Recent News & Accomplishments
2016
After competing in the Mid-Atlantic ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) Regional contest the Computer Science Department’s three competing teams scored in the top 15 out of 182 teams. The top team, UMDblack, placed third. Mahsa Derakhshan, John Tan, and Hadi Yami have earned a spot to compete in the ICPC World Finals to be held in Rapid City, South Dakota from May 20-17th 2017. Their coaches are PhD student Peng Shangfu and Jack and Rita Minker Professor of Computer Science Mohammad Haghiagyahi. After their competition this May, we will interview the students about their... read more
On Saturday, December 3rd, Terrapin Hackers hosted Major League Hacking’s annual Local Hack Day , with over 100 registered students. At 9am, thousands of eager high school and university students in different locations begin to code. Local Hack Day acknowledges the “local hacker community around the world.” University of Maryland and local high school hackers gathered at Collider--the Terrapin Hackers meeting and coworking space--to participate in the festivities. For twelve consecutive hours, students worked on creating personal or group projects related to software or hardware. Participants... read more
Emerita Professor Bonnie Dorr (now also of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition , IHMC) has been named an ACL ( Association for Computational Linguistics ) Fellow for 2016. Fellows are recognized for their “enduring and outstanding contributions to the field of computational linguistics." Professor Dorr was specifically recognized for her “significant contributions to machine translation, summarization, and human evaluation.” Dorr also served as the Vice President of the ACL in 2005. Professor Dorr joined the Computer Science Department in 1992 after she earned in PhD in... read more
Professor Vipin Kumar (PhD, '82), Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, and the William Norris Endowed Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, is the 2016 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award , one of IEEE Computer Society's most prestigious awards. This award honors Kumar's outstanding contributions in the application of high-performance computers using innovative approaches. Currently, Kumar's research interests include data mining, high-performance computing, and their applications in Climate/Ecosystems and Biomedical domains. Kumar... read more
Professor Atif Memon is serving as co-chair of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation to be held in Tokyo, Japan in March 2017. He has been working with Professor Yasuharu Nishi of University of Electro-Communications Tokyo, Japan. This conference "is intended to provide a common forum for researchers, scientists, engineers and practitioners throughout the world to present their latest research findings, ideas, developments and applications in the area of Software Testing, Verification and Validation," and it is the premiere conference for its... read more
On January 1st 2017, Robert Pless , PhD '00 will begin as the inaugural Patrick and Donna Martin Endowed Professor of the George Washington University in Washington, DC. Pless is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Washington Univerity in St. Louis, MO. His research areas include computer vision and robotics. His dissertation advisor was Yiannis Aloinmonos. Read GWU's article on Pless here: https://graduate.seas.gwu.edu/welcome-professor-robert-pless read more
Professor Sam H. Noh, recently named the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS), is an alumnus of the Department of Computer Science. Noh, who was a student of Professor Ashok Agrawala, is also Professor and Head of the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology (UNIST) in Ulsan, Korea. The ACM featured Noh in an interview about his research on new memory technogies. Article: http://www.acm.org/articles/people-of-acm/2016/sam-noh read more
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