Recent News & Accomplishments
2022
Alexander Levine, Chahat Singh, Leonidas Tsepenekas and Weijia Xu each received the UMD’s Graduate School Semester Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year 2022–2023.
Four graduate students in the University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science received prestigious Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowships for 2022-23: Alexander Levine, Chahat Singh, Leonidas Tsepenekas and Weijia Xu. The fellowship provides full-time support to UMD doctoral candidates who are in the latter stages of writing their dissertations. Levine, a graduate of Brown University who double majored in physics and computer Science, worked as a software engineer before joining UMD in 2018. His research interests center on robust machine learning, with a particular focus on providing... read more
Andreea Alexandru , a first-year postdoctoral researcher in the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2), is proof that global wanderlust and a budding scientific career can coincide in harmony. Originally from Bucharest, Romania, Alexandru has visited 26 countries so far, keeping a scratch map of her travels in her home office. “Looking at places I’ve visited and plan to visit inspires a mental map of the goals I’ve achieved so far—and future goals as well,” says Alexandru, who earned her doctorate in electrical and systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. Her research is... read more
The University of Maryland’s computer science graduate program earned top-25 accolades in U.S. News & World Report’s 2023 Best Graduate Schools list. Overall, the program ranked No. 9 among public universities and No. 17 overall. Four specialties also ranked in the top 25: Artificial intelligence specialty at No. 13 Programming language specialty at No. 15 Theory specialty at No. 20 Systems specialty at No. 21 The rankings are based on statistical surveys of more than 2,150 programs and reputation surveys sent to more than 23,200 academics and professionals, conducted in fall 2021 and... read more
George Li, a sophomore computer science and mathematics double-degree student, is one of the three UMD students to have been awarded 2022 scholarships by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation , which encourages students to pursue advanced study and research careers in the sciences, engineering and mathematics. Over the last decade, UMD’s nominations yielded 35 scholarships—the second-most in the nation behind Stanford University. The Goldwater Foundation has honored 76 UMD winners and five honorable mentions since the program’s first award was given in 1989. “... read more
More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the persistent virus continues to rear its ugly head, with the U.S. now nearing one million COVID-related deaths. While vaccines have proven effective in decreasing COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations, administering the vaccines continues to be a challenge—both in terms of convincing skeptical individuals to get vaccinated, and in providing easy and equitable access to vaccination sites. New research between the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia (UVA) is working to address the latter, with experts from both institutions... read more
Niall Williams, co-advised by Distinguished University Professor Dinesh Manocha & Affiliate Assistant Research Professor Aniket Bera, is one of only 4 graduate students to receive the Honorable Mention, Best Paper award at the 2022 IEEE VR conference.
Williams, a University of Maryland third year doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science, was recently recognized with an Honorable Mention, Best Paper award at the prestigious 2022 IEEE VR conference for his cutting edge work on developing a novel metric to analyze the similarity between physical and virtual environments for natural walking in virtual reality. The IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality is a globally renowned top conference for presenting and publishing breakthrough innovative research work in the broad areas of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR/AR/XR). The... read more
A multi-institutional team that includes Associate Professor Rob Patro (left in photo) and Ph.D. student Dongze He (right) has released a toolkit for the efficient processing of single-cell and single-nucleus RNA sequencing data.
Rapid improvements in cell sequencing technologies in the last decade have provided clinicians and scientists with many valuable insights— from better treatment options for patients with heart disease and cancer to a much deeper understanding of how certain pathogens can affect plants and animals. In particular, the exponential growth of high-throughput single-cell and single-nucleus RNA-sequencing technologies (collectively, single-cell transcriptomics technologies) have produced a wealth of new data. In fact, single-cell transcriptomic data constitutes the most ubiquitous components of... read more
Experts from the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia are developing sophisticated algorithms that can help health care officials determine the best locations to place vaccination sites.
More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the persistent virus continues to rear its ugly head, with the U.S. now nearing one million COVID-related deaths. While vaccines have proven effective in decreasing COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations, administering the vaccines continues to be a challenge—both in terms of convincing skeptical individuals to get vaccinated, and in providing easy and equitable access to vaccination sites. New research between the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia (UVA) is working to address the latter, with experts from both institutions... read more
A pioneering researcher of bias in machine learning has joined the University of Maryland’s Computational and Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Lab for two years as a visiting scholar. Jieyu Zhao , who graduated with her doctorate in computer science from the University of California at Los Angeles last December, comes to UMD as a Computing Innovation Fellow, a prestigious postdoctoral program supported by the National Science Foundation. She is working with Hal Daumé III, a professor of computer science with joint appointments in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced... read more
Testudo, twists and turns on Paul Capriolo’s (B.S. ’06, computer science) path to tech success
Some people know they’re destined for a future in computer science from the moment they sit down at a keyboard for the first time. Paul Capriolo (B.S. ’06, computer science) is not one of those people. “I wasn’t drawn to computers as a kid, I wasn’t into the culture at an early age,” he said. “I was around 14 when our family got our first computer and I used it for games and stuff, but how it worked, how to build programs to make it do what I wanted, that didn’t even cross my mind as a possibility, it never even entered my brain.” But as Capriolo will tell you, a “lightbulb moment” in his... read more