Recent News & Accomplishments
2013
Professor A. Udaya Shankar has recently published a book titled "Distributed Programming: Theory and Practice". This text presents a practical and rigorous method to develop distributed programs that correctly implement specifications. It also covers how to write specifications and how to use them. Examples address both classical problems (e.g., distributed termination detection) and non-classical problems (e.g., network sockets). The book bridges the gap between books that focus on specific concurrent programming languages and books that focus on distributed algorithms. Programs are written... read more
2012
Professor Larry Davis, previous CS Chair for 12 years, has been elected as a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is being recognized for his contributions to image processing and computer vision. Congratulations Prof. Davis! read more
Aravind Srinivasan has recently been named a fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as a fellow of AAAS, the world's largest general federation of scientists and the publisher of the journal Science, is an honor bestowed upon members by their peers. The AAAS says these individuals have been elevated to this rank "because of their efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished". Aravind has been highlighted for his distinguished contributions to algorithms, probabilistic methods, and networks. read more
CS and UMIACS Professor Bonnie Dorr was recently featured in The Odyssey, a magazine from the College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences, highlighting her work in developing translation technologies for the U.S. Department of Defense. Dorr and her doctoral students created Topiary, a summarizer that distills information, and the Translation Edit Rate Plus (TERp), an evaluation metric for machine translation. To read more, please read pages 7 and 8 of the Odyssey's October 2012 edition . read more
A team representing UMD has won the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest for the Mid-Atlantic region , placing first in a field of 173 teams. The team is comprised of students Shangfu Peng, Ang Li, and Hossein Esfandiari. The win qualifies them to advance to the world-final competition to be held in Saint Petersburg, Russia in Summer, 2013. Two other UMD teams also placed well. Team #2 of Milad Gholami, Melika Abolhassani and Anirudh Bandi placed 7th. Team #3 of Mandeep Bedi, Luke Valenta, and David Karesh placed 9th. All three teams are coached by Mohammad Hajiaghayi . read more
Professor Samir Khuller was recently named to the European Symposia on Algorithms Steering Committee. The Symposia cover research in efficient algorithms and data structures in computer science, discrete applied mathematics, operations research and mathematical programming. read more
Jeff Hollingsworth is serving as the general chair of SC12 to be held in Salt Lake City during Nov. 2012. SC12 is the premier international conference for high-performance computing (HPC), networking, storage and analysis. The conference is expecting 10,000 attendees representing more than 50 countries and more than 350 exhibitors. For more information about SC12, visit http://sc12.supercomputing.org . read more
The University of Maryland's Cyber Security Club Competition Team won first place in the college division of the Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference (MDC3) at the CyberMaryland Conference held at the Baltimore Convention Center on October 17, 2012. Teams were challenged to a six hour Capture The Flag/King of the Hill variation which consisted of hacking into machines and protecting them from other competitors' attacks. The team won the top prize among the top 8 competitors within the college team division. The team, coached by DIT's Rob Maxwell, was comprised of the following students:... read more
Ben Shneiderman received the 2012 IEEE Visualization Career Award in recognition of his contributions to and leadership in information visualization and human computer interaction. The award was presented at the VisWeek Conference in Seattle on October 16, 2012. Shneiderman's video acceptance speech, which was shown to the 1000+ attendees ( YouTube Video ), thanks his graduate students and Dr. Catherine Plaisant for their contributions over many years. Key innovations include the dynamic queries for rapid visual exploration in multiple coordinated windows, treemaps for space-filling... read more
The Department is pleased to announce the Larry S. Davis Doctoral Dissertation Awards for 2012, for dissertations in Computer Science. The awards have been made to recent graduates: Derek Monner Title: A Neurocomputational Model of Grounded Language Comprehension and Production at the Sentence Level Advisor: Jim Reggia and Christopher Hayden Title: Clear, Correct, and Efficient Dynamic Software Updates Advisors: Jeff Foster and Mike Hicks In addition, one other thesis was given honorable mention: Nicholas Chen Title: The Use of Multiple Slate Devices to Support Active Reading Activities... read more