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Professorial Faculty and Research

The teaching and research interests of our faculty span most major areas of contemporary computer science. The Department has been consistently ranked highly in national surveys conducted by both the National Academy of Science and U.S. News and World Report (12’th in their most recent survey). Several specific research areas have been especially highly ranked (Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Database Systems and Computer Vision), while other areas, we believe, have improved dramatically during the past ten years and should soon be nationally recognized (especially computer systems and computer security). Faculty research is supported by substantial external funding. This funding comes from federal agencies (NSF, DARPA, NIST, NASA, ONR, NIH, etc.), private foundations, and industry. At the end of 2002, our Department active awards totaled $16,364,240 in federal grants and contracts to the Department, $3,094,409 in gifts, and $51,642,160 in UMIACS awards (the latter are often collaborative efforts with faculty in other departments). Twenty proposals were submitted to the 2003 NSF ITR program; as that list shows, many of them included faculty form other departments and institutions.

Our faculty have been widely honored for their contributions to the field. We have

• 7 Fellows of the ACM,
• 4 Fellows of the AAAS,
• 5 Fellows of AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) and
• 11 Fellows of the IEEE.

Fourteen of our faculty have won NSF CAREER awards, four won its precursor, the PYI award, and one was named a Presidential Faculty Fellow.

Compared to ten years ago when our last review was conducted, our research program now has a significant interdisciplinary component, as discussed briefly in the overview section of this report. There are seventeen faculty from seven academic departments on our campus (Electrical and Computer Engineering, Linguistics, Philosophy, Mechanical Engineering, Library and Information Sciences, Business and Management, Materials and Nuclear Engineering) and one from the Mathematics Department at Towson State University who are actively engaged in joint projects with our faculty. Additionally, several of our faculty hold affiliate appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and almost all of our faculty hold joint appointment with one of the two large computationally oriented research institutes on the campus – The Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and the Institute for Systems Research. There are, additionally, two recently established Laboratories in software engineering (the Fraunhofer Center) and computer systems (the MIND Laboratory) which afford our faculty opportunities to work closely with industrial partners on the application of Maryland technology to complex, real world problems. These, along with several other research institutes and laboratories with which our faculty have active collaborations, are described in an Appendix to this report.

The Department, in conjunction with UMIACS, has been very active in faculty recruiting during the past few years. In each of academic years 2000-2001 and 2001-2002 we interviewed over twenty candidates annually for positions in many areas and at all ranks. The tables below shows the faculty members we have hired since 1998. This year, because of budget limitations, we are searching for only two positions with UMIACS – a new UMIACS Director and a faculty member in the area of computational biology.

Assistant Professors

Faculty Member	PhD Received	Institution	Hiring Date
Bederson, Benjamin	1992	NYU	Jan-98
Chawathe, Sudarshan	1998	Stanford	May-99
Bhattacharjee, Samrat	1999	Georgia Tech	Aug-99
Arbaugh, William	1999	Penn	Jul-00
Memon, Atif	2001	Pittsburgh	Aug-02
Getoor, Lise	2001	Stanford	Dec-02
Iftode, Liviu	1998	Princeton	Jan-02
Sussman, Alan	1991	CMU	Jan-02
Hicks, Michael	2001	Penn	Jul-02
Guimbretiere, Francois	2002	Stanford	Aug-02
Katz, Jonathan	2002	Columbia	Aug-02
Foster, Jeffrey	2002	UC Berkeley	Jan-03

Associate Professors

Varshney, Amitabh	1994	North Carolina	Jan-00
Srinivasan, Aravind	1993	Cornell	Aug-01
Jacobs, David	1992	MIT	Aug-02

The Department places significant emphasis on providing a nurturing environment for its junior faculty. Startup packages, which cover summer salary, graduate student support, equipment, travel, etc., have averaged $250,000. Additionally, each new faculty member is assigned a mentor from the associate and full professors. This mentor assists the new faculty member with proposal preparation (reviewing drafts of proposals, especially CAREER award proposals), teaching strategies (dealing with academic dishonesty, rules for submissions and grading of projects, access to course materials from previous versions of the course), and as a general sounding board for questions and concerns. This program has been in place for the past two years. Teaching loads are competitive with other leading institutions. Our goal is to have faculty teach between 40-50% of their courses at the graduate level. New faculty are guaranteed 50% graduate courses during their first two years at Maryland. Special incentives are provided to recruit female candidates, including maternity leave benefits. Promotions to Full Professor have stringent requirements for national prominence in research and excellent in education and service. The table below summarizes promotions made since 1997.

