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.”

WNCG Graduate Student, and recent winner of the WNCG Student Leadership Award,   Francesco Monticone, recently accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. Monticone received a BS and MS in Electronics Engineering from Politecnico di Torino in Italy, and is a member of Prof. Andrea Alù’s Metamaterials and Plasmonics Research Group. His research interests include applied electromagnetics, metamaterials, plasmonics and nanophotonics with applications ranging from microwaves to optical frequencies.

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