Faculty

06/15/2011 - The Board of Regents of The University of Texas System has recognized Professor Calvin Lin and Senior Lecturer Mike Scott for outstanding teaching.

06/03/2011 - Senior Lecturer Michael Scott is one of four faculty members at The University of Texas at Austin selected to hold a Dads' Association Centennial Teaching Fellowship during the 2011-12 fall semester.

05/26/2011 - Professor Inderjit Dhillon, together with Justin Brickell, Suvrit Sra and Joel Tropp have been selected to receive the award of the 2011 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Outstanding Paper Prize for their paper entitled, "The Metric Nearness Problem," which appeared in the SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications (SIMAX). Their paper is one of the three winning papers.

05/16/2011 - Researchers at Yale and the University of Texas used a neural network -- a computer brain -- to test out medical theories of what causes schizophrenia. The result was a computer brain that can't tell the difference between stories about itself and fanciful stories about gangsters, and claims responsibility for terrorist acts.

05/09/2011 - Computer simulations of malfunctioning brains may be the key to understanding schizophrenia and other conditions. A research team including computer scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and a professor of psychiatry at Yale have been testing various theories of how schizophrenic brains misfire as they process information. People with schizophrenia often have trouble repeating different stories, for instance, frequently combining elements of separate stories and inserting themselves into the narrative.

05/06/2011 - In a bid to help understand the way that the human brain malfunctions to cause mental illness scientists have caused a computer system to lose its mind and claim responsibilty for a terrorist bombing. The team at the University of Texas and Yale University, including Professor Risto Miikkulainen and grad student Uli Grasemann, were looking to how the human brain is affected with schizophrenia by simulating a hypothesis that excessive dopamine in the brain can cause “exaggerated salience”, whereby the brain is learning from things it shouldn’t.

05/04/2011 - Professor Chandrajit Bajaj received a 2011-12 Moncrief Grand Challenge Faculty Award to pursue his project on three-dimensional imaging at the molecular level of therapeutic drug targets. He was among seven University of Texas at Austin researchers selected for the award who are confronting what the scientific community has defined as this century's grand challenges in drug design, environmental sustainability and improved oil recovery. The awards range up to $60,000 for a semester.

05/03/2011 - The Department of Computer Science (UTCS) congratulates Professor Mike Walfish, winner of a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation. The CAREER awards recognize promising young faculty and supports their research with five years of funding.

04/20/2011 - A new partnership between researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University has been created to help improve teaching and learning through educational innovation and technology.

02/11/2011 - IBM and eight universities from around the world will collaborate on developing the company's Watson supercomputer and the question-answering technology behind it. The University of Texas at Austin Department of Computer Science which will collaborate on automated reasoning and common sense.