Recent News & Accomplishments
2017
Jagdeep Singh,’86, Qiang Yang Ph.D.,’89 and Rajiv Gandhi Ph.D.,’03 Inducted into the Alumni Hall of Fame
As part of the commencement activities held on May 22, the department honored its three newest members of the Alumni Hall of Fame . Professor Samir Khuller, Elizabeth Iribe Chair of Computer Science, served as master of ceremonies and the inductees in attendance offered remarks. Jagdeep Singh Jagdeep Singh has spent his life as an entrepreneur, and innovator. After finishing his undergraduate degree by the age of 19, Singh went to work for Hewlett-Packard before founding several very successful companies. He was named to MIT Technology He is currently the cofounder and CEO of QuantumScape... read more
Professor Jeff Foster has been named one of the Outstanding Directors of Graduate Studies for this academic year. Since 2012, the Graduate School has presented this award to individuals who have “made exceptional contributions to graduate education, a graduate program, and/or the graduate student experience in that program.” Foster has served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the last five years, and is also a memeber (and co-founder) of the Programming Languages at University of Maryland (PLUM) Lab . read more
On Wednesday, May 24th, Larry Davis, Professor of Computer Science and UMIACS, will be hosting a Deep Learning Workshop at the brand new Edward St. John Teaching and Learning Center . For one day, eleven faculty and researchers from around the country will give a variety of talks on several different areas of deep learning including quantifying interpretability of deep networks, acoustic word embeddings, and speech recognition. Speakers include Professor Richard Baraniuk (Rice), Professor Joan Bruna (NYU), Professor Rama Chellappa (UMD) Professor Hal Daume (UMD), Dr. Xuedong Huang (Microsoft... read more
Brendan Iribe, cofounder of Oculus, has established a substantial fund to support the Department of Computer Science in various initiatives to encourage more women and other underrepresented students to take courses in and major in computer science at the University of Maryland. Iribe’s gift will support the Center for Women in Computing, summer research experiences for undergraduates (REUs), and a speaker series highlighting women academics and industry representatives in computer science. read more
Today marks the end of an era. Ben Shneiderman, Professor of Computer Science and founder of the Human Computer Interaction Lab here at the University is celebrating his retirement. Learn more about Ben and his career on this website . read more
Prayaag Venkat has been named a Goldwater Scholar for 2017. His accomplishment has been highlighted by the College of Computer Math and Natural Sciences on their website in Matt Wright's article congratulating the college's awardees: Prayaag Venkat—a computer science and mathematics double major who is also a member of the University Honors Program and a Banneker/Key Scholar—is interested in an area of theoretical computer science known as approximation algorithms, which look for the closest optimal solutions to complex problems for which exact solutions are impractical. Venkat has worked... read more
Naveen Durvasula headed to Intel ISEF
Professor Aravind Srinivasan and Assistant Professor John Dickerson mentor Naveen Durvasula, a Montgomery Blair Magnet High School student, who conducts research on improved kidney exchange methodologies. Durvasula has recently been selected to compete in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF) in May. “The purpose of my project is to compute, for a given donor-patient pair who wishes to enter a kidney-paired donation system, the expected quality of the kidney they would receive, and how long it would take for them to receive that kidney,” said Durvasula. In order to... read more
Ahmed Elgohary has received a PhD fellowship from IBM for 2017-2018. Elgohary has a history of research with IBM, which resulted in a Best Paper the 42nd Annual Conference on Very Large Databases 2016 (VLDB) held in New Delhi, India. He interned at IBM Almaden Lab, where he worked with computer scientists from a variety of research backgrounds including systems, databases, algorithms, and machine learning. He worked with Mathais Boehm and Frederick R. Reiss at IBM, and at the university, Elgohary's advisors are Professor Philip Resnick and Professor Doug Oard ( from the i-School). About the... read more
Ph.D. students Milod Kazerounian and Elissa Redmiles have been named as National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellows for 2017. Kazerounian's advisor is Professor Jeff Foster, and Redmiles' advisor is Assistant Professor Michelle Mazurek. Two undergraduates computer science majors have been named NSF Graduate Research Fellows as well: Katherine Cordwell, who is a double major with mathematics, and Jonathan San Miguel who is a double majoring with physics. Congratulations to all! read more
Each year the University System of Maryland (USM) awards faculty members for excellence and their contributions to the university community. This year, one of the recipients for excellence in mentoring is Associate Professor of Computer Science, Neil Spring. According to USM, the awards represent "the highest honor presented by the board to exemplary faculty members. Presented in four categories, the awards honor excellence in teaching, public service, mentoring, innovation, and a combined category of research, scholarship and creative activity." Doctoral student Ramakrishna Padmanabhan... read more