Artificial Intelligence

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.

05/05/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas—Computer networks that can’t forget fast enough can show symptoms of a kind of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers further clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Yale University have found. The researchers used a virtual computer model, or “neural network,” to simulate the excessive release of dopamine in the brain. They found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion.

08/04/2010 - Every day—every minute, every second—the world’s computers are amassing visual information at an extraordinary rate. Aspiring Tarantinos are sending their two-minute videos to Youtube in the hopes of going viral. Mom and Dad are uploading their Napa Valley vacation photos to Flickr. Doctors are sending patient MRIs to medical databases, and satellites are scanning the earth for evidence of sinister activity.

07/03/2009 - Texas Computer Science students are programming robots to play soccer... and winning. Current robots are only 2-feet high, but the goal is to develop robotic players large and skillful enough to beat a real-live World Cup team by 2050. Students from Texas Tech (TT) and The University of Texas at Austin (UT) use C++ to program robots to play without human interaction during the games. The robots play as a team and make individual decisions.

08/09/2007 - Marvin, a self-driving Isuzu SUV programmed by University of Texas at Austin computer scientists and members of Austin Robot Technology (ART), passed a recent driving test and will advance to the semifinals of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) 2007 Urban Challenge race.

01/18/2007 - Dr. Peter Stone, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, received the 2007 Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).

07/12/2003 - Dr. Peter Stone, assistant professor of computer sciences, and his student team won first place in a computer-simulated soccer competition at RoboCup 2003 in Italy.