Machine Learning

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.

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.

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.

11/17/2021 - Any fan of jazz music can attest to the beauty of musical improvisation. However, many famous improvisational piano pieces aren't recorded in sheet music. “There's a lot of music that exists in the world that doesn't have musical transcriptions because it was played improvisationally—virtuosos that never decided to write anything down,” explained Varun Rajaram. This is because transcribing the notes of a piece (especially polyphonic pieces where multiple notes play at a time) is a difficult task even for skilled musicians.

10/11/2021 - Bilingual aphasia is a language impairment to multilingual people acquired through some sort of injury, usually a stroke. Patterns of language impairment in multilingual stroke patients are very diverse. Sometimes language impairment affects all languages the person speaks equally, while other times it affects one language more than the other. The way in which a stroke affects a multilingual patient depends on many different variables such as when each language was learned, how frequently each one is used etc.

07/22/2021 - Floorplans are used in many industries to help people visualize what the inside of a building looks like without actually seeing it. Traditionally, floorplans have been created by actually observing a 3D environment either manually or with the aid of 3D sensors. But what happens when the luxury of observing the 3D environment isn’t available—for example, when a robot is introduced to a new environment? Would it be able to quickly create floor maps without actually seeing the entire environment being mapped in detail?

10/28/2020 - We live in an increasingly digital era. Research shows that the average American checks their phone about 58 times daily, and spends an average of 4.5 hours a day on their phone. Without a doubt the amount of time the modern-day person spends on their phones has changed many aspects of how our society functions. For example, in the past decade we have seen a dramatic shift in forms of advertising.

08/26/2020 - The National Science Foundation has selected The University of Texas at Austin to lead NSF AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning, bolstering the university’s existing strengths in this emerging field. Machine learning is the technology that drives AI systems, enabling them to acquire knowledge and make predictions in complex environments. This technology has the potential to transform everything from transportation to entertainment to health care.

04/19/2019 - Water, sunlight, nutrients—these ingredients are essential for plant growth. However, these basic ingredients don’t always yield the ideal plant. In fact, optimizing these variables is complicated, causing some plants to fall flat on flavor. Machine learning can help.

03/06/2019 - Gene-editing or genome engineering is the altering of DNA within a living organism. Once believed to be far-fetched and unthinkable, it is becoming more and more common due to scientific breakthrough techniques like CRISPR. What most people don’t know though is the use of computing tools in conjunction with CRISPR make gene-editing as efficient and mistake-free as possible—making it a viable cure to deadly genetic diseases.