News

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

Concentrations Offer Expertise in Specialized Fields of Computer Science

05/02/2018 - For students who are passionate about a specialized subfield of computer science, Texas Computer Science has made it easier for them to enhance their skills and set themselves apart by choosing a concentration. Read More

UT Competitive Programming Team Goes to ACM-ICPC World Finals

Left to Right - Assistant Professor Etienne Vouga, Arnav Sastry ('18), Ethan Arnold ('19), Daniel Talamas ('18), and Lecturer Glenn Downing

04/26/2018 - On Thu, 19 Apr 2018, the UT Competitive Programming team competed at the ACM-ICPC World Finals at Peking University in Beijing, China. The competition consisted of teams from 140 regions (approx. 420 students) trying to solve 11 problems in 5 hrs and 20 min. The first-place team, Moscow State University, solved 9 problems. UT solved 4 problems and tied with 42 other teams for 56th place. Read More

What happens when AI meets robotics?

04/10/2018 - By Pallab Ghosh, BBC News Researchers in Texas are developing robots that have minds of their own. The scientists are creating systems that can learn for themselves and be able to operate in the home, the workplace and even on the sports field. Read More

Fifty Years after Sci-Fi’s “2001,” Rethinking Our Relationship with AI

04/03/2018 - UT College of Natural Sciences News | Esther R Robards-Forbes Read More

Ethical Foundations Class Introduces Ethical Thinking to Computer Science Students

04/01/2018 - Computers touch every part of our daily lives, from work to shopping to social media, and behind computer programs are human computer scientists making decisions. How do we make sure that these decisions don’t harm others? Read More

Four UTCS Professors Win NSF CAREER Award

Vijay Chidambaram, Scott Niekum, Simon Peter, and Eric Price

03/30/2018 - Four UTCS professors—Vijay Chidambaram, Scott Niekum, Simon Peter, and Eric Price —have won the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development award for 2018. Read More

Students Blend Science, Art and Communication to Design Games and Apps

Students showcase their games during Digital Demo Day. Photo by Jennifer Reel.

Students showcase their games during Digital Demo Day. Photo by Jennifer Reel.

03/26/2018 - The UT Game and Mobile Media Applications (GAMMA) program was established six years ago upon a simple principle: humans like to play. GAMMA, a collaboration between the College of Natural Sciences, the College of Fine Arts and the Moody College of Communications, is an undergraduate certificate program that prepares students for careers in designing video games and mobile apps. As an interdisciplinary initiative that blends expertise from all three colleges, the certificate program gives students opportunities to apply both computing and creativity toward the production of apps and games that are useful and entertaining. Read More

UT Computer Science Graduate Program Among Top Ten in the U.S.

03/21/2018 - According to U.S. News & World Report’s 2019 Best Graduate Schools report, UT’s computer science graduate program is among the top 10 best graduate programs for computer science in the country, as well as among the top 5 among public schools and the best in Texas. Read More

Two Ph.D. Students Awarded IBM Fellowships

03/20/2018 - Two computer science Ph.D. students, Rishab Goyal and Josiah Hanna, were selected for the highly-competitive 2018 IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Program. Read More

UT Computer Science Adding Ethics Courses to Curriculum

03/06/2018 - AUSTIN (KXAN) — At the University of Texas at Austin, computer science students are being asked to go beyond coding and engineering. Their department wants them to graduate with an understanding of ethics as well. Read More

Three UTCS Faculty Receive Google Research Awards

02/22/2018 - Three UTCS professors won a 2017 Google Faculty Research award, which is awarded to academic researchers in order to fund research proposals. Vijay Chidambaram received an award for systems research, Kristen Grauman received an award for machine perception research, and Işil Dillig received an award for security research. Read More

Women in Computer Science Hosts "Magical" All-Women Hackathon

Women in Computer Science student organization members

02/22/2018 - On Saturday, Women in Computer Science hosted WiCS Hacks, an all-women 12-hour hackathon sponsored by HomeAway, IBM and Bloomberg. This year, the theme of the hackathon was magic and featured categories such as educational technology, community impact, IBM Watson and “magical hacks.” Eighty people attended the event, and the projects were judged by faculty members. Read More

Vijay Chadambaram and Eric Lee Win Best Paper Prize at FAST 2018

02/16/2018 - UTCS Professor Vijay Chidambaram and undergraduate researcher Eric Lee co-authored a paper titled "Protocol-aware Recovery for Consensus-based Storage'' which won the best paper prize at the 2018 USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST). Read More

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