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Graduate Students

Artificial Intelligence Revs Up Evolution’s Clock (Audio)

Hyenas mobbing a lion

10/14/2020 - Evolutionary biologists never have enough time. Some of the most mysterious behaviors in the animal kingdom—like parenting—evolved over thousands of years, if not longer. Human lifespans are just too short to sit and observe such complex behaviors evolve. But computer scientists are beginning to offer clues by using artificial intelligence to simulate the life and death of thousands of generations of animals in a matter of hours or days. It's called computational evolution.

Mobile Robotics Lab Reaches Milestone in Campus-Scale Autonomous Navigation

The UT Campus-Jackal (left) and the UT Campus-Husky (right)

10/06/2020 - A group of Texas Computer Science (TXCS) researchers from the Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory (AMRL) comprising Joydeep Biswas, Sadegh Rabiee, Jarrett Holtz, Kavan Sikand, Max Svetlik, and John Bachman (UMass Amherst) have reached an incredible milestone in their research: deploying an autonomous robot that autonomously navigates on the campus-scale, resilient to everyday changes and varying conditions.

TXCS Research Team Wins 2020 PointNav Challenge

Illustration of a room and all of the items in it as obstacles to navigate around.

08/31/2020 - A team comprising Texas Computer Science (TXCS) Ph.D. student Santhosh Ramakrishnan, postdoctoral researcher Ziad Al-Halah, and TXCS Professor Kristen Grauman recently won first place in the 2020 Habitat visual navigation challenge held at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

TXCS Students Help Build App to Aid UT Community As They Return to Campus

08/24/2020 - As students, faculty, and staff prepare to return to campus for the fall semester, a key concern is making the university as safe as possible and properly tracking health data to prevent outbreaks. An interdisciplinary team of researchers and students, including Texas Computer Science (TXCS) undergraduate students Rohit Neppali, Anshul Modh, Viren Velacheri, and Ph.D. student Anibal Heinsfeld, developed the Protect Texas Together app to help track and mitigate the spread of COVID-19 on the Forty Acres.

Investigating How to Make Robots Better Team Members

surgical team in operating room monitoring patient stats

07/17/2020 - Imagine that you are a robot in a hospital: composed of bolts and bits, running on code, and surrounded by humans. It’s your first day on the job, and your task is to help your new human teammates—the hospital’s employees—do their job more effectively and efficiently. Mainly, you’re fetching things. You’ve never met the employees before, and don’t know how they handle their tasks. How do you know when to ask for instructions? At what point does asking too many questions become disruptive?

TXCS Researchers Design Evolutionary Algorithms for Neural Networks

Plot of the activation functions the researchers discovered

05/28/2020 - Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly evolving field, with advancements occurring every day. While the idea of an artificial intelligence system may conjure images of an autonomous machine that rattles out facts like a hi-tech encyclopedia, complex AI exists only because a countless number of talented individuals dedicate their time toward refining these systems.

Changing the Evolution of Database Applications

Yuepeng Wang, a sixth-year PhD student at Texas Computer Science

02/04/2020 - Most websites that we use every day are database applications, which means that they involve software that interacts with an underlying database. As these websites evolve to meet the demands of their users, so must the software and the database schema, i.e., the model that determines the layout of the data. This process is extremely time-consuming and error-prone, because developers not only need to transform the data, but also re-implement all the affected parts of the application.

Ruohan Gao Awarded Google PhD Fellowship

Ruohan Gao, Google Fellowship, Texas Computer Science, Graduate Student

09/18/2019 - UT Computer Science graduate student Ruohan Gao has been awarded a 2019 Google PhD Fellowship for his research in Machine Perception, Speech Technology and Computer Vision. He is one of over 50 recipients announced this year from North America, Asia, Africa, India, Europe and the Middle East.