News

The UT Austin Villa Robotics Team recently won third place at the RoboCup@Home 2017 competition, in the category of Domestic Standard Platform League. The competition was held in Nagoya, Japan. Robocup was originally founded by Japanese researchers to develop robots that could play soccer well enough to eventually defeat world champion players. The idea was playfully implemented in order to fuse robot engineering with artificial intelligence and development. Now the original goal of the competition has expanded to include other areas and goals of robotics.

WNCG student Ahmed Kord was recently awarded a Graduate Dean’s Prestigious Fellowship Supplement for the 2016-2017 academic year. The award was presented in recognition of Kord’s receipt of an external Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship earlier this year. “This award bespeaks [Kord’s] excellent performance, his initiative to go after external support for his research, and his program’s enthusiastic support of him,” Marvin Hackert, Interim Dean of Graduate Studies at UT Austin, stated in Kord’s acceptance letter.