Texas ECE postdoctoral fellow Junyuan Hong has been named a Best Paper Award Finalist from the 50th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB2024) which took place in Guangzhou, China from August 26-30, 2024. The award was for the paper "LLM-PBE: Assessing Data Privacy in Large Language Models." It was co-authored with Junyuan's advisor, Prof. Atlas Wang, as well as colleagues from The University of California, Berkeley, The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, The University of Chicago and the National University of Singapore.

The University of Texas at Austin has introduced what is believed to be the first undergraduate robotics program in the country that allows high school students to apply directly as part of their freshman admissions application. The honors program will integrate students as soon as they arrive on campus into the immersive and interdisciplinary curriculum, which includes hands-on research, engineering and computer science coursework, and participation in UT’s top-ranked Texas Robotics’ events and programs.