Recent News & Accomplishments
2015
The Computer Science department held an intro to VR programming seminar for students over winter break.
While most of us were home for winter, the Computer Science department hosted an intro to VR programming seminar. This seminar introduced students to the basics of the game engine Unity , as well as proper VR practices. Led by undergraduate Shariq Hashme, the students ranged in experience from CMSC132 to 400-level courses and most had little experience in VR. Hashme structured the seminar like a condensed, but open-ended, course. The first few days were all about the basics -- shaders, scripts, optimal VR practices. After that, he let the students loose to work on their own projects, giving... read more
Computer science seems to come just as easy to Alex as lacrosse does. Although she replaced multiple names on her high school’s track records and guided the soccer team to a county championship, she always felt lacrosse just clicked for her. Her feelings about lacrosse are similar towards the introductory computer programming class she took to fulfill her high school’s technology requirement. Alex was named a Rising Star in Computer Science for superior academic achievement, and her success was not contained to the classroom. She also led Marriotts Ridge High School lacrosse team to state and... read more
Sometimes, RSVPing for an event can be more of a harrowing process than it should be. There's the lurking fear of “what if something comes up?”, the constant worry of which friends or acquaintances may or may not be there; even, sometimes, the periodic thoughts of “am I even qualified to attend this?" In a place as big as Maryland, figuring out the unsaid rules of department-event-going can be more than a little stressful, especially when your major alone has twice as many students as your high school. The Computer Science Department's Hot Chocolate Social, held from 4 PM to 6 PM Wednesday,... read more
Computer science sophomore, Jeremy Krach, took third place in IBM’s Master the Mainframe 2014 this winter, beating out 4,900 high school and college students across the United States and Canada. The competition, which ran from October to December 31st 2014, lets students who have never done any mainframe programming before to learn how to use, maintain, and design applications. Through Master the Mainframe, which is now in its tenth year, IBM aims to equip students with basic mainframe programming skills to make them more competitive in the enterprise computing industry. The competition was... read more
Professor Amitabh Varshney and his work on the brain’s cortex and how it processes the visual and language is the subject of a Forbes.com article entitled "Human-Like Robots are getting jobs." While the title of the article is a bit hyperbolic, the article highlights the work that Varshney is doing to advance artificial intelligence and the algorithms necessary to produce life-like robots. Describing the work done in the Computer Science Department as that which "seems to fly off the pages of a science fiction," the article details Varshney's work on analyzing functions of the brain, and his... read more
Professor and Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science Samir Khuller and Professor Dave Mount advised two students from Montgomery Blair High school's magnet program who have been named as Intel Student Talent Search 2015 Semi-Finalists. Khuller advised Matthew Das Sarma on his project "Absorptive Matchings and the Minimum Vertex Cover with Hard Capacities Problem," and Mount advised Sachin Pandey on his project "Optimizing Nearest Neighbor Search Methods Using Volume Overlap." Each year, several Computer Science faculty members give of their time to advise talented high school... read more
Because of Professor Yiannis Aloimonos’ (CS, CVL, UMIACS) , Dr. Cornelia Fermuller’s (UMIACS), and PhD candidate Yezhou Yang's research, robots can learn to cook in a way similar to the rest of us. By watching instructional videos on YouTube, the robot in their project is able to determine what series of steps is necessary to complete a task—in this case, how to manipulate objects associated with cooking and learn to cook. Their project is being done in conjunction with the National Information Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence in Australia (NICTA). It is also the... read more
Professor Jonathan Katz (CS, UMIACS), who also currently serves as the Director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2), is the recipient of a Humboldt Award for 2015. This award will allow him to travel to Germany to work on a long term research project with his collaborators Professors Michael Backes and Dominique Shroeder at Saarland University. Katz has been recognized for his outstanding work and impressive body of research. The awards committee also strongly believes that he will continue to produce ground-breaking work in the future. The Alexander von Humboldt foundation provides... read more
The Association for Computer Machinery has named Professor Aravind Srinivasan (CS, UMIACS, and AMSC) as a 2014 ACM Fellow. read more
CS alumus Dr. Manoel Gomes Mendonça was recently appointed Secretary of Science, Technology and Innovation of his home state of Bahia in Brazil. The state is one of the largest in the country with a population of 15 million people. Dr. Mendonca was appointed for a four year term. Prior to his appointment, Mendonça was a professor at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), where he was heading the Fraunhofer Project Center for Software and System Engineering. Mendonça received his Ph.D. in 1997. His advisor was Victor Basili. read more