Recent News & Accomplishments

 2016

On January 1st 2017, Robert Pless , PhD '00 will begin as the inaugural Patrick and Donna Martin Endowed Professor of the George Washington University in Washington, DC. Pless is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Washington Univerity in St. Louis, MO. His research areas include computer vision and robotics. His dissertation advisor was Yiannis Aloinmonos. Read GWU's article on Pless here: https://graduate.seas.gwu.edu/welcome-professor-robert-pless  read more
Professor Sam H. Noh, recently named the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS), is an alumnus of the Department of Computer Science. Noh, who was a student of Professor Ashok Agrawala, is also Professor and Head of the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology (UNIST) in Ulsan, Korea. The ACM featured Noh in an interview about his research on new memory technogies. Article: http://www.acm.org/articles/people-of-acm/2016/sam-noh  read more
In September 2016, Maryland Commerce provided additional support for the Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair in computer science with $1.1million. A $1.5 million private donor match will support research for this endowed chair in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. For the university press release, please read here: http://www.umdrightnow.umd.edu/news/21-million-state-maryland-will-match-private-donations-two-endowed-chairs-umd  read more
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Along with Distinguished University Professor Ben Shneiderman and Dr. Catherine Plaisant , members of the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) will receive two Test of Time Awards at the IEEE VISualization Conference which is being held in Baltimore from Oct 24-28. For their work from 2006 entitled, A Visual Interface for Multivariate Temporal Data: Finding Patterns of Events across Multiple Histories , Professor Ben Shneiderman, Professor Jerry Fails, Dr. Amy Karlson, and Dr. Layla Shahamat received the first VAST Conference Test of Time Award. This particular award goes to a paper from the...  read more
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Professor Atif Memon has been chosen to speak at the annual Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC). Memon is known for having founded the Event Driven Software Lab (EDSL), where faculty and students study “issues of design, development, quality assurance and maintenance of such software applications.” Among his other remarkable work and research, he continues to teach the Fundamentals of Software Testing course. This year, from November 15th to 16th, Google will be hosting its GTAC in Sunnyvale, California. The conference makes a significant impact in the technology community, joining both...  read more
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From the Division of Research : The University of Maryland (UMD) has appointed Amitabh Varshney, Ph.D., Interim Vice President for Research, effective October 3, 2016. In this role, Varshney will provide strategic leadership to support the continued growth of UMD's $560 million research enterprise. Varshney joined the UMD Department of Computer Science faculty in 2000, and since 2010, has served as director of the UMD Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). A leader in interactive visual computing research, Varshney’s work has focused on exploring the applications of high-...  read more
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Professor V.S. Subrahmanian and his research, which includes algorithmic measures of social media patterns (called STONE, for Shaping Terrorist Organization Network Efficacy) to counter terrorist attacks worldwide, were both featured on PBS Newshour on September 6th 2016. His work will also be featured on a longer special on PBS Nova special on the aftermath of the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks entitled, "15 years of Terror" by Miles O'Brien, airing on September 7th 2016 at 9pm EST. Subrahmanian's software may be able to help predict salient information about future terrorist attacks...  read more
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Professor Mihai Pop co-organized a workshop entitled "Next Generation Sequencing - Algorithms, and Software For Biomedical Applications" at the Schloss Dagstuhl Leibniz Zentrum fur Informatik in Dagstuhl, Germany. Pop worked with Professor Gene Myers of the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, Professor Knut Reinert of the Freie Universitaet in Berlin, and Professor Tandy Warnow of the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Scientists from Europe and the United States worked together for a week to identify computational challenges and opportunities in sequencing data and emerging experimental...  read more
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PhD student Ahmed Elgohary is a bit of a Renaissance individual. He has worked with Professor Amol Deshpande in databases, and he is now working with Assistant Professor Marine Carpuat in machine learning, natural language processing, and natural language inference. In a brief interview in late August, he noted that a good thing about the University of Maryland is the opportunity for students to explore different fields and work with different advisors as they decide the best area in CS for them to conduct research. He originally thought he was going to focus on databases, but he took a...  read more
Professor and Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science Samir Khuller gave a talk at the European Symposium on Algorithms in Aarhus, Denmark. In 2015, ESA named Sudipto Guha and Samir Khuller as winners of the ESA Test-of-Time award for their paper Approximation Algorithms for Connected Dominating Sets (Proceedings ESA'96, Algorithmica 20:4 (1998) 374-387). PhD Student Brian Brubach, who is advised by Professor Aravind Srinivasan, also gave a paper entitled New Algorithms, Better Bounds, and a Novel Model for Online Stochastic Matching with Karthik A. Sankararaman, Aravind...  read more