News

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

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.”

With Big Data playing a role in the lives of companies and individuals across the globe, and data being collected on everything from apps to electronic health records to parking meters, society debates how best to use this mass of information. “The stormy sea of Big Data can lead to data indigestion,” WNCG Associate Director Prof. Constantine Caramanis states. “We are interested in the application of data for engineering problems, from petroleum to health to recommendation engines.”

With Big Data playing a role in the lives of companies and individuals across the globe, and data being collected on everything from apps to electronic health records to parking meters, society debates how best to use this mass of information. “The stormy sea of Big Data can lead to data indigestion,” WNCG Associate Director Prof. Constantine Caramanis states. “We are interested in the application of data for engineering problems, from petroleum to health to recommendation engines.”

There is a new app on the market that encourages users to go nuts over healthcare, complete with a squirrely mascot. Created by the founders of Accordion Health and dubbed the “health nuts,” the two new apps, Pistachio and Chestnut, bring medical care back under the control, and into the palms of, users and patients.