Recent News & Accomplishments
2015
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
Senior Lecturer Jandelyn Plane has certainly stayed busy this summer. In addition to leading the Computer Science Connect camp, directing the Maryland Center for Women in Computing, and serving... read more
PhD student Noseong Park, postdoctoral fellow Edoardo Serra, and Professor and Director of the Lab for Computational Cultural Dynamics and Center for Digital International Government V.S. Subrahmanian have published a paper in IEEE Intelligent Systems on the use of predictive analytics to prevent rhinoceros poaching. Building “...on behavior models of both rhinos and poachers,” the Anti-Poaching Engine system detailed in the paper represents a promising step towards increasing animal protection. The paper, “...the first entry in [Intelligent Systems'] new Predictive Analytics column,” is... read more
PhD student Adil Yalcin's work on Keshif, a web-based data visualization tool designed to be readily usable to a wide audience, was featured in a Mobility Lab article this Monday. Yalcin is co-... read more
The laboratory for Programming Languages at the University of Maryland (PLUM) released Adapton June 25, 2015. The lab is directed by Professors Jeff Foster and Michael Hicks and Assistant Professor David Van Horn. Adapton is a library offering “...programming language abstractions for incremental computation.” The website defines an incremental computation as one in which “...repeating [the computation] with a changed input is faster than from-scratch recomputation.” Adapton is currently available for OCaml , with implementations in Rust and Racket coming soon. A sizeable number of people... read more
Craig Abod (B.S. Computer Science, 1986) received the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Greater Washington June 18, 2015. Abod is President and CEO of Carahsoft Technology Corporation. read more
The Maryland Advanced Research Computing Center, a collaboration between the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University, is scheduled to open this month. The Center will be located close to... read more