Professorial Promotions (since 1997)

Faculty Member	Date	Title
Dorr, Bonnie	Aug-98	Associate Prof
Franklin, Michael	Aug-99	Associate Prof
Golubchick, Leana	Aug-01	Associate Prof
Hollingsworth, Jeff	Aug-00	Associate Prof
Keleher, Pete	July-01	Associate Prof
Khuller, Samir	Aug-97	Associate Prof
Porter, Adam	Aug-98	Associate Prof
Tseng, Chau-Wen	Aug-01	Associate Prof
Perlis, Don	Aug-97	Professor
Pugh, Bill	Aug-01	Professor
Saltz, Joel	Aug-97	Professor
V. S. Subrahmanian	Aug-00	Professor
James Hendler	Aug-00	Professor

The Department research environment is enhanced by a wide range of regularly ongoing conferences and seminars. These vary from Department Colloquia to many individual research group seminars, some of which are publicized (see Department Web page) and others which are not. A list of the Department Colloquia for 2002 is given below. Few if any Department Colloquia are held in the Spring as this is when faculty candidates come to give research talks, making for a full schedule of seminars.

Department Colloquia: 2002 Distinguished Lecture Series

Quantum Physics and the Nature of Computation

Umesh Vazirani, University of California-Berkeley

Peer-To-Peer Data Management

Hector Garcia-Molina, Stanford University

OceanStore: Toward Global Scale, Self-Repairing, Secure, and Persistent Storage

John Kubiatowicz, University of California-Berkeley

Immersive Virtual Reality for Scientific Visualization

Andries Van Dam, Brown University

Embedded Devices: The Impact on Optimizing Compilers

Mary Lou Soffa, University of Pittsburgh

Navigating Audio Like Text: Browsing and Searching Voicemail Messages

Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University and ATT Labs-Research

Challenges

Our Department of Computer Science is quite strong, and we believe it has the potential to move into the top ten in the US. Most members of our faculty have prominence in their research areas and several are acknowledged as among the world leaders in their fields. The size of the department coupled with the breadth of numerous faculty members adds to our strength. We see the following as the major challenges to meeting this goal

• We lost two of our database faculty members who specialize in database systems to top 5 universities (Faloutsos to Carnegie Mellon, Franklin to Berkeley). The recent hiring freeze will make it difficult to replace them, and to replenish that group.

• The University of Maryland separates Computer Engineering and Computer Science, with the former falling in the Engineering College (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering). Thus, unlike at some of our peer departments, some areas associated with computing (particularly embedded systems and robotics) fall under the aegis of the engineering school. In recent years, a number of faculty have been given affiliate appointments between the two colleges, but we believe that a closer relationship would be desirable, and this will be a focus of activity in the coming years.

• The University has targeted computational biology as an area to expand, building on the talents of our faculty in both the computer science and the biology departments, and on our geographical proximity to the National Institutes of Health. The Computer Science Department is a bit concerned, however, that the University may be too narrowly focused on the computational aspects and would be better off taking a broader view of biocomputing, including bioinformatics and biorobotics and sensing.

• The recent construction of a new classroom building with facilities for networking, projection, and webcasting and containing significantly more space than our previous building, addressed a major infrastructure need for our department. Unfortunately, this increase in teaching space did not address the critical need for space for our research laboratories. In the past decade, the Department has significantly increased its presence in experimental computer science, but the lack of space makes it extremely difficult for groups to build the demonstration facilities necessary for many of our research endeavors. Recently, one of our laboratories has had to move off campus to provide housing for its students and research associates, and others threaten to follow. Space thus remains a critical need for our department.

• Although there is considerable demand for our graduate students, we believe our success in placing graduate students into academic positions is not commensurate with the general reputation of the department. We are actively exploring ways to improve the quality of students’ research and presentations. This topic is addressed in more detail in the section on graduate education.

Next, Undergraduate Program

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