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. 

This year, five WNCG alumni and postdoctoral fellows accepted faculty positions throughout the country. Their acceptance continues the recent wave over the last few years of WNCG students and postdoctoral fellows finding permanent homes at some of the world’s leading institutions. Here’s a quick look at where a few of these alumni are headed, what they look forward to most about being a faculty member and how WNCG helped prepare them for their new ventures. Joe Neeman WNCG Advisor: Sujay Sanghavi

WNCG Postdoctoral Researcher, Pedro Santacruz, recently accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at San Jose State University. “Since I started working on my PhD, an academic position has always been my ultimate goal,” Prof. Santacruz states. “I have a particular affinity for teaching and, combined with the possibilities for research, an academic position is a perfect fit for me.”