News

Many supervised learning methods are naturally cast as optimization problems. For prediction models which are linear in their parameters, this often leads to convex problems for which many guarantees exist. Models which are non-linear in their parameters such as neural networks lead to non-convex optimization problems for which guarantees are harder to obtain. In this talk, I will consider two-layer neural networks with homogeneous activation functions where the number of hidden neurons tends to infinity, and show how qualitative convergence guarantees may be derived.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) has awarded nearly $2 million to a national research consortium that includes lead institution Ohio State University as well as the University of California-Irvine and the University of Texas at Austin. The grant will create a new Tier 1 University Transportation Center (UTC). According to the DOT, these centers aim to “advance research and education programs that address critical transportation challenges facing our nation.”

Two Facets of Learning Robust Models: Fundamental Limits and Generalization to Natural Out-of-Distribution Inputs-Prof. Hamed Hassani (Univ. of Pennsylvania)

WNCG's Prof. Jeff Andrews has been named as a recipient of a 2021 Qualcomm Faculty Award. The Qualcomm Faculty Award (QFA) "supports key professors and their research through a $75,000 charitable donation to their university. The goal of the QFA funding is to strengthen Qualcomm’s engagement with faculty who are playing a key role in our recruiting of top graduate students."

WNCG welcomes two new faculty for the fall semester: Kyeji Kim and Atlas Wang.   Hyeji Kim comes to WNCG having joined Texas ECE as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2020.

A team of Texas ECE students has been named a winner of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2020 (North America) competition. The team of Khurram Mazher and Andrew Graff won for their project "Radar-to-radar Interference: System Level Analysis and Solutions." Khurram and Andrew were one of 13 winning teams selected from 42 finalists. The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship began in 2009, and "has continued to grow with the addition of more universities, more candidates, and expansion to our research centers internationally."

The National Science Foundation has selected The University of Texas at Austin to lead the 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.

The New Yorker feature "How Vulnerable is GPS?" discusses WNCG professor Todd Humphreys' journey uncovering and demonstrating security weaknesses in the Global Positioning System. Humphreys is a pioneer in the the study of Global Navigation Satellite Systems. His research group was the first to demonstrate cm-accurate RTK positioning through a smartphone antenna, and in 2012 they demonstrated the first successful spoofing of UAVs. Since then, Humphreys has examined real-world instances of spoofing and jamming that raise serious concerns about the ubiquitous technology.

WNCG student Nithin Ramesan received the Best Student Paper Award at the 18th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc and Wireless Networks (WiOpt 2020).  This is the second year in a row that the award has gone to a WNCG student. Ramesan’s winning paper, "Wireless Queues in Poisson Interference Fields: the Continuum Between Zero and Infinite Mobility," was co-authored with his advisor, Prof. François Baccelli.

WNCG's annual signature event, typically held in the fall, has been postponed to spring 2021. Texas Wireless Summit brings together leaders from industry and academia in an annual forum on emerging technology. First conceived in 2003 as the "Wireless Networking Symposium," the event has continued to grow and evolve over the years. Each year’s theme explores possible waves of transformative technologies and the research that will make them a reality.