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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. 

Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and the AMOLF institute in the Netherlands have invented the first mechanical metamaterials that easily transfer motion effortlessly in one direction while blocking it in the other, as described in a paper published on Feb. 13 in Nature. The material can be thought of as a mechanical one-way shield that blocks energy from coming in but easily transmits it going out the other side.

Join Prof. Andrea Alù as he shares insight into his work with metamaterials, light and an "invisibility cloak." 

Image: Erik Zumalt, The University of Texas at Austin Profs. Andrea Alù and Mikhail Belkin in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have created a new nonlinear metasurface, or meta mirror, that could one day enable the miniaturization of laser systems.