Recent News & Accomplishments
2015
Prince George's Community Television, a local television news network, has produced a report on Sparks Elementary School students' visit to the Department of Computer Science and University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies' Autonomy, Robotics, and Cognition Lab Thursday, June 4. Their video covering the event can be viewed here , and features interviews with Professor Yiannis Aloimonos and Associate Research Scientist Cornelia Fermüller. read more
After he and his brothers sold Webs.com, a web host and website builder, alum Idris Mokhtarzada continued working there as a Senior Architect—before leaving to focus on a new set of problems. read more
On Wednesday, June 17, Professor Adam Porter signed his appointment letter as Executive Director of the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering (CESE), starting July 1, 2015. read more
Professor Jonathan Katz will give the keynote address at the 15th annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), to be held June 30 to July 2, 2015 in Philadelphia, and has been invited to speak at a Symposium on Foundations of Cyber Security and Privacy, to be held July in Munich, Germany. PETS , an annual symposium which “...[brings] together privacy and anonymity experts from around the world to discuss recent advances and new perspectives,” will take place on the campus of Drexel University. Professor Katz will be delivering the keynote Tuesday, June 30, titled “Secure... read more
Competitions between man and machine always seem to hold more than purely objective significance. Whether as a result of alarming science-fiction conjectures about robots overthrowing humanity or of a more reactionary desire to assert humanity's superiority to its creations, people often tend to assign a great deal of societal importance to innovations in automation—IBM's Watson system, which recently won against two Jeopardy champions in 2011, stands out as an example of this behavior. QANTA, a question-answering system based on deep learning principles, was developed by a team of... read more
The 2015 SIGPLAN election results were released recently. With their announcement came the news that Professor Michael Hicks of the University of Maryland would serve as the chair of SIGPLAN from July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2018. SIGPLAN, a special interest group (SIG) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), focuses on programming languages: examining the theoretical and practical sides of the very broad field. It “...explores programming language concepts and tools focusing on design, implementation, and efficient use,” according to the ACM's description . The group sponsors a number... read more
Professor Larry Davis will be recognized at a workshop in his honor from June 10 to June 12, 2015, during the final days of the annual CVPR Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. The workshop (link here ) will be comprised of multiple short talks from its attendees in Professor Davis' honor. Professor Davis has taught at the University of Maryland since 1981. He received his PhD from the University of Maryland in 1976. He is affiliated with UMIACS and is the director of the Center for Automation Research (CfAR) at UMD, and from 1999 to 2012 served as Chair of the Department. His research... read more
In spring semester of 2015, the Computer Science Department graduated fifteen students from the PhD program, and we are pleased to announce where they’ll be headed for postdocs, research positions, and positions in industry. We wish all of our graduating students continued success. May 2015 PhD Graduates: Marco David Adelfio , Mitre Corporation (McLean, VA) Ejaz Ahmed , Amazon (Boston, MA) Florin Chelaru , Postdoc, MIT (Cambridge, MA) Rajesh Chitnis , Postdoc, Weizmann Institute of Science ( Rehovot , Israel) Gary Lee Jackson , JHU Applied Physics Lab (Laurel, MD) Reza Khani , Microsoft (... read more
Robotics Team Students from Sparks Elementary in Baltimore County visited the Department on June 4th.
A group of eight fifth-grade robotics team students, ten of their parents, and two of their robotics coaches from Sparks Elementary School in Baltimore County, Maryland visited the Department of Computer Science this Thursday, June 4. The visit came in the wake of the team's high placings at the VEX Robotics World Championship in Louisville, Kentucky this past April. The eight students and their twelve parents and teachers got to see a variety of the Department's research throughout the day, beginning with a visit to the Autonomy, Robotics, and Cognition (ARC) Laboratory at 10:00am. There,... read more
The 2015 cohort of Combinatorial Algorithms Applied Research (CAAR) undergraduate students began work at the University of Maryland Monday, June 1. CAAR is an NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, focused on bridging “...the disconnect between the core algorithms community and research communities in other disciplines within Computer Science.” The ten-week-long program will run to August 7. “This summer the UMCP REU-CAAR program will bring in 16 undergraduates from across the country, plus 12 local high school students, to work for 10 weeks on research projects!... read more