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Over the past decade, the world has seen tremendous increases in the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The main horsepower behind the success of AI systems is provided by deep learning models and machine learning (ML) algorithms. Recently, a new AI paradigm has emerged: Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) including its subfield Neural Architecture Search (NAS). State-of-the-art ML models consist of complex workflows with numerous design choices and variables that must be tuned for optimal performance.

As an interdisciplinary research center, WNCG supports research with applications in several areas. Our faculty and students are leading the way in topics from 6G to artificial intelligence and machine learning, to healthcare technology and beyond. WNCG graduate students showcased some of their work in a virtual open house for affiliates last fall. In lieu of a traditional poster session, the students filmed five-minute videos introducing their research. Check out a curated selection of our students’ research videos on WNCG’s YouTube channel here.

WNCG professor Jon Tamir aims to leverage machine learning techniques to make brain scans faster and more informative. He received an Amazon Machine Learning Research Award in 2020 from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support the work. A recent article on Amazon Science explored the details of Prof. Tamir's research on MRI scans.

Pneumonia has emerged as a life-threatening complication of COVID-19, accounting for nearly half of all patients who have died from the novel coronavirus in the U.S. since the beginning of the pandemic. Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, pneumonia was responsible for more than 43,000 deaths in 2019.

WNCG students Akash Doshi and Manan Gupta have been named winners in the 2021 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) North America Program. Doshi and Gupta proposed the project “Federated Generative Learning for Channel Estimation in mmWave and THz systems.” The pair was one of 16 winners chosen from 43 teams of finalists. “We are extremely honored to have been selected as the recipients of this prestigious fellowship,” Gupta said. “We look forward to working with Qualcomm to develop impactful and innovative wireless technology.”

IBM recently announced the awardees of this year’s IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Program. WNCG student Tianlong Chen was among only 16 students selected worldwide for 2021. According to IBM, the Fellowship Awards Program is “intensely competitive.” Awardees are exceptional Ph.D. students conducting research in promising and disruptive technologies, particularly: Hybrid Cloud; Quantum Computing / Quantum Systems; Artificial Intelligence; Cloud / Open Source Technologies; Security / Cyber Security; Data Science; and Systems.

WNCG professor Atlas Wang received a Data Science Research Award from Adobe for his work on “Towards Automated Design of Efficient Deep Multi-Modal Recommendation Models.” Every year, Adobe funds a university faculty research program to “promote the understanding and use of data science in the area of marketing with the goal “to encourage both theoretical and empirical development of solutions to problems in marketing.”

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.”

The National Science Foundation has selected The University of Texas at Austin to lead the NSF AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning, bolstering the university’s existing strengths in this emerging field. Machine learning is the technology that drives AI systems, enabling them to acquire knowledge and make predictions in complex environments. This technology has the potential to transform everything from transportation to entertainment to health care.

WNCG student Nithin Ramesan received the Best Student Paper Award at the 18th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc and Wireless Networks (WiOpt 2020).  This is the second year in a row that the award has gone to a WNCG student. Ramesan’s winning paper, "Wireless Queues in Poisson Interference Fields: the Continuum Between Zero and Infinite Mobility," was co-authored with his advisor, Prof. François Baccelli.