Recent News & Accomplishments
2016
Professor Mihai Pop co-organized a workshop entitled "Next Generation Sequencing - Algorithms, and Software For Biomedical Applications" at the Schloss Dagstuhl Leibniz Zentrum fur Informatik in Dagstuhl, Germany. Pop worked with Professor Gene Myers of the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, Professor Knut Reinert of the Freie Universitaet in Berlin, and Professor Tandy Warnow of the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Scientists from Europe and the United States worked together for a week to identify computational challenges and opportunities in sequencing data and emerging experimental... read more
PhD student Ahmed Elgohary is a bit of a Renaissance individual. He has worked with Professor Amol Deshpande in databases, and he is now working with Assistant Professor Marine Carpuat in machine learning, natural language processing, and natural language inference. In a brief interview in late August, he noted that a good thing about the University of Maryland is the opportunity for students to explore different fields and work with different advisors as they decide the best area in CS for them to conduct research. He originally thought he was going to focus on databases, but he took a... read more
Professor and Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science Samir Khuller gave a talk at the European Symposium on Algorithms in Aarhus, Denmark. In 2015, ESA named Sudipto Guha and Samir Khuller as winners of the ESA Test-of-Time award for their paper Approximation Algorithms for Connected Dominating Sets (Proceedings ESA'96, Algorithmica 20:4 (1998) 374-387). PhD Student Brian Brubach, who is advised by Professor Aravind Srinivasan, also gave a paper entitled New Algorithms, Better Bounds, and a Novel Model for Online Stochastic Matching with Karthik A. Sankararaman, Aravind... read more
Professor Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi has been named the program chair for the 29th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA) to be held in Washington, D.C., in July 2017. The conference is the top ACM conference in the field of parallelism, which encompasses any computational system that can perform multiple operations or tasks simultaneously. The conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery special interest groups SIGACT (ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory) and SIGARCH (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer... read more
Professor Larry Davis, also founder and professor of UMIACS, is now a Distinguished University Professor. After earning a Ph.D. here in the department in 1976 with Azriel Rosenfeld, Davis began working as an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 1977. In 1981, he returned to the University of Maryland as professor in the Computer Science department. After a few years here, he founded the Institute of Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) in 1985, and served as its director until 1994. Davis also served as the Chair of the Department from 1999 until 2012. He now serves as... read more
The Computer Science Department is pleased to announce the hire of two lecturers for the 2016-17 academic year: Melika Abolhassani , Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Maryland (expected Dec 2016), will start as a Lecturer in January, 2017. Abolhassani works in Algorithmic Graph Theory, Approximation and Randomized Algorithms, and Algorithmic Game Theory. Jason Filippou , MS, Computer Science, University of Maryland, started as a lecturer in August of 2016. Jason works in learning stochastic automata for better action recognition and cyber-security. read more
The Department congratulates Professor Aravind Srinivasan on being a keynote speaker at the 22nd International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON 2106). The conference took place in Ho Chi Minh City,Vietnam August 2-4, 2016. Aravind Srinivasan is a professor of Computer Science, UMIACS, and AMSC here at the University. He serves as Editor-In- Chief of the ACM Transactions on Algorithms, Managing Editor for Theory of Computing, andan Associate Editor for Networks. He also serves as Vice Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on the Mathematical Foundations of Computing. Srinivasan... read more
The Department of Computer Science is pleased to announce our newest professorial faculty members: Joh n Dicke rson , Ph.D., Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, will start as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in July of 2016. Dickerson works at the intersection of computer science and economics, with a focus on solving practical problems using stochastic optimization and machine learning. Furong Huang , Ph.D., Computer Network and Distributed Computing, University of California, Irvine, will start as an Assistant Professor Computer Science in July of 2017, after a post-doc... read more
From August 8-9 2016, members of the computer science faculty at the University of Maryland will travel to Kaiserslautern, Germany to meet with faculty from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) . They will be discussing plans for the newly-established joint Ph.D. program in Computer Science in which University of Maryland students will be co-advised by faculty at both institutions. This two-day Max Planck Maryland Faculty Summit will give members of each group an opportunity to meet in person, learn more about each other’s research, identify common interests, and look for opportunities to... read more
For their work entitled "Imitation Learning as Cause-Effect Reasoning," PhD students Garrett Katz and Di-Wei Huang won Best Student Paper at the Ninth Annual Conference for Artificial General Intell igence (AGI 2016) held in New York, New York from July 16-19, 2016. Professor Jim Reggia advises both students. Katz and Huang have also collaborated with Professor Rodolphe Gentili of the Kinesiology Department. (L-R: Katz, Huang) Katz explained what comprises imitation learning in robots. "The robot learns new skills by observing a human demonstrator rather than being programmed... read more