Recent News & Accomplishments
2020
Assistant Professor Michelle Mazurek receives the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for a project titled "Improving the Reliability of Human-Centered Secure-Development Research." Improving software security is a critical need for the U.S. and the world. In order to solve the problem, an understanding of how human decision-making interacts with technology in the process of secure software development is needed. However, studying these human factors is typically expensive, time-consuming and difficult and the study requires many choices about experimental design while balancing... read more
Assistant Professor Xiaodi Wu receives the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for a project titled “On the Foundations of End-to-End Quantum Application." "This is an exciting time for quantum computing! With the availability of prototypes of quantum machines, especially the recently established quantum supremacy, it becomes possible for researchers to design and implement real-world end-to-end quantum applications" said Wu Wu’s project sets a comprehensive research agenda toward this target, as an effort to bridge the gap between the theoretical foundation of quantum computing... read more
A team of UMD researchers lead by Associate Professor Tom Goldstein , and including Assistant Professor John Dickerson , Assistant Professor Furong Huang , Professor David Jacobs , Professor Jonathan Katz , and Assistant Professor Abhinav Shrivastava , recently received a $3.2M award to study the security of machine learning methods. The awarded project, titled “Repelling Evasion and Poisoning Attacks: A Principled Way Forward,” is supported by DARPA's Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception (GARD) program. “A number of new security threats to machine learning systems have recently... read more
Assistant Professor Pratap Tokekar receives the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for a project titled "Secure, Resilient, and Risk-Aware Multi-Robot Coordination". Current multi-robot systems are "brittle" since the failure of a single robot may bring the whole team down. Cyber-attacks that incapacitate robots or compromise their sensors are becoming increasingly realistic. Tokekar’s project focuses on multi-robot coordination in scenarios where the robots operate in failure-prone or adversarial environments. The project aims to address the key question of how a team of robots... read more
Assistant Professor Soheil Feizi receives National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for a project titled "Information-Theoretic and Statistical Foundations of Generative Models". Generative models provide a statistical understanding of data and play an important role in the success of modern machine learning in various application domains including vision, speech, natural languages, computational biology, etc. Building on the success of deep learning, recent advances in modern generative models such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs) have... read more
Professor Emeritus, Former Department Chair, and UMD Distinguished Scholar and Teacher, recently received the 2020 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award
The Education Committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA-E) awarded Professor Samir Khuller the 2020 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award . The award recognizes his incredible efforts in mentoring Undergraduate students on their research over the last decade. Over the last 12 years Khuller has mentored 32 undergraduate students (approx. 16 from UMD) with diverse backgrounds of which approximately fifty percent of his mentees are women. Several his mentees have matriculated into top tier graduate programs including Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of... read more
The Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20) will be held February 7-12, 2020 at the Hilton New York Midtown, New York, USA.
One of the oldest and most prestigious artificial intelligence (AI) conferences will take place next week in New York City. The Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence ( AAAI) will bring together researchers and practitioners in AI, machine learning (ML), and related fields for a week of paper presentations, invited speakers, workshops, and tutorials. Additionally, collocated conferences such as the ACM/SIGAI Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society ( AIES ) will attract a diverse set of participants to discuss the impact of AI, and AI hype, on society. UMDCS researchers will... read more
Alireza Farhadi is advised by Professor Mohammad Hajiaghayi
Alireza Farhadi fourth-year PhD student, advised by Prof. Mohammad Hajiaghayi was recently awarded the 2020 Facebook fellowship. The Facebook fellowship program aims to encourage and support promising doctoral students, engaged in innovative and relevant research in areas related to computer science and engineering.Farhadi secured the fellowship under the Economics and Computation category. His research work focuses on Combinatorial Optimization, Algorithmic Game Theory, and Algorithmic Graph Theory. As a winner of the fellowship, Farhadi will receive tuition and fees paid for the 9 months of... read more
The department recognizes with gratitude the following faculty and staff for their tireless leadership and extraordinary contributions in preparing and moving to our new home, The Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering. The Staff & Faculty Award Committee (Chaired by Jim Reggia) made several recommendations. read more
Three graduate assistants from the department were among the award's distinguished winners
Three Computer Science graduate students win the Outstanding Graduate Assistant Awards out of approximately 4,000 UMD graduate students who serve the campus as administrative, research, or teaching assistants. The award established by the Graduate School recognizes and honors the outstanding contributions that Graduate Assistants provide to students, faculty, departments, administrative units, and the University as a whole. Kevin Hogan - Outstanding Research Assistant award Kevin Hogan’s research interests focus on Software Engineering, Programming Languages, and Security. He is currently a... read more