Recent News & Accomplishments
2019
The department is saddened by the loss of Professor Emeritus Ray Miller, who passed away on June 5, 2019 at the age of 90. read more
The Prize is sponsored jointly by the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) and the EATCS Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC)
Professor Srinivasan receives the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing for his paper titled "Randomized Distributed Edge Coloring via an Extension of the Chernoff–Hoeffding Bounds", coauthored by Alessandro Panconesi. This paper appeared in the SIAM Journal on Computing in 1997, and an earlier version appeared in PODC 1992. Several distributed resource-allocation problems, such as contention-free protocols, can be formulated as edge-coloring problems on networks. Prof. Srinivasan’s paper presents the first non-trivial distributed algorithm for this problem, and has led to much... read more
Assistant Professor Leilani Battle received the award for her project titled “Supporting Interactive Data Exploration at Scale”.
Visualizations are invaluable when exploring complex datasets. However, as datasets continue to grow at unprecedented rates, both visualization systems and database management systems are needed to process and render data efficiently. Leilani’s study aims to develop optimizations that enable close collaboration between visualization systems and database management systems, which can lead to better outcomes for systems (e.g., lower latency) and users (e.g., faster and more effective exploration).The study proposes to develop new evaluation techniques to improve the way they test systems... read more
Ahmed Abdelkader, Alireza Farhadi, Doowon Kim and Mahsa Derakhshan secured the Ann g. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship for 2019-2020
The Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship is part of the Graduate School's Semester Dissertation Fellowship program. This program provides support to outstanding doctoral students who are in the latter stages of writing their dissertations. The Wylie is full‐time fellowship. read more
Assistant Prof. Soheil Feizi has received $1 M National Science Foundation (NSF) award for his multi-disciplinary collaboration project, "CDS&E: Data-Driven Modeling and Analyses of Extreme Waves," with Prof. Balakumar Balachandran in Mechanical Engineering and Kayo Ide in Astro & Ocean Science. Rogue (freak) waves are rare events but they pose one of the greatest maritime risks. The award will be used to develop a unified, data-driven framework along with machine learning tools to advance the analysis and prediction of rare events such as oceanic freak waves. The framework and tools... read more
Dinesh Manocha and Hanan Samet were part of a select group of eight researchers chosen for this honor. SIGGRAPH established the Academy last year to recognize individuals who have made substantial contributions to computer graphics and interactive techniques. Manocha was specifically noted for his contributions to geometric modeling, GPU computing, Interactive rendering of large complex scenes, and interactive sound simulation. Manocha co-leads a major research group with more than 20 members on geometric and simulation algorithms with applications to computer graphics, robotics and virtual... read more
Computer Science Senior and Banneker/Key Scholar Louis-Henri Merino has received a Fulbright U.S. Student Grant to conduct research in Lausanne, Switzerland. Merino will collaborate with researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) on a secure electronic voting system that can resist attacks from hackers. Merino will work to adapt Ford’s prototype system to the requirements of voting systems used in Switzerland. In addition, he hopes to write code that gives voters the ability to verify that they cast their votes as intended, while keeping their own identity private... read more
Ph. D. student Denis Peskov who is conducting research at UMD with his graduate advisor, Computer Science Associate Professor Jordan Boyd-Graber. has been awarded a German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, DAAD) scholarship. DAAD is the largest international educational exchange program in Germany. The opportunity will enable Peskov to conduct research in natural language processing—the task of teaching computers to understand human language—with Alexander Fraser, a professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Munich, Germany. More on the story-... read more
Brian Brubach, who is co-supervised by Prof. Mihai Pop and Aravind Srinivasan, received two awards recently
2019 Graduate School Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award. This award "recognizes the outstanding contributions that the GAs provide to students, faculty, departments, administrative units, and the University as a whole". 2019 Finalist for University of Maryland Graduate Student Distinguished Service Award . This award "celebrates graduate students who have made outstanding contributions to the University community in the areas of service, involvement, leadership, and scholarship". read more
Steven Ryan has been selected to receive this year's staff award in recognition of his many contributions to computing resources in the department, including his help transitioning to the new computing facilities in Iribe, managing the undergraduate IT staff, providing support for departmental courses, and responding rapidly to computing problems experienced by staff,students and faculty. read more