News

Alumni in the News: Farnam Jahanian Becomes New President of Carnegie Mellon

11/08/2018 - Texas alumnus Farnam Jahanian became Carnegie Mellon University’s new president this past month on October 26th. He is a nationally recognized computer scientist, successful entrepreneur, and leader in higher education. Jahanian received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently a fellow of a number of prestigious academic groups including the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Read More

Teaching Computers to Read with Machine Learning

Texas Computer Science Assistant Professor Greg Durrett

11/01/2018 - The internet is a vast network of knowledge, containing the sum of humanity’s greatest accomplishments, algorithms, and stories. However, accessing this information usually requires the critical eye of a human user. Greg Durrett, a Texas Computer Science Assistant Professor, is using statistical machine learning to change just that. Read More

Voting App “BeVote” Programmed by UT Students

10/18/2018 - Students at The University of Texas at Austin have a new tool to help them become better informed as voters. BeVote is a free cellphone app designed exclusively for UT students that provides accurate, nonpartisan information and was programmed by UT students. Read More

Computer Science to Launch Online Master's Degree

UT Tower and south mall with gradient overlay

10/09/2018 - The University of Texas at Austin is making plans to bring its top-ranked computer science graduate program to students and professionals beyond campus through a new online master’s degree program. Read More

Computer Scientists Receive $1.7 Million Grant to Make Chip Design Easier

An "Asynchronous FPGA chip" built using the tools Keshav Pingali and his collaborators are developing for DARPA.

An "Asynchronous FPGA chip" built using the tools Keshav Pingali and his collaborators are developing for DARPA.

10/03/2018 - Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, Yale University and Texas State University have been awarded $5 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of a program designed to spark the next wave of semiconductor innovation and circuit design in the U.S. Read More

Lo, Zhang, and Stone Win Best Paper Award for Task Planning in Robots

Researchers stand by their poster at conference in Stockholm

09/13/2018 - Shih-Yun Lo, Shiqi Zhang, and Peter Stone are recipients of the 2018 Best Robotics Track Paper Award at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS). They received this award for their research on planning efficiently for task-level navigation in robots. Their group, led by Texas Computer Science professor Peter Stone, includes Shih-Yun Lo, a Texas Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering, and Shiqi Zhang, a former Texas postdoc student and current Assistant Professor at SUNY Binghamton. Read More

Kristen Grauman Awarded J.K. Aggarwal Prize for Image Matching Research

08/31/2018 - Texas Computer science professor Kristen Grauman is the recipient of the 2018 J.K. Aggarwal Prize from the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) for her contributions to the field of image matching and retrieval. Read More

Scott Aaronson Awarded Tomassoni-Chisesi Physics Prize for Quantum Computing Research

08/31/2018 - UT computer science professor Scott Aaronson is a recipient of the prestigious 2018 Tomassoni-Chisesi Award from the Sapienza University of Rome Physics Department for his research in quantum computation. Read More

Professor Kristen Grauman Trains Computers to Understand What They’re Seeing

08/06/2018 - In order for a robot to be able to navigate the world, it must be able to “see” its environment and be able to process what it sees. However, since computers don’t naturally know how to understand images, this is a task easier said than done. Computer vision researchers are up to the task of training these programs. Read More

Major Quantum Computing Advance Made Obsolete by UT Grad

07/31/2018 - Ewin Tang, a 2018 University of Texas at Austin graduate in computer science and mathematics, is receiving national attention for a feat accomplished at the age of 18 by disproving, as part of an honors thesis, a widely held assumption about the hottest next-thing in technology, quantum computing. Read More

First Bytes Creates Community and Career Opportunities for Women in Tech

Former campers, Texas Computer Science alumnae and HomeAway software engineers, Tiffany Tsai (left) and Cassie Schwendiman (right), credit First Bytes with helping lead them on their path to computer science.Texas Computer Science

Former campers, Texas Computer Science alumnae and HomeAway software engineers, Tiffany Tsai (left) and Cassie Schwendiman (right), credit First Bytes with helping lead them on their path to computer science.

07/30/2018 - More than just a summer camp for creating memories and making new friends, First Bytes opens up a wide variety of opportunities in computer science for high school girls and helps build a community of women in the tech industry. Read More

Could Robots Compete in the 2050 World Cup? This UT Team Thinks It’s Possible

Photograph courtesy of JT Genter.

