Recent News & Accomplishments
2015
Undergraduate students Galen Stetsyuk and Mikhail Sorokin, in conjunction with the Virtual Reality (VR) Club, have developed a tank game named Core Disruption for the Oculus Rift to inspire general interest in VR. A demonstration of the game will be available in TerpZone in the Stamp Student Union during the first week of school. In the hope of learning more about the project—and with the nebulous goal of not getting motion sickness—I stopped by the CS Undergraduate Project Room in AV Williams in mid-August to meet with Stetsyuk and Sorokin. Both developers are sophomores majoring... read more
The Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), with the support of a Public Outreach and Informing the Public Grant from the American Physical Society, ran The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction from July 30 to August 1. An outreach workshop for science fiction writers, the Schr ö dinger Sessions gave its attendees a “ crash course ” in physics through lectures and tours by faculty from the University of Maryland and JQI. The goal of the workshop was to inspire new works of fiction incorporating sound depictions of quantum physics, with the hope of compelling audiences to learn... read more
Senior Lecturer Jandelyn Plane has certainly stayed busy this summer. In addition to leading the Computer Science Connect camp, directing the Maryland Center for Women in Computing, and serving... read more
PhD student Noseong Park, postdoctoral fellow Edoardo Serra, and Professor and Director of the Lab for Computational Cultural Dynamics and Center for Digital International Government V.S. Subrahmanian have published a paper in IEEE Intelligent Systems on the use of predictive analytics to prevent rhinoceros poaching. Building “...on behavior models of both rhinos and poachers,” the Anti-Poaching Engine system detailed in the paper represents a promising step towards increasing animal protection. The paper, “...the first entry in [Intelligent Systems'] new Predictive Analytics column,” is... read more
PhD student Adil Yalcin's work on Keshif, a web-based data visualization tool designed to be readily usable to a wide audience, was featured in a Mobility Lab article this Monday. Yalcin is co-... read more
The laboratory for Programming Languages at the University of Maryland (PLUM) released Adapton June 25, 2015. The lab is directed by Professors Jeff Foster and Michael Hicks and Assistant Professor David Van Horn. Adapton is a library offering “...programming language abstractions for incremental computation.” The website defines an incremental computation as one in which “...repeating [the computation] with a changed input is faster than from-scratch recomputation.” Adapton is currently available for OCaml , with implementations in Rust and Racket coming soon. A sizeable number of people... read more
Craig Abod (B.S. Computer Science, 1986) received the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Greater Washington June 18, 2015. Abod is President and CEO of Carahsoft Technology Corporation. read more
The Maryland Advanced Research Computing Center, a collaboration between the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University, is scheduled to open this month. The Center will be located close to... read more
In early July on Twitter, Laird Malamed, the Chief Operating Officer of Oculus, announced that he will be running a charity marathon for two organizations for children as well as the Computer Science Department’s Andrew Reisse Memorial Scholarship : Mr. Malamed will run this marathon in Vermont on his 48 th birthday, July 12 th . This event also marks number thirty-three in his quest to run a marathon in all fifty states. An accomplished marathoner, Malamed has already run a marathon on all seven continents. He kindly agreed to an interview about how he met Andrew Reisse, whom he has called “... read more
A number of students in the Computer Science Connect Camp run by Dr. Jandelyn Plane presented their final projects on Wednesday, July 1 in the Virtual and Augmented Reality Laboratory. read more