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Faculty

Etienne Vouga Earns Regents’ Recognition for Outstanding Teaching

Etienne Vouga sitting at his desk in his office at GDC, wearing a black t-shirt and facing his computer.

11/11/2024 - UT Computer Science Associate Professor Etienne Vouga has earned a 2024 Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award for demonstrating extraordinary classroom performance and innovative teaching. Vouga is one of 12 recipients this year from across the University of Texas System.

Remembering Turing Award Winner E. Allen Emerson

E. Allen Emerson pictured against a gray backdrop with text to the right reading, "Remembering E. Allen Emerson, June 2, 1954 - October 15, 2024"

10/18/2024 - UT Computer Science mourns the loss of Professor Emeritus E. Allen Emerson, winner of the most prestigious award in computer science and a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin since the early 1980s, who died on October 15 after an extended illness."I'm very sad to learn of Allen's death, he was a good friend and a great scientist,” said Don Fussell, Chair of the Department of Computer Science. “His work was a huge step forward in the development of tools that help designers create systems with known, verifiable properties."

Keeping Up with AI’s Increasingly Complex Networking Demands

Daehyeok Kim, Aditya Akella, and Venkat Arun against an abstract background of shapes.

09/24/2024 - The job of building computer networks that train and run large AI models is becoming increasingly complicated because traditional network designs can’t operate at the higher speeds that the AI workloads require and need to be tuned to a variety of communication endpoints (such as CPUs, graphics processing units and AI accelerators) that have widely different characteristics, including data generation speeds. Moreover, AI workloads require advanced network monitoring capabilities to quickly diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks.

New AI Institute Led by UT Researchers Will Accelerate Cosmic Discovery

Four quadrants of scientific-images come together, with webs showing bright spots for star formation, galaxy clustering, identifications of galaxies that are labeled and a futuristic network.

09/18/2024 - The University of Texas at Austin has been selected to lead the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins, a new $20 million research initiative focused on using AI to explore the universe’s biggest mysteries, from dark matter to the origins of life. Greg Durrett, Associate Professor of Computer Science at UT, is a co-investigator on this groundbreaking project, further cementing UT’s leadership in AI research.

UT Computer Science Professor Trains AI Through Game Theory

Computer scientists Ryan Farell and Chandrajit Bajaj standing side-by-side in front of the visualization wall in the POB Vis Lab.

08/30/2024 - Computer science professor Chandrajit Bajaj was recently awarded funding by the U.S. Army Futures Command’s University Technology Development Division (UTDD), in support of DEVCOM C5ISR, for game theory research to develop artificial intelligence systems. The project will utilize Dynamic Belief Games to train AI agents to be better planning and decision support tools for next-generation communications systems.

Central Texas students start school year with new tool that could revolutionize education, experts say

Professor Greg Durrett teaches a course designed for educators that explains the ins and outs of large language models like Chat GPT.

08/22/2024 - AUSTIN (KXAN) — Students heading back to school this semester are entering the classroom with a new tool that experts say could soon be as common as a calculator. “It’s a very useful tool, and students are going to have to know how to use that tool when they should use that tool when they shouldn’t use the tool,” said Greg Durrett, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas in Austin.

Texas RoboCup Team on KXAN

NAO Humanoid robots playing soccer in the Intelligent Robotics lab in the UT Computer Science Gates Dell Complex.

08/12/2024 - Are AI robots the future of sports? These UT students think soAustin (KXAN) — A team of UT students, led by Professor Peter Stone, recently triumphed at the RoboCup Home competition in the Netherlands, where their AI-powered robots autonomously played soccer. The students believe their research is paving the way for a future where robots can compete against humans in sports, revolutionizing the field of AI robotics.

UT computer science lab announces way to make short-form content more accessible

Amy Pavel standing outside on UT Austin campus in a black button down shirt smiling at the camera.

08/09/2024 - The UT computer science lab, with faculty member Amy Pavel and recent graduate Tess Van Daele at the forefront, has developed an AI system called ShortScribe to enhance accessibility for visually impaired users of short-form videos on platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels. Pavel, an assistant computer science professor and co-author of the research paper, explained that the system utilizes AI technologies such as Optical Character Recognition, Automatic Speech Transmission, and GPT-4 to segment videos, transcribe speech, and create detailed audio descriptions.