TXCS Alumnus Greg Kuhlmann Aims to Help Others Succeed by Making Anti-Fraud Systems More Accessible

TXCS alumnus Greg Kuhlman
12/01/2020 - Alumnus Greg Kuhlmann was introduced to computers and programming by his family at a young age. During Kuhlmann’s childhood, his grandfather taught him how to program on his VIC-20 when he was just six years old and his father would take him to Amiga Users Group meetings. The ability offered by programming to change bits of code and see a new outcome right before his eyes was what really drew Kuhlmann in. Unbeknownst to him, he would go on to earn a graduate degree in computer science and start his own cybersecurity startup. Read More

Leaving Their Mark

Game Night w ABCS & Quora

Photo credit - América Quistiano

11/11/2020 - Two UT undergraduate leaders talk about the Department of Computer Science’s new endowment and what it means for future students “This time, this summer, in the context of social change and everything, things just finally fell into place,” said Audra Collins, a computer science senior at The University of Texas at Austin. Collins is president of the Association of Black Computer Scientists (ABCS), which seeks to create paths to educational and professional success for Black and other underrepresented students in this major. Read More

Tech Startup Powered by Two Computer Science Professors Teams Up with Intel

A visual representation of a graph containing epidemiological data.

A visual representation of a graph containing epidemiological data.

11/10/2020 - Industry analysts say that more data has been collected in the past two years than in all of human history combined. Data about what we buy, what we watch, where we go and who our friends are is constantly being collected and stored. Analyzing all that data and gaining insights from it is the hard part. Read More

Alumni Gift Launches New AI Institute

Zaib And Amir Husain Photo by: Sloan Breeden

Zaib And Amir Husain
Photo by: Sloan Breeden

11/06/2020 - This fall, the National Science Foundation selected The University of Texas at Austin — a world leader in artificial intelligence research — to lead a new, $20 million national institute for machine learning. Read More

Mission Accomplished

Anna Hiss Gym Ribbon Cutting
11/05/2020 - UT Austin is committed to working with the U.S. military to identify and prioritize research that can quickly be adapted to help protect and defend the nation’s interest. Read More

UT Scientists Use AI to Find Tourist Movement Patterns in Cuzco, Peru

10/28/2020 - We live in an increasingly digital era. Research shows that the average American checks their phone about 58 times daily, and spends an average of 4.5 hours a day on their phone. Without a doubt the amount of time the modern-day person spends on their phones has changed many aspects of how our society functions. For example, in the past decade we have seen a dramatic shift in forms of advertising. Read More

Artificial Intelligence Revs Up Evolution’s Clock (Audio)

Hyenas mobbing a lion

Photo credit: Stephanie Dloniak

10/14/2020 - Evolutionary biologists never have enough time. Some of the most mysterious behaviors in the animal kingdom—like parenting—evolved over thousands of years, if not longer. Human lifespans are just too short to sit and observe such complex behaviors evolve. But computer scientists are beginning to offer clues by using artificial intelligence to simulate the life and death of thousands of generations of animals in a matter of hours or days. It's called computational evolution. Read More

Mobile Robotics Lab Reaches Milestone in Campus-Scale Autonomous Navigation

The UT Campus-Jackal (left) and the UT Campus-Husky (right)

The UT Campus-Jackal (left) and the UT Campus-Husky (right)

10/06/2020 - A group of Texas Computer Science (TXCS) researchers from the Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory (AMRL) comprising Joydeep Biswas, Sadegh Rabiee, Jarrett Holtz, Kavan Sikand, Max Svetlik, and John Bachman (UMass Amherst) have reached an incredible milestone in their research: deploying an autonomous robot that autonomously navigates on the campus-scale, resilient to everyday changes and varying conditions.  Read More

Predictive Science Research Gets Major Boost Thanks to the Department of Energy

Predictive science is crucial to the prediction and modeling of extreme weather. This is a visualization of predicted storm surge on the Louisiana coast caused by Hurricane Laura, the Category 4 Atlantic hurricane that struck Texan shores earlier this year. Credit: Computational Hydraulics Group, Oden Institute.

10/05/2020 - Source: College of Natural Sciences Many of the decisions we make are now guided by computational simulations, from designing new spacecraft to predicting the spread of a pandemic. But it's not enough for a simulation model to just issue predictions. A decision-maker needs to know just how much those predictions can be trusted. Read More

TXCS Alumna Barbara Jones Creates Tech Company Prioritizing a Diverse Work Environment

TXCS alumna Barbara Jones
09/14/2020 - Barbara Jones is no stranger to perseverance: the Texas Computer Science (TXCS) alumna, who graduated from the university in 1998, earned her degree at a time where “there were probably four Black people in the whole computer science department.” With over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, Jones has witnessed massive shifts in how the world grapples with diversity, new technologies, and how businesses operate. Read More

Students Across Programs Create Website to Encourage People to Eat Local

08/31/2020 - As COVID-19 continues to have a devastating effect on communities and economies, many people are wondering: How can I help? Beyond volunteering and direct monetary donations, there is a push for more people to eat from local restaurants. As the Restaurant Performance Index (RPI) decreases, it’s crucial for community-conscious people to support their neighborhood eateries and help keep these businesses afloat. Read More

