Recent News & Accomplishments
2020
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
Assistant Professor Pratap Tokekar receives the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for a project titled "Secure, Resilient, and Risk-Aware Multi-Robot Coordination". Current multi-robot systems are "brittle" since the failure of a single robot may bring the whole team down. Cyber-attacks that incapacitate robots or compromise their sensors are becoming increasingly realistic. Tokekar’s project focuses on multi-robot coordination in scenarios where the robots operate in failure-prone or adversarial environments. The project aims to address the key question of how a team of robots... read more
Assistant Professor Soheil Feizi receives National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for a project titled "Information-Theoretic and Statistical Foundations of Generative Models". Generative models provide a statistical understanding of data and play an important role in the success of modern machine learning in various application domains including vision, speech, natural languages, computational biology, etc. Building on the success of deep learning, recent advances in modern generative models such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs) have... read more
Professor Emeritus, Former Department Chair, and UMD Distinguished Scholar and Teacher, recently received the 2020 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award
The Education Committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA-E) awarded Professor Samir Khuller the 2020 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award . The award recognizes his incredible efforts in mentoring Undergraduate students on their research over the last decade. Over the last 12 years Khuller has mentored 32 undergraduate students (approx. 16 from UMD) with diverse backgrounds of which approximately fifty percent of his mentees are women. Several his mentees have matriculated into top tier graduate programs including Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of... read more
The Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20) will be held February 7-12, 2020 at the Hilton New York Midtown, New York, USA.
One of the oldest and most prestigious artificial intelligence (AI) conferences will take place next week in New York City. The Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence ( AAAI) will bring together researchers and practitioners in AI, machine learning (ML), and related fields for a week of paper presentations, invited speakers, workshops, and tutorials. Additionally, collocated conferences such as the ACM/SIGAI Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society ( AIES ) will attract a diverse set of participants to discuss the impact of AI, and AI hype, on society. UMDCS researchers will... read more