Recent News & Accomplishments
2020
Jack and Rita G. Minker Professor Mohammad Hajiaghayi was recently named the fellow of European Association for Theoretical Computer Science -2020, for his outstanding contributions to the algorithmic graph theory, game theory, and distributed computing. He was one of the 3 members selected by the EATCS Fellow Selection Committee. Hajiaghayi’s research focuses on algorithmic game theory and combinatorial auctions, network design, combinatorial optimizations and approximation algorithms, fixed-parameter algorithms, algorithmic graph theory, distributed and mobile computing, and computational... read more
Professor Aravind Srinivasan was recently named a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for 2020 . SIAM is an international society which aims to promote research that will lead to effective new mathematical and computational methods and techniques for science, engineering, industry, and society. SIAM specifically recognized Srinivasan for his “contributions to randomized algorithms and probabilistic methods with applications to network and computational science”. Srinivasan’s research has been at the intersection of randomized algorithms, AI, discrete... read more
Computer Science undergraduate Pavan Ravindra, a Banneker/Key Scholar has been named the 2020 Goldwater Scholar by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. Ravindra was among the 396 Barry Goldwater Scholars selected from 1,343 students nominated nationally this year. The scholarship encourages students to pursue higher education and career in sciences, engineering and mathematics. In addition to Computer Science, Ravindra is also majoring in Biochemistry. He is also a member of the Integrated Life Sciences program in the Honors College. Ravindra developed an... read more
Yogesh Balaji, Sanghyun Hong and Nitin Sanket were awarded the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship for the 2020-2021 academic year.
Three students from the department were awarded the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship for the 2020- 2021 academic year. The Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship supports students with excellent qualifications who are in the latter stages of writing their dissertations. Yogesh Balaji - Prior to joining UMD, Balaji graduated with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India. His research work focuses on problems involving out-of-distribution generalization, domain adaptation and generative modeling. He plans to work towards developing efficient neural... read more
A team of researchers led by Professor Aravind Srinivasan at UMD and by the University of Virginia overall, secured the prestigious NSF Expeditions in Computing award on the timely topic of Computational Epidemiology. The other UMD faculty involved are Distinguished University Professor Rita R. Colwell and Assistant Professor Abhinav Bhatele (CS and UMIACS). The growth and the adaptability of the human population in addition to the globalization, antimicrobial resistance, urbanization, climate change, and ecological pressures has increased the risk of a global pandemic. Srinivasan’s project... read more
Assistant Professor Abhinav Shrivastava and Assistant Professor John Dickerson’s mentoring leads high school students to the top 300 scholars in this year’s Regeneron Science Talent Search, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious competition.
Michelle Tang, advised by Assistant Professor Abhinav Shrivastava , and Zach Zhao, advised by Assistant Professor John Dickerson , were selected as semifinalists in the 2020 Regeneron Science Talent Search . The Regeneron STS is the oldest and arguably most prestigious high school competition in the United States. On top of this, Zach Zhao’s project went on to win the ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize , established in 2015 by DEC/Microsoft alumni David Cutler and Gordon Bell, which recognizes students who pursue computing challenges beyond the traditional classroom environment. Both Tang and Zhao... read more
On February 29th, the department hosted the 30th Annual UMD High School Programming Competition (HSPC), which brought together high school students from a diverse set of schools around the DC Metro area. 30 teams of talented High School students gathered for a three-hour competition to compete ( in teams of four) and to demonstrate their programming skills and problem solving abilities. Problems involved creative combinations of the application of core computer science and mathematics concepts such as graph theory, dynamic programming, recursion, combinatorics, and probability. This year’s... read more
Assistant Professor Michelle Mazurek receives the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for a project titled "Improving the Reliability of Human-Centered Secure-Development Research." Improving software security is a critical need for the U.S. and the world. In order to solve the problem, an understanding of how human decision-making interacts with technology in the process of secure software development is needed. However, studying these human factors is typically expensive, time-consuming and difficult and the study requires many choices about experimental design while balancing... read more
Assistant Professor Xiaodi Wu receives the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for a project titled “On the Foundations of End-to-End Quantum Application." "This is an exciting time for quantum computing! With the availability of prototypes of quantum machines, especially the recently established quantum supremacy, it becomes possible for researchers to design and implement real-world end-to-end quantum applications" said Wu Wu’s project sets a comprehensive research agenda toward this target, as an effort to bridge the gap between the theoretical foundation of quantum computing... read more
A team of UMD researchers lead by Associate Professor Tom Goldstein , and including Assistant Professor John Dickerson , Assistant Professor Furong Huang , Professor David Jacobs , Professor Jonathan Katz , and Assistant Professor Abhinav Shrivastava , recently received a $3.2M award to study the security of machine learning methods. The awarded project, titled “Repelling Evasion and Poisoning Attacks: A Principled Way Forward,” is supported by DARPA's Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception (GARD) program. “A number of new security threats to machine learning systems have recently... read more