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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 Prof. Todd Humphreys and his group of researchers in the Radionavigation Laboratory made headlines in recent months with their major breakthroughs in centimeter-accurate positioning. A few of the students have already created a startup spin-off to push these breakthroughs in precise positioning to the mass market.

Imagine drawing a light painting using a phone’s antenna and GPS system. Imagine a world of virtual reality, where buildings are perfect replicas of their real-world counterparts, down to the exact height of a piece of gum stuck under a desk. Where a person cannot only see their location on the street but also the exact height and orientation of their mobile device in hand. This world of imagination and precise positioning is now becoming a reality, and through the efforts of WNCG students, even finding its way to market. 

Img: Two of the Cockrell School graduate students behind Radiosense, Ken Pesyna and Andrew Kerns. Cockrell School of Engineering, UT Austin Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a centimeter-accurate GPS-based positioning system that could revolutionize geolocation on virtual reality headsets, cellphones and other technologies, making global positioning and orientation far more precise than what is currently available on a mobile device.