Recent News & Accomplishments
2023
Michael Cummings, a professor of biology with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies , is the recipient of a $50,000 Individual Project Grant that will support his work in analyzing genetic ancestry more accurately at the sub-chromosome level. The award comes from the university’s Grand Challenges Grants Program , a $30 million initiative to support research that offers promising solutions to emerging societal issues like climate change, social injustice, global health and education disparities. Cummings’ three-year project, "Accurate, Equitable... read more
Three graduate students in the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2) have been awarded seed grants to pursue research in security and privacy that has not yet been externally funded. “It’s a validation that the work we’re conducting is relevant to security and privacy research in the eyes of MC2 faculty, some of the top researchers in the world,” says Omer Akgul , a sixth-year computer science doctoral student who studies the negative effects of virtual private network (VPN) advertising being vague and misleading. He previously led a study that examined YouTube influencer marketing ads for VPNs... read more
Four graduate students in the Department of Computer Science have been named recipients of the prestigious Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year 2023-2024. Sweta Agrawal , Nakul Garg , Pranav Goel, and Shoken Kaneko were each awarded the fellowship, with Agrawal and Goel being fifth-year students and Garg and Kaneko in their fourth year. The Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship is named after Ann Wylie, a professor emerita in the Department of Geology at the University of Maryland. The fellowship provides doctoral candidates who are in the latter stages of writing their... read more
Michel Cukier, director of the Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students (ACES) undergraduate Honors College program and a professor of reliability engineering, has received a University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Mentoring. Cukier is being recognized for creating ACES, “a unique, multidisciplinary, successful program for educating the nation’s future cybersecurity leaders,” said the board in a statement. The awards are the highest honor presented by the USM Board of Regents and carry a $2,000 prize. Cukier and the 18 other award recipients will... read more
University of Maryland’s Distinguished University Professor Ming Lin and Emeritus Professor Samir Khuller have been elected to the Computing Research Association (CRA) Board of Directors. CRA is a North American organization that brings together academic departments, laboratories, and professional societies involved in computing research. The election of Lin and Khuller to the board reflects their outstanding contributions to the field of computer science and their leadership roles in academia. Lin is an expert in Robotics, Virtual Reality, Computer Graphics, and Human-Centric Computing. Her... read more
Senior Maxwell Myers conquers the challenges of track and computer science and clinches a career opportunity at Microsoft.
University of Maryland computer science major Maxwell Myers knows what it takes to be a winner. From the day he joined the track team as a freshman at Howard High School in Ellicott City, Md., Myers dedicated himself to working hard and building his confidence, running race after race with a commitment to keep getting faster. One of his proudest moments was breaking his own personal record at the 2018 Maryland outdoor state championship. “That race was the culmination of everything I had worked for in track and field and it was one of the most surreal moments in my life,” Myers reflected. “I... read more
Wordplay is all in a day’s work for the seasoned video game writer
Kyle Orland (B.S. ’04, computer science ; B.A. ’04, journalism) played the computer game Minesweeper anywhere he could find a personal computer as a kid in the ’90s: the computer nook in his middle school’s library, the home office of a friend’s parents and even the computer section of his local Circuit City while his mom shopped. The deceptively simple Microsoft game, which challenges players to click cells without detonating hidden mines, came pre-installed on more than 4 billion personal computers sold between 1992 and 2012. Despite the ubiquity of Minesweeper, Orland said its cultural... read more
The Stanfills named a classroom in the Brendan Iribe Center and made a $3 million estate gift to establish an endowed chair in enterprise computing.
Craig Stanfill (Ph.D. ’83, computer science) discovered he had a knack for programming in high school. After a brief stint as a biochemistry major at Michigan State University—Stanfill described himself as a klutz in the laboratory—he switched his major to math and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1973. To further explore his earlier interests in programming, Stanfill entered the University of Maryland’s computer science graduate program in 1979 to study artificial intelligence under Professor Charles Rieger III. His dissertation focused on knowledge representation, a branch of... read more
Chris Metzler , an assistant professor of computer science and a faculty member in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) has received seed funding from the Brain and Behavior Institute (BBI) to explore neural synchrony, a phenomenon that occurs when two peoples’ brain activity sync-up as they share a similar experience. Examples of this are musicians performing in a band, co-pilots landing an airplane, or children interacting with their caregivers. Metzler, a co-PI of the award, is studying neural synchrony in the context of the latter, with the goal of... read more
The book, Human-Centered AI, won the computing and information sciences category.
A book authored by Emeritus Professor Ben Shneiderman was recognized by the Association of American Publishers with a prestigious Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) award . The awards, now in their 47th year, acknowledge books, journals, and digital products of extraordinary merit that make a significant contribution to a field of study. Both the publisher (Oxford University Press) and the author of the book— (Schneiderman)—are now eligible for the R.R Hawkins Award which recognizes an outstanding scholarly work in all disciplines in the arts and sciences. That award is expected to... read more