Recent News & Accomplishments
2017
Each year, the Department of Computer Science awards outstanding professors, instructors, and teaching assistants for the ingenuity, intelligence, thoughtfulness, and care that they bring to the classroom. This year, awardees have been recognized for their dedication, love of science, and the ways that they help to make the department one of the best at the University of Maryland. Assistant Professor Marine Carpuat, Senior Lecturer Nelson Padua-Perez, and Senior Lecturer Fawzi Emad, served on the award committee. Congratulations to the recipients of this year’s awards! Professor of the year:... read more
The University of Maryland strives to conduct leading research in state of the art laboratories throughout campus. However, as required skillsets for jobs in STEM grows, upper-level undergraduate students in the Department of Computer Science are finding new opportunities to learn research skills inside of the classroom while applying them to real-world problems. In Professor Atif Memon's Programming Handheld Systems class, offered as CMSC436, 83 undergraduate students worked with scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a comprehensive suite of apps to improve... read more
Professor Dave Mount will be one of two keynote speakers for the 25th annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA) in Vienna Austria. The symposium will take place from September 4th-8th 2017. The ESA is one of the premier conferences on algorithms and covers research in all aspects of the design, analysis, engineering, and application of algorithms and data structures. ESA is held under the aegis of ALGO which is the congress of the leading international gathering of researchers on Algorithms in Europe. read more
The Computer Science Department is pleased to announce our newest professors of computer science. Samir Khuller, Professor and Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science mentioned the diverse interests and talent pool of the newest members of the faculty. "Our new, brilliant faculty will add to the wonderful, diverse graduate and undergraduate courses we offer. Their research will greatly contribute to our well-established innovative, brilliant, work that our amazing faculty members continually produce," he said. These four assistant professors will join the thirteen professors added... read more
Kianté Brantley has been awarded a Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation in Bridge to the Doctorate (LSAMP DB) fellowship. This highly competitive fellowship is awarded to encourage and support University of Maryland graduate students who are pursing graduate degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It also aims to foster a diverse and interactive science community and seeks to increase the number of underrepresented students who earn degrees in STEM fields. In addition to this good news, Brantley learned that he is the recipient of a Sloan PEM Equipment Grant... read more
Jagdeep Singh,’86, Qiang Yang Ph.D.,’89 and Rajiv Gandhi Ph.D.,’03 Inducted into the Alumni Hall of Fame
As part of the commencement activities held on May 22, the department honored its three newest members of the Alumni Hall of Fame . Professor Samir Khuller, Elizabeth Iribe Chair of Computer Science, served as master of ceremonies and the inductees in attendance offered remarks. Jagdeep Singh Jagdeep Singh has spent his life as an entrepreneur, and innovator. After finishing his undergraduate degree by the age of 19, Singh went to work for Hewlett-Packard before founding several very successful companies. He was named to MIT Technology He is currently the cofounder and CEO of QuantumScape... read more
Professor Jeff Foster has been named one of the Outstanding Directors of Graduate Studies for this academic year. Since 2012, the Graduate School has presented this award to individuals who have “made exceptional contributions to graduate education, a graduate program, and/or the graduate student experience in that program.” Foster has served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the last five years, and is also a memeber (and co-founder) of the Programming Languages at University of Maryland (PLUM) Lab . read more
On Wednesday, May 24th, Larry Davis, Professor of Computer Science and UMIACS, will be hosting a Deep Learning Workshop at the brand new Edward St. John Teaching and Learning Center . For one day, eleven faculty and researchers from around the country will give a variety of talks on several different areas of deep learning including quantifying interpretability of deep networks, acoustic word embeddings, and speech recognition. Speakers include Professor Richard Baraniuk (Rice), Professor Joan Bruna (NYU), Professor Rama Chellappa (UMD) Professor Hal Daume (UMD), Dr. Xuedong Huang (Microsoft... read more
Brendan Iribe, cofounder of Oculus, has established a substantial fund to support the Department of Computer Science in various initiatives to encourage more women and other underrepresented students to take courses in and major in computer science at the University of Maryland. Iribe’s gift will support the Center for Women in Computing, summer research experiences for undergraduates (REUs), and a speaker series highlighting women academics and industry representatives in computer science. read more
Today marks the end of an era. Ben Shneiderman, Professor of Computer Science and founder of the Human Computer Interaction Lab here at the University is celebrating his retirement. Learn more about Ben and his career on this website . read more