News Category: News

As the world began to lock down in the early months of 2020 at the onset of COVID-19, researchers in the McLellan Lab at The University of Texas at Austin were furiously at work. 

When Nathan Harris arrived at the Michener Center for Writers, he had already begun writing his now best-selling novel, “The Sweetness of Water.”

As a Michener Fellow, Harris spent his time in the program finishing and refining it with the encouragement and feedback from faculty members and fellow students. By the start of his third year, he had made the novel his dissertation and secured a book deal.

Seeing is not always believing—at least not for Ph.D. alumnus Ruohan Gao, whose research in machine learning uses senses beyond just sight to inform artificial intelligence.

Gao’s work investigates how algorithms locate and understand audio-emitting objects when multiple sound sources are present. While conventional approaches to object identification in unsupervised machine learning rely solely upon visual cues, Gao’s work leverages audio as a semantic signal to disentangle object sounds in unlabeled video.

You are invited to watch The University of Texas at Austin's Three Minute Thesis (3MT) on Friday, Nov. 12, 2021 at 10 a.m.

3MT is a competition that helps graduate students cultivate the skills to communicate academic and research concepts to general audiences. Participating students use approachable language and concepts to explain their research in three minutes or less to a panel of judges.