Recent News & Accomplishments
2023
The $500,000 award aims to increase the number of Black, Latina and Native American women receiving undergraduate computing degrees at UMD
The Reboot Representation Tech Coalition (Reboot Representation) recently awarded the University of Maryland $500,000 for the RESET Project , a new program housed in the Iribe Initiative for Inclusion and Diversity in Computing (I4C) that aims to reset tech culture to Represent, Excel and Support Equity in Tech (RESET). Black, Latina and Native American (BLNA) women represent approximately 16% of the total U.S. population, yet they make up only 4% of students obtaining bachelor's degrees in computing. The landscape at UMD is similar––BLNA women make up 13% of UMD undergraduates, but only 5%... read more
The recent Ph.D. graduate from George Mason University brings a deep background in data science, computational biology and machine learning
Fardina Alam will join the University of Maryland's Department of Computer Science in August 2023 as a lecturer. Alam, who recently earned her Ph.D. in computer science from George Mason University, was honored with the department's outstanding dissertation award for her research on utilizing deep learning techniques to extract meaningful information from protein structure data. “ We are excited to welcome Dr. Alam to our department,” said Department Chair Matthias Zwicker , who holds the Elizabeth Iribe Chair for Innovation and the Phillip H. and Catherine C. Horvitz Professorship. “ With... read more
Soheil Feizi shares his thoughts on the Insufficient Reliability of Publicly Available AI Detectors and its concerns for educators
New preprint research from assistant professor Soheil Feizi and colleagues at the University of Maryland finds that no publicly available AI detectors are sufficiently reliable in practical scenarios. “They have a very high false-positive rate and can be pretty easily evaded,” Feizi told me. For example, he said, when AI writing is run through paraphrasing software, which works like a kind of automated thesaurus, the AI detection systems are little better than a random guess. (I found the same problem in my tests of Turnitin .) He’s also concerned that AI detectors are more likely to flag the... read more
The cost of operating the systems is so high that companies aren’t deploying their best versions to the public
AI chatbots have a problem: They lose money on every chat. The enormous cost of running today’s large language models, which underpin tools like ChatGPT and Bard, is limiting their quality and threatening to throttle the global AI boom they’ve sparked. Their expense, and the limited availability of the computer chips they require, are also constraining which companies can afford to run them and pressuring even the world’s richest companies to turn chatbots into moneymakers sooner than they may be ready to. “The models being deployed right now, as impressive as they seem, are really not the... read more
The awards will enable the students to conduct research and present at scientific conferences over the summer
Every year, the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS) Alumni Network offers summer awards to help undergraduates defray costs related to conducting research, attending conferences or interning. Read below how this year’s award recipients plan to further their professional and career development with diverse funding opportunities. Riya Kumari Senior computer science major Riya Kumari will be attending the 2023 I nternational Conference on Robotics and Automation in Lond on to present her research with the Perception and Robotics Group, led by Computer Science Professor... read more
The prestigious award has been granted for his remarkable work on mitigating spurious correlations in deep learning.
Soheil Feizi , an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, received an Amazon Research Award to continue his work mitigating spurious correlations in deep learning. These correlations occur when deep learning models mistakenly identify irrelevant or coincidental relationships in the data, leading to inaccurate results and potential biases. The award program aims to foster innovation and support cutting-edge research in machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. Feizi is one of 79 award recipients from 54 universities across 14 countries... read more
UMD artificial intelligence experts Soheil Feizi and Furong Huang share their latest research on large language models like ChatGPT, the possible implications of their use and what’s coming next.
In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has made tremendous strides thanks to advances in machine learning and growing pools of data to learn from. Large language models (LLMs) and their derivatives, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s BERT, can now generate material that is increasingly similar to content created by humans. As a result, LLMs have become popular tools for creating high-quality, relevant and coherent text for a range of purposes, from composing social media posts to drafting academic papers. Despite the wide variety of potential applications, LLMs face increasing... read more
The President of the University of Maryland, Darryll J. Pines, chimes in on the debate whether Artificial Intelligence is beneficial to higher education and whether Chat GPT is just the beginning
When I began putting together my “State of the Campus” presentation to the University Senate in late February, I workshopped the introduction with not only staff members in the president’s office and our Office of Marketing and Communications, but also with one of the newest arrivals to higher education: ChatGPT. I didn’t do this as a PR stunt, or to demonstrate how new artificial-intelligence systems will uproot and replace traditional learning — or university faculty and staff. I did it to show that ChatGPT, and whatever comes to compete with it or take it to the next level, is not... read more
Adonis uses artificial intelligence to automate insurance company and health care provider payment collection processes.
University of Maryland alum Akash Magoon (B.S. ’18, computer science), a visionary entrepreneur and tech innovator, is making waves as CEO of Adonis —a company named after the Greek god of renewal. Adonis, which recently received $17.3 million in Series A funding, uses artificial intelligence to bridge the gap of one of the medical sector’s most overlooked issues: automating insurance company and health care provider payment collection processes. “We knew that in the medical provider ecosystem, there needed to be a new company that was taking a renewed approach to how everyone was thinking... read more
From tackling food insecurity to fostering cultural exchanges, UMD students and alums are positively impacting communities through their newly formed companies.
What if drones could deliver produce to people in food-insecure areas or an app could help farmers in developing countries secure loans? These are just a couple of the ideas that University of Maryland students and alums turned into full-fledged businesses with help from the Mokhtarzada Hatchery , a startup incubator in the Department of Computer Science. To celebrate their success over the last academic year, the four 2022-23 teams showcased their startups at the second annual Demo Day event on May 8, 2023. Haroon Mokhtarzada, who founded the hatchery with his brothers Idris and Zeki in 2021... read more