Recent News & Accomplishments
2023
From Maryland to ‘Wunderland,’ computer science alums Kristin and Andy Looney have been on a game-changing journey.
In a big, purple Victorian house not far from the University of Maryland campus, Kristin (B.S. ’88, computer science) and Andy Looney (B.S. ’86, computer science) have spent nearly three decades making a unique kind of magic. Together, through their company Looney Labs, the husband and wife have created a smorgasbord of signature games with names like Icehouse , Fluxx and Volcano , giving gamers of all ages a new way to play. “Our mission is to create fun—to create attractive, innovative and, above all, really fun parlor games,” Kristin explained. Though their business is all about games, it’... read more
The team received the award for their work on the performance portability of different programming models for graphics processing units.
A team from the Parallel Software and Systems Group (PSSG) at the University of Maryland received the Best Research Poster Award for their work on the performance portability of parallel programming models on graphics processing units (GPUs) at the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC23) , held in Denver, Colorado, from November 12 to 17, 2023. Their poster, " Evaluating Performance Portability of GPU Programming Models ,” made a notable contribution by examining various programming models and observing their overall efficiency. UMD... read more
He received the award for his exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems and technology.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has announced that Professor Alexander Barg (ECE/ISR) is the 2024 recipient of its Richard W. Hamming Medal . Barg, who also serves as an affiliate faculty member at the Department of Computer Science, was honored “for contributions to the theory of error-correcting codes and their applications in distributed storage, non-volatile memory, and digital fingerprinting.” The Richard W. Hamming Medal, established in 1986, is the highest IEEE-wide award for exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems and technology. It... read more
The award provides significant run-time on supercomputers managed by the U.S. government.
University of Maryland researchers have won a competitive award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that will provide them access to some of the world’s most powerful computational platforms. The award—from the DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment ( INCITE ) program—will enable UMD experts in high-performance computing and machine learning to scale distributed AI training and develop new AI vision and language models used in popular applications like DALL-E and ChatGPT. The researchers will use federal facilities to develop and test their novel methods... read more
Christopher Metzler collaborates with the LEAD Lab to advance inclusion in neuroscience.
The Language, Experience and Development (LEAD) Lab is pursuing innovations to include more people of color in cognitive studies, including hairstyling techniques that optimize how brain activity is measured. The LEAD lab, led by its Director, Assistant Professor Rachel Romeo , embarked on this work after noticing a barrier to inclusion posed by the technology she used for her research into how early experiences affect cognitive development. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) uses light beams delivered through a cap studded with sensors to track neural blood flow. But the caps were... read more
His research on large language model vulnerabilities earns a spot in a global AI conference.
Large language models (LLMs)—a type of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm—are used to power various applications from chatbots to writing assistants. Yet, these models face increasing security risks from prompt hacking—a process where models are coerced into abandoning their intended tasks in favor of potentially harmful instructions. University of Maryland computer science major Sander Schulhoff will present a research paper on this issue at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2023 conference, scheduled for December 6 to 10, 2023, in Singapore. His paper, titled... read more
Their innovative work focuses on improving place recognition capabilities, a critical component for accurately identifying the specific locations visited by diverse robots.
Peng Gao , formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland and now at the University of Massachusetts Amherst , received a Best Paper Award in the Agri-Robotics category at the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), held in Detroit, Michigan, from October 1 to 5, 2023. His paper, titled "Visual, Spatial, Geometric-Preserved Place Recognition for Cross-View and Cross-Modal Collaborative Perception," stood out among 1,700 accepted papers, highlighting its innovative advancements in robotics. In addition to Gao, collaborators on the research... read more
Dinesh Manocha, a co-PI of the challenge, contributes expertise in perception-based machine learning and multi-agent coordination.
A multi-institutional team led by the University of Maryland (UMD) has been selected for the DARPA Triage Challenge , in which participants compete to develop novel methods of detecting injuries, particularly in mass casualty incidents, so that medical personnel can respond more quickly, efficiently, and precisely. Dubbed RoboScout DTC, the UMD team will be part of the Systems Competition, one of three competitions in the Triage Challenge, and will focus its efforts on primary triage, in which medical personnel seek to identify and treat those most urgently in need of care. In mass casualty... read more
Whether it’s managing an office move or handling multiple maintenance requests, J’Vaughn Holmes could be one of the busiest staff members on the University of Maryland campus, yet he juggles his hectic workload with consummate ease and an engaging sense of humor. As the facilities coordinator for the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and the Department of Computer Science, it is Holmes’ responsibility to make sure everything runs smoothly behind the scenes so that faculty, staff and students have the proper space and equipment to get their work done... read more
Her work offers a fresh perspective on traditional planning languages used in robotics.
Angeline Aguinaldo , a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, received a Best Paper Award for her research in the field of robotic representation at the 2023 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI ) Fall Symposium on Unifying Representations for Robot Application Development, held in Arlington, Virginia, from October 25 to 27, 2023. Her paper, titled “ A Categorical Representation Language and Computational System for Knowledge-Based Robotic Task Planning ,” made a notable contribution to AI planning. In addition to Aguinaldo, collaborators on... read more