News

This week, WNCG professor Nanshu Lu was a guest on The National Nanotechnology Initiative's podcast, "Nano Matters." In this episode of the “Nano Matters” podcast, Nanshu Lu, Associate Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses her work using nanotechnology to design wear-and-forgettable biosensors that can monitor a person’s health. Listen to the full podcast via The National Nanotechnology Initiative's YouTube channel.

A recent article in Quanta Magazine explored why neural networks must be much larger than conventionally expected. The findings, which come from a paper by Sébastien Bubeck of Microsoft Research and Mark Sellke of Stanford University, give some insight into a question that has come up repeatedly over several decades. WNCG professor Alex Dimakis was quoted in the article, providing background on overparameterization in neural networks. Read the article via quantamagazine.org.

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.

A recent article in Alcalde explored how The University of Texas at Austin has been working to promote student mental health. The article included WNCG professor Brian Evans' experience finding ways to foster a supportive environment for his students. According to Prof. Evans, “the idea is to reduce the unnecessary stress and anxiety that I cause by making certain choices in the way the class proceeds.” The topic of mental health has become increasingly important throughout the challenges and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Newsweek Magazine recently published a list of "America's Greatest Disruptors: Medical Marvels," celebrating researchers and companies "pushing the technological boundaries of health care." WNCG faculty member Dr. Andrea Thomaz was featured along with her colleague Dr. Vivian Chu and their company, Dilligent Robotics. Dilligent Robotics developed robots for deployment in healthcare settings—an innovation that has become especially critical to healthcare processes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more here via Newsweek.

More than 100 military ships appear to have had their locations in the waters near Ukraine and Russia falsified. WNCG professor Todd Humphreys weighed in on this summer's confusion at sea on a recent NPR Morning Edition. Listen to the newscast via NPR.

WNCG professor Nanshu Lu's work on wearable electronic tattoos was featured in a BBCNews piece on the future of light-emitting tattoos. Prof. Lu and her team have shown that their tattoo-like system can measure blood flow in the fingertips and they hope to demonstrate that the same technology could also be used on the neck, head and muscles, with data transferred to a nearby computer via a Bluetooth chip built into the device. Read the article on BBCNews.

WNCG professor Andrea Thomaz appeared on The Robot Brains Podcast this week to talk about her research, her robots, and how her company Diligent Robotics has been changing healthcare during the pandemic. The podcast is hosted by renowned artificial intelligence researcher, professor and entrepreneur Pieter Abbeel. Pieter is joined by leading experts in AI Robotics from all over the world as he explores how far humanity has come in its mission to create conscious computers, mindful machines and rational robots.  Listen to the episode on The Robot Brains Podcast website.

The March cover of Nature Reviews Materials features a paper written by Farzad Zangeneh-Nejad and co-authored by WNCG alumni Dimitrios Sounas and Romain Fleury and WNCG professor Andrea Alù. Metamaterials provide a platform to leverage optical signals for performing specific-purpose computational tasks with ultra-fast speeds. In their paper "Analogue Computing with Metamaterials," Zangeneh-Nejad et. al. survey the basic principles, recent advances and promising future directions for wave-based-metamaterial analogue computing systems.

WNCG professor Todd Humphreys, an expert in GPS spoofing, is featured in a recent New York Times opinion piece on the nation's need for a GPS backup. Although the system is essential, it's also vulnerable. Read the full piece by Kate Murphy in The New York Times.