Recent News & Accomplishments
2009
Professor Rance Cleaveland (CS/ISR) is the principal investigator and Professor Steven Marcus is a co-PI for the University of Maryland's portion of a major new National Science Foundation collaborative research grant, "Formal Analysis of Complex Systems." *The five-year, $10 million project is part of NSF's "Expeditions in Computing" initiative. read more
Professor Emeritus Harold P.Edmundson passed away on July 9, 2009. Professor Edmundson held a joint appointment in Computer Science and the Mathematics Department from 1967 until 1991 when he retired. Ed" was a volunteer in Rocky Mountain National Park until shortly before his death. His obituary is located at: www.allnutt.com . read more
Abhinav Gupta and Larry Davis' recent CVPR 2009 paper, on describing storylines of videos, was featured in IEEE Spectrum article and on the front-page of Discovery Tech News. The paper describes a technique to automatically generate blurbs describing the plays of the baseball game. This research was done in collaboration with researchers at Univ. of Pennsylvania. IEEE Spectrum Discovery News read more
This year's VLDB best paper award has been given to Jian Li, Barna Saha, and Prof. Amol Deshpande for their paper, A Unified Approach to Ranking in Probabilistic Databases". Barna's graduate advisor is Samir Khuller and Jian has been working with both Samir and Amol. The paper is the result of a project begun in one of Amol's classes. The students continued to work on the project following the class's completion and submitted the paper covering their results. read more
Hanan Samet is the winner of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Research Award for 2009. This award recognizes his landmark book on data structures and its impact on the theory and practice of GIS science. read more
Jan Plane has been selected as the 2008-2009 Provost's Faculty Academic Advisor of the Year and she will be honored at the Undergraduate Studies Advising Conference on August 18. Jan's nomination mentioned her willingness to give of her time to the mentoring of students, being the AWC chapter advisor, and the respect that she has garnered from both faculty and students. read more
The paper "Using Histograms to Better Answer Queries to Probabilistic Logic Programs" by Matthias Broecheler, Gerardo Simari and V.S. Subrahmanian has been named the recipient of the Best Student Paper Award at the 2009 International Conference on Logic Programming to be held in Pasadena, CA in July 2009. read more
Mike Hicks and his former student, Iulian Neamtiu, were quoted in an MIT Technology Review article on a company developing live updating for Linux. The UMD project web site detailing their research on dynamic updating was linked in the article. More information can be found at: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22674/page2/ read more
The University of Maryland will host a workshop on parallel computing systems on May 29, 2009, titled " Theory and Many-Cores (T&MC): What Does Theory Have to Say About Many-Core Computing? ." The workshop is being organized by Professor Uzi Vishkin (ECE/UMIACS). The main objective of the workshop will be to explore opportunities for theoretical computer science research and education in the emerging era of many-core computing, and develop understanding of the role that theory should play in it. Workshop website: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/conferences/tmc2009/ read more
Dave Jacobs' work on recognizing trees from iPhone pictures has been described in a CNN Science-Tech blog post. More information is available at: http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/05/04/future-iphone-app-may-identify-trees-from-photos/ read more