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Data Mining

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.

UT Partners with SparkCognition to Host Data Mining and Analytics Competition

06/18/2019 - Two hundred and forty Texas Computer Science students recently participated in a data mining and analytics competition hosted by SparkCognition, an Austin-based enterprise artificial intelligence company with software solutions that help clients analyze complex data, reveal actionable insights, and identify and automate optimal responses. The company awarded scholarship prizes to the first, second, and third place winners of $10,000, $3,000, and $2,000 respectively.

Computer claims responsibility for terrorist bombing

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.

Computer Vision - Seeing Anew

Computer Vision

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.