12/15/2016 - Professor Risto Miikkulainen has won the 2017 Gabor Award from the International Neural Network Society (INNS), which recognizes the achievements of highly accomplished researchers in engineering applications of neural networks. Risto is on the forefront of neuroevolution—the evolution of neural networks using genetic algorithms.
03/09/2016 - AlphaGo, a program that plays what many consider the most difficult of board games, Go, has just won the first of five matches against the world's top human player. The series is scheduled to continue through March 12. Developed by Google's DeepMind subsidiary, AlphaGo has already beaten the European Go champion. A few days before the latest competition, we asked Risto Miikkulainen, an artificial intelligence researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, for his thoughts on this historic contest.
11/30/2015 - Lorenzo Alvisi was selected for his contributions to reliable distributed systems. His research interest is in distributed computing, with a particular emphasis on issues of dependability.
08/17/2015 - AUSTIN (KXAN) – A computer science professor at the University of Texas at Austin stopped by KXAN to talk about his research on computer gaming and the human brain. Dr. Risto Miikkulainen is studying the brain to figure out how it works and translate that knowledge to making better computer games.
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.
07/20/2015 - Jacob Schrum and Risto Miikkulainen won the Best Paper Award in the Digital Entertainment and Arts track at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO). 2015 Conference for their paper on "Solving Interleaved and Blended Sequential Decision-Making Problems through Modular Neuroevolution."
07/15/2015 - Should we heed the warnings of movies such as ‘Terminator Genisys’ and the TV show ‘Humans’?
04/05/2013 - UTCS alum Paul Taele has been awarded a National Science Foundation East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute (NSF EAPSI) fellowship for 2013. Paul will be carrying out research that focuses on enhancing creative computing tools for promoting better design thinking using sketch recognition techniques with Dr. Richard C. Davis at Singapore Management University in Singapore.
08/14/2012 - The UT^2 game bot, created by Jacob Schrum, Igor Karpov, and Professor Risto Miikkulainen, won the Humanlike Bot Competition at the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2012). The UT^2 bot is the first winning bot in the history of the Humanlike Bot Competition to be judged as human more often than half the human players participating in the evaluation.
09/12/2011 - UTCS is pleased to announce Best Paper Awards won by our faculty, staff and students.