Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data-driven methods are rapidly transforming research across every discipline.
Through the State of Agentic AI Series, the Center for Analytics and Data Science (CADS) aims to support faculty, staff, and student researchers in responsibly applying, evaluating, and innovating with AI. Co-led by CADS alongside partner faculty, campus units, and industry partners, this initiative provides a coordinated pathway from foundational literacy to advanced research application. Programming will include:
- Research Seminars: Keynote talks from prominent guest faculty and national leaders in autonomous systems and information sessions for research funding and programs.
- Hands-On Workshops: Applied, technical sessions focused on building agents for research, industry use cases, and technical proposal communications led by TXST Faculty.
- Industry & Faculty Panels: Collaborative discussions bridging academic innovation with industry applications alongside corporate leaders.
- Continued AI-Ready Office Hours: Dedicated support sessions co-hosted with campus partners.
Ultimately, our goal is to enhance institution-wide readiness for AI-facilitated and AI-enabled research across all skill levels and academic disciplines.
Program Overview
Web Pages for specific events with further details will roll out as they are confirmed. For past event recordings or materials, visit the specific event page.
Research Seminar: From *How* to Learn to *What* to Learn in Multiagent Systems and Robotics
Monday, September 14, 2026 | 11AM - 12:15PM | Alkek 441 Conference Room
The Center is proud to host Dr. Peter Stone, Truchard Foundation Chair in Computer Science and Head of UT Austin’s School of Computing, Founding Director of Texas Robotics, and Chief Scientist at Sony AI.
Led by Dr. Stone, this talk presents methods for identifying what to learn within the framework of reinforcement learning, focusing especially on applications in multiagent systems and robotics.
Research Seminar: Creating Neuro-Symbolic Models for Boosting Interpretability and Reasoning Capabilities of AI
Friday, September 25, 2026 | 11AM - 12:15PM | Comal 116
In this talk, Dr. Parth Padalkar will show how symbolic reasoning and logic can be combined with neural networks to produce clear, rule-based explanations of model decisions. He will demonstrate how compact logic-based rules can be extracted from CNNs and Vision Transformers to reveal what the model has learned, without sacrificing accuracy. The later part of the talk will also focus on improving reasoning abilities of LLMs using logic programs.
Workshop: How to Build Agents for Research
Friday, October 16, 2026 | 10AM - 11:30AM | Alkek 452
A Hands-on Technical Workshop for Researchers!
Generative AI is shifting from conversational chat to autonomous AI agents capable of planning, code execution, and tool integration. Hosted by CADS and led by Dr. Aniruddha Bora, this hands-on workshop guides research faculty through building, evaluating, and deploying research agents.
Workshop | Agentic AI in Action: From Idea to Production
Friday, October 23, 2026 | 11AM - 12:30PM | Alkek 440
A Hands-on Technical Workshop on Production Agentic AI
Building an agent is easy. Deciding whether you need one, designing it to be trusted, and running it at enterprise scale is where most efforts succeed or stall. Led by Naveen Ramakrishna, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Dell Technologies, this workshop walks through how production agentic systems are decided on, architected, deployed, governed and evolved.