Recent News & Accomplishments
2014
On August 19th, 2014, during the ACM SIGCOMM meeting in Chicago, two members of the Department of Computer Science received awards for their contributions to the field of Networking and Data Communication. Professor Neil Spring was awarded the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award for his paper with Ratul Mahajan and David Wetherall on "Measuing ISP Topologies with Rocketfuel." His paper, published in 2004, has been recognized for its ongoing, significant contribution to research conducted in this field. During the same ceremony, Aaron Schulman (Ph.D. ’13) accepted the SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation... read more
While interning in the AI group at Rocket Fuel in Silicon Valley this summer, PhD student Florin Chelaru saw his paper with Professor Hector Bravo entitled "Epiviz: interactive visual analytics for functional genomics data" published in Nature Methods . Chelaru is a graduate of the University Alexandru Ioan Cuza of Iași in Romania, and is a third year PhD student in the Computer Science Department. Chelaru took time out of his busy schedule to sit down for an interview and tell us a bit about his research in bioinformatics and genomic research, his work with Hector Bravo, and his experiences... read more
The Department is pleased to announce that the university has named two faculty members, Dr. Bonnie Dorr and Dr. Dianne O'Leary, as Professors Emeritae of the university. Dr. Bonnie Dorr is now Professor Emerita in both computer science and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Dr. Dorr came to the university in 1990, and her research includes many areas of broad-scale multilingual processing, including machine translation, summarization and cross-language retrieval. She is also associate director of the Institute for Human Machine Cognition, which is a non-profit research institution... read more
Two University of Maryland Ph.D. students, David Harris in applied mathematics (advised by Dr. Aravind Srinivasan) and Vahid Liaghat in computer science (advised by Dr. MohammadTaghi HajiAghayi) have been appointed to speak at China Theory Week 2014. China Theory Week is an annual workshop that has been held since 2007 under the sponsorship of Professor Andrew Chi-Chih Yao of IIIS at Tsinghua University. It provides opportunity for the most accomplished Ph.D. students to meet, as well as to present and discuss their research. The workshop will be held from September 8-12, 2014 in IIS,... read more
Dr. Aravind Srinivasan, professor of computer science at University of Maryland, College Park, will be serving as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Algorithms starting September 1, 2014. This is a peer-reviewed journal which is distributed quarterly, and publishes extenisve original research centered on algorithms. Dr. Srinivasan is very much looking forward to his position as Editor-in-Chief. “Algorithms are becoming ubiquitous not just as a scientific discipline, but as a field having significant impact in practice,” Srinivasan said. “I thank our department, college, and UMD for... read more
An alumnus of our Computer Science Department and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University, Subbarao ‘Rao’ Kambhampati (PhD ’89) has been named President Elect of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). He will serve as the president of the organization from 2016-18. In addition to Kambhampati’s many accomplishments, he has written a paper with Professor Dana Nau, who has recently been named a fellow of the AAAI. However, in fall of 1984, Rao Kambhampati was a graduate student bent on finding a clever way to earn a place in Emeritus... read more
Vahid Liaghat , a PhD candidate, has been awarded a 2014 Google Fellowship for research in Market Algorithms. He is one of only fourteen recipients of this award from the United States and Canada. Google awards these fellowships to outstanding students such as Liaghat to recognize them for their talent, creativity, knowledge, and to support their future contributions to computer science. Liaghat's current research interests include design and analysis of online algorithms, algorithmic game and graph theory as well as combinatorial optimization. This is Liaghat's second major award of 2014, as... read more
CS alumnus and Zoosk co-founder Shayan Zadeh discusses how his education provided him with an algorithm for future success. read more
Professor David Jacobs' work helps us to identify the flora and fauna in the world around us. A few years ago, his group here at the university, along with collaborators from Columbia University and the Smithsonian produced Leafsnap , an interactive electronic field guide for plants. Recently, Jacobs reunited with his team--including Professor Peter Belhumeur of Columbia University's Computer Science Department--to create and launch Birdsnap , a lively and interactive website and iphone app that uses facial recognition and pattern matching to identify different types of birds. Casual... read more
Mustafa Bilgic, assistant professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology and University of Maryland alumnus, has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his proposal entitled “Active Learning through Rich and Transparent Actions.” While at the University of Maryland, Bilgic worked with Lise Getoor. Bilgic’s project “Active Learning through Rich and Transparent Actions” focuses on how Active Learning can potentially minimize the costs, time and effort that is involved with annotating machine models. “I am very happy to have received this award,... read more