Recent News & Accomplishments
2020
Three graduate assistants from the department were among the award's distinguished winners
Three Computer Science graduate students win the Outstanding Graduate Assistant Awards out of approximately 4,000 UMD graduate students who serve the campus as administrative, research, or teaching assistants. The award established by the Graduate School recognizes and honors the outstanding contributions that Graduate Assistants provide to students, faculty, departments, administrative units, and the University as a whole. Kevin Hogan - Outstanding Research Assistant award Kevin Hogan’s research interests focus on Software Engineering, Programming Languages, and Security. He is currently a... read more
This year THREE of our Computer Science students have been selected for Honorable Mention for the 2020 Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. Mark Keller: Advisor : Max Leiserson Keller has been working on two projects with the Leiserson Research Group ( https://lrgr.io ) focusing on visualizing mutation signatures (patterns of mutation corresponding to distinct mutational processes) in human cancer, and benchmarking algorithms for the decomposition of cancer genomes into mutational signatures and their activities. Keller plans to begin graduate... read more
Todd Holden , Senior Web Services Developer, has been selected to receive the Staff Service Award for Fall 2019 in recognition of his exceptional contributions in developing and managing the AV equipment in the Iribe Building. In addition to serving as a primary point-of-contact for the contractors and Division of IT as a building expert for the AV systems, Todd contributes his expertise as a web administrator by leading the campus Drupal User's Group. Todd’s efforts in updating data to csrankings.org elevated the department's ranking from 16th to 10th during 2019. read more
2019
Mihai Pop, professor of computer science and director of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS),was recently named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. Among the 58 researchers from universities, companies and research centers in Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States, Pop was... read more
Professor Donald Perlis along with his team, Justin Brody and Timothy Clausner (both visiting scientist, UMIACS ) received $980 K Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) award for their project titled -- "Toward Knowledge of Cooperative Agency: A Foundation for Task-General Teaming.” The project will take the first steps towards an initial theory of cooperative agency as the bedrock on which general autonomous teaming can be built. The DARPA award came through the recently launched CREATE (Context Reasoning for Autonomous Teaming) program, which aims to explore the utility of... read more
Professor Hal Daumé III and Associate Professor Tom Goldstein have been unanimously selected as the inaugural Pier Giorgio Perotto Endowed Professors by a committee, consisting of distinguished faculty members within and outside of the Department of Computer Science. Daumé’s research focuses on developing efficient machine learning algorithms to build natural language processing systems based on interactions with people. This involves designing techniques that can actively interact with human experts to learn to mimic their behavior, as well as methods that can actively request information... read more
Computer Science majors Hassan Syyid and Sandeep Ramesh are developing an app to find the safest route for the commuters
For people who live in crime-ridden neighborhoods, walking to work, school or even the grocery store safely can be stressful, if not outright dangerous. Two UMD computer science majors want to put an angel on their shoulders—or in their phones. Freshmen Hassan Syyid and Sandeep Ramesh are developing Path Angel, an app to help commuters find the safest route to their destination. It took triple honors last month at Cornell University’s Big Red Hacks: Hack to Save Your Community! The duo was inspired to create their app while walking around the Cornell campus and trying to find a shady path to... read more
The University of Maryland’s Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering has come up for praise for its architectural innovation and aesthetics. The American Institute for Architects (AIA) recently recognized the structure with an Award of Merit in the architecture category. The award praises the building’s interior design, mastery of composition, functionality, material and color palettes, as well as its well-integrated adherence to the highest levels of accessibility, health and safety, environmental, and occupant-comfort considerations, standards, and regulations. In... read more
Professor Emeritus Jack Minker was recently awarded the Brooklyn College Alumni Association Post 50th Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award on the occasion of the 70th reunion of the class of 1949. In an era when computer science was not a course of study, Dr. Minker majored in mathematics and earned a B.A. at Brooklyn College, an M.S. at the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. His career in industry began in 1951 at Bell Aircraft Corporation. This was followed by positions at RCA, and the Auerbach Corporation, where he served as Technical Director of the... read more
Saeed Seddighin was advised by Professor MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi and Pan Xu was advised by Professor John Dickerson and Professor Aravind Srinivasan
Saeed Seddighin and Pan Xu have been named the 2019 recipients of the Larry S. Davis Doctoral Dissertation Award. This dissertation award recognizes the two most outstanding dissertations completed over the past year in the department. Seddighin was recognized by this award for his work entitled “Campaigning via LPS: Solving Blotto and Beyond." The competition between the Republican and the Democrat nominees in the U.S presidential election is known as Colonel Blotto in game theory. The Colonel Blotto game and its extensions have been used in a wide range of applications from political... read more