Revealing contents of 2,000-year-old papyrus from Herculaneum charred by Vesuvius’s eruption UW alum Brent Seales, Director of the Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments at the University of Kentucky, is featured in the article “Buried by the Ash of Vesuvius, These Scrolls Are Being Read for the First Time in Millennia” on Smithsonian.com. “I’m continuing …

UW–Madison Computer Sciences’s Professor Mark D. Hill has been named Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), whose mission is to catalyze the computing research community and enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research. “It is an honor and a challenge to lead the CCC’s work catalyzing impactful information technology research, such as explaining machine learning results, …

Meenakshi Syamkumar stands in front of about 20 middle-school students who are participating in the Latino Youth Summit session “Intro to App Building,” while Caroline Hardin walks around the room. The two are graduate students who have led this mobile-app workshop several times. Syamkumar tells the students that the standard phrase when getting a new …

Most people exhibit the patience of a two-year-old when it comes to apps loading on our smartphones or information retrieval on our computers. We post on social media, collect fitness information, and keep hundreds or even thousands of photographs on our phones and computers or in the cloud without a thought about what it takes …

Prof. Jignesh Patel’s spinoff DataChat won the information technology award at the 15th annual Governor’s Business Plan Contest this week. The contest was organized by the Wisconsin Technology Council and sponsored by a wide range of public interest groups, technology businesses and providers of services to entrepreneurs. The contest began by winnowing 196 entries from 56 Wisconsin …

Professor Gurindar Sohi was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this spring – a high honor that places him in the ranks of Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Einstein and Barack Obama. The Academy tackles current critical issues, such as alternative energy, preserving institutions of higher education, and our global nuclear future, …

By Jennifer Smith   While debugging is part and parcel of software development, it has remained an afterthought in the world of machine learning, says Jerry Zhu, who holds the Sheldon B. and Marianne S.  Lubar Professorship in Computer Sciences. Zhu and collaborators in the University of Wisconsin–Madison Computer Sciences Department are working to change that, …

By Jennifer Smith   Yingyu Liang, a new faculty member in machine learning in the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Computer Sciences, enjoys bringing his disparate interests together.  In his free time, he enjoys hobbies ranging from badminton to classical Chinese poetry. Within computer science, he was drawn to machine learning because it pulls together …

By Jennifer Smith   “All of the breakthroughs that look like science fiction to us—artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, automated assistants, natural language recognition—are powered by data,” says assistant professor Theo Rekatsinas, who joined the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in fall 2017. “While it might seem boring to manage data, the outcomes can …

By Jennifer Smith [Story by Katie Vaughn, UW–Madison College of Letters & Science] As a child, Rachel Rose wore clothes emblazoned with C-3PO and drifted off to sleep on Star Warssheets. And while the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and the Jedi knights may have filled her dreams, she never imagined she’d grow up to …