Recent News & Accomplishments
2008
HCIL's NSF-funded workshop on Children's Mobile Technologies gathered 45 people from 5 different countries to consider the future in this important research area. HCIL workshop website: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/childrensmobileworkshop/ read more
Dianne O'Leary will be the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecturer at the SIAM Annual meeting, July 7, in San Diego. http://www.siam.org/prizes/sponsored/kovalesky.php As of January 2009, Dianne will serve as editor-in-chief of SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications. Dianne is also one of four plenary speakers at the 2008 SIAM Conference on Data Mining, Atlanta, April 25. http://www.siam.org/meetings/sdm08/invited.php read more
Newly-admitted Terps from the class of 2012 were welcomed at a "Meet the Family!" reception held on the evening March 13th. These students and their families are deep in the springtime ritual of comparing schools to which they have been accepted, and were greeted by faculty, students and alum all eager to have them confirm with College Park. The event included presentations by faculty on the wide variety of research opportunities open to undergrads in our program, plus 'student only' panels conducted by present CS majors. read more
Increasingly, rigorous evaluations of software with human subjects are expected in computer science research. Computer science researchers are also studying how humans perform tasks so that they can evaluate how best to augment these tasks with technology. To support these research needs, we have built a usability lab as a service to the Computer Science department and UMIACS in room 3452 of A.V. Williams. This lab is equipped with many things needed to conduct a user study, including video recording, screen capture and analysis software. The HCIL UX lab was dedicated March 12 th , 2008. More... read more
The Department of Computer Science will hold a visit day for prospective graduate students on Friday, March 28th 2008. The visit day is organized to provide prospective graduate students with a chance to get an up-close view of the department. It is an opportunity for the students to meet faculty and students of the department and learn about the graduate program. read more
The UMD High School Programming Contest brings talented students from high schools throughout the DC metropolitan area to the campus to participate in a three hour competition. Students competing in teams of four demonstrate their programming skills and problem solving abilities by attempting to solve eight programming problems in Java, using the Eclipse programming environment, on Apple MacBooks. The 2008 Contest took place Saturday, March 8, at the CSIC Building at the University of Maryland, College Park. 39 teams from Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia competed in the... read more
Ben Bederson co-authors Voting Technology: The Not-So-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot , an investigative study into how voters respond to new equipment. See also: HCIL news release read more
Atif Memon has been invited to give an Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) seminar on "Testing Event-Driven Systems" at the National Institute of Standards & Technology. read more
The Lab for Computational Cultural Dynamics' SOMA Terror Organization Portal (STOP) and social network site for terrorism related analysis and prediction was featured in several major news media. STOP provides methods for reasoning about terror groups and forecasting what they might do in the future. In addition, it contains unique social networking capabilities that allow analysts to effectively cooperate in order to better understand and counteract terror groups. Articles by: Computerworld Magazine , IT week , UPI News , Network World. read more
2007
The International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction in cooperation with the International Ergonomics Association, Human Interface Society has published a special issue, Reflections on Human-Computer Interaction, in honor of Ben Shneiderman 's 60th Birthday. This special issue of the Journal is volume 23, #3 with an article on Ben's work and his impact on the field can be found on pages 195 through 204. Catherine Plaisant (UMD) and Chris North (VA Tech) were guest editors for this issue. read more