Newsletter-2015-Winter

12/09/2015 - Nicholas Cobb, a second-year computer science student, has won national recognition repeatedly for his work with a charitable organization he started at the age of 12. Most recently, he traveled to New York for recognition at the 2015 Nickelodeon HALO Awards. From giving coats to the homeless, to awarding scholarships, to providing feeding assistance and mobilizing other youth to create change, Comfort and Joy, the organization Cobb started, helps needy Texans and will soon be expanding to other parts of the country.

11/04/2015 - University of Texas researcher designs novel way to analyze bigger datasets using supercomputers and machine learning algorithms. How do Netflix or Facebook know which movies you might like or who you might want to be friends with? Here’s a hint: It starts with a few trillion data points and involves some complicated math and a lot of smart computer programming.

11/03/2015 - There are few things as full of anxiety, heartbreak, and anguish as finding out that you or someone you love has cancer. Unfortunately, it’s not at all uncommon. By the American Cancer Society’s estimates it is expected that in the year 2015 alone, there will be 1.6 million new cancer diagnoses and nearly 600,000 deaths—or roughly 1,600 people every day. But statistics are hardly necessary to realize the enormity of the problem. So far, the road to a cure has been long and complicated and with what’s seemed like no end in sight—until recently.

11/02/2015 - Three conferences and a workshop, all in the field of formal verification and system design, were held from the end of September through the beginning of October. The first, MEMOCODE ‘15, in its thirteenth year, is dedicated to bringing principles of formal methods to hardware development, which enables hardware designers to prove rigorously that their chips will function as intended. Indeed, as hardware has grown exponentially more complex, traditional methods of testing have become unreliable, and instead formal proofs of correctness are preferred.

10/22/2015 - The field of computer science is playing a balancing act in our society these days. In some circles, holding a computer science degree immediately brands you as a cool techie who is going to catch the next plane to the promised land that is Silicon Valley. On the other hand, there are still many people who buy into the image of a computer scientist being an antisocial hacker who does genius things with computers

10/13/2015 - UT Computer Science is the sixth best global university for computer science, according to the 2016 U.S. News & World Report Rankings. According to the same report, the university is also the 30th best global university overall out of 750 schools.

10/02/2015 - More than 600 students from 10 universities competed to create viable working software in a 24 hour hackathon over the weekend. HackTX began Saturday at 1 p.m. and concluded Sunday at 11 a.m., after which the teams were judged on innovation, usefulness and creativity. The top 10 teams then presented their work to a panel of technology CEOs and fellow students.

09/22/2015 - The future of any computer science program is entirely dependent on the ongoing strength of its faculty. At UT Computer Science, we are proud to say that our future is bright indeed as we welcome four new faculty into our robotics and systems groups. These talented individuals join four other recent faculty additions, ensuring that UT Computer Science will continue to be a leader in the field for years to come.

08/12/2015 - A computer science team at The University of Texas at Austin has found that robots evolve more quickly and efficiently after a virtual mass extinction modeled after real-life disasters such as the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Beyond its implications for artificial intelligence, the research supports the idea that mass extinctions actually speed up evolution by unleashing new creativity in adaptations.

06/23/2015 - UT News — The University of Texas at Austin is ranked No. 19 in the world for high-impact science, according to the Nature Index, which tracks publication in the world’s top research journals — the latest in a series of global rankings that recognize UT Austin among the world’s elite research universities. UT Austin ranks No. 8 among all U.S. universities.