07/26/2018 - By Rachel Cooper, The Alcalde For the past month, the world has been watching national soccer teams from across the globe compete in a surprising and nail-biting World Cup. Although the U.S. didn’t make the cut for the 2018 version of the quadrennial tournament, there’s an unorthodox soccer team close to home that did pretty well on the international stage—a group of Longhorns and their goal-scoring robots. Read More

Researchers Win Best Paper Award at USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2018

07/24/2018 - This month, a group of UTCS researchers won a best paper award at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2018 for their paper, "TxFS: Leveraging File-System Crash Consistency to Provide ACID Transactions." Read More

Professor Scott Niekum Teaches Robots to Help Humans with Dreaded Tasks

07/18/2018 - Robots are everywhere, from the Roomba cleaning your floor to the first self-driving cars traveling the roads. As robots advance and help with more and more tedious or dangerous tasks, they need an easy and efficient way to learn and adapt to their surroundings. Read More

New Dual Degree Honors Program at The University of Texas at Austin Combines Computer Science, Business

Texas CSB The University of Texas at Austin

06/27/2018 - A new, highly selective integrated honors degree program in computer science and business at The University of Texas at Austin will offer a rigorous four-year undergraduate curriculum aimed at preparing students for top technology careers. Read More

UT Austin Villa Wins 3D Simulation League Championship for Fifth Consecutive Year

RoboCup 3D Simulation League Soccer Competition 1st Place Trophy, RoboCup 2018 Montreal, Canada

06/25/2018 - UT Austin Villa continues its winning streak in the 3D Simulation League by defeating magmaOffenburg 2-0 in the championship at last week’s RoboCup 2018 competition. Read More

Researchers Win Best Paper Award for Mobile Acoustic Imaging Technique

06/20/2018 - A team of computer science researchers consisting of professor Lili Qiu and her Ph.D. students Wenguang Mao and Mei Wang won the Best Paper Award last week at MobiSys 2018 for their work in creating a system that can perform acoustic imaging with a smartphone. Read More

Incoming Turing Scholar Receives Forty Acres Scholarship

06/07/2018 - From studying Latin to playing ultimate frisbee, incoming computer science freshman Abby Criswell has always had “this weird of habit of getting into loads of crazily different things that … don’t seem to have any connection.” As a future Turing Scholar, Dean’s Scholar and pre-medical student, she wants to continue making unusual connections by combining her interests in coding and medical technology. Read More

Professor Etienne Vouga Uses Complex Geometry to Solve Real-World Problems

06/06/2018 - The world is made up of shapes of all kinds, from boxy cubes to perfect spheres and everything in between. Some shapes work best for certain applications; for example, only a few configurations will lead to a stable building. Read More

UT Hosting 2018 Linked Data Benchmark Council Meeting

05/25/2018 - Texas Computer Science is hosting the 11th annual Technical User Community Linked Data Benchmark Council meeting on Friday, June 8th in the Gates-Dell Complex. Read More

Linear Algebra Foundations to Frontiers - Programming for Correctness Online Course Launches Second Offering

05/15/2018 - The only effective way to raise the confidence level of a program significantly is to give a convincing proof of its correctness. But one should not first make the program and then prove its correctness, because then the requirement of providing the proof would only increase the poor programmer’s burden. On the contrary: the programmer should let correctness proof and program grow hand-in-hand. - “The Humble Programmer,” Edsger W. Dijkstra (1972) Read More

UT Broadens Academic Reach with Two Research Symposiums

05/10/2018 - This spring, the UT Department of Computer Science launched two new research consortiums with the first annual Texas Systems Research Consortium Symposium and UT Robotics Consortium Symposium. Read More

These Mathematical Techniques Could Help Design Shape-shifting Materials

A snapdragon flower petal grown from a cylinder. In each state, the colors show the growth factors of the top (left) and bottom (right) layer, and the thin black lines indicate the direction of growth. The top layer is viewed from the front, and the bottom layer is viewed from the back, to highlight the complexity of the geometries. (Credit Harvard SEAS)

A snapdragon flower petal grown from a cylinder. In each state, the colors show the growth factors of the top (left) and bottom (right) layer, and the thin black lines indicate the direction of growth. The top layer is viewed from the front, and the bottom layer is viewed from the back, to highlight the complexity of the geometries. (Credit Harvard SEAS)

05/08/2018 - UT College of Natural Sciences News | October 16, 2017 Nature has a way of making complex shapes from a set of simple growth rules. The curve of a petal, the swoop of a branch, even the contours of our face are shaped by these processes. What if we could unlock those rules and reverse engineer nature's ability to grow an infinitely diverse array of shapes? Read More

UT students compete in 'Shark Tank'-style pitch for $25K prize

Joshua Baer and Millie Price

05/04/2018 - AUSTIN (KXAN) - Thirteen startups and one big prize of $25,000. Thursday night, student entrepreneurs at UT Austin competed in a "Shark Tank" style pitch contest Read More

Jacqueline Gibson Earns 2018 President’s Leadership Award

Jacqueline Gibson, photo courtesy of The Alcalde

05/02/2018 - Undergraduate student Jacqueline Gibson is one of six recipients of the 2018 President’s Leadership Award, which is given annually by the Texas Exes. Jacqueline and her fellow awardees represent some the most active participants on the Forty Acres and set the pace on campus. According to the Alcalde, "These students are what one could conservatively call active participants—not simply for showing up, but for taking charge, too." Read More

Pages