Recent News & Accomplishments
2021
Break Through Tech DC hosts its first summer Guild at UMD
Trying out a career in tech can be the best way to explore whether it’s the right fit. And this summer, University of Maryland students got that opportunity through the university’s recently announced partnership with Break Through Tech , which aims to propel more students who identify as women and non-binary into tech education—and ultimately tech careers. Through the Guild program , 55 students got paid to gain hands-on experience in designing and coding real-world applications. With two weeklong virtual sessions in August, incoming freshmen and rising sophomores at UMD learned about design... read more
On Thursday, August 26 th the department welcomed partners (from on-campus and off) and the Fall 2020 & 2021 cohorts of Master’s and PhD students to attend the Computer and Computational Sciences Research Day. Co-hosted with UMIACS , the event featured more than 25 faculty talks in association with Applied Math and the iSchool, in the Antonov auditorium at the Iribe Center . The presentations offered a unique opportunity for the faculty researchers to give brief summaries of their current research. “It was great to meet students from two cohorts face to face in our magnificent building,... read more
The new institute—with Department of Computer Science faculty member Andrew Childs as director—will significantly add to the vibrant quantum research ecosystem established in the mid-Atlantic region.
The University of Maryland has been tapped to lead a multi-institutional effort supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that is focused on developing quantum simulation devices that can understand, and thereby exploit, the rich behavior of complex quantum systems. The NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation announced on September 2, 2021, brings together computer scientists, engineers and physicists from five academic institutions and the federal government. Funded by a $25 million award from NSF, researchers in the UMD-led institute will develop... read more
Daniel Gottesman , one of the newest Fellows of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS) and the Brin Family Endowed Professor in Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Maryland, is no stranger to the region. He grew up in Montgomery County, just a short drive from the Maryland campus, and both his parents worked as biologists at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. Now, Gottesman is returning to his native Maryland after a career that has taken him across North America and through different areas of quantum information science. In his wake,... read more
An estimated 42 million sex workers drive more than $180 million in business annually worldwide. They often rely on the internet to do their job, but keeping their private and professional identities separate online is a critical safety challenge. Sex workers—and other vulnerable groups such as trans people and intimate partner abuse survivors—face higher rates of stalking, harassment, and assault. Yet little research has been conducted on how to improve digital security tools with these users in mind. A multi-institutional team of digital security analysts recently published a paper... read more
University of Maryland researchers are developing a novel algorithm that significantly improves the virtual reality (VR) experience by redirecting users to avoid colliding with physical objects. The project is led by third-year computer science doctoral student Niall Luke Williams , a researcher in the Geometric Algorithms for Modeling, Motion, and Animation (GAMMA) lab. His advisers are Distinguished University Professor Dinesh Manocha and assistant research professor Aniket Bera , both of whom hold appointments in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. “... read more
A University of Maryland expert in wireless networking and mobile computing has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) award to expand Wi-Fi infrastructure in regional urban greenspaces.
Nirupam Roy , an assistant professor of computer science with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), is the principal investigator of the $150K award . He is partnering on the project with the Maryland-National Capital Parks and Planning Commission ’s (M-NCPPC) Department of Parks and Recreation . His team includes Jennifer Roberts , an associate professor of kinesiology; Elizabeth Bonsignore , an assistant research scientist in the College of Information Studies (iSchool); Naomi Sachs , an assistant professor in the Department of Plant... read more
University of Maryland researchers won a Distinguished Paper Award for their work uncovering a unique form of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that can be used to censor internet access. DDoS attacks are an advanced form of traditional denial-of-service attacks, wherein a perpetrator tries to make a machine or network unavailable to legitimate users by flooding it with superfluous requests. The DDoS attacks are different in that they can flood a network from multiple sources, making it difficult to stop the cyberattack by simply blocking one source. The UMD team used an artificial... read more
Aravind Srinivasan, a Distinguished University Professor of computer science, has been selected to receive a 2021 Distinguished Career Award from the Washington Academy of Sciences . Since 1940, the academy has recognized scientists in the Washington, D.C., region for their scientific achievements and leadership. The Distinguished Career Award is the organization’s highest honor, acknowledging scientists and scholars who have a significant impact on their respective fields of study. Srinivasan was cited by the academy for his distinguished contributions to algorithms, probabilistic methods,... read more
Two University of Maryland graduate students in the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Lab are a part of the latest cohort of Computing Innovation (CI) Fellows , a prestigious postdoctoral research program managed by the Computing Research Association. Denis Peskov (left in photo) and Kianté Brantley (right) will join 67 other graduate students nationwide in receiving a CI Fellows award—a two-year paid postdoctoral computing position. Supported by the National Science Foundation, the CI Fellows program aids recent and soon-to-be Ph.D. computing graduates whose job... read more