News

WNCG professor Alex Dimakis of has been invited to serve as a member of the AI Commission of the US Chamber of Commerce. The Commission on Artificial Intelligence Competitiveness, Inclusion, and Innovation (AI Commission) will research and recommend artificial intelligence policies as it relates to regulation, international research and development competitiveness, and future jobs. The AI Commission will convene field hearings in key locations around the U.S. and internationally to explore these critical issues.

A new approach could lower computing costs and increase accessibility to state-of-the-art natural language processing. WNCG student Tianlong Chen is the lead author of a study in artificial intelligence that posits that hidden within massive neural networks, leaner subnetworks exist that can complete the same task more efficiently. The study is co-authored by WNCG assistant professor Zhangyang "Atlas" Wang, along with Jonathan Frankle of MIT CSAIL, and Shiyu Chang, Sijia Liu, and Yang Zhang, all of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

Text was considered relatively safe from adversarial attacks, because, whereas a malicious agent can make minute adjustments to an image or waveform of sound, it can’t alter a word by, say, 1%. But Prof. Alex Dimakis of Texas ECE and his collaborators have investigated a potential threat to text-comprehension AIs.  The research was led by UT student Qi Lei and collaborators at IBM Research and Amazon. The study was published in SysML 2019 and covered by Nature News. 

WNCG faculty member Haris Vikalo has been promoted to full professor. Vikalo’s was one of five promotions celebrated by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) this week; Profs. Deji Akinwande and Ali Yilmaz were also promoted to Professor, while Prof. Mohit Tiwari made tenure as an Associate Professor, and Prof. Mark McDermott was promoted to Professor of Practice.

Former WNCG Postdoctoral Researcher, Dr. Yakir Hadad, recently joined the faculty in the School of Electrical Engineering and the Department of Physical Electronics at Tel-Aviv University in Israel. His role as a tenure track Senior Lecturer is the equivalent of a tenure track Assistant Professor in the United States’ academic system.