Recent News & Accomplishments
2015
Professor and Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science Samir Khuller and Professor Dave Mount advised two students from Montgomery Blair High school's magnet program who have been named as Intel Student Talent Search 2015 Semi-Finalists. Khuller advised Matthew Das Sarma on his project "Absorptive Matchings and the Minimum Vertex Cover with Hard Capacities Problem," and Mount advised Sachin Pandey on his project "Optimizing Nearest Neighbor Search Methods Using Volume Overlap." Each year, several Computer Science faculty members give of their time to advise talented high school... read more
Because of Professor Yiannis Aloimonos’ (CS, CVL, UMIACS) , Dr. Cornelia Fermuller’s (UMIACS), and PhD candidate Yezhou Yang's research, robots can learn to cook in a way similar to the rest of us. By watching instructional videos on YouTube, the robot in their project is able to determine what series of steps is necessary to complete a task—in this case, how to manipulate objects associated with cooking and learn to cook. Their project is being done in conjunction with the National Information Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence in Australia (NICTA). It is also the... read more
Professor Jonathan Katz (CS, UMIACS), who also currently serves as the Director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2), is the recipient of a Humboldt Award for 2015. This award will allow him to travel to Germany to work on a long term research project with his collaborators Professors Michael Backes and Dominique Shroeder at Saarland University. Katz has been recognized for his outstanding work and impressive body of research. The awards committee also strongly believes that he will continue to produce ground-breaking work in the future. The Alexander von Humboldt foundation provides... read more
The Association for Computer Machinery has named Professor Aravind Srinivasan (CS, UMIACS, and AMSC) as a 2014 ACM Fellow. read more
CS alumus Dr. Manoel Gomes Mendonça was recently appointed Secretary of Science, Technology and Innovation of his home state of Bahia in Brazil. The state is one of the largest in the country with a population of 15 million people. Dr. Mendonca was appointed for a four year term. Prior to his appointment, Mendonça was a professor at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), where he was heading the Fraunhofer Project Center for Software and System Engineering. Mendonça received his Ph.D. in 1997. His advisor was Victor Basili. read more
2014
Assistant Professor Zia Khan's co-authored " Impact of regulatory variation from RNA to protein " was recently published in Science magazine's ScienceExpress section. This his second publication in Science , the first being published in November of 2013. The paper presents an analysis of the association of genetic variation with transcript expression, ribosome profiling and steady state protein levels. read more
The department is pleased to announce the appointment of three new affiliate faculty members: Niklas Elmqvist, Vanessa Frias-Martinez, and Richard Marciano. read more
In an article addressing the future of artificial intelligence, Tanya Lewis of Live Science.com turned to Professor Don Perlis for insight on the history and developments that have taken place in AI over the last several years. Perlis explained to Lewis that humans have eagerly anticipated the development of 'conscious machines' since the inception of Artificial Intelligence studies in the 1950s. The research that Perlis conducts with his colleagues and students include artificial intelligence: commonsense reasoning; flexible, domain-general, self-adjusting autonomous systems; and... read more
The department is pleased to announce that Marine Carpuat will join the faculty in the Spring of 2015 as an Assistant Professor. Carpuat's main research areas are multilingual natural language processing and statistical machine translation. She designs computational models that use second languages as meaning annotation to make language processing applications more accurate, more robust, and more useful. She is currently a researcher with National Research Council Canada . Prior to NRC, Carpuat was a postdoctoral researcher at the Columbia University Center for Computational Learning Systems... read more
Horace Ip's dissertation entitled: " Towards Data-Driven Large-Scale Scientific Visualization and Exploration" has won the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC)'s Best Dissertation of the Year award. Horace's advisor is Amitabh Varshney. IEEE VGTC sponsors the annual Best Doctoral Dissertation Award program to recognize outstanding academic research and development in visualization and visual analytics. The competition is administrated by the IEEE Visualization Pioneers Group (VPG) under the auspices of IEEE VGTC. The IEEE VGTC VIS Pioneers Group Doctoral Dissertation... read more