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Faculty

Scott Aaronson Elected AAAS Fellow

UT Computer Science Professor Scott Aaronson

02/01/2023 - UT Computer Science Professor Scott Aaronson is one of six faculty in The University of Texas at Austin, to be elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)— the world's largest general scientific society. His research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory more generally. He has won numerous awards throughout his career, most recently the 2020 Association for Computing Machinery Prize for groundbreaking contributions to quantum computing.

Exploring Annotator Rationales for Active Learning with Transformers

Filtering data in transformers

12/14/2022 - For decades, natural language processing (NLP) has provided methods for computers to understand language in a way that mimics humans. Since they are built on transformers, complex neural network layers, these large language models' decision making processes are usually incomprehensible to humans and require large amounts of data to be trained properly. In the past, researchers have tried to remedy this by having models explain their decisions by providing rationales, short excerpts of data that contributed most to the label.

How Novel Encryption Methods Are Making a Future of Online Privacy Possible

computer broken in half showing encrypted text

08/04/2022 - Privacy has become increasingly valuable and rare as technology has become more closely integrated with our lives. Private information retrieval (PIR) protocols allow you to retrieve information through an encoded query while also protecting your personal information. Our current security standard online can be viewed as a “no-privacy baseline,” which means the vast majority of our online information retrieval isn’t protected by any of these protocols. Cryptographers like UT Computer Science professor David Wu are building innovative solutions that support this growing preference for online privacy.

Researchers Aim to Make Computer Networks Easier to Change on the Fly

UT Computer Science Professor Aditya Akella in blue button down shirt in front of limestone wall

08/04/2022 - It's hard to make changes to the software running on a computer network while it's in use—and that can make it harder to respond quickly to a cyberattack. The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to computer scientists from Rice University, The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Washington to develop runtime programmable networks that can respond to real-time changes rapidly and without interruption of service.

Aditya Akella and Collaborators Earn Test of Time Award

UT Austin tower clock

06/29/2022 - The ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2010 research paper “Network Traffic Characteristics of Data Centers in the Wild”, written by UT Computer Science Professor Aditya Akella, along with collaborators Theophilus Benson and David A.

Inderjit Dhillon Named AAAI Fellow

UT Computer Science Professor Inderjit Dhillon

05/25/2022 - Inderjit Dhillon, Gottesman Family Centennial Professor in Computer Science and a member of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, has been named a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).