Category: news

Xtreme algorithms will be starting back up today (1/24) and will be every Thursday at 3. Today will be a talk by Austin Luchsinger where he’ll go over the paper he presented at the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2019) on January 9th. We will continue to keep the Xtreme page up to date.

As is true with every semester, our group changes. We also say goodbye to Andrew Winslow, who has taken a job at Google, and to David Dittman, who graduated in December. Good luck! Joining our group is Michael Alaniz and Eden Canales. Welcome!

Finally, we had a journal version of a conference paper from UCNC last year accepted.

The HackR hackathon was a lot of fun and had some really great results. The proceedings are now online here. Thanks to everyone for a great event!

ASARG is sponsoring a research hackathon, which is like a 24-hour workshop, where teams of students work on problems and write a short paper. The event is free for students with shirts, prizes, food, etc. It will be held December 1-2 at Nerdvana. We’re only allowing around 60 students, so register as soon as possible. The event page is here: utrgv.hackresearch.com.

Our summer efforts have paid off with our paper being accepted into the 30th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA19).  The paper is titled “Full Tilt: Universal Constructors for General Shapes with Uniform External Forces” with the authors Jose Balanza-Martinez, David Caballero, Angel A. Cantu, Luis Angel Garcia, Austin Luchsinger, Rene Reyes, Robert Schweller, and Tim Wylie.

Here is a link to more information on the paper: SODA19

We want to welcome the new members to the research group. Most of the members from the summer are continuing to work with us: Bryan, Tim, David, and Jose. Mauricio finished his LSAMP scholarship and is continuing with the group in research. Our newest member is Ari, who joins the group as an MS student and had a lot of undergraduate research experience with Dr. Grabowski.

Finally, we want to mention the new faculty member, Dr. Jingru Zhang, who’s expertise is in Computational Geometry. We are excited for the opportunities and knowledge she brings to the group.

Robert Schweller and Tim Wylie were just awarded a 3-year NSF grant for the project “Unifying Self-Assembly through Tile Automata.” We are extremely excited about the number of opportunities this will open up for the research group.

The formal UTRGV announcement of the award is here: http://www.utrgv.edu/en-us/about-utrgv/news/press-releases/2018/july-11-national-science-foundation-awards-grant-to-utrgvs-department-of-computer-science/index.htm

Also, our congressman (Representative Vicente Gonzalez) posted about it here: https://gonzalez.house.gov/media/press-releases/congressman-gonzalez-announces-nearly-500000-nsf-grant-utrgv-computer-science

A short abstract and presentation was accepted to be presented at the 21st Japan Conference on Discrete and Computational Geometry, Graphs, and Games. The paper, titled Tile Pattern-Building Games on a Grid are PSPACE-complete, is the outcome of a class project led by Angel and Austin from the Spring 2017 special topics course on games and computation. The full author list is Arturo Gonzalez, Cesar Lozano, Austin Luchsinger, Eduardo Medina, Fernando Martinez, Arnoldo Ramirez, and Tim Wylie.

Link

We have several new students working with us this summer on a variety of topics. They are being added to the members section and will have more information up shortly including contact information/etc. We’re excited to have everyone on board!

The paper “Self-Assembly of Any Shape with Constant Tile Types using High Temperature” was accepted and will appear the 26th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2018) this Fall in Finland. http://esa-symposium.org/ and http://algo2018.hiit.fi/esa/.