UMD Announces Promotions for Computer Science Faculty Members

The University of Maryland's Department of Computer Science is pleased to announce the promotion of four faculty members, recognizing their contributions to research, teaching and leadership within the field of computer science. The promotions are effective between November 2023 and August 2024. 

"Our faculty members have truly earned their promotions through their relentless pursuit of innovation, excellence in teaching and innovative research. Their work continues to set new standards in computer science,” said Department Chair Matthias Zwicker, who holds the Elizabeth Iribe Chair for Innovation and the Phillip H. and Catherine C. Horvitz Professorship. “These promotions highlight their remarkable achievements and underscore the department's unwavering dedication to fostering talent and pushing the boundaries of knowledge in computer science.”

Promoted to Professor:

Jordan Boyd-Graber Ying, who holds a joint appointment at the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), has been promoted to full professor. His research focuses on enhancing the utility, interpretability and human interaction capabilities of machine learning. 

"I work on making AIs use language to cooperate more effectively with users to show them the information that best helps them detect misinformation, explore documents, answer questions or conduct negotiations," Boyd-Graber said. "This requires adapting AIs to tailor information to users' needs and abilities. The technical challenge is building representations that efficiently capture the relationship between users' abilities and AI's memory, as people don't want to spend hours training AIs."

Promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure:

Furong Huang, who holds a joint appointment in UMIACS, has been promoted to associate professor. Specializing in trustworthy machine learning, AI for sequential decision-making and high-dimensional statistics, her research centers on creating reliable and interpretable machine learning models that operate effectively in real-world settings. Huang has made significant strides in sequential decision-making, developing algorithms that optimize performance while adhering to ethical and safety standards.

"My current research focuses on enhancing the robustness, efficiency and fairness of AI/ML models," Huang said. "My plans include investigating generative AI, developing detection mechanisms for AI-generated content and building models for robot-human teaming. These advancements will ensure AI's responsible and ethical application, protecting societal interests and promoting fairness. Through this work, I strive to contribute to a future where AI responsibly supports and enhances human endeavors."

Abhinav Shrivastava, who holds a joint appointment in UMIACS and an affiliate appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been promoted to associate professor. He has established a broad-ranging research agenda, primarily in computer vision and machine learning. His work focuses on developing large-scale recognition algorithms and systems to analyze images and videos effectively and efficiently. He uses a wide range of supervisory signals to build recognition systems that can tackle the challenges of the open world and operate efficiently, securely and robustly under real-world constraints. More recently, his research focus has evolved to include compositional learning, implicit representations, generative modeling, predictive perception and the intersection of computer vision, learning and robotics.

"My long-term research goal is to equip machines with perception abilities, to enable them to understand, interact with and respond to their environment seamlessly," Shrivastava said. "I would like to thank my mentors, colleagues, collaborators and family for their support throughout my career, and, most importantly, my students for inspiring me with their hard work and helping me learn and grow."

Promoted to Senior Lecturer:

Michael Marsh has been promoted to senior lecturer. His research focuses on information assurance in distributed systems. His work emphasizes establishing and maintaining trustworthiness and reliability, contributing to the development of secure and dependable computing environments.

"I believe in setting students up for success without compromising on rigor, whether through the course structure or creating supplemental materials to fill in the gaps between formal coursework and real-world tools and practices," Marsh said. "More recently, I've been working on tools that augment Canvas to support faculty teaching large classes."

—Story by Samuel Malede Zewdu, CS Communications