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.

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.

WNCG student Philip Tan was among the winners of the 2021 Catalyst Award, part of the first phase of the Healthy Longevity Global Competition. Winners were announced by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) last month at the inaugural Global Innovator Summit.

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 Andrea Thomaz was interviewed by Austin Monthly on how her company Diligent Robotics is "revolutionizing health care in the age of COVID-19." Read the full interview on Austin Monthly.

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.”

Picture your typical hospital scene: Patients being admitted at the front desk, doctors performing consultations, nurses administering medicine … and robots wandering the hallways toward the supply closet? Robots in the storeroom may not be the norm quite yet, but it’s happening in Austin thanks to WNCG professor Andrea Thomaz and her company, Diligent Robotics.

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.