, a team of programmers led by University of Texas at Austin computer scientists Peter Stone and Patrick MacAlpine, has won the 2011 RoboCup Soccer championships in the 3-D simulation division. The UT Austin Villa team beat 21 other teams from 11 nations for the trophy. In the process they scored 136 goals and conceded none. The annual tournament, which was founded in 1997 to foster innovation in artificial intelligence and robotics research, was held last week in Istanbul, Turkey.

05/16/2011 - Researchers at Yale and the University of Texas used a neural network -- a computer brain -- to test out medical theories of what causes schizophrenia. The result was a computer brain that can't tell the difference between stories about itself and fanciful stories about gangsters, and claims responsibility for terrorist acts.

05/09/2011 - Computer simulations of malfunctioning brains may be the key to understanding schizophrenia and other conditions. A research team including computer scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and a professor of psychiatry at Yale have been testing various theories of how schizophrenic brains misfire as they process information. People with schizophrenia often have trouble repeating different stories, for instance, frequently combining elements of separate stories and inserting themselves into the narrative.

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 - On Friday, April 8, 2011, the College of Natural Sciences (CNS) hosted the annual Undergraduate Research Forum. Six UTCS students were recognized by the college for their outstanding posters and presentations and were honored with awards and fellowships.

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.

02/14/2011 - 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.