Recent News & Accomplishments
2016
In September 2016, Maryland Commerce provided additional support for the Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair in computer science with $1.1million. A $1.5 million private donor match will support research for this endowed chair in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. For the university press release, please read here: http://www.umdrightnow.umd.edu/news/21-million-state-maryland-will-match-private-donations-two-endowed-chairs-umd read more
Along with Distinguished University Professor Ben Shneiderman and Dr. Catherine Plaisant , members of the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) will receive two Test of Time Awards at the IEEE VISualization Conference which is being held in Baltimore from Oct 24-28. For their work from 2006 entitled, A Visual Interface for Multivariate Temporal Data: Finding Patterns of Events across Multiple Histories , Professor Ben Shneiderman, Professor Jerry Fails, Dr. Amy Karlson, and Dr. Layla Shahamat received the first VAST Conference Test of Time Award. This particular award goes to a paper from the... read more
Professor Atif Memon has been chosen to speak at the annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC). Memon is known for having founded the Event Driven Software Lab (EDSL), where faculty and students study “issues of design, development, quality assurance and maintenance of such software applications.” Among his other remarkable work and research, he continues to teach the Fundamentals of Software Testing course. This year, from November 15th to 16th, Google will be hosting its GTAC in Sunnyvale, California. The conference makes a significant impact in the technology community, joining both... read more
From the Division of Research : The University of Maryland (UMD) has appointed Amitabh Varshney, Ph.D., Interim Vice President for Research, effective October 3, 2016. In this role, Varshney will provide strategic leadership to support the continued growth of UMD's $560 million research enterprise. Varshney joined the UMD Department of Computer Science faculty in 2000, and since 2010, has served as director of the UMD Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). A leader in interactive visual computing research, Varshney’s work has focused on exploring the applications of high-... read more
Professor V.S. Subrahmanian and his research, which includes algorithmic measures of social media patterns (called STONE, for Shaping Terrorist Organization Network Efficacy) to counter terrorist attacks worldwide, were both featured on PBS Newshour on September 6th 2016. His work will also be featured on a longer special on PBS Nova special on the aftermath of the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks entitled, "15 years of Terror" by Miles O'Brien, airing on September 7th 2016 at 9pm EST. Subrahmanian's software may be able to help predict salient information about future terrorist attacks... read more
Professor Mihai Pop co-organized a workshop entitled "Next Generation Sequencing - Algorithms, and Software For Biomedical Applications" at the Schloss Dagstuhl Leibniz Zentrum fur Informatik in Dagstuhl, Germany. Pop worked with Professor Gene Myers of the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, Professor Knut Reinert of the Freie Universitaet in Berlin, and Professor Tandy Warnow of the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Scientists from Europe and the United States worked together for a week to identify computational challenges and opportunities in sequencing data and emerging experimental... read more
PhD student Ahmed Elgohary is a bit of a Renaissance individual. He has worked with Professor Amol Deshpande in databases, and he is now working with Assistant Professor Marine Carpuat in machine learning, natural language processing, and natural language inference. In a brief interview in late August, he noted that a good thing about the University of Maryland is the opportunity for students to explore different fields and work with different advisors as they decide the best area in CS for them to conduct research. He originally thought he was going to focus on databases, but he took a... read more
Professor and Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science Samir Khuller gave a talk at the European Symposium on Algorithms in Aarhus, Denmark. In 2015, ESA named Sudipto Guha and Samir Khuller as winners of the ESA Test-of-Time award for their paper Approximation Algorithms for Connected Dominating Sets (Proceedings ESA'96, Algorithmica 20:4 (1998) 374-387). PhD Student Brian Brubach, who is advised by Professor Aravind Srinivasan, also gave a paper entitled New Algorithms, Better Bounds, and a Novel Model for Online Stochastic Matching with Karthik A. Sankararaman, Aravind... read more
Professor Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi has been named the program chair for the 29th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA) to be held in Washington, D.C., in July 2017. The conference is the top ACM conference in the field of parallelism, which encompasses any computational system that can perform multiple operations or tasks simultaneously. The conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery special interest groups SIGACT (ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory) and SIGARCH (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer... read more
Professor Larry Davis, also founder and professor of UMIACS, is now a Distinguished University Professor. After earning a Ph.D. here in the department in 1976 with Azriel Rosenfeld, Davis began working as an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 1977. In 1981, he returned to the University of Maryland as professor in the Computer Science department. After a few years here, he founded the Institute of Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) in 1985, and served as its director until 1994. Davis also served as the Chair of the Department from 1999 until 2012. He now serves as... read more