Recent News & Accomplishments
2015
Assistant Professor Dr. Michelle Mazurek was awarded a grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) September 1, 2015. Titled “Supporting Secure Mobile App Development”, the grant is for $333,714 over three years. Dr. Mazurek is the Principal Investigator on the grant, and the work will be done in collaboration with her students and researchers from Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. “The goal of the project is to improve security and privacy decision-making by developers of mobile applications (who are not security experts),”... read more
Associate Professor Dr. Mihai Pop was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) September 1, 2015. The grant, listed as “Scalable and Highly Accurate Methods for Metagenomics”, was awarded to Dr. Pop in collaboration with Professors Tandy Warnow and William Gropp from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. It is scheduled to last from September 1, 2015 to an estimated end date of August 31, 2019. The grant focuses on developing methods for “annotating metagenomic sequences”, as Dr. Pop puts it: determining which organisms are present in a sample... read more
The computer science department added a new office over the summer. The Office of Student Enrichment, directed by University of Pennsylvania alum and ex-associate professor at Maryland Rich Gerber, is a boon for students looking to get involved. For now, its physical presence is no more than Gerber’s own office, but it has already reached dozens of passionate undergraduates. When I talked to Gerber, he was in middle of his first major initiative: furnishing the first dedicated hacker-maker space inside the Computer Science Instructional Center. Despite the meteoric rise in the popularity of... read more
What do you get when you combine three talented UMD computer science students, entrepreneurial spirit, and a passion for giving back to the community? In the case of Arjun Baradwaj, Shabai Liu, and Eric Segev, the result is aeVidi, a flourishing web design and development business that serves small companies and non-profit organizations. The three students developed their idea for this company in 2013 as a way to combine their talents and fill their free time. “I’ve always had an entrepreneurial drive and web development was something I thought could foster that,” Baradwaj says. The founders... read more
This year's Daemon Dash had new categories, new rules, and even more sponsors, inspiring bigger hacks than in year's past. Read about this year's winning hacks, which include virtual reality, Computer Science events page redesigns, and a research paper writing aide. read more
Over 1,000 students poured into the Xfinity Center for the 2015 Computer Science Fall Career & Internship Fair. There were 126 companies, ranging from small software development firms to Fortune 500 companies. With so many companies, it could be a little overwhelming for some students. For Senior Eric Shiang, the sheer number of companies meant he needed to come to the fair with a plan. "[The number of companies] really made you have to pick which ones you want to talk to because there definitely wasn't enough time to look at all of them," he explained. "The cool part... read more
In case you weren’t able to fully check out this year’s First Look Fair, here are a few computer science related clubs you can check out: Terrapin Hackers : the Terrapin Hackers are an organization that helps students interested in going to hackathons meet other people and get involved. There is a hackathon going on almost every weekend, and Terrapin Hackers organizes bus trips to get you there. The club also hosts Hacktorials where students lead workshops to teach you some aspect of design or engineering. They even have their own design space, Collider. This club is great for networking,... read more
College Park, MD, September 9, 2015 — The Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland is one of six recipients of matching funds to endowed professorships made through the Maryland E-Nnovation Initiative Fund (MEIF) to universities in the state of Maryland. Established by The Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED), this initiative matches private donations (individual or bundled) of at least $500,000. The program was established to catalyze private donations for “basic and applied research in scientific fields.” Ms. Elizabeth Iribe’s gift of $1.5... read more
Undergraduate students Galen Stetsyuk and Mikhail Sorokin, in conjunction with the Virtual Reality (VR) Club, have developed a tank game named Core Disruption for the Oculus Rift to inspire general interest in VR. A demonstration of the game will be available in TerpZone in the Stamp Student Union during the first week of school. In the hope of learning more about the project—and with the nebulous goal of not getting motion sickness—I stopped by the CS Undergraduate Project Room in AV Williams in mid-August to meet with Stetsyuk and Sorokin. Both developers are sophomores majoring... read more
The Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), with the support of a Public Outreach and Informing the Public Grant from the American Physical Society, ran The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction from July 30 to August 1. An outreach workshop for science fiction writers, the Schr ö dinger Sessions gave its attendees a “ crash course ” in physics through lectures and tours by faculty from the University of Maryland and JQI. The goal of the workshop was to inspire new works of fiction incorporating sound depictions of quantum physics, with the hope of compelling audiences to learn... read more