Recent News & Accomplishments
2015
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
In spring semester of 2015, the Computer Science Department graduated fifteen students from the PhD program, and we are pleased to announce where they’ll be headed for postdocs, research positions, and positions in industry. We wish all of our graduating students continued success. May 2015 PhD Graduates: Marco David Adelfio , Mitre Corporation (McLean, VA) Ejaz Ahmed , Amazon (Boston, MA) Florin Chelaru , Postdoc, MIT (Cambridge, MA) Rajesh Chitnis , Postdoc, Weizmann Institute of Science ( Rehovot , Israel) Gary Lee Jackson , JHU Applied Physics Lab (Laurel, MD) Reza Khani , Microsoft (... read more
Robotics Team Students from Sparks Elementary in Baltimore County visited the Department on June 4th.
A group of eight fifth-grade robotics team students, ten of their parents, and two of their robotics coaches from Sparks Elementary School in Baltimore County, Maryland visited the Department of Computer Science this Thursday, June 4. The visit came in the wake of the team's high placings at the VEX Robotics World Championship in Louisville, Kentucky this past April. The eight students and their twelve parents and teachers got to see a variety of the Department's research throughout the day, beginning with a visit to the Autonomy, Robotics, and Cognition (ARC) Laboratory at 10:00am. There,... read more
The 2015 cohort of Combinatorial Algorithms Applied Research (CAAR) undergraduate students began work at the University of Maryland Monday, June 1. CAAR is an NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, focused on bridging “...the disconnect between the core algorithms community and research communities in other disciplines within Computer Science.” The ten-week-long program will run to August 7. “This summer the UMCP REU-CAAR program will bring in 16 undergraduates from across the country, plus 12 local high school students, to work for 10 weeks on research projects!... read more
The University of Maryland's College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences announced May 14, 2015 that Dr. Atif Memon had been promoted from Associate to Full Professor. Dr. Memon joined the University of Maryland in August 2001 as an Assistant Professor. With research interests spanning software engineering, human-computer interaction, cybersecurity, bioinformatics, and computational biology, he is affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Department of Computer Science here at the University. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Karachi, a... read more
On Saturday May 16th, Professor Mohammad Hajiaghayi will be leading a team of four graduate students in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals in Marrakech, Morocco. Sina Dehghani, Soheil Ehsani, and Xi Yi will be competing with 128 teams from all over the world compete to solve “eight or more complex, real-world problems, with a grueling five-hour deadline.” Dehghani, Ehsani, and Yi will work together with a single computer as well as race against the clock and other teams in what the contest calls a “battle of logic, strategy, and mental endurance.” The ACM... read more
Last month, Maryland’s Club Ultimate captain, Paige Nelson, and her team, competed in the Colonial Division-I Conference Tournament. After a weekend of convincing victories over all seven other teams from the Maryland, Delaware, and D.C. area, Women’s Ultimate Frisbee secured a spot in the Regional Tournament, where two weeks later they earned third place. You may think of two people casually throwing a disc back and forth in a park when you hear “Ultimate Frisbee,” but the sport is far from just a game of catch. In fact, UMD’s Club Team practices five days a... read more
For anyone who wasn't able to attend the Friday May 8th meeting with Dean Jayanth Banavar.
After a tense week following the surprising news that the University of Maryland would be implementing differential pricing , Dean Jayanth Banavar held an impromptu meeting on Friday May 8th to listen to student concerns. The main concerns addressed in the meeting were where the money will be going and how to avoid springing news like this onto students in the future. For where the money is going, Department Chair Dr. Samir Khuller explained that it would go to funding more TA support, bringing in more lecturers, and expanding faculty. Right now, it costs $1.5 million to pay for all the TAs... read more
Bitcamp has grown. After attracting 750 students at its 2014 inauguration, Bitcamp's 2015 return was complemented by well over a thousand hackers from across the country and world as well as sponsorships from top industry names like Red Hat, Microsoft, and Twitter. A record 660 UMD students attended the hackathon, with hundreds of CS majors and graduates filling Cole Field House with demonstrations of their hacks for the weekend. In step with its name Bitcamp 2015 continued the camping theme of the previous year, bringing back both the center-place “campfire” and the extremely popular late... read more
Chris Testa, class of 2007, has a few problems with the state of the Internet. “The wires of the Internet are […] chokepoints,” he says [to me over a video conference]. “Once [they] have the wires of the Internet, they can gain control.” To Testa, 'they' is the NSA, Verizon, or any other group capable of doing unsavory things with our data – whether it be censorship, bandwidth restriction, or indiscriminate surveillance. Whitebox, therefore, is a response to these dangers: an open source, open hardware, wireless-framework-meets-radio rolled into one big challenge against the domination of... read more