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. 

How electromagnetic, acoustic and optic waves interact with materials creates a foundation for various scientific and technological phenomena. With the invention of metamaterials over the last decades, wave matter interactions not found in nature have opened new possibilities for manipulating wave types across different frequencies.

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.

Each year, WNCG faculty nominate one outstanding student to receive the WNCG Student Leadership Award. The award is presented to a student based on their cumulative contributions to the center, including their representation of WNCG to the greater community, their mentorship of fellow students, their research visibility and recognition from external organizations.