Recent News & Accomplishments
2010
Professor Dianne O'Leary will be giving a talk, Confidence and Misplaced Confidence in Image Reconstruction" Date: March 8, 2010 Time: 4:00 pm Location: CSIC 1115 Forming the image from a CAT scan and taking the blur out of vacation pictures are problems that are ill-posed. By definition, small changes in the data to an ill-posed problem make arbitrarily large changes in the solution. How can we hope to solve such problems using noisy data and inexact computer arithmetic? In this talk we discuss the use of side conditions and bias constraints to improve the quality of solutions. We discuss... read more
Richard Matthew McCutchen, a Junior majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics is one of the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award winners for 2010. Two additional CS students received awards, John Silberholz, who was a finalist and Allie Hoch received an honorable mention in the contest. Date: Monday, March 1, 2010 Time: 4:00 pm Location: CSIC 1115 Richard Matthew McCutchen , "Streaming algorithms for clustering of point sets". John Silberholz , "Integrating Post-Newtonian Equations on Graphics Processing Units". Allie Hoch , "Finding Meaningful Patterns in Gene Annotation Graphs... read more
Hamid Pirahesh, IBM Fellow talks about "Impact of Cloud Computing on Emerging Analytic Software Systems and Solutions". Abstract & Bio Date: February 23, 2010 Time: 4:00 pm Location: AV Williams 1146 read more
Ben Shneiderman has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering for research, software development and scholarly texts concerning human-computer interaction and information visualization. UM press release read more
ACM SIGCHI identifies and honors leaders and shapers of the field of human-computer interaction with annual SIGCHI Awards. The Social Impact Award honors individuals who promote the application of human-computer interaction research for pressing social needs. This year the award was given to Ben Bederson and Allison Druin of the University of Maryland for their joint work in developing the International Children's Digital Library and their individual work in developing new methods that give children a voice in the development of new technologies, and for their work on electronic voting... read more
UMD CS undergraduate students: Alan Jackoway, Mitchell Katz, Matt McCutchen, finished 14th overall (tied with 22 other schools) and 5th among U.S. competitors in the ACM Programming Contest World Finals, held in Harbin, China. They tied with teams from several other US universities (Stanford, Cornell, CMU, MIT, and Michigan) for the best placement by a North American Team (the Stanford team was crowned the North American champions based on the time taken to solve the problems). The contest featured 103 teams chosen from over 7000 teams that participated in the regional contests worldwide... read more
Professor Amitabh Varshney is the PI for Maryland's new CUDA Center. "NVIDIA, a world leader in visual computing technology, has named the University of Maryland a CUDA Center of Excellence in recognition of the university's quality and diversity of supercomputing research and Maryland's leading work integrating CUDA-enabled graphics processing units (GPUs) into computer science education and multidisciplinary research. The prestigious and highly competitive award includes three years of project funding from NVIDIA and the gift of a high-performance supercomputer GPU cluster. Press release:... read more
Uzi Vishkin to give a Parallel@Illinois Distinguished Lecture and a Computer Science Colloquium, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, March 15, 2010, entitled: "Using Simple Abstraction to Guide the Reinvention of Computing for Parallelism". Download abstract read more
Ben Shneiderman will be presented an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Castilla-LaMancha on February 9, 2010 in Ciudad Real, Spain. read more
2009
CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards for 2010 have been announced and Richard Matthew McCutchen, a Junior majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics is one of the winners. Matt has a long history of research going back to high school when he worked on the popular matching" problem (e.g., matching a set of people to jobs trying to satisfy their preferences) which has been cited by several researchers. At Maryland, Matt has worked on streaming algorithms for clustering and developed a new algorithm for handling outliers. He has also worked on various projects in the area of... read more