TXCS Research Team Wins 2020 PointNav Challenge

Illustration of a room and all of the items in it as obstacles to navigate around.
08/31/2020 - A team comprising Texas Computer Science (TXCS) Ph.D. student Santhosh Ramakrishnan, postdoctoral researcher Ziad Al-Halah, and TXCS Professor Kristen Grauman recently won first place in the 2020 Habitat visual navigation challenge held at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). Read More

UT Austin Selected as Home of National AI Institute Focused on Machine Learning

Image from Philipp Krähenbühl's Object Detection Research
08/26/2020 - The National Science Foundation has selected The University of Texas at Austin to lead NSF AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning, bolstering the university’s existing strengths in this emerging field. Machine learning is the technology that drives AI systems, enabling them to acquire knowledge and make predictions in complex environments. This technology has the potential to transform everything from transportation to entertainment to health care. Read More

TXCS Students Help Build App to Aid UT Community As They Return to Campus

08/24/2020 - As students, faculty, and staff prepare to return to campus for the fall semester, a key concern is making the university as safe as possible and properly tracking health data to prevent outbreaks. An interdisciplinary team of researchers and students, including Texas Computer Science (TXCS) undergraduate students Rohit Neppali, Anshul Modh, Viren Velacheri, and Ph.D. student Anibal Heinsfeld, developed the Protect Texas Together app to help track and mitigate the spread of COVID-19 on the Forty Acres. Read More

TXCS Professor Keshav Pingali Named Member of Academia Europaea

Keshav Pingali
08/06/2020 - Texas Computer Science (TXCS) Professor Keshav Pingali has been elected as a foreign member of the Academia Europaea, an internationally-recognized organization dedicated to advancing scholarship across the world. Read More

TXCS Researchers Explore How Artificial Agents Collaborate on a Shared Task

08/05/2020 - There’s an (albeit cliché) saying that says that two heads are better than one. Unsurprisingly, this idiom extends to artificial agents. In the field of AI, researchers have been working to understand how to make independent agents, who may have different goals, work together in an environment to complete a shared task. Read More

TXCS Researchers Win Best Paper Awards at Evolutionary Computation Conferences

black laptop computer turned on with code on screen
07/28/2020 - Texas Computer Science (TXCS) is proud to announce that two research teams have received awards at preeminent evolutionary computation conferences. Read More

UT Austin to Partner in New NSF Quantum Computing Institute

Illustration credit: Nicolle R. Fuller/National Science Foundation

07/22/2020 - Original story by Marc G Airhart, College of Natural Sciences Read More

Investigating How to Make Robots Better Team Members

surgical team in operating room monitoring patient stats
07/17/2020 - Imagine that you are a robot in a hospital: composed of bolts and bits, running on code, and surrounded by humans. It’s your first day on the job, and your task is to help your new human teammates—the hospital’s employees—do their job more effectively and efficiently. Mainly, you’re fetching things. You’ve never met the employees before, and don’t know how they handle their tasks. How do you know when to ask for instructions? At what point does asking too many questions become disruptive? Read More

Power of DNA to Store Information Gets an Upgrade

DNA strand over code
07/15/2020 - Article by Esther R Robards-Forbes | College of Natural Sciences Read More

TXCS Student Creates App to Help Austin’s Black Community

Earl Potts sits on a golden couch at the AfroTech Conference for Black students in computer science
07/09/2020 - Earl Potts, a Texas Computer Science (TXCS) and African and African Diaspora Studies student, created the app “Keep Austin Black” to provide Austinites with an extensive directory of local Black-owned businesses. Though Potts initially started working on the app in October 2019, he went back to working on “Keep Austin Black” as a response to the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests going on throughout the United States.  Read More

TXCS Alumna Finds Passion for Security and Privacy Research

Franzi Roesner, TXCS alumnus, White woman with blonde hair in green button down shirt standing in front of a building smiling
07/07/2020 - Franziska Roesner has spent over 16 years studying and working in the computer science field. Yet she only started studying computer science by pure happenstance. Roesner initially applied only to The University of Texas’ Plan II Honors Program. After realizing that the application required that she choose a backup major, Roesner selected computer science “without really knowing what it was.” Upon learning that she was accepted into both majors, she went to the advising office intending to drop computer science. Read More

BigHPC Texas/Portugal Partnership Forged to Transform Data Science

BigHPC text over background illustrating a sense of speed
06/24/2020 - Note: the original article was written for and published on the Texas Advanced Computing Center website. Authorship credit goes to Faith Singer-Villalobos. Read More

Kristen Grauman Named Finalist in 2020 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists

Kristen Grauman
06/22/2020 - Story by Cason Hunwick for the College of Natural Science's News Page.  University of Texas at Austin computer science researcher Kristen Grauman was selected as a finalist for the 2020 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists. Read More

Pangolin: An Efficient and Flexible Graph Mining System on CPU and GPU

Illustration of a pangolin with line and bar graphs
06/11/2020 - The datasets used by many software applications can be represented as graphs, defined by sets of vertices and edges. These graphs are rich with useful information, and can be used to determine patterns and relationships among the stored data. This process of discovering relevant patterns from graphs is called Graph Pattern Mining (GPM). A team of Texas Computer Science (TXCS) researchers advised by Dr. Keshav Pingali has done groundbreaking work to make GPM programs more efficient and accessible. Read More

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