News

WNCG professor Atlas Wang has received several grants for his work on artificial intelligence. 

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.

WNCG professor Aryan Mokhtari has received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study Computationally Efficient Second-Order Optimization Algorithms for Large-Scale Learning. The project “lays out an agenda to develop a class of memory efficient, computationally affordable, and distributed friendly second-order methods for solving modern machine learning problems.”

The spring semester is in full swing, and as WNCG continues on the forefront of research, the group has welcomed a new director. Professor Constantine Caramanis began his three-year term as WNCG Director at the start of the new calendar year. Prior to that, he served as the group’s associate director. With Caramanis stepping into the new role, Professor Alex Dimakis was chosen among WNCG faculty to serve as associate director. WNCG’s leadership system allows the associate director to learn the ropes over the course of the term before serving their own term as director. 

Envision an early cubist painting by the famous artist Pablo Picasso. To the untrained eye, the painting can look like a jumbled series of boxes overlapping and intertwining with each other. But the art of cubism is about exploring the world from multiple perspectives. The painting, which at first looks like boxes, is actually a city seen from multiple perspectives.

The Texas Wireless Summit (TWS) is a unique event that brings the high profile of a world-class conference right to UT Austin’s front door. Hosted by WNCG, TWS offers direct access to cutting-edge research and innovations from industry leaders, academics, investors and startups. The 14th annual TWS saw record high attendance with nearly 300 participants consisting of academics, industry partners, business leaders, researchers and students from across the world.