Recent News & Accomplishments
2019
Awards from NSF and JP Morgan
Assistant Professor Furong Huang has received an NSF Award for her work entitled Principled Methods for Learning and Understanding of Neural Networks. The work advocates theoretically guaranteed training and understanding of neural networks via techniques from learning theory, nonconvex optimization and consistent latent variable model learning using spectral methods. The project aims to • Guarantee training of deep nets • Analyze generalization ability of compressed deep neural networks • Provide reliable deep neural networks robust to the worst attackers Huang was awarded a “2019 J.P... read more
award from the College of Computer Mathematical and Natural Sciences
Ms. Amy Vaillancourt, a senior advisor with the Department, has been named the Thelma M. Williams Advisor of the Year of 2019. Each year, the College selects an advisor from a pool of nominees whom students recognize for their outstanding work with undergraduate students. Vaillancourt has worked as an advisor for the department for the last five years. During her time here, she has advised hundreds of students, served as an organizer for the Department's Career Fair, and has initated excellent programs including guided study sessions for students. Before working in undergraduate studies here... read more
Researchers from the University of Maryland have swept the runners-up categories for the SIGSPATIAL best paper competition. The authors include Heba Aly, Samet Ayhan, and Professor Hanan Samet. Aly’s paper, written with John Krumm (Microsoft Research), Gireeja Ranade (UC Berkeley), and Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research) is entitled On the value of spatiotemporal information: principles and scenarios. Ayhan’s paper was written with Samet as well as Pablo Costas (Boeing Europe) and is entitled ),“Prescriptive analytics system for long-range aircraft conflict detection and resolution.” Both... read more
Financial and technology leader Capital One is an inaugural partner of the center.
The University of Maryland recently launched a multidisciplinary center that uses powerful computing tools to address challenges in big data, computer vision, health care, financial transactions and more. The University of Maryland Center for Machine Learning will unify and enhance numerous activities in machine learning already underway on the Maryland campus. Machine learning uses algorithms and statistical models so that computer systems can effectively perform a task without explicit instructions, relying instead on patterns and inference. At UMD, for example, computer vision experts are... read more
Assistant Professor Soheil Feizi’s “Network Maximal Correlation” has been given the IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (TNSE) Best Paper Award for 2019 . This work (named the best for over a three-year period) introduces a new statistic for measuring dependency in multivariate random variables, as well as introducing a computational framework to evaluate it given multivariate data sets. The goal of the new measure is to automatically identify complex, non-linear dependencies that would not be observed with traditional measures of correlation. read more
Senior computer science major Louis-Henri Merino has been named a Fulbright Scholar for the 2019-2020 academic year. He will be studying block chains with Bryan Ford at L'École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) , a research institute and university in Lausanne, Switzerland. After his year abroad, Merino will return to the University of Maryland to earn a Ph.D. in Reliability Engineering from the A. James Clark School of Engineering . As a French speaker, Merino is looking forward to working on his language skills in Lausanne and other French-speaking European cities during his time... read more
Professor Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi has been named as one of 168 John Simon Guggenheim Fellows for 2019 for Applied Mathematics. He is one of thirteen scientists to receive this award and is the first Computer Scientist at the University of Maryland honored in this way. He was named among artists, musicians, filmmakers, art critics, literature scholars and writers. Hajiaghayi will be using his fellowship to continue his work on big graph algorithms and algorithmic game theory. When he received the call about the fellowship, he immediately shared the news with his wife Dr. Arefeh Nasr as well... read more
Soheil Behnezhad Yuan Su have been awarded Google Ph.D. Fellowships for 2019. Soheil Behnezhad is advised by Professor Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi and researches the design and analysis of algorithms. He is particularly interested in algorithms for processing large-scale graphs in parallel/distributed, streaming, and stochastic settings. He is also interested in algorithmic game theory. He has recently published papers in Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) and and Symposium on Parallelism in Algorthims and Architectures (SPAA). Yuan Su is advised by Professor Andrew Childs. Su's research... read more
For her work on inclusion and diversity in the Department and for co-founding the Inclusion Speaker Series, academic advisor Freddie Salley was awarded the Office of Multi-ethnic Student Education’s (OMSE) Excellent in Service Award for “outstanding contributions to advancing the inclusive excellence of multi-ethnic students on campus.” Salley has been an advisor in the Department for two years. In addition to her other duties—in which she is responsible for assigning undergraduate TAs to courses. While cofounding the Inclusion Speaker Series (with B.K. Adams and Ken Kolkason), she has served... read more
Professor Hanan Samet’s paper (written with students and colleagues) entitled “A New View on News,” has been awarded ACM SIGSPATIAL’s 10-year impact award for 2018. Originally published in 2008, this paper, which describes a system (called NewsStand newsstand.umiacs.umd.edu ) that uses a map query interface to collect, analyze, and gather news stories, has garnered many citations and has been the discussion of many researchers in the academic community. In October 2014, Samet’s work was the subject of a short video produced by the ACM. http://vimeo.com/106352925 NewStand monitors thousands of... read more