Skip to main content

Artificial Intelligence

Transforming Human-Robot Interaction Through Mood Inducing Music

Young person lounging back with a boombox under their right foot listening to music.

05/06/2024 - Music has always had the power to stir our emotions, from the exhilaration of a fast-paced rock anthem to the melancholy of a soulful ballad. But, could the music we listen to also affect how we make decisions, especially in our interactions with robots? This intriguing question lies at the heart of a study conducted by UT Austin Assistant Professor Elad Liebman and Professor Peter Stone.

New “Essentials of AI” Course Launches This Fall

White letters spell the abbreviation AI with bands of color surrounding

08/11/2023 - The Department of Computer Science and the Good Systems program present a one semester-credit-hour course titled “Essentials of AI for Life and Society.” Experts in artificial intelligence predict that AI-powered technologies will continue to become more and more a part of our everyday lives. It will affect how we work, spend our leisure time, make policy decisions and make sense of the world around us. And yet, most of us don’t really understand how the technologies work or what their potential risks and benefits are.

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.

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.

Computer Science Researcher Aims to Automate Software Development

Isil Dillig

03/23/2022 - Isil Dillig is an associate professor of computer science who works to improve the security and reliability of software systems and automatically generate programs from high-level specifications. She received a Sloan Research Fellowship and an NSF CAREER award. Could you describe your main research interests?

AI Bests Expert Human Players at Video Game

race cars rounding corner on race track

02/23/2022 - An artificial intelligence system made history recently by beating a human world champion in Sony's popular video racing game, Gran Turismo Sport. The technological feat, which made the cover of the journal Nature, involved an AI system designed in part by three University of Texas at Austin computer science Ph.D. alumni and professor Peter Stone.