Recent News & Accomplishments
2016
Professor Jonathan Katz, who is also the Director of the Maryland CyberSecurity Center , was interviewed on the The Cyber Wire Daily Podcast , on January 20th, 2016. Senior Media Producer Dave Bittner spoke with Katz about security and authentication and how users can protect themselves and their data. Katz talked about about two-factor authentication (in which a system requires not only a password, but another means to identify the user--such as a text message to a mobile device) to protect user information from possible attackers. He talked about the primacy of passwords, and encouraged... read more
Professor Aravind Srinivasan (CS, UMIACS, and AMSC) has been recognized as a 2016 Distinguished Alumnus Awardee of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras . This award was established in 1993 to recognize myriad accomplishments of IIT Madras' alumni. Srinivasan, who earned his B.Tech from IIT Madras in 1989, is one of twelve distinguished alumni who have been recognized for this honor this year. He will receive the award in April of this year. “The Indian Institute of Technologies have produced a very large and impressive number of scientists, engineers, and other people who are leading... read more
Professor Atif Memon recently published an article entitled Colluding Apps: Tomorrow’s Mobile Malware Threat in the November/December issue of IEEE Security and Privacy . He published this work with Ali Anwar, a student in his junior year from the Science Magnet Program at Montgomery Blair High School in Takoma Park, MD. Memon’s and Anwar’s work addresses the malicious nature of some of the applications that people have on their mobile devices, and how that personal information can be taken and transmitted without a user’s knowledge. They examine Android, a very popular operating system for... read more
2015
After graduating from the University of Maryland in 1996 with a degree in Computer Science, Sujal Patel moved to the Pacfic Northwest to work for Real Networks in Seattle. In 2001, he went on to found Isilon, a hardware and software company that sold clustered file systems for digital content and other data. He served as CTO originally, and then went on to serve the company as CEO from 2007 until EMC Sytems acquired the company. Patel remained with EMC until 2012. Recently, Patel was named Strategic Director at the Madrona Venture Group, a venture capital firm in Seattle. The Madrona Venture... read more
On December 17, 2015, The Computing Research Association (CRA) announced the 2016 Outstanding Undergraduate Research award winners. Computer Science Seniors Andrea Bajcsy and Frank Cangialosi both received Honorable Mentions for their research. Bajcsy, a Brendan Iribe Scholarship recipient, works with Professor Yiannis Aloimonos in Computer Vision and Robotics, and Cangialosi, a Gannon-Della Torre Scholarship recipient, works with Research Scientist Dave Levin in Computer Networks, Security, and Measurement . *** In a time when most of their peers are headed to industry to work for large... read more
On December 15, 2015, the National Academic of Inventors named Professor Ben Shneiderman as a NAI fellow. read more
On December 14, 2015, Professor Dorothea Wagner, Steering Committee Chair of the European Symposia for Algorithms (ESA) , announced that a Test of Time Award will be given to “ Approximation Algorithms for Connected Dominating Sets ,” a paper co-authored in 1996 by Professor Samir Khuller , Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science, and Professor Sudipto Guha of the University of Pennsylvania. The ESA Test of Time Award identifies and celebrates “outstanding papers in algorithms research that were published in the ESA proceedings 19-21 years ago, and which are still influential and... read more
University of Maryland study suggests that a society’s level of mobility influences whether its members treat outsiders as individuals
One can’t help but notice that migration is increasing. The trend over the last century has been toward greater mobility for more people around the world. Many people today live in a place different from where they were born, with different social norms and customs. A new study by University of Maryland researchers points to a surprising byproduct: increased mobility may help people to treat each other as individuals rather than as members of a defined social group. The work suggests that mobility counteracts the tendency of populations to become more ethnocentric—or prone to favor members of... read more
On October 29th, 2015, The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) held a Celebration of Distinguished Professor Emerita Dianne O'Leary on the Occasion of her Retirement, during their annual conference. The organizers of the celebration for Professor O'Leary included Misha E. Kilmer of Tufts University, Tamara G. Kolda of Sandia National Laboratories, James G. Nagy of Emory University, and Julianne Chung of Virginia Tech. Scholars in the field gathered to give papers in her honor and to celebrate the significance of Professor O'Leary's work as a Computer Scientist and Applied... read more
For his presentation entitled "Trace Oblivious Program Execution: A Programming Language Approach to Security," PhD candidate Chang Liu earned the John Vlissides Award at the ACM conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) Doctoral Symposium held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from October 23-30, 2015. OOPSLA is operated by SIGPLAN and was held as a part of SPLASH '15. Liu’s advisors are Professor Michael Hicks and Associate Professor Elaine Shi (now at Cornell University). The John Vlissides Award is given by a selection committee to a doctoral... read more