News

WNCG professor Atlas Wang has received several grants for his work on artificial intelligence. 

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 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.”

Four Texas ECE students have been awarded Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines.

Advances in machine learning are announced every day, but efforts to fundamentally rethink the core algorithms of AI are rare.

Embedded systems often operate on sensitive data in safety-critical environments, including transportation, health care, and industrial control. Embedded software can leak information about the activity and data via physical side-channels, such as electromagnetic (EM) fields, which can be measured with ease by an adversary using modest equipment. Such measurements can be used to profile programs, find anomalies in the software, identify sensitive information, and most fundamentally, reveal what instructions are being executed on the system.

WNCG alumnus Prof. Siddhartha Banerjee has been named a recipient of the National Science Foundation Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award. Banerjee received his doctorate from Texas ECE in 2013. As a member of WNCG, he was advised by Profs. Sanjay Shakkottai and Sujay Sanghavi. He is currently an Assistant Professor of operations research and information engineering at Cornell University, and he also serves as a technical consultant for popular rideshare service Lyft.

Evdokia Nikolova, Assistant Professor in Texas ECE, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for her work on "AitF: Collaborative Research: Algorithms and Mechanisms for the Distribution Grid.”  The goal of this project is to “help the distribution grid and its participants transition from its current functionality of serving mostly traditional consumers, to the future grid that needs to sustainably integrate prosumers, renewables and distributed energy resources.”

Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and the AMOLF institute in the Netherlands have invented the first mechanical metamaterials that easily transfer motion effortlessly in one direction while blocking it in the other, as described in a paper published on Feb. 13 in Nature. The material can be thought of as a mechanical one-way shield that blocks energy from coming in but easily transmits it going out the other side.