News

WNCG alumnus Dr. Qi Lei has received the 2021 Oden Institute Outstanding Dissertation Award. Her winning dissertation, “Provably effective algorithms for min-max optimization," proposes optimization algorithms to find the equilibrium point of two-player zero-sum games. Read the dissertation abstract and find the link to the full text via the University of Texas Libraries. At WNCG, Lei was advised by Prof. Alex Dimakis; she was co-advised by Dr. Inderjit Dhillon from the University of Texas Department of Computer Science.

IBM recently announced the awardees of this year’s IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Program. WNCG student Tianlong Chen was among only 16 students selected worldwide for 2021. According to IBM, the Fellowship Awards Program is “intensely competitive.” Awardees are exceptional Ph.D. students conducting research in promising and disruptive technologies, particularly: Hybrid Cloud; Quantum Computing / Quantum Systems; Artificial Intelligence; Cloud / Open Source Technologies; Security / Cyber Security; Data Science; and Systems.

WNCG professor Nanshu Lu's work on wearable electronic tattoos was featured in a BBCNews piece on the future of light-emitting tattoos. Prof. Lu and her team have shown that their tattoo-like system can measure blood flow in the fingertips and they hope to demonstrate that the same technology could also be used on the neck, head and muscles, with data transferred to a nearby computer via a Bluetooth chip built into the device. Read the article on BBCNews.

In his research paper, “RTSense: RFID based Temperature Sensing,” WNCG alumnus Dr. Swadhin Pradhan and Prof. Lili Qiu explore how passive RFID tags could address the problem of battery-dependent sensory devices. 

WNCG professor Andrea Thomaz appeared on The Robot Brains Podcast this week to talk about her research, her robots, and how her company Diligent Robotics has been changing healthcare during the pandemic. The podcast is hosted by renowned artificial intelligence researcher, professor and entrepreneur Pieter Abbeel. Pieter is joined by leading experts in AI Robotics from all over the world as he explores how far humanity has come in its mission to create conscious computers, mindful machines and rational robots.  Listen to the episode on The Robot Brains Podcast website.

WNCG professor Andrea Alù was named a recipient of the Dan Maydan Prize in Nanoscience Research for 2021. The prize is awarded annually to an emerging and outstanding young scientist. It honors significant academic accomplishments in the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. The prize was established in 2019 by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in conjunction with the American Friends of the Hebrew University (AFHU).

Nitin Jonathan Myers has accepted a position at the Delft University of Technology, in Delft, the Netherlands. He will join the faculty as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC), with a focus on signal processing. He received his Ph.D. in 2020 from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of WNCG advised by Prof. Robert Heath. Since graduating, Myers has worked as a Senior Engineer with Samsung Semiconductor on the 5G modem research and development team.

WNCG student Philip Tan has been selected as a Fellow of the National Science Foundation’s 2021 Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). GRFP recognizes outstanding graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) or in STEM education. The program supports these students in pursuing full-time research-based degrees through a five-year fellowship. A full list of this year's recipients can be found on the GRFP website.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are among the trendiest technologies in the world right now, and The University of Texas at Austin is rapidly becoming a leader in advancing these concepts as they come to impact more aspects of our daily lives.

The March cover of Nature Reviews Materials features a paper written by Farzad Zangeneh-Nejad and co-authored by WNCG alumni Dimitrios Sounas and Romain Fleury and WNCG professor Andrea Alù. Metamaterials provide a platform to leverage optical signals for performing specific-purpose computational tasks with ultra-fast speeds. In their paper "Analogue Computing with Metamaterials," Zangeneh-Nejad et. al. survey the basic principles, recent advances and promising future directions for wave-based-metamaterial analogue computing systems.