Recent News & Accomplishments
2020
Computer Science senior Krithika Ramanathan has been awarded the 2020-21 Fulbright Scholarship. She will serve as an English Teaching Assistant in Sri Lanka. “ My interest in education began slightly before joining UMD”, said Ramanathan. “I volunteered at a school in India in developing curriculum and leading classroom activities to help with underserved communities”. A National Merit and AP Scholar from Thomas S. Wootton High School, Ramaanthan’s interests have always been at the intersection of Computing and Education. Ramanathan began her passion for teaching as a summer outreach... read more
Paul Chrisman Iribe Professor Dinesh Manocha receives the 2020 Pierre Bézier Award in recognition of his technically significant and lasting contributions in Solid, Geometric and Physical Modeling and their Applications. In addition to being a professor in Computer science, Manocha holds joint appointments in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and UMIACS. He is also affiliated with Maryland Robotics Center and Institute for Systems Research . The Pierre Bézier award, modeled after the Association of Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award was established in 2007 in the... read more
Varun Suryan, a doctoral student advised by Assistant Professor Pratap Tokekar wins the University of Maryland’s Three-Minute Thesis Competition for 2020. An undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur, India, and Master in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech, Suryan’s research focuses on multi-arm bandits and their application to solving informative path planning problems in robotics. “My main motivation in entering this competition was to challenge myself to break down my research in front of a general audience in less than three minutes,”... read more
Alex Hanson , a first-year doctoral student advised by Assistant Professor Abhinav Shrivastava , recently won the Department of Defense National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship for 2020. Hanson’s current research focuses on selecting data to make neural network training faster and produce more accurate models. In particular, his work aims to capture meaningful representations of high-level concepts from data via machine learning and use geometric methods to interpret and improve those representations. “I am hoping to be able to distinguish what a neural network... read more
Assistant Professor Soheil Feizi recently won the AWS Machine Learning Research Award for his project titled “Explainable Deep Learning: Accuracy, Robustness and Fairness”. The AWS Machine Learning Research Awards (MLRA) aims to support research to advance the frontiers of machine learning (ML) and its application across a wide range of problems. The funded project focuses on developing accurate, robust and fair interpretation methods for deep learning models. “The growing use of deep learning in sensitive applications such as medicine, autonomous driving, and finance raises concerns about... read more
Assistant Professor John Dickerson received the 2020 Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award. This university-level award recognizes the outstanding mentoring provided by individual faculty. Dickerson was nominated for the award by Duncan McElfresh , a fourth-year PhD student in the Applied Mathematics & Statistics, and Scientific Computation (AMSC) program, and was supported by several other students. “Working with John has made the challenges of graduate school seem easy, and even enjoyable,” said McElfresh. “John is extremely supportive and treats his students as collaborators, I am... read more
Assistant Professor David Levin was recently selected as one of the awardees of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) 2020 Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award under the Junior faculty at a PhD granting institution category. The award recognizes the academic alliance (including Non-Profit U.S. Institutions) representatives for their outstanding mentorship, cutting edge research opportunity, encouragement and inclusion of women and minority students in computing related fields. “I consider this aspect of my work to really be what the job is all about to me, —... read more
Ph.D. students Rohan Chandra, Kanishka Ganguly, Kamal Gupta and Kevin Hogan receive the UMD Graduate Student Research Fellowship for summer 2020. Rohan Chandra (Advisor- Dinesh Manocha ) Chandra earned his bachelors in electronics engineering from Delhi Technological University, New Delhi, India, and his master’s in computer science from UMD in 2018. His research work focuses on socially acceptable autonomous driving and aims to develop a new metric that can be used to "measure" social behavior. “While most of the current focus on AVs in both industry and academia is on their safe and proper... read more
Associate Perotto Professor Thomas Goldstein and Assistant Professor Furong Huang recently received the 2020 JPMorgan Faculty Research Award for their project titled “Robust, Private and Fair ML for Financial Models”. The focus of the project is towards security vulnerabilities in the Financial machine learning models which include the adversarial attacks, privacy leaks, and fairness violations. The research has three-fold goals: · Studying how adversarial attacks impact markets · Preventing leaks of the user’s private data and · Safeguarding the protected attributes of the customers in order... read more
Makana Castillo-Martin, Jason Fan, Nick Franzese and Lillian Huang received the 2020 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships
Four graduate students from the department, Makana Castillo-Martin, Jason Fan, Nicholas Franzese and Lillian Huang were recently awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships for 2020. The NSF fellowship program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Makana Castillo-Martin An undergraduate in Mathematics and Computer Science from Reed College, Castillo-Martin is currently studying the user perceptions of fairness and privacy. She plans to work in academics to broaden engagement and participation in... read more