News

The UT Austin Villa Robotics Team recently won third place at the RoboCup@Home 2017 competition, in the category of Domestic Standard Platform League. The competition was held in Nagoya, Japan. Robocup was originally founded by Japanese researchers to develop robots that could play soccer well enough to eventually defeat world champion players. The idea was playfully implemented in order to fuse robot engineering with artificial intelligence and development. Now the original goal of the competition has expanded to include other areas and goals of robotics.

In January 2016, WNCG welcomed two new faculty to its ranks - the husband and wife dynamic duo of research, Profs. Andrea and Edison Thomaz. “It is an incredibly exciting time to be at UT Austin,” Prof. Edison Thomaz states. “And WNCG exemplifies the type of forward-thinking that makes UT stand out. Having graduated from UT myself many ages ago, I could not pass up the opportunity to come back, contribute and be part of this transformation.”

Prof. Andrea Alù has been named the recipient of the inaugural ACS Photonics Young Investigator Award and Lectureship from the American Chemical Society (ACS). The award “honors the contributions of one individual, within the first 5-10 years of an independent research career, who has made major impacts on the field of photonics.” Prof. Alù will receive the award and be the plenary speaker at META’16, the 7th International Conference on Metamaterials, Photonic Crystals and Plasmonics, in Malaga, Spain in July 2016.