News

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

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

TXCS Students Receive University Wide Endowed Presidential Scholarship

Congratulations to the 2020-21 University-wide Endowed Scholarship Winners

06/04/2020 - Texas Computer Science (TXCS) is proud to announce that 19 TXCS students have received the Unrestricted Endowed Presidential Scholarship (UEPS). The scholarship is awarded to exemplary juniors or seniors who have maintained a GPA of 3.75 or higher and have been recommended by a faculty member. Recipients are evaluated on the basis of their scholastic merit, extracurricular involvement, and leadership qualities. 247 UT Austin students earned the award for the 2020-2021 academic year. Read More

Standing Together in the College of Natural Sciences

06/02/2020 - A message from Dean Paul Goldbart to the College of Natural Sciences community underscores the need to stand in solidarity and support one another. This post was updated on Tuesday, June 2 to include a statement from the CNS Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Dear College of Natural Sciences community members, Read More

New Online Master’s Degree in Data Science is a First for The University of Texas at Austin

UT Launches New Online Master’s Degree in Data Science

06/01/2020 - In response to high demand for professionals with scientific and technical training to understand and work with massive amounts of data, The University of Texas at Austin is set to launch a new online master’s degree program in data science. Pending final approval by UT System and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the new program will be a collaboration between the Department of Computer Science, ranked among the top 10 programs in the country by U.S. Read More

TXCS Researchers Design Evolutionary Algorithms for Neural Networks

Plot of the activation functions the researchers discovered

Plot of the activation functions the researchers discovered

05/28/2020 - Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly evolving field, with advancements occurring every day. While the idea of an artificial intelligence system may conjure images of an autonomous machine that rattles out facts like a hi-tech encyclopedia, complex AI exists only because a countless number of talented individuals dedicate their time toward refining these systems. Read More

Undergraduate Experience Prepares Alumnus to Launch Startup

Denis Ignatovich (right) and Grant Passmore, co-founders of Imandra

UT alumni Denis Ignatovich (right) and Grant Passmore (left)

05/26/2020 - On August 1, 2012, the global financial services firm Knight Capital, which was at the time the largest trader in U.S. equities, lost $460 million due to a “technology breakdown.” One of their trading servers housed defective code, causing the group irreparable damage. Almost exactly a year later, a Goldman Sachs computer glitch resulted in a number of erroneous trades, resulting in a loss of over $100 million for the company. Read More

TXCS Faculty and Alumni Win Awards at AAMAS

05/21/2020 - The 2020 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMS) was held from May 9-13, and Texas Computer Science (TXCS) Professor Peter Stone and alumnus Kurt Dresner were awarded the IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award for their 2008 paper “A multiagent approach to autonomous intersection management.” In additio Read More

Texas Computing Community Honored With Test of Time Awards

05/19/2020 - Texas Computer Science (TXCS) alumni and faculty were honored in two separate conferences this month with Test of Time awards. Read More

Texas Computer Science Welcomes Three Class of 2024 Forty Acres Scholars

Sophia Li from Murphy, Texas, is the recipient of the Charline and Red McCombs Family Forty Acres Scholarship

Lana Mohamed from San Antonio, Texas, is the recipient of the Stamps Forty Acres Scholarship

Amelia Nickerson from Leander, Texas, is the recipient of the Sarah M. and Charles E. Seay Forty Acres Scholarship

05/19/2020 - For years, the Texas Exes Forty Acres Scholars Program has made it their mission to “inspire and nurture visionary leaders and help them use their talents to benefit society.” The program is a full-ride, merit-based scholarship given to highly qualified students entering the University of Texas at Austin. Scholars are selected based on their intellectual curiosity, outstanding academic success, and desire to use their skills to change the world. Read More

TXCS Student Part of President’s Award for Global Learning Winning Team

TXCS junior Rosaleen Xiong

05/18/2020 - The President’s Award for Global Learning is one of UT Austin’s most prestigious grants. Its mission is to create global leaders through providing selected students with hands-on, cross-cultural experience. Teams who apply for the award are tasked with examining a real-world problem affecting a specific geographical region, and creating and implementing a solution to it. After a rigorous selection process involving proposals and a pitch competition, one team is chosen from each of three regions. Read More

