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Faculty

UT Austin Villa Wins at 2016 World RoboCup

07/07/2016 - The UT Austin Villa robot soccer team, led by University of Texas at Austin computer science professor Peter Stone, returned from the 2016 RoboCup competition in Leipzig, Germany as the world champions in the 3D Simulation league and with an impressive second-place win in the Standard Platform League (SPL).

Why is CGI in the Movies Still So Hard?

06/17/2016 - College of Natural Sciences | Point of Discovery As the summer movie season kicks into high gear, we talk with a scientist about some of the challenges in simulating the way everyday objects behave on the big screen through computer generated imagery (CGI). Etienne Vouga's computer simulations have helped bring to life a wizard's hair in The Hobbit and clothing in Tangled.

New Method of Producing Random Numbers Could Improve Cybersecurity

05/16/2016 - With an advance that one cryptography expert called a "masterpiece," University of Texas at Austin computer scientists have developed a new method for producing truly random numbers, a breakthrough that could be used to encrypt data, make electronic voting more secure, conduct statistically significant polls and more accurately simulate complex systems such as Earth's climate.

David Zuckerman's award from the Simons Foundation

04/15/2016 - David Zuckerman has been selected as a Simons Investigator in Theoretical Computer Science. David's research focuses primarily on pseudorandomness and the role of randomness in computing. He is best known for his work on randomness extractors and their applications. His other research interests include coding theory, distributed computing, cryptography, inapproximability, and other areas of complexity theory.

Chandrajit Bajaj Selected as SIAM Fellow

04/01/2016 - Chandrajit Bajaj has been selected as a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) "for fundamental contributions to applied mathematics algorithms in geometric modeling, imaging science, bioinformatics, and data visualization." SIAM Fellows are designated each year to recognize members of the community for their distinguished contributions to the disciplines of applied mathematics, computational science and related fields.

A.I. Expert Weighs in on Historic Computer vs. Human Contest

03/09/2016 - AlphaGo, a program that plays what many consider the most difficult of board games, Go, has just won the first of five matches against the world's top human player. The series is scheduled to continue through March 12. Developed by Google's DeepMind subsidiary, AlphaGo has already beaten the European Go champion. A few days before the latest competition, we asked Risto Miikkulainen, an artificial intelligence researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, for his thoughts on this historic contest.