Remembering Kent Farrell Smith
Kent Farrell Smith, a Kahlert School of Computing emeritus faculty member and former department chair, passed away on September 12, 2025.
Born and raised on the shores of Bear Lake in Fish Haven, Idaho, Kent moved to Utah to study electrical engineering at Utah State University. He first came to the University of Utah as a PhD student with an interest in early computers. His interest in computer science provided the opportunity for involvement with early computer research, working towards the innovation of integrated circuit design. Following his PhD, Kent served as a professor and researcher at the University of Utah for both the computer science and electrical engineering departments.
Kent collaborated with innovators behind such landmarks as the first video game, Pong; the first artificial heart; the first artificial eye implant; military innovations such as the Gatling gun; and CMOS, still used today in a majority of electronics. Kent remained active in circuit design and defense contracts for the remainder of his life, while also remaining actively involved in his church and the lives of his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
His viewing will take place on Thursday, September 18, 2025, followed by a celebration of Kent’s life on Friday, September 19, 2025.
https://www.memorialutah.com/obituaries/kent-smith
Tokyo's Mori Art Museum Features an AI Art Installment Utilizing Work from Kahlert School of Computing Faculty
In the bustling Roppongi district in Tokyo's Minato ward lives the Mori Art Museum, a contemporary art space nestled in the 54-story Roppongi Hills Mori Tower.
A recent exhibit at Mori Art Museum entitled "MACHINE LOVE: Video Game, AI and Contemporary Art" contained approximately 50 works of contemporary art utilizing game engines, AI, and virtual reality (VR). Among the works exhibited was German American artist Diemut Strebe's "El Turco/Living Theater", featuring code written by Kahlert School of Computing Assistant Professor Ben Greenman.
The piece presents two character puppets on screen. The puppets speak out loud as their lips move in sync, and their words appear on screen like a chat history. One puppet portrays an inventor of smart home devices being interviewed by the other puppet. However, the course of the conversation can change, and each performance is unique.
One puppet is controlled by a human. Another puppet is controlled by Anthropic’s Claude AI. The audience is faced with a challenge: which puppet is AI, the inventor or the interviewer? Does it matter?
Behind the scenes, this project combines several technologies: including Claude API, Azure text to speech, Amazon speech to text, and Unreal Audio to Face. The piece uses the Racket programming language, developed by Kahlert School Professor Matthew Flatt, to synchronize these different technologies in an event-based framework. For example, Audio to Face can sleep until Claude has written the next part of its puppet's script.
Select performances of "El Turco/Living Theater" are available on the artist's YouTube channel.
Greenman would like to extend a special thanks to Varun Shankar for providing access to a machine for software development.
Mary Hall Elected Vice Chair of Computing Research Association Board of Directors
Mary Hall Elected Vice Chair of Computing Research Association Board of Directors
Goldman Sachs U of U Former Intern Panel - April 3
Event Details
April 3, 2025
5:00 PM- 6:00 PM
Warnock Enginerring Building (WEB) room 1250
Please join us for the U of U Former Intern Panel. This event will provide you an opportunity to learn more about our businesses, network with Goldman Sachs professionals and learn more about ourSummer program opportunities with Goldman Sachs.
This event is open to all sophomore engineering students as well as incoming new analysts and summer analysts.
Goldman Sachs is where exceptional people build extraordinary careers. We hire people with diverse skill sets, interests, and backgrounds – and we provide them with the hands-on experience to business challenges and opportunities to learn firsthand from the very best.
If you are someone who thrives on excellence, join us at our upcoming event to learn more about Goldman Sachs and our long-standing apprenticeship culture.
We look forward to meeting you.
NSF-Simons CosmicAI Institute Seminar Series with Varun Shankar - March 26
Event Information
March 26, 2025
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Evans Conference Room, Warnock Engineering Building (WEB) Room 3780
Zoom Access
Meeting ID: 958 8067 9001
Passcode: 255836
Structure-Preserving, Low-Parameter, Interpretable, Operator Learning for Surrogate Modeling with Varun Shankar (Assistant Professor, Kahlert School of Computing)
Scientific machine learning (SciML) is a relatively new scientific discipline that weds scientific computing and high performance computing with carefully designed machine learning (ML) techniques. In the context of astrophysics, SciML has been applied to galaxy classification and identification, outlier detection, and uncertainty quantification.
