Recent News & Accomplishments
2016
Where is the Marriott? What do I wear? What can I win?
This Thursday, April 7th at 6pm, is Casino Night 2016. In case any of you are freshmen or transfer students, the Association of Women in Computing Casino Night is an annual fundraiser to support women in technology. This is an event where for $5 for students ($10 at the door) you get a night of delicious food, fake gambling with your professors, and very real prizes. Your ticket gives you $500 in funny money that you can use at blackjack, craps, and more, which you can turn in at the end of the night for raffles. This year is bigger and better than ever, and while this post can’t give... read more
On March 29, 2016, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that Senior Andrea Bajcsy and Alumna Talia Ringer were awarded NSF Graduate Fellowships. This year the NSF made 2,000 award offers after receiving 17,000 applications. Both Bajcsy and Ringer will be using their awards towards PhDs in computer science. Ringer is currently a first year PhD student at University of Washington, and Bajcsy is still in the process of choosing a university. When asked about both fellowship winners, Professor Samir Khuller, Elizabeth Iribe Stevinson Chair of Computer Science said, “Talia Ringer... read more
The Department of Computer Science is pleased to announce that Mossaab Bagdouri has been named as one of IBM's PhD Fellows for 2016. Bagdouri is entering his final year as a graduate student in the Computer Science Department, where he works on making machines understand human language through Information Retrieval, Text Classification, and Computational Linguistics. Bagdouri currently conducts research with Doug Oard in the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Lab . Bagdouri holds a Ingénieur d'Etat en Informatique from École Nationale Supérieure d'... read more
The Department of Computer Science is pleased to announce that Michael Antonov, Brendan Iribe, and Andrew Reisse are the newest inductees to the Alumni Hall of Fame. Each year, the department celebrates the contributions that alumni have made to the field of computing and the impact that these contributions have had on society: Michael Antonov (B.S., Computer Science, 2003 ) currently serves as Chief Software Architect at Oculus VR (he is also a co-founder of the company) where he leads the development of virtual reality software including game integrations, sensor-based tracking and system... read more
Brendan Iribe will be speaking with participants at the bitcamp hackathon on April 8th at 9:30pm. The Computer Science Department is a proud sponsor of the event, which seeks to bring students from all over the US together to spend 36 hours developing software, and engineering creative "hacks" for a panel of distinguished judges. Many CS undergradates are responsible for putting on this event, and we'll be sure to highlight student projects after the event. read more
On March 23, 2016, Professor Eytan Ruppin of Computer Science and The Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology published a new article in Cell Systems entitled "Metabolic Network Prediction of Drug Side Effects" with Itay Shaked, Matthew A. Oberhardt, Nir Atias, and Roded Sharan (all of Tel Aviv University). The team of researchers are examining ways to quickly determine side effects from medications using machine learning methods. They use m edical informatics resources and a human genome-scale metabolic model to present the array of model-based phenotype predictors (AMPP) to... read more
On March 10th, Alum Arijit Biswas (PhD ‘14) was named by Live Mint in conjunction MIT Technology Review as one of eight of India’s Top Innovators under 35. He has been identified as someone whose innovations will shape the future for decades to come. Biswas is currently working as a research scientist at the Xerox Research Centre India . Biswas joined the Computer Science Department in 2009 after completing his undergraduate degree in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. His research advisor here was Professor David Jacobs. Of his experience... read more
Research at Google has named graduate students Hossein Esfandiari and Kartik Nayak as 2016 Google PhD Fellowship awardees. This award recognizes "outstanding graduate students doing exceptional work in computer science, related disciplines, or promising research areas" from all over the world. Esfandiari was awarded a fellowship for his exceptional research in Market Algorithms, and Nayak was awarded a fellowship for his exceptional research in Security. Esfandiari and Nayak competed among many talented to students from all over the world to win this year's fellowships. In the award letter... read more
Abhinav Gupta (PhD '09, advisor: Larry Davis) was one of 126 scholars from the U.S. or Canada to receive a Sloan Fellowship for 2016. Gupta is currently an Assistant Professor of Robotics in Carnegie Melon's School of Computer Science. Gupta's research interests include ways to represent the visual word in terms of " the underlying 3D scene and develop reasoning approaches based on physical, functional and causal relationships between the different elements in the scene." He is also interested in the link between Language and Vision and the roles that language plays in visual learning... read more
Editor's note: This article has been updated to reflect the program's new 2017 start date. The Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland is pleased to announce the creation of a Graduate Certificate of Professional Studies in Data Science starting in Fall Semester 2016 Fall Semester 2017. Called the “best job in America,” data scientists are in demand for their ability to create data-centric products, applications, or programs to address many scientific, socio-political, or business questions. In order to provide working professionals with the... read more