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Research

Paving the Way for a New Era in Crash Consistency Testing

a chipmunk stuffing peanuts into its cheeks

09/27/2023 - The work of researchers from The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Computer Science in crash consistency has yielded a breakthrough innovation—the Chipmunk system. At its core, Chipmunk zeroes in on a crucial mission—meticulously testing file systems to identify and tackle crash consistency bugs that can significantly impact data integrity and system reliability. The UT Austin team has produced a promising solution that could pave the way for a new era in data storage and stability.

Brain Activity Decoder Can Reveal Stories in People’s Minds

Alex Huth (left), Shailee Jain (center) and Jerry Tang (right) prepare to collect brain activity data in the Biomedical Imaging Center at The University of Texas at Austin. The researchers trained their semantic decoder on dozens of hours of brain activity data from participants, collected in an fMRI scanner. Photo Credit: Nolan Zunk/University of Texas at Austin.

05/01/2023 - The work relies in part on a transformer model, similar to the ones that power ChatGPTA new artificial intelligence system called a semantic decoder can translate a person’s brain activity — while listening to a story or silently imagining telling a story — into a continuous stream of text. The system developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin might help people who are mentally conscious yet unable to physically speak, such as those debilitated by strokes, to communicate intelligibly again.

A More Efficient Future For Neural Network Systems

layers of wood representing layers of data

04/21/2023 - UT Computer Science Ph.D. Garrett Bingham’s research under Professor Risto Miikkulainen in smart automated machine learning has made significant steps toward more efficient neural network systems.

Amazon Teams Up With UT To Establish New Science Hub

Amazon Science Hub

04/11/2023 - AUSTIN, Texas — The University of Texas at Austin and Amazon are launching a science and engineering research partnership to enhance understanding in a variety of areas, including video streaming, search and information retrieval and robotics.

Advances in Batch Arguments Reduce Verification Costs

Stacks of shipping containers side-by-side in various colors.

03/03/2023 - A methodology developed by UT professors will allow the cost of verifying computations to be reduced by batching many separate arguments together. Brent Waters, a computer science professor and a co-author of the paper, was inspired to find a more efficient way to verify computations by refining techniques that had already come out over a decade ago.

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.

New Partnership Will Scale Up Investment in Ethical AI Research and Innovation

Kenneth R. Fleischmann, Will Griffin, Mikel Rodriguez and Alice Xiang at the 2022 Good Systems Symposium. Credit: Stacey Ingram Kaleh.

08/05/2022 - The University of Texas at Austin and the MITRE Corporation, a nonprofit dedicated to solving problems for a safer world, have formed a partnership that includes accelerating innovative ethical artificial intelligence (AI) research currently underway by interdisciplinary teams of researchers who are part of UT Austin's Good Systems research grand challenge.

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.