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The University of Texas at Austin is one of 13 university teams in North America set to participate in the EcoCAR EV Challenge, a prestigious collegiate competition to re-engineer state-of-the-art vehicles and prepare students for the future.

​The National Science Foundation (NSF) awards a Graduate Research Fellowship to students who plan on pursuing a research-based master's or Ph.D. program in a STEM-related field. The fellowship is awarded to exceptional individuals and will support them in elevating their research with the goal of furthering advancements that will transform the future.

In 2020, a deep learning generative model designed to turn low-resolution images into high-quality photos was posted online. When a user uploaded a low-resolution image of President Obama, though, it returned an image that is now referred to as 'White Obama.' The Face Depixelizer model, based on an algorithm called PULSE, was reconstructing images with predominantly white features, setting off a heated debate across social media.

Isil Dillig is an associate professor of computer science who works to improve the security and reliability of software systems and automatically generate programs from high-level specifications. She received a Sloan Research Fellowship and an NSF CAREER award.

As society's reliance on technology increases, computer scientists are now placed at the forefront of new and unique ethical decisions. However, most computer science curricula don't require a substantial education in ethics, despite that an educational discussion on ethical issues can lead scientists to have greater awareness of the consequences and repercussions of their creations.

A new Graduate Portfolio in Computational Medicine combines novel and existing courses from across the University of Texas at Austin to create a unique program in a rapidly expanding medical field.

An artificial intelligence system made history recently by beating a human world champion in Sony's popular video racing game, Gran Turismo Sport. The technological feat, which made the cover of the journal Nature, involved an AI system designed in part by three University of Texas at Austin computer science Ph.D. alumni and professor Peter Stone.

The College of Natural Sciences is the academic home base for six tenured and tenure-track faculty new to Texas Science this spring—and one new department chair who returns to our Department of Molecular Biosciences and academic leadership on the Forty Acres. These new faculty members have expertise in a wide range of areas, from medical applications for data science and statistics to improving interactions between computers and people, including people with impaired vision. These outstanding researchers and teachers join the fall cohort for 2021-2022 as the newest members of our faculty.

The Association for Computing Machinery, the primary professional organization in the field of computer science, has named Brent Waters as an ACM Fellow. The award goes only to highly distinguished computer scientists representing the top 1% of ACM members.

While for many 2021 may have felt like it lasted a few years, it was in fact just 12 months—and University of Texas at Austin scientists and researchers managed to pack a ton of new discoveries into that time. From the furthest reaches of the cosmos to the depths of the ocean and from the tiniest microbes to the most massive black holes, research in Texas Science covered a lot of ground, as researchers pushed boundaries, answered big questions and offered solutions to the world's problems. Here are 16 examples of how UT Austin scientists, mathematicians and technologists used 2021 to usher in new knowledge and innovations to help change the world.