Recent News & Accomplishments
2015
After graduating from the University of Maryland in 1996 with a degree in Computer Science, Sujal Patel moved to the Pacfic Northwest to work for Real Networks in Seattle. In 2001, he went on to found Isilon, a hardware and software company that sold clustered file systems for digital content and other data. He served as CTO originally, and then went on to serve the company as CEO from 2007 until EMC Sytems acquired the company. Patel remained with EMC until 2012. Recently, Patel was named Strategic Director at the Madrona Venture Group, a venture capital firm in Seattle. The Madrona Venture... read more
On December 17, 2015, The Computing Research Association (CRA) announced the 2016 Outstanding Undergraduate Research award winners. Computer Science Seniors Andrea Bajcsy and Frank Cangialosi both received Honorable Mentions for their research. Bajcsy, a Brendan Iribe Scholarship recipient, works with Professor Yiannis Aloimonos in Computer Vision and Robotics, and Cangialosi, a Gannon-Della Torre Scholarship recipient, works with Research Scientist Dave Levin in Computer Networks, Security, and Measurement . *** In a time when most of their peers are headed to industry to work for large... read more
On December 15, 2015, the National Academic of Inventors named Professor Ben Shneiderman as a NAI fellow. read more
On December 14, 2015, Professor Dorothea Wagner, Steering Committee Chair of the European Symposia for Algorithms (ESA) , announced that a Test of Time Award will be given to “ Approximation Algorithms for Connected Dominating Sets ,” a paper co-authored in 1996 by Professor Samir Khuller , Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science, and Professor Sudipto Guha of the University of Pennsylvania. The ESA Test of Time Award identifies and celebrates “outstanding papers in algorithms research that were published in the ESA proceedings 19-21 years ago, and which are still influential and... read more
University of Maryland study suggests that a society’s level of mobility influences whether its members treat outsiders as individuals
One can’t help but notice that migration is increasing. The trend over the last century has been toward greater mobility for more people around the world. Many people today live in a place different from where they were born, with different social norms and customs. A new study by University of Maryland researchers points to a surprising byproduct: increased mobility may help people to treat each other as individuals rather than as members of a defined social group. The work suggests that mobility counteracts the tendency of populations to become more ethnocentric—or prone to favor members of... read more
On October 29th, 2015, The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) held a Celebration of Distinguished Professor Emerita Dianne O'Leary on the Occasion of her Retirement, during their annual conference. The organizers of the celebration for Professor O'Leary included Misha E. Kilmer of Tufts University, Tamara G. Kolda of Sandia National Laboratories, James G. Nagy of Emory University, and Julianne Chung of Virginia Tech. Scholars in the field gathered to give papers in her honor and to celebrate the significance of Professor O'Leary's work as a Computer Scientist and Applied... read more
For his presentation entitled "Trace Oblivious Program Execution: A Programming Language Approach to Security," PhD candidate Chang Liu earned the John Vlissides Award at the ACM conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) Doctoral Symposium held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from October 23-30, 2015. OOPSLA is operated by SIGPLAN and was held as a part of SPLASH '15. Liu’s advisors are Professor Michael Hicks and Associate Professor Elaine Shi (now at Cornell University). The John Vlissides Award is given by a selection committee to a doctoral... read more
On November 11th 2015, Eytan Ruppin, Professor of Computer Science, and Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computation Biology published a co-authored a paper entitled " Diversion of aspartate in ASS1-deficient tumours fosters de novo pyrimidine synthesis " in Nature . The team of scientists examined two types citrullinaemia ( amino acid disorders that do not allow cells to produce citrin--which is essential to removing urea, ammonia, and other toxic substances from the blood via the liver) to show that levels of Argininosuccinate synthase (ASS1), the missing enzyme that... read more
Before coming to the University of Maryland in 2002 to earn a master's degree in Computer Science, Pooja Sankar '04, earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at IIT, Kapur. Ms. Sankar then took her talents to Oracle, Kosmix, and Facebook before founding her company Piazza while she earned her MBA at Stanford Business School. Piazza, is an online, educational platform that allows professors, teaching assistants, and students, to ask and answer questions as well communicate and exchange ideas. Ms. Sankar was recently interviewed on NPR , and she spoke about how this platform can help shy... read more
This October, the University of Maryland sent 44 students to Austin, Texas, for the 2015 Grace Hopper Conference. We also had 19 attend this year’s Code(Her) conference in Washington, DC. On October 21st, there was an event to recap the two diversity conferences as well as a dessert social for students and sponsors. The panel had 8 young women in computer science answering questions and was moderated by Phyllis Kolmus of AT&T Government Solutions. The first question was about what they learned at the conferences. Freshman Fonda Li, who went to Code(Her), got to participate in UI workshops... read more