Recent News & Accomplishments
2014
CS alumnus and Zoosk co-founder Shayan Zadeh discusses how his education provided him with an algorithm for future success. read more
Professor David Jacobs' work helps us to identify the flora and fauna in the world around us. A few years ago, his group here at the university, along with collaborators from Columbia University and the Smithsonian produced Leafsnap , an interactive electronic field guide for plants. Recently, Jacobs reunited with his team--including Professor Peter Belhumeur of Columbia University's Computer Science Department--to create and launch Birdsnap , a lively and interactive website and iphone app that uses facial recognition and pattern matching to identify different types of birds. Casual... read more
Mustafa Bilgic, assistant professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology and University of Maryland alumnus, has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his proposal entitled “Active Learning through Rich and Transparent Actions.” While at the University of Maryland, Bilgic worked with Lise Getoor. Bilgic’s project “Active Learning through Rich and Transparent Actions” focuses on how Active Learning can potentially minimize the costs, time and effort that is involved with annotating machine models. “I am very happy to have received this award,... read more
We are delighted to announce that Eytan Ruppin, Andrew Childs, Thomas Goldstein, Michelle Mazurek, Anwar Mamat, and Pedram Sadeghian will be joining us shortly. Eytan Ruppin will join the department as a Professor and Director of the Center for BioInformatics and Computational Biology. His main area of expertise is in computational systems biology, with an emphasis on genome scale metabolic system modeling of human, microbial and plant metabolism. His lab projects focused on the study of metabolic alterations in cancer and aging, which aimed to identify and explore novel disease biomarkers... read more
Jacob Devlin (M.S., 2009) has won the 2014 Best Long Paper award from the Association of Computational Linguistics for his co-authored paper entitled "Fast and Robust Neural Network Joint Models for Statistical Machine Translation". Mr. Devlin graduated with an M.S. in Computer Science in 2009 and currently works as an NLP Research Scientist at BBN Technologies. At Maryland, Jacob was supervised by Professor Bonnie Dorr. Read more about the ACL Best Paper Awards 2014 here: http://acl2014.org/BestPaper.htm read more
Professor Jacob Lurie of Harvard University’s Mathematics Department has won the Inaugural Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics . Professor Bill Gasarch mentored Lurie from 1992-93; at the time, Lurie was a high school student at the Montgomery Blair Magnet Program . Together, Gasarch and Lurie worked on Recursion theory and Surreal numbers. Gasarch has mentored many students from Montgomery Blair over the years. Read more about Professor Lurie and his prize here: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/06/lurie-wins-award/ read more
The Department of Computer Science is pleased to announce that Ramani Duraiswami and Jeff Foster have both been promoted to the rank of Professor. Ramani joined the department in 2004, and he currently directs research at the Perceptual Interfaces and Reality Laboratory (PIRL). His primary research interests include computer audition, computer vision, machine learning and scientific computing. Ramani is also a member of UMIACS (University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies). Jeff joined the department in 2003, and he currently serves as the Associate Chair of the Graduate... read more
UMD CS Alumnus Amnon Lotem (Ph.D. 2000) and co-authors Ronald Fagin and Moni Naor have been honored with the 2014 G ö del Prize for their paper, Optimal Aggregation Algorithms for Middleware. This paper introduces the “threshold algorithm”, which is used for gathering multi-sourced information, and provides a framework to design and analyze algorithms that can help aggregate information from multiple data sources. The G ö del prize recognizes outstanding papers in theoretical computer science and is presented by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and ACM’s... read more
Sergey Ivanov, the IT Systems Administrator for the CS Department, participated in the 117th Boston Marathon on April 24th 2014. On that cool, clear day, Sergey ran 26.2 miles through Massachusetts. Starting in Hopkinton, he ran 13.1 miles northeast to Wellesley, then ran another seven miles to Newton’s Heartbreak Hill, and then on to the finish line in Boston. Sergey competed in what can only be described as barefoot running sandals (entirely reminiscent of footwear that might have been worn by athletes in the ancient Olympics). He finished the race in an impressive time of 3:37:55 at a pace... read more
Bitcamp supported in part by the UMD Computer Science Department
Bitcamp, the University of Maryland’s first Major League Hackathon, drew nearly 700 students from colleges as far away as Toronto, Canada. Bitcamp opened with a keynote speech from Brendan Iribe and Michael Antonov, of Oculus VR. read more