TXCS Student Deploys Website to Connect People to Combat COVID-19

Amir Mostafavi and Ali Ajam in front of the UT Austin tower

TXCS student Amir Mostafavi (left) and his friend Ali Ajam, the developers of kovid19.org

04/13/2020 - As the number of COVID-19 infections rises and people remain in isolation, the streets have increasingly begun to look like scenes from doomsday movies. This is in stark contrast to grocery stores and other essential establishments, however, where people continue to congregate out of need for essential supplies. Read More

TXCS Students Create Program to Find Product Availability and Promote Social Distancing

04/01/2020 - On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 (coronavirus) a pandemic. A few days later, Texas Computer Science (TXCS) students Rithwik Pattikonda and Darshan Bhatta returned home for spring break to their homes in Plano and Irving, respectively. Both witnessed how stores struggled with the surge in customers, and realized that these stores, while providing a necessity, were also breeding grounds for the possible transmission of COVID-19. They decided to take action. Read More

New Partnership Aims to Demystify Artificial Intelligence “Black Boxes”

Isil Dillig (left) and Swarat Chaudhuri are part of a new, multi-institution initiative aimed at better understanding what happens inside artificial intelligence "black boxes."

03/25/2020 - The promise of artificial intelligence to solve problems in drug design, discover how babies learn language, and make progress in many other areas has been stymied by the inability of humans to understand what's going on inside AI systems. Researchers at six universities, including The University of Texas at Austin, are launching a partnership aimed at turning these AI "black boxes" into human-interpretable computer code, allowing them to solve hitherto unsolvable problems. Read More

Joydeep Biswas Builds Robots to Navigate the Real World

03/09/2020 - Read More

A Veteran’s Path to Texas Computer Science

Travis Eakin, undergraduate student at The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Computer Science

03/05/2020 - Travis Eakin is 27-years-old, a veteran, and studying computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. Though his profile isn’t the traditional image of a college student, his background is not uncommon. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “over 1,000,000 student Veterans are using their G.I. Read More

TXCS Researchers Win Supercomputing Best Paper Prize

Robert van de Geijn, Lee Killough, and Tze Meng Low accepting the award at PP20 in Seattle, Washington

Robert van de Geijn, Lee Killough, and Tze Meng Low accepting the award at PP20 in Seattle, Washington

03/04/2020 - The paper titled “The BLIS Framework: Experiments in Portability” recently received the 2020 SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing Best Paper Prize. Among the authors of this paper are TXCS professor Dr. Read More

First Class of Online Master’s Students Transform Digital Learning

02/27/2020 - In fall 2019, The University of Texas at Austin launched the Master of Computer Science Online. Through a partnership with edX, an online platform for education and learning, the university was able to bring Texas Computer Science’s top-ranked degree to students around the world, in an affordable and flexible program. Read More

UT Programming Team Competes at ICPC North America Championship

The UT Programming Team at the ICPC NAC in Atlanta, Georgia

02/26/2020 - On Sat, 22 Feb 2020, the UT Programming Team competed in the ICPC North America Championship (NAC) in Atlanta, Georgia, hosted by Georgia Tech. Read More

New Sandboxing Approach in Web Browser Increases Security

computer science professor, Hovav Shacham, The University of Texas at Austin

02/25/2020 - A powerful new approach to securing web browsers, using a tool called WebAssembly, is getting its first real-world application in the Firefox browser. Read More

Changing the Evolution of Database Applications

Yuepeng Wang, sixth-year PhD student in Dr. Işıl Dillig’s lab

02/04/2020 - Most websites that we use every day are database applications, which means that they involve software that interacts with an underlying database. As these websites evolve to meet the demands of their users, so must the software and the database schema, i.e., the model that determines the layout of the data. This process is extremely time-consuming and error-prone, because developers not only need to transform the data, but also re-implement all the affected parts of the application. Read More

Texas CS Alumnus Joins the Race to Build Self-Driving Trucks

Locomation trucks in convoy formation

01/23/2020 - The race to build the best autonomous cargo vehicle is heating up, indicating big developments for the $700 billion U.S. trucking market. With the rise of e-commerce comes the accompanying need for more efficiently delivered goods, a demand that the transportation industry is not currently equipped to cope with. Self-driving trucks could solve this problem by simultaneously decreasing the cost and increasing the safety of freight transport. Read More

Pages