Recent News & Accomplishments
2015
The 2015 cohort of Combinatorial Algorithms Applied Research (CAAR) undergraduate students began work at the University of Maryland Monday, June 1. CAAR is an NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, focused on bridging “...the disconnect between the core algorithms community and research communities in other disciplines within Computer Science.” The ten-week-long program will run to August 7. “This summer the UMCP REU-CAAR program will bring in 16 undergraduates from across the country, plus 12 local high school students, to work for 10 weeks on research projects!... read more
The University of Maryland's College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences announced May 14, 2015 that Dr. Atif Memon had been promoted from Associate to Full Professor. Dr. Memon joined the University of Maryland in August 2001 as an Assistant Professor. With research interests spanning software engineering, human-computer interaction, cybersecurity, bioinformatics, and computational biology, he is affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Department of Computer Science here at the University. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Karachi, a... read more
On Saturday May 16th, Professor Mohammad Hajiaghayi will be leading a team of four graduate students in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals in Marrakech, Morocco. Sina Dehghani, Soheil Ehsani, and Xi Yi will be competing with 128 teams from all over the world compete to solve “eight or more complex, real-world problems, with a grueling five-hour deadline.” Dehghani, Ehsani, and Yi will work together with a single computer as well as race against the clock and other teams in what the contest calls a “battle of logic, strategy, and mental endurance.” The ACM... read more
Last month, Maryland’s Club Ultimate captain, Paige Nelson, and her team, competed in the Colonial Division-I Conference Tournament. After a weekend of convincing victories over all seven other teams from the Maryland, Delaware, and D.C. area, Women’s Ultimate Frisbee secured a spot in the Regional Tournament, where two weeks later they earned third place. You may think of two people casually throwing a disc back and forth in a park when you hear “Ultimate Frisbee,” but the sport is far from just a game of catch. In fact, UMD’s Club Team practices five days a... read more
For anyone who wasn't able to attend the Friday May 8th meeting with Dean Jayanth Banavar.
After a tense week following the surprising news that the University of Maryland would be implementing differential pricing , Dean Jayanth Banavar held an impromptu meeting on Friday May 8th to listen to student concerns. The main concerns addressed in the meeting were where the money will be going and how to avoid springing news like this onto students in the future. For where the money is going, Department Chair Dr. Samir Khuller explained that it would go to funding more TA support, bringing in more lecturers, and expanding faculty. Right now, it costs $1.5 million to pay for all the TAs... read more
Bitcamp has grown. After attracting 750 students at its 2014 inauguration, Bitcamp's 2015 return was complemented by well over a thousand hackers from across the country and world as well as sponsorships from top industry names like Red Hat, Microsoft, and Twitter. A record 660 UMD students attended the hackathon, with hundreds of CS majors and graduates filling Cole Field House with demonstrations of their hacks for the weekend. In step with its name Bitcamp 2015 continued the camping theme of the previous year, bringing back both the center-place “campfire” and the extremely popular late... read more
Chris Testa, class of 2007, has a few problems with the state of the Internet. “The wires of the Internet are […] chokepoints,” he says [to me over a video conference]. “Once [they] have the wires of the Internet, they can gain control.” To Testa, 'they' is the NSA, Verizon, or any other group capable of doing unsavory things with our data – whether it be censorship, bandwidth restriction, or indiscriminate surveillance. Whitebox, therefore, is a response to these dangers: an open source, open hardware, wireless-framework-meets-radio rolled into one big challenge against the domination of... read more
Five graduate assistants from the department were among the award's distinguished winners.
It was announced Thursday, April 30 , that five Computer Science graduate students at the University of Maryland—Ioana Bercea, Mohammad Reza Khani, Matthew Mauriello, Andrew Miller, and Shangfu Peng—were recognized as recipients of the University-wide 2015 Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award. The award, which is awarded to 80 of some 4,000 Graduate Assistants annually, was created by the University's Graduate School "to recognize and honor the outstanding contributions that Graduate Assistants provide to students, faculty, departments, administrative units, and the University as a whole,"... read more
You may have seen Amelia bouncing from one student to the next in the TA room of AV Williams, or maybe heard her distinct voice calming another frantic student who is failing a release test. If you’re a witness to this, then you can probably attest to seeing that same student’s submit server go from a whole lot of red, to all green after just a few minutes of conversing with her. It seems as though Amelia’s position as a TA was inevitable. “I noticed a pattern in high school. All of the volunteer work and groups I’d been a part of involved some form of working with kids and teaching.” Her... read more
With well over twenty-thousand students and more than eight-hundred clubs and organizations, finding a niche at Maryland can be overwhelming. For Adam Weiner, it was his early interest in music production and DJ’ing that eventually led him to the Terrapin Beats Society. read more