Recent News & Accomplishments
2023
Maryland Cybersecurity Center researchers honored for study on China's real-time encryption blocking system.
Researchers in the Maryland Cybersecurity Center have been recognized for their groundbreaking study on China’s latest censorship system that blocks fully-encrypted traffic in real time. “Our work not only provides a detailed, data-driven understanding of how China has been censoring fully-encrypted traffic, it also uses these new findings to present a slew of ways to circumvent censorship,” says Dave Levin , an associate professor of computer science and core member in MC2. The Great Firewall of China (GFW) is the nickname given to the combination of tools, services and rules that the... read more
He received the esteemed award for his pioneering research and scholarship in spatial databases and related fields.
Hanan Samet , a Distinguished University Professor of computer science with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies is the inaugural recipient of the Lifetime Impact Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (ACM SIGSPATIAL). He was honored for his pioneering research and scholarship in spital databases and related fields and dedicated service to ACM SIGSPATIAL. The award recognized his five decades of advancing technical achievements and educational tools focused on databases, data... read more
Leeman sought out University Career Center support for internship applications and interviews and landed a Major League Baseball internship.
Why did you decide to study computer science at UMD and what do you hope to do with your degree? I’ve always been drawn to technology and how it can be utilized to impact our daily lives. My passion for computer science grew with two computer science electives in high school, where I learned basics in HTML, CSS, Javascript and Java. As I prepare to graduate, I am proud of all the skills I’ve developed in computer programming and data analysis, and I hope to apply them to building software that can benefit the lives of others. How have you taken advantage of opportunities on campus to pursue... read more
From Maryland to ‘Wunderland,’ computer science alums Kristin and Andy Looney have been on a game-changing journey.
In a big, purple Victorian house not far from the University of Maryland campus, Kristin (B.S. ’88, computer science) and Andy Looney (B.S. ’86, computer science) have spent nearly three decades making a unique kind of magic. Together, through their company Looney Labs, the husband and wife have created a smorgasbord of signature games with names like Icehouse , Fluxx and Volcano , giving gamers of all ages a new way to play. “Our mission is to create fun—to create attractive, innovative and, above all, really fun parlor games,” Kristin explained. Though their business is all about games, it’... read more
The team received the award for their work on the performance portability of different programming models for graphics processing units.
A team from the Parallel Software and Systems Group (PSSG) at the University of Maryland received the Best Research Poster Award for their work on the performance portability of parallel programming models on graphics processing units (GPUs) at the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC23) , held in Denver, Colorado, from November 12 to 17, 2023. Their poster, " Evaluating Performance Portability of GPU Programming Models ,” made a notable contribution by examining various programming models and observing their overall efficiency. UMD... read more
He received the award for his exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems and technology.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has announced that Professor Alexander Barg (ECE/ISR) is the 2024 recipient of its Richard W. Hamming Medal . Barg, who also serves as an affiliate faculty member at the Department of Computer Science, was honored “for contributions to the theory of error-correcting codes and their applications in distributed storage, non-volatile memory, and digital fingerprinting.” The Richard W. Hamming Medal, established in 1986, is the highest IEEE-wide award for exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems and technology. It... read more
The award provides significant run-time on supercomputers managed by the U.S. government.
University of Maryland researchers have won a competitive award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that will provide them access to some of the world’s most powerful computational platforms. The award—from the DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment ( INCITE ) program—will enable UMD experts in high-performance computing and machine learning to scale distributed AI training and develop new AI vision and language models used in popular applications like DALL-E and ChatGPT. The researchers will use federal facilities to develop and test their novel methods... read more
Christopher Metzler collaborates with the LEAD Lab to advance inclusion in neuroscience.
The Language, Experience and Development (LEAD) Lab is pursuing innovations to include more people of color in cognitive studies, including hairstyling techniques that optimize how brain activity is measured. The LEAD lab, led by its Director, Assistant Professor Rachel Romeo , embarked on this work after noticing a barrier to inclusion posed by the technology she used for her research into how early experiences affect cognitive development. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) uses light beams delivered through a cap studded with sensors to track neural blood flow. But the caps were... read more
His research on large language model vulnerabilities earns a spot in a global AI conference.
Large language models (LLMs)—a type of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm—are used to power various applications from chatbots to writing assistants. Yet, these models face increasing security risks from prompt hacking—a process where models are coerced into abandoning their intended tasks in favor of potentially harmful instructions. University of Maryland computer science major Sander Schulhoff will present a research paper on this issue at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2023 conference, scheduled for December 6 to 10, 2023, in Singapore. His paper, titled... read more
Their innovative work focuses on improving place recognition capabilities, a critical component for accurately identifying the specific locations visited by diverse robots.
Peng Gao , formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland and now at the University of Massachusetts Amherst , received a Best Paper Award in the Agri-Robotics category at the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), held in Detroit, Michigan, from October 1 to 5, 2023. His paper, titled "Visual, Spatial, Geometric-Preserved Place Recognition for Cross-View and Cross-Modal Collaborative Perception," stood out among 1,700 accepted papers, highlighting its innovative advancements in robotics. In addition to Gao, collaborators on the research... read more