Recent News & Accomplishments
2014
Two University of Maryland Ph.D. students, David Harris in applied mathematics (advised by Dr. Aravind Srinivasan) and Vahid Liaghat in computer science (advised by Dr. MohammadTaghi HajiAghayi) have been appointed to speak at China Theory Week 2014. China Theory Week is an annual workshop that has been held since 2007 under the sponsorship of Professor Andrew Chi-Chih Yao of IIIS at Tsinghua University. It provides opportunity for the most accomplished Ph.D. students to meet, as well as to present and discuss their research. The workshop will be held from September 8-12, 2014 in IIS,... read more
Dr. Aravind Srinivasan, professor of computer science at University of Maryland, College Park, will be serving as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Algorithms starting September 1, 2014. This is a peer-reviewed journal which is distributed quarterly, and publishes extenisve original research centered on algorithms. Dr. Srinivasan is very much looking forward to his position as Editor-in-Chief. “Algorithms are becoming ubiquitous not just as a scientific discipline, but as a field having significant impact in practice,” Srinivasan said. “I thank our department, college, and UMD for... read more
An alumnus of our Computer Science Department and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University, Subbarao ‘Rao’ Kambhampati (PhD ’89) has been named President Elect of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). He will serve as the president of the organization from 2016-18. In addition to Kambhampati’s many accomplishments, he has written a paper with Professor Dana Nau, who has recently been named a fellow of the AAAI. However, in fall of 1984, Rao Kambhampati was a graduate student bent on finding a clever way to earn a place in Emeritus... read more
Vahid Liaghat , a PhD candidate, has been awarded a 2014 Google Fellowship for research in Market Algorithms. He is one of only fourteen recipients of this award from the United States and Canada. Google awards these fellowships to outstanding students such as Liaghat to recognize them for their talent, creativity, knowledge, and to support their future contributions to computer science. Liaghat's current research interests include design and analysis of online algorithms, algorithmic game and graph theory as well as combinatorial optimization. This is Liaghat's second major award of 2014, as... read more
CS alumnus and Zoosk co-founder Shayan Zadeh discusses how his education provided him with an algorithm for future success. read more
Professor David Jacobs' work helps us to identify the flora and fauna in the world around us. A few years ago, his group here at the university, along with collaborators from Columbia University and the Smithsonian produced Leafsnap , an interactive electronic field guide for plants. Recently, Jacobs reunited with his team--including Professor Peter Belhumeur of Columbia University's Computer Science Department--to create and launch Birdsnap , a lively and interactive website and iphone app that uses facial recognition and pattern matching to identify different types of birds. Casual... read more
Mustafa Bilgic, assistant professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology and University of Maryland alumnus, has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his proposal entitled “Active Learning through Rich and Transparent Actions.” While at the University of Maryland, Bilgic worked with Lise Getoor. Bilgic’s project “Active Learning through Rich and Transparent Actions” focuses on how Active Learning can potentially minimize the costs, time and effort that is involved with annotating machine models. “I am very happy to have received this award,... read more
We are delighted to announce that Eytan Ruppin, Andrew Childs, Thomas Goldstein, Michelle Mazurek, Anwar Mamat, and Pedram Sadeghian will be joining us shortly. Eytan Ruppin will join the department as a Professor and Director of the Center for BioInformatics and Computational Biology. His main area of expertise is in computational systems biology, with an emphasis on genome scale metabolic system modeling of human, microbial and plant metabolism. His lab projects focused on the study of metabolic alterations in cancer and aging, which aimed to identify and explore novel disease biomarkers... read more
Jacob Devlin (M.S., 2009) has won the 2014 Best Long Paper award from the Association of Computational Linguistics for his co-authored paper entitled "Fast and Robust Neural Network Joint Models for Statistical Machine Translation". Mr. Devlin graduated with an M.S. in Computer Science in 2009 and currently works as an NLP Research Scientist at BBN Technologies. At Maryland, Jacob was supervised by Professor Bonnie Dorr. Read more about the ACL Best Paper Awards 2014 here: http://acl2014.org/BestPaper.htm read more
Professor Jacob Lurie of Harvard University’s Mathematics Department has won the Inaugural Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics . Professor Bill Gasarch mentored Lurie from 1992-93; at the time, Lurie was a high school student at the Montgomery Blair Magnet Program . Together, Gasarch and Lurie worked on Recursion theory and Surreal numbers. Gasarch has mentored many students from Montgomery Blair over the years. Read more about Professor Lurie and his prize here: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/06/lurie-wins-award/ read more