Recent News & Accomplishments
2015
Elissa Redmiles, a PhD student at the University of Maryland, received the Judges' Choice Prize in the 2015 Microsoft Challenge for Change competition. Redmiles' entry was one of fifteen finalists in her age group, out of over 2,100 total applicants to the contest. The Microsoft Challenge for Change is an annual competition in which students in age groups of 13-17 (added this year's competition) and 18-25 submit a proposal for an idea that uses technology to benefit society. Students compete for a $2,500 award to help start their project, a Windows Phone, the opportunity to serve as a... read more
Assistant Professor Héctor Corrada Bravo and PhD student Wikum Dinalankara have published a study detailing a “robust” prediction method for the progression of tumors, based on the use of an anti-profile method to model variabilities in gene expression. The paper can be found at Libertas Academica here , and a detailed article from UMIACS is located here . read more
When most people get directions, they assume the directions will be accurate and navigable. In the age of Google Maps and other geographical technologies, it's usually an easy assumption to make. For some users, however, conventional shortest-path directions may not be enough. Graduate student Kotaro Hara's work, done in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and advised by Assistant Professor Jon Froehlich, focuses on mobility technology. Certain sidewalks in cities are difficult to access for individuals in wheelchairs or with other mobility impairments, due to a lack of curb ramps or other... read more
Prince George's Community Television, a local television news network, has produced a report on Sparks Elementary School students' visit to the Department of Computer Science and University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies' Autonomy, Robotics, and Cognition Lab Thursday, June 4. Their video covering the event can be viewed here , and features interviews with Professor Yiannis Aloimonos and Associate Research Scientist Cornelia Fermüller. read more
After he and his brothers sold Webs.com, a web host and website builder, alum Idris Mokhtarzada continued working there as a Senior Architect—before leaving to focus on a new set of problems. read more
On Wednesday, June 17, Professor Adam Porter signed his appointment letter as Executive Director of the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering (CESE), starting July 1, 2015. read more
Professor Jonathan Katz will give the keynote address at the 15th annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), to be held June 30 to July 2, 2015 in Philadelphia, and has been invited to speak at a Symposium on Foundations of Cyber Security and Privacy, to be held July in Munich, Germany. PETS , an annual symposium which “...[brings] together privacy and anonymity experts from around the world to discuss recent advances and new perspectives,” will take place on the campus of Drexel University. Professor Katz will be delivering the keynote Tuesday, June 30, titled “Secure... read more
Competitions between man and machine always seem to hold more than purely objective significance. Whether as a result of alarming science-fiction conjectures about robots overthrowing humanity or of a more reactionary desire to assert humanity's superiority to its creations, people often tend to assign a great deal of societal importance to innovations in automation—IBM's Watson system, which recently won against two Jeopardy champions in 2011, stands out as an example of this behavior. QANTA, a question-answering system based on deep learning principles, was developed by a team of... read more
The 2015 SIGPLAN election results were released recently. With their announcement came the news that Professor Michael Hicks of the University of Maryland would serve as the chair of SIGPLAN from July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2018. SIGPLAN, a special interest group (SIG) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), focuses on programming languages: examining the theoretical and practical sides of the very broad field. It “...explores programming language concepts and tools focusing on design, implementation, and efficient use,” according to the ACM's description . The group sponsors a number... read more
Professor Larry Davis will be recognized at a workshop in his honor from June 10 to June 12, 2015, during the final days of the annual CVPR Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. The workshop (link here ) will be comprised of multiple short talks from its attendees in Professor Davis' honor. Professor Davis has taught at the University of Maryland since 1981. He received his PhD from the University of Maryland in 1976. He is affiliated with UMIACS and is the director of the Center for Automation Research (CfAR) at UMD, and from 1999 to 2012 served as Chair of the Department. His research... read more