Recent News & Accomplishments
2019
Assistant Professor Leilani Battle received the award for her project titled “Supporting Interactive Data Exploration at Scale”.
Visualizations are invaluable when exploring complex datasets. However, as datasets continue to grow at unprecedented rates, both visualization systems and database management systems are needed to process and render data efficiently. Leilani’s study aims to develop optimizations that enable close collaboration between visualization systems and database management systems, which can lead to better outcomes for systems (e.g., lower latency) and users (e.g., faster and more effective exploration).The study proposes to develop new evaluation techniques to improve the way they test systems... read more
Ahmed Abdelkader, Alireza Farhadi, Doowon Kim and Mahsa Derakhshan secured the Ann g. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship for 2019-2020
The Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship is part of the Graduate School's Semester Dissertation Fellowship program. This program provides support to outstanding doctoral students who are in the latter stages of writing their dissertations. The Wylie is full‐time fellowship. read more
Assistant Prof. Soheil Feizi has received $1 M National Science Foundation (NSF) award for his multi-disciplinary collaboration project, "CDS&E: Data-Driven Modeling and Analyses of Extreme Waves," with Prof. Balakumar Balachandran in Mechanical Engineering and Kayo Ide in Astro & Ocean Science. Rogue (freak) waves are rare events but they pose one of the greatest maritime risks. The award will be used to develop a unified, data-driven framework along with machine learning tools to advance the analysis and prediction of rare events such as oceanic freak waves. The framework and tools... read more
Dinesh Manocha and Hanan Samet were part of a select group of eight researchers chosen for this honor. SIGGRAPH established the Academy last year to recognize individuals who have made substantial contributions to computer graphics and interactive techniques. Manocha was specifically noted for his contributions to geometric modeling, GPU computing, Interactive rendering of large complex scenes, and interactive sound simulation. Manocha co-leads a major research group with more than 20 members on geometric and simulation algorithms with applications to computer graphics, robotics and virtual... read more
Computer Science Senior and Banneker/Key Scholar Louis-Henri Merino has received a Fulbright U.S. Student Grant to conduct research in Lausanne, Switzerland. Merino will collaborate with researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) on a secure electronic voting system that can resist attacks from hackers. Merino will work to adapt Ford’s prototype system to the requirements of voting systems used in Switzerland. In addition, he hopes to write code that gives voters the ability to verify that they cast their votes as intended, while keeping their own identity private... read more
Ph. D. student Denis Peskov who is conducting research at UMD with his graduate advisor, Computer Science Associate Professor Jordan Boyd-Graber. has been awarded a German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, DAAD) scholarship. DAAD is the largest international educational exchange program in Germany. The opportunity will enable Peskov to conduct research in natural language processing—the task of teaching computers to understand human language—with Alexander Fraser, a professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Munich, Germany. More on the story-... read more
Brian Brubach, who is co-supervised by Prof. Mihai Pop and Aravind Srinivasan, received two awards recently
2019 Graduate School Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award. This award "recognizes the outstanding contributions that the GAs provide to students, faculty, departments, administrative units, and the University as a whole". 2019 Finalist for University of Maryland Graduate Student Distinguished Service Award . This award "celebrates graduate students who have made outstanding contributions to the University community in the areas of service, involvement, leadership, and scholarship". read more
Steven Ryan has been selected to receive this year's staff award in recognition of his many contributions to computing resources in the department, including his help transitioning to the new computing facilities in Iribe, managing the undergraduate IT staff, providing support for departmental courses, and responding rapidly to computing problems experienced by staff,students and faculty. read more
Students in Associate Professor Jordan Boyd-Graber’s course used the tools of natural language processing—information retrieval representations, distributed semantics, sequence models, and reinforcement learning—to create question answering systems
On May 13, four former Jeopardy! champions took on students’ final projects to see whether trivia whizzes or artificial intelligence could better answer questions These question answering systems played a game called quiz bowl. Unlike Jeopardy! where you can only answer at the end of the question, you can interrupt a quiz bowl question when you know the answer. Trivia aficionados consider this a “truer” test of who knows more about a given subject, particularly because the questions are structured so that easier clues that more people know follow the initial obscure clues. If you can answer... read more
Awards from NSF and JP Morgan
Assistant Professor Furong Huang has received an NSF Award for her work entitled Principled Methods for Learning and Understanding of Neural Networks. The work advocates theoretically guaranteed training and understanding of neural networks via techniques from learning theory, nonconvex optimization and consistent latent variable model learning using spectral methods. The project aims to • Guarantee training of deep nets • Analyze generalization ability of compressed deep neural networks • Provide reliable deep neural networks robust to the worst attackers Huang was awarded a “2019 J.P... read more