- May 2008
- HCIL's 25th Anniversary and Annual Symposium will be held May 29 & 30, 2008
- The Department's annual Awards Ceremony was held April 18, 2008.
- The annual Botball Robotics contest will be held in Ritchie Colliseum on May 3, 2008
- April 2008
- Visit our Maryland Day events on April 26, 2008.
- Calendar
- May 2008
- Congrats to Dave Jacobs on a recent article in the Smithsonian magazine about his research on developing a botanical field guide that uses image processing methods.
- MAXWell Lab names as home to the first WiMAX Forum endorsed applications lab in North America
- April 2008
- Derek Juba and Adam O'Donovan have received NVIDIA Fellowships for 2008-2009.
- Professors Vic Basili, David Jacobs, Atif Memon, Hanan Samet and Ben Shneiderman will be recognized at the first annual UM Scholarship and Research Celebration.
- An invention disclosure by Adam O'Donovan, Nail Gumerov and Ramani Duraiswami won the UMD 2007 invention of the year.
- Professor Ben Shneiderman has been selected as the FY08 winner of the CMPS Board of Visitors Distinguished Faculty Award.
- Archive
HCIL 25th Anniversary and Annual Symposium
Come celebrate the Human-Computer Interaction Lab's 25th anniversary by joining us for a very special Symposium on May 29, 2008. Not only will you hear talks about cutting-edge research being conducted at the HCIL, but this year we will begin the Symposium with a very special keynote panel, "25 Years of HCI, 25 Years of the HCIL." Esteemed colleagues from outside of the HCIL will offer their reflections. In addition, this year we will continue the tradition of demos and posters following the talks, but these will happen as a part of lab tours where you will be able to see our new facilities. The following day, May 30, 2008 there will be a wide variety of tutorials and workshops that can't be missed. Be sure to sign up early, since space is limited.
Department Awards Ceremony, 2008
The Department hosted its 2008 annual Awards Ceremony on April 18, recognizing the achievements of faculty, staff and students over the past year. Congratulations to all recipients on their accomplishments and hard work.
Botball Robotics Contest 2008
The annual Botball Robotics contest for the DC region will be held in Ritchie Coliseum on May 3. Botball engages students of all backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) as they work together as a team to achieve a long-term goal. Botball gives students the opportunity to be on the creative side of technology as they design, build, program, and document a pair of autonomous mobile robots to play in a competition.
Maryland Day - April 26, 2008
Make sure to visit our events on Saturday, April 26, 2008 at the 10th Annual Maryland Day.
Kriegspiel Chess
See Kriegbot, our Artificial Intelligence Program, in action on the game of Kriegspiel Chess -- a version of chess in which most of your opponent's actions are hidden from you.
The Audio Camera
We have developed an audio camera that allows us to display the sound as an image. Each pixel of this image represents the intensity of sound from a particular direction. Audio images can be compared with visual images in a number of interesting applications, including noise supression, imaging of room acoustics, and video-conferencing.
MyeVyu: Making Campus Safer and Improving Campus Life
Come see the future of mobile devices and campus information technology! We will show not only what you can find on campus web sites in an integrated view, but also the location, audio, and video of roaming users running around campus.
Graduate Visit Day 2008
The Computer Science Department's annual Graduate Visit Day was held on March 28, 2008. Visit Day began with a welcome/information session, continued with lunch followed by a poster session, included individual meetings with faculty and a campus tour, and concluded with dinner out in small groups, hosted by faculty and current students. The entire department pitched in to help make Visit Day a great success.
High School Programming Contest
The UMD High School Programming Contest brings talented students from high schools throughout the DC metropolitan area to the campus to participate in a three hour competition. Students competing in teams of four demonstrate their programming skills and problem solving abilities by attempting to solve eight programming problems in Java, using the Eclipse programming environment, on Apple MacBooks.
The 2008 Contest took place Saturday, March 8, at the CSIC Building at the University of Maryland, College Park. 39 teams from Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia competed in the contest.
HCIL UX (User Experience) Laboratory
Increasingly, rigorous evaluations of software with human subjects are expected in computer science research. Computer science researchers are also studying how humans perform tasks so that they can evaluate how best to augment these tasks with technology.
To support these research needs, we have built a usability lab as a service to the Computer Science department and UMIACS in room 3452 of A.V. Williams. This lab is equipped with many things needed to conduct a user study, including video recording, screen capture and analysis software.
The HCIL UX lab was dedicated March 12th, 2008. More pictures and information will be posted.
Meet the Family
Newly-admitted Terps from the class of 2012 were welcomed at a "Meet the Family!" reception held on the evening March 13th. These students and their families are deep in the springtime ritual of comparing schools to which they have been accepted, and were greeted by faculty, students and alum all eager to have them confirm with College Park. The event included presentations by faculty on the wide variety of research opportunities open to undergrads in our program, plus 'student only' panels conducted by present CS majors.
