Recent News & Accomplishments
2018
The recipients of the Larry S. Davis Doctoral Dissertation Award for 2018 are Garrett Katz and Xiao Wang. The awards recognize the two best dissertations in the department each year. Garrett Katz' dissertation is titled, "A Cognitive Robotic Imitation Learning System Based on Cause-Effect Reasoning." Professor Jim Reggia served as his advisor. After completing postdoctoral research with Reggia, Katz has begun his first year as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Syracuse University. Xiao Wang's dissertation is titled " A New Paradigm For Practical Maliciously Secure Multi-party... read more
The Perception and Robotics Group Lab’s (PRG) work on drones able to pass through small gaps in walls—thanks to vision inspired by insects—was featured as a project on IEEE Spectrum media on September 11th 2018. Gapflyt is led by Professor Yiannis Aloinmonos and Dr. Cornelia Fermüller along with their graduate students Nitin J. Sanket, Chahat Deep Singh, and Kanishka Ganguly. Soon after being highlighted on IEEE, the group’s work has become the subject of over twenty-five web publications from around the world. Here is a video of their work: read more
The Department of Computer Science is pleased to welcome two new Basili Fellows for Fall 2018: Robert Rand and Leonidas Lampropoulos. Leonidas Lapropoulous Robert Rand Robert Rand is finishing his Ph.D at the University of Pennsylvania with Professor Steve Zdancewic. Rand's thesis explores the intersection of programming languages, formal verification and quantum computing. Together with Jennifer Paykin, he was a lead developer of QWIRE , a Programming language and verification tool for quantum programs. Prior to joining UPenn, he received his undergraduate degree from Yeshiva University... read more
The inaugural Victor Basili Postdoctoral Fellows for the past two years, Niki Vazou and Thomas Gilray, have finished their time in the department and will be starting academic careers. Vazou has been named an assistant research professor at IMDEA Software in Madrid, Spain. She received a Ph.D in computer science from the University of California San Diego under the direction of Professor Ranjit Jhala in 2016. Gilray has been named an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Alabama, Birmingham . Before starting his fellowship at the University of Maryland... read more
Srijan Kumar (Ph.D ’17) has been recognized as one of two runners-up for the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) dissertation award. This dissertation award recognizes “outstanding work done by graduate students in the areas of data science, machine learning and data mining.” Kumar was nominated by his advisor, Professor V.S. Subrahmanian (now of Dartmouth College). Kumar is currently completing post-doctoral research at Stanford University with Prof. Jure Leskovec. His research revolves around machine learning, data mining, and computational social... read more
Ph.D. student Elissa Redmiles has been named one of two graduate student awardees of the John Karat Usable Privacy and Security Student Research Award during the Fourteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2018). Named in honor of John Karat, the award celebrates Redmiles’ research in usable privacy and security, their efforts to mentor others, and their community service to the field. Assistant Professor Michelle Mazurek, who is Redmiles’ advisor, nominated her for the award. When asked about her plans for the next year, Redmiles said that she will be going on the academic job... read more
Kianté Brantley is a 2018 recipient of a fellowship from the ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) and Intel. He was nomintated by his advisor, Professor Hal Daumé III, and was selected to receive the award out of a very competitive field. The SIGHPC/Intel fellowship provides $15,0000 annually for five years and was established to encourage a more diverse group of students to pursue graduate degrees in data science and computational science. Brantley is a second year Ph.D student in computer science and he is currently interning at Microsoft in New York City in the... read more
Kartik Nayak (Ph.D. ’18) has been appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Duke University. Before he starts at Duke in 2019, Nayak will be completing postdoctoral work at the VMWare Research Group in San Jose, California. Nayak’s graduate advisors were Professor Jonathan Katz, who is also Director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center, and Associate Professor Elaine Shi of Cornell University. Nayak’s research focuses on applied cryptography. For his thesis, he developed and built several systems for privacy-preserving computation based on approaches... read more
From the President's Office: August 1, 2018 Dear University of Maryland faculty and staff, I am pleased to announce the appointment of Jeff Hollingsworth as Vice President and Chief Information Officer (CIO) following a competitive search. He will lead the Division of Information Technology with a talented staff of over 300, overseeing the technology strategy, infrastructure, and services that are critical to the University's operations. A longtime member of our faculty, Jeff assumed the role of Interim CIO in June 2017, reporting to our Provost. Since then, he has implemented effectively and... read more
by Sydney Rowan
Professor William Gasarch is the director of the REU program at the University of Maryland. Gasarch received his doctorate in Computer Science from Harvard in 1985. He then became a Full Professor at the University of Maryland in 1998. He is known for his work in computational complexity theory, computability theory, computational learning theory, and Ramsey theory. Professor Gasarch has helped over 45 undergraduates on research projects. He is not mentoring any projects in the computer science REU this summer; instead he is in charge of admissions, setting up activities, and overseeing the... read more