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As part of the Planet Texas 2050 Fall Research Showcase Series, join us to hear talks on: “PaleoTexas” [Team: Daniel Breecker (project lead – JSG), Jay Banner (JSG), Christopher Bell (JSG), Jonathan Jarvis (TARL), Lee Ann Kahlor (Advertising and Public Relations, Center for Women’s and Gender Studies), Melissa Kemp (Integrative Biology), Adam Rabinowitz (Classics), Timothy Shanahan (JSG), Stacie Skwarcan (JSG), and Darrel Tremaine (ESI)] “Resources, Stress, and Population Dynamics in Premodern Urban Societies” [Team: Adam Rabinowitz (project lead – Classics), Jay Banner (JSG), Tim Beach (Geography), Deborah Bolnick (UConn), Michael Holleran (Architecture), Jonathan Jarvis (TARL), Melissa Kemp (Integrative Biology)Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach (Geography), Lourdes Rodriguez (Pop Health), Astrid Runggaldier (Art & Art History Mesoamerica Center), Rick Smith (Dartmouth), David Stuart (Art & Art History, Mesoamerica Center), Rabun Taylor (Classics), Fred Valdez (Anthropology), and Dennis Wylie (Center for Biomedical Research Support)] Register now.

Researchers from four UT labs have been building a system that will use robots to conduct contactless deliveries on campus — carrying everything from food to books. People will be able to place orders via a new iOS app, starting with lemonade. The robots will cross complex terrain and navigate around people, cars and other obstacles typical on campus. From offices to dormitories, these deliveries will improve safety and efficiency on the UT Austin campus and help limit exposure during the COVID-19 pandemic. Presenters include Associate Professor Junfeng Jiao (School of Architecture), Associate Professor Luis Sentis (Department of Aerospace Engineering), Assistant Professor Joydeep Biswas (Department of Computer Science), and  Assistant Professor of Practice Justin Hart (Department of Computer Science). Register now.  Presentation hosted by the Smart Cities Consortium.

This conference runs from Thursday, Nov. 19 - Friday, Nov. 20. Machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms promise many benefits such as overcoming human limitations and biases in decision-making and productivity. However, deployment of machine learning algorithms has shown that these algorithms may amplify existing biases in society, create new biases, increase privacy and cybersecurity risks, and pose novel ethical dilemmas. The conference will explore how society and organizations can maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of these algorithms. Learn more and register.

The Good Systems Disinformation Network invites you to hear a presentation from Yan Leng (McCombs School of Business) and Ying Ding (School of Information). They will present on their findings that shed light on the distinct characteristics of misinformation and its cultural, social, and political implications, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their study also offers insights into combating misinformation in China and across the world at large. Register now. 

Tune in at 4 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 13 to hear Good Systems Founding Chair Ken Fleischmann's panel discuss how they approached creating scalable coursework and syllabi, how they can foster collaboration with other educators at their own schools and externally, and how they continually evolve an evolving practice. See the whole schedule and learn more.

In this talk, we present an ongoing collaboration with the City of Austin on assessing pedestrian road usage. The project uses high performance computing resources at TACC and artificial intelligence to analyze traffic cameras owned by the City of Austin. We explore qualitative and quantitative metrics to describe pedestrian activity and corresponding changes, which may be used to prioritize the deployment of pedestrian safety solutions, or evaluate their performance. Please email goodsystems@austin.utexas.edu to receive the meeting link.  Presentation hosted by the Smart Cities Consortium.

Explore the intersection between technology, AI and racial justice in this panel featuring School of Information assistant professor Min Kyung Lee, Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering professor Chandra Bhat and School of Journalism and Media professor S. Craig Watkins. 

For more than a century and a half it has been widely-believed that the physics of diffraction imposes certain fundamental limits on the resolution of an optical system. However our understanding of what exactly can and cannot be resolved has never risen above heuristic arguments which, even worse, appear contradictory. In this work we remedy this gap by studying the diffraction limit as a statistical inverse problem and, based on connections to provable algorithms for learning mixture models, we rigorously prove upper and lower bounds on how many photons we need (and how precisely we need to record their locations) to resolve closely-spaced point sources. Moreover we show the emergence of a phase transition, which helps explain why the diffraction limit can be broken in some domains but not in others. This is based on joint work with Sitan Chen. Join us via this Zoom webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85064165756  

Explore the ways in which social media and other digital platforms are used as tools for spreading propaganda, disinformation and politically motivated harassment. Good Systems Research Director Dr. Sam Woolley from the Moody College of Communication will provide examples from the 2020 election and other international political events to support his research and findings. Learn more and register.