Recent News & Accomplishments

 2013

Computer science senior undergraduate students Luke Valenta and Graham Welch were named 2013-2014 Philip Merrill Presidential Scholars. The Merrill Presidential Scholars Program honors Maryland’s most successful seniors and their University faculty mentors. As a Merrill Presidential Scholar, Luke selected Computer Science department faculty member Fawzi Emad as his university mentor and Graham selected Computer Science department faculty member Dr. Michelle Hugue. We interviewed Luke and Graham to find out more about their interest in computer science and future plans. Why did you...  read more
Result published in the Royal Society's flagship international biological research journal.
Professor Dr. Dana Nau, two of Dr. Nau's former Ph.D. students: Ryan Carr and Postdoctoral Researcher Patrick Roos, and Psychology Professor Dr. Michele Gelfand study the evolution of 'Third Party Punishment'. Their paper describing the results of this study, "High strength-of-ties and low mobility enable the evolution of third-party punishment" has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. According to Dr. Nau, "This interdisciplinary research is the first time that cross-cultural psychologists and computational game theorists have collaborated to examine the evolution of...  read more
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Professor Dana Nau has been named a 2014 ACM fellow for his contributions to automated search and planning. ACM recognizes fellows for their significant contributions to computing. Dr. Nau's research is in artificial intelligence, with a focus on automated planning and game theory. Learn More: Dana Nau's Website: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~nau/ Press Release: http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2013/fellows-2013  read more
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Computer Science senior undergraduate student Vicky Lai is a Finalist in the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards for 2014. The CRA's Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards recognize undergraduate students who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research. The January 2014 issue of Computing Research News will include an article on the award and an announcement of the awards will be posted on CRA's website ( www.cra.org ) later this week. Learn More: http://cra.org/awards/undergrad/  read more
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Computer Science undergraduate student Sam Feldman is the CEO and Founder of Quickmailcheck. Quickmailcheck is a service that allows users to access their email via text message without the need for a smart phone interface or the Internet. Sam and Quickmailcheck received the 2nd Place Award and the Audience Choice Award at the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship’s Pitch Dingman Competition. Learn More: Quickmailcheck.com Digman Center Website  read more
The HotNets-XII Workshop Is Taking Place at UMD Nov. 21-22, 2013
The Twelfth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-XII) workshop is being held at the University of Maryland from November 21-22, 2013. Sponsored by UMIACS, ACM SIGCOMM, Cisco, Microsoft Research, Google and vmware, the HotNets workshop was created as a forum for discussing early-stage, creative networking research. Dr. Dave Levin of the Computer Science Department and UMIACS is the General Chair for HotNets-XII. To follow the workshop live, visit the Live Blog of HotNets-XII on layer9 . Learn More: HotNets-XII Homepage Information from SIGCOMM on the HotNets Workshops  read more
Fawzi Emad and Michelle Hugue honored as Maryland Faculty Mentors
Computer science senior undergraduate students Luke Valenta and Graham Welch were named 2013-2014 Philip Merrill Presidential Scholars. The Merrill Presidential Scholars Program honors Maryland’s most successful seniors and their designated University faculty and K-12 teachers for their mentorship. As a Merrill Presidential Scholar, Luke selected CS faculty member Fawzi Emad as his university mentor and his father Dr. Van Valenta as his K-12 mentor. Graham selected CS faculty member Dr. Michelle Hugue as his university mentor and Dae Yi, his high school teacher, as his K-12 mentor. To learn...  read more
Dr. Catherine Plaisant, Dr. Ben Shneiderman and their research team received a Distinguished Paper Award at the American Medical Informatics Association Conference in Washington D.C. The award was given to only 5 full-length research papers out of the 330+ papers submitted to the conference. The award winning paper is entitled " Twinlist: Novel User Interface Designs for Medication Reconciliation." Twinlist is an interface for medication reconciliation that alleviates the tediousness of manual reconciliation without diminishing a clinician's decision making ability . The award winning paper...  read more
3rd Place Team Advances to World Finals
A team consisting of UMD undergraduate students Scott DellaTorre, Dylan Ladwig, Rizeng Zheng and reserve member Ashton Webster advanced to the World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC) after placing 3rd in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Contest. The second UMD student team, made up of Melika Abolhasani, Anu Bandi, Milad Gholami and reserve member Alex Alberg placed 9th in the competition. The Mid-Atlantic regional contest had a record high of more than 190 teams from regions including District of Columbia, East Pennsylvania,...  read more
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Three hundred young women (middle-school students) filed into the Riggs Alumni Center on Wednesday, November 13, 2013 for the Cool Careers in Cyber Security for Girls Workshop . Sitting at tables covered with computer parts, padlocks, cryptology puzzles and other cybersecurity paraphernalia, the girls tried to pick locks with shims made from soda cans, decrypt a secret message, and identify missing parts in a disassembled computer. Women who work in cybersecurity and computer science guided the girls through these activities and introduced concepts such as penetration testing, cryptography,...  read more