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. 

On November 6 and 7, WNCG hosted the Texas Wireless Summit (TWS). TWS is the group’s annual conference. TWS brings together leading figures in industry, academia, and government to discuss the latest developments in information systems technology. The theme for this year, “What Started Here Has Changed the Wireless World,” was a celebration of the 15 years since the creation of WNCG, founded by Professor Ted Rappaport. 

The 2017 Texas Wireless Summit (TWS) will take place November 6-7, 2017, and feature sessions and panels on diverse topics including millimeter wave networks, the future of automated vision and navigation, software defined networking and applications of machine learning. This year’s Summit will be a very special event marking the fifteenth anniversary of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG).