Recent News & Accomplishments
2016
As a part of Ben Shneiderman's course on How to do Great Research, graduate students are writing short articles on research that inspires them. “The sharp thrill of seeing them [killdeer birds] reminded me of childhood happiness, gifts under the Christmas tree, perhaps, a kind of euphoria we adults manage to shut out most of the time. This is why I bird‐watch, to recapture what it's like to live in this moment, right now." — Lynn Thomson, Birding with Yeats: A Memoir David Jacobs , professor of computer science at UMD, and his colleague Peter Belhumeur professor of... read more
As a part of Ben Shneiderman's course on How to do Great Research, graduate students are writing short articles on research that inspires them. Mental health is one of the largest problems facing the United States today. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) highlights some gloomy statistics: one in four adults suffers from some form of mental health disorder; 60% of them do not receive proper diagnosis or care; and the spending on serious mental illness ends up costing Americans nearly $200 billion in lost earnings each year [1]. The difficulty of diagnosing mental illness lies... read more
On March 23rd, 2016, students and alumni from the Quality Enhancement Systems and Teams (QUEST) Honors Program visited Google in Washington, DC to meet with Dr. Vint Cerf, an Internet pioneer and Turing Award winner well-known for co-designing TCP/IP protocols and the Internet’s architecture. Cerf now serves as vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. Mr. Danny Laurence (’14), an alumnus of the QUEST program and the Department of Computer Science, moderated the event. He and Cerf sat on small stage in an intimate auditorium for a fireside-style chat. QUEST students... read more
Please join us for groundbreaking on Maryland Day, April 30th: Wallace D. Loh , President, University of Maryland Jayanth Banavar Dean, College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences Samir Khuller Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair, Department of Computer Science cordially invite you to events celebrating the groundbreaking of THE BRENDAN IRIBE CENTER FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE AND INNOVATION Saturday, April 30, 2016, 9:30 A.M. location: Parking Lot GG1, future location of the Iribe Center The Iribe Center will offer unprecedented opportunities for students and faculty members to explore and... read more
At the fourteenth Copper Mountain Conference on Iterative Methods , PhD Candidate Kookjin Lee gave a paper entitled “A Preconditioned Low-Rank Projection Method with a Rank-Reduction Scheme for Stochastic Partial Differential Equations” to over 200 conference attendees in an informal and relaxed atmosphere. Lee’s paper was one of four recognized as ‘Best Student Paper’ at the conference which was held in Copper Mountain, Colorado from March 20-25, 2016. Both Lee, and his advisor Professor Howard Elman were kind enough to take a break from their busy schedules and speak about the conference,... read more
The Computer Science Department is pleased to announce that Héctor Corrada Bravo (also of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology ) has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. Corrada Bravo's research focuses on statistical and machine learning methods for high-throughput genomic data analysis. This includes pre-processing of measurements from high-throughput assays, disease risk models that integrate high-throughput genomic and other data, and cancer epigenetics and biomarker discovery. He also works on the development of new methods and tools from multiple areas in... read more
On April 15, 2016, Professor Ramani Duraiswami (also of UMIACS) will be presented with a University System of Maryland Board of Regents ’ Faculty Award for Scholarship, Research or Creative Activity . Each year, the UMD Board of Regents recognizes faculty in this category for their "exceptional scholarship or research that extend or deepen the bounds of knowledge or of creative activities that are recognized as innovations in the nominee’s discipline." Professor Samir Khuller, Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science, and a faculty committee nominated Duraiswami for his creative... read more
Where is the Marriott? What do I wear? What can I win?
This Thursday, April 7th at 6pm, is Casino Night 2016. In case any of you are freshmen or transfer students, the Association of Women in Computing Casino Night is an annual fundraiser to support women in technology. This is an event where for $5 for students ($10 at the door) you get a night of delicious food, fake gambling with your professors, and very real prizes. Your ticket gives you $500 in funny money that you can use at blackjack, craps, and more, which you can turn in at the end of the night for raffles. This year is bigger and better than ever, and while this post can’t give... read more
On March 29, 2016, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that Senior Andrea Bajcsy and Alumna Talia Ringer were awarded NSF Graduate Fellowships. This year the NSF made 2,000 award offers after receiving 17,000 applications. Both Bajcsy and Ringer will be using their awards towards PhDs in computer science. Ringer is currently a first year PhD student at University of Washington, and Bajcsy is still in the process of choosing a university. When asked about both fellowship winners, Professor Samir Khuller, Elizabeth Iribe Stevinson Chair of Computer Science said, “Talia Ringer... read more
The Department of Computer Science is pleased to announce that Mossaab Bagdouri has been named as one of IBM's PhD Fellows for 2016. Bagdouri is entering his final year as a graduate student in the Computer Science Department, where he works on making machines understand human language through Information Retrieval, Text Classification, and Computational Linguistics. Bagdouri currently conducts research with Doug Oard in the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Lab . Bagdouri holds a Ingénieur d'Etat en Informatique from École Nationale Supérieure d'... read more