Recent News & Accomplishments
2019
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
award from the College of Computer Mathematical and Natural Sciences
Ms. Amy Vaillancourt, a senior advisor with the Department, has been named the Thelma M. Williams Advisor of the Year of 2019. Each year, the College selects an advisor from a pool of nominees whom students recognize for their outstanding work with undergraduate students. Vaillancourt has worked as an advisor for the department for the last five years. During her time here, she has advised hundreds of students, served as an organizer for the Department's Career Fair, and has initated excellent programs including guided study sessions for students. Before working in undergraduate studies here... read more
Researchers from the University of Maryland have swept the runners-up categories for the SIGSPATIAL best paper competition. The authors include Heba Aly, Samet Ayhan, and Professor Hanan Samet. Aly’s paper, written with John Krumm (Microsoft Research), Gireeja Ranade (UC Berkeley), and Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research) is entitled On the value of spatiotemporal information: principles and scenarios. Ayhan’s paper was written with Samet as well as Pablo Costas (Boeing Europe) and is entitled ),“Prescriptive analytics system for long-range aircraft conflict detection and resolution.” Both... read more
Financial and technology leader Capital One is an inaugural partner of the center.
The University of Maryland recently launched a multidisciplinary center that uses powerful computing tools to address challenges in big data, computer vision, health care, financial transactions and more. The University of Maryland Center for Machine Learning will unify and enhance numerous activities in machine learning already underway on the Maryland campus. Machine learning uses algorithms and statistical models so that computer systems can effectively perform a task without explicit instructions, relying instead on patterns and inference. At UMD, for example, computer vision experts are... read more
Assistant Professor Soheil Feizi’s “Network Maximal Correlation” has been given the IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (TNSE) Best Paper Award for 2019 . This work (named the best for over a three-year period) introduces a new statistic for measuring dependency in multivariate random variables, as well as introducing a computational framework to evaluate it given multivariate data sets. The goal of the new measure is to automatically identify complex, non-linear dependencies that would not be observed with traditional measures of correlation. read more
Senior computer science major Louis-Henri Merino has been named a Fulbright Scholar for the 2019-2020 academic year. He will be studying block chains with Bryan Ford at L'École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) , a research institute and university in Lausanne, Switzerland. After his year abroad, Merino will return to the University of Maryland to earn a Ph.D. in Reliability Engineering from the A. James Clark School of Engineering . As a French speaker, Merino is looking forward to working on his language skills in Lausanne and other French-speaking European cities during his time... read more