Within SciML, operator learning is a rapidly emerging and powerful new paradigm for surrogate modeling across engineering and the sciences, with recent successes in climate modeling, material design, and carbon sequestration problems (to name a few). In this talk, I will present a unified framework that encompasses many operator learning paradigms and use this to present three advancements in operator learning: (1) the Kernel Neural Operator (KNO), a generalization of the Fourier neural operator that allows for greater flexibility in kernel choices and for local spatial adaptivity while inherently using far fewer trainable parameters; (2) the ensemble DeepONet, a generalization to Deep Operator Networks that enables the incorporation of spatial adaptivity directly into a set of basis functions; and (3) a new operator learning paradigm based on kernel approximation that analytically preserves the divergence free property and requires minimal training, all while achieving state-of-the-art performance on incompressible flow problems.
We argue that operator learning has the potential to positively impact astrophysics through trustworthy, rapid, and interpretable surrogate models for multiscale simulations of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) and numerical general relativity (GR), and for inverse problems such as physical parameter estimation.
Goldman Sachs: Leadership and Economic Insights with Rob Kaplan - March 24
Event Information
March 24, 2025
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Rick and Marian Warner Auditorium in the Robert H. and Katharine B. Garff Building
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Join Goldman Sachs on Monday, March 24 to hear unique insights on leadership and the economy from Rob Kaplan - Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs and former CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Goldman Sachs is where exceptional people build extraordinary careers. We hire people with diverse skill sets, interests, and backgrounds - and we provide them with the hands-on experience to business challenges and opportunities to learn firsthand from the very best.
Register through the University of Utah Handshake page here.
Announcing the Inaugural Kahlert Impact Prize Honorees
We are proud to recognize the inaugural recipients of the Kahlert Impact Prize.
The Kahlert School of Computing offers the Kahlert Impact Prize to two graduate students who, whether through research or service, show a track record of success and a compelling story of the high impact of their work. Honorees receive a scholarship of $2,000 each.
Amit Samanta
PhD Student
Amit works in the area of system design and implementation. His recent work has focused on serverless computing platforms, which are often deployed by large cloud services. Cloud workloads demand massive resources, and they are often dynamic and unpredictable. Amit’s contributions improve resource utilization while targeting performance and sustainability metrics.
Amit has published many papers at top systems conferences, earning him multiple awards. He has collaborated with industry professionals on some of his work. A key novelty is the deployment of scheduling algorithms that consider cutting-edge technologies like persistent or disaggregated memory. More recently, the carbon footprint of cloud platforms has come under scrutiny – Amit’s ongoing work explores carbon-aware and sustainability-aware network routing schemes. Amit has a long track record of service to his research community, including engagement in program committees, artifact evaluation committees, and event organizing.
Maitrey Mehta
PhD Candidate
Maitrey works to expand the impact of AI to low-resourced languages. While most recent large language model advancements (like ChatGPT) are evident for English, progress in other languages has languished. Maitrey has focused on his native language of Gujarati, with hopes that it provides a roadmap to extend AI technologies to the many other languages spoken by the world’s population.
Maitrey’s vision is to give every human the right to interact with technology in one’s native language. To achieve this, he focuses on a key ingredient for developing this technology: data. Data is the fuel that powers modern LLMs, and there is an unfortunate data disparity across languages. His research aims to find efficient methods to close this resource gap. Maitrey contributed the first semantically annotated dataset in the Gujarati language that also captures cultural nuances. Subsequently, this dataset has been used to create dependency treebanks and other basic language tools like parsers and taggers. Maitrey has collaborated with industry and other groups on campus. He has helped the research community by serving on program committees and through mentorship roles. Among many talks on AI, he has also presented to an audience of veteran business owners at the 7th Annual Utah Veteran Business Conference in 2023.
UCBPC Computing Industry Panel—February 11
Tomorrow (February 11) at 3:30 PM, UCBPC hosts their Computing Industry Panel in Marriott Library Room 1120. Join us for an engaging discussion with professionals from top tech companies and academia. We hope to see you there!