Research Spotlight: Theoretical Computer Science
Theoretical Computer Science (TCS), broadly speaking, is concerned with understanding the very nature of computation: What problems can be solved by computers? And how efficiently can such problems be solved? TCS encompasses research in such diverse areas as complexity theory, algorithms, cryptography, distributed computing, machine learning, and more; the common thread is a focus on precise models and rigorous mathematical analysis of particular problems within those models.
David Jacobs
Congratulations to David Jacobs on a recent article in the Smithsonian magazine about his work on developing a botanical field guide that uses image processing methods.
UM Gets Only U.S. Lab for WiMAX Next Generation Wireless Applications
"The University of Maryland will be the home to North America's first, and the world's second, laboratory dedicated to creating applications for WiMAX, a next generation technology for Web, phone and other wireless communications. ... The MAXWell Lab will provide developers of WiMAX compatible hardware and software with a large test bed and support of faculty and students in university's highly-ranked computer science and computer and electrical engineering departments."
NVIDIA Fellowship Recipients
Derek Juba and Adam O'Donovan have received NVIDIA Fellowships for 2008-2009.
UM Scholarship and Research Celebration
The research accomplishments of Computer Science professors Vic Basili, David Jacobs, Atif Memon, Hanan Samet and Ben Shneiderman will be recognized at the first annual UM Scholarship and Research Celebration to be held May 1st in the Art/Sociology building atrium from 4:00 to 6:00 pm.
UM OTC Announces Inventions of the Year
Adam O'Donovan, Nail Gumerov and Ramani Duraiswami won the UMD 2007 Information Science Invention of the year with their "Audio Camera for Efficient Sound Localization".
Much as an optical camera creates images from captured light intensity to create a real time picture, an audio "camera" creates a real-time audio image out of sound arriving from all directions to a specific point - the location of the camera. The audio images can be projected onto a corresponding video image for a complete understanding of where the sound originates. Audio images are created using a spherical microphone array "beam former" and then related to video images using standard computer vision techniques.
Shneiderman receives distinguished faculty award
Professor Ben Shneiderman has been selected as the FY08 winner of the CMPS Board of Visitors Distinguished Faculty Award.
The award is given annually to a tenured faculty member for outstanding accomplishments over the previous five years that have contributed significantly to raising the profile and visibility of the College.
Ben Shneiderman
Ben Shneiderman will give a keynote speech at the ACM SIGMOD conference titled, "Extreme Visualization: Squeezing a Billion Records into a Million Pixels".
Best Paper, SIGMOD 2008
The paper titled "Scalable network distance browsing in spatial databases" authored by Professor Hanan Samet, and his students Jagan Sankaranarayanan and Houman Alborzi (who moved to Google) has been chosen to receive a "best paper" award in the SIGMOD 2008 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, June 2008.
NSF Graduate Fellowship
Jessica Chang, BS '07, received an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Jessica is now at University of Washington (Seattle).
Fast Lane: https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/grfp/AwardeeList.do?method=sort&page=8
Aravind Srinivasan
Aravind Srinivasan was an invited speaker at the Network Design Workshop of the 9th INFORMS Telecommunications Conference.
Dianne O'Leary receives multiple honors from AWM and SIAM
Dianne O'Leary will be the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecturer at the SIAM Annual meeting, July 7, in San Diego.
http://www.siam.org/prizes/sponsored/kovalesky.php
As of January 2009, Dianne will serve as editor-in-chief of SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications.
Dianne is also one of four plenary speakers at the 2008 SIAM Conference on Data Mining, Atlanta, April 25.
Jonathan Katz
Jonathan Katz was invited to speak at the Fifth Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC) 2008
Children's Mobile Workshop
HCIL's NSF-funded workshop on Children's Mobile Technologies gathered 45 people from 5 different countries to consider the future in this important research area.
HCIL workshop website: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/childrensmobileworkshop/
STOP featured in several major news media
The Lab for Computational Cultural Dynamics' SOMA Terror Organization Portal (STOP) and social network site for terrorism related analysis and prediction was featured in several major news media. STOP provides methods for reasoning about terror groups and forecasting what they might do in the future. In addition, it contains unique social networking capabilities that allow analysts to effectively cooperate in order to better understand and counteract terror groups. Articles by: Computerworld Magazine, IT week, UPI News, Network World.
Atif Memon
Atif Memon has been invited to give an Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) seminar on "Testing Event-Driven Systems" at the National Institute of Standards & Technology.
Ben Bederson
Ben Bederson co-authors Voting Technology: The Not-So-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot, an investigative study into how voters respond to new equipment.
See also: HCIL news release
