Recent News & Accomplishments

 2009

Jon Kleinberg, Tisch University Professor from Cornell University presents Meme-tracking, Scheduling, and the Dynamics of the News Cycle". Date: October 15, 2009 Time: 4:00 pm Location: CSIC Building, Room 1115 The flow of news through on-line networks has created a complex landscape of media sources and led to rich datasets that provide glimpses into how news is produced, shaped, and consumed. We begin by discussing methods for studying how news stories spread through such a system, using an approach that tracks short pieces of as they travel and mutate across news sources. This type of...  read more
The International Children's Digital Library was named a winner of the 2009 Digital Education Award which recognizes exceptional web sites and projects focused on K - 12 and higher education. Congratulations to Allison Druin and Ben Bederson on this achievement.  read more
Randy Baden, Adam Bender, Professor Neil Spring, Professor Bobby Bhattacharjee, and Daniel Starin received the SIGCOMM 2009 Best Student Paper Award for their paper "Persona: An Online Social Network with User-defined Privacy." http://www.sigcomm.org/about/awards/student-award-recipients  read more
NetGrok , a tool for visualizing computer networks in real-time, was featured in a cover story on security visualization for the September 2009 issue of Linux Magazine . Netgrok was developed by CS graduate students Ryan Blue, Cody Dunne, Adam Fuchs, Kyle King and Aaron Shulman as part of a Spring 2008 Information Visualization course.  read more
A paper by Kutluhan Erol, PhD graduate and Professors Jim Hendler and Dana Nau has received an honorable mention for the ICAPS Influential Paper award, which will be awarded at the ICAPS-2009 conference in Greece this September. The award honors the authors of a significant and influential paper" in automated planning and scheduling, published at least 10 years ago in one of the ICAPS family of conferences (ICAPS, ECP, EWSP, AIPS). The paper is: K. Erol, J. Hendler, and D. S. Nau. UMCP: A sound and complete procedure for hierarchical task-network planning. In Proc. International Conf. on AI...  read more
Prof. Dana Nau gave a keynote talk in September at KI-2009 , the annual German Conference on AI.  read more
Professor Rance Cleaveland (CS/ISR) is the principal investigator and Professor Steven Marcus is a co-PI for the University of Maryland's portion of a major new National Science Foundation collaborative research grant, "Formal Analysis of Complex Systems." *The five-year, $10 million project is part of NSF's "Expeditions in Computing" initiative.  read more
Professor Emeritus Harold P.Edmundson passed away on July 9, 2009. Professor Edmundson held a joint appointment in Computer Science and the Mathematics Department from 1967 until 1991 when he retired. Ed" was a volunteer in Rocky Mountain National Park until shortly before his death. His obituary is located at: www.allnutt.com .  read more
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Abhinav Gupta and Larry Davis' recent CVPR 2009 paper, on describing storylines of videos, was featured in IEEE Spectrum article and on the front-page of Discovery Tech News. The paper describes a technique to automatically generate blurbs describing the plays of the baseball game. This research was done in collaboration with researchers at Univ. of Pennsylvania. IEEE Spectrum Discovery News  read more
This year's VLDB best paper award has been given to Jian Li, Barna Saha, and Prof. Amol Deshpande for their paper, A Unified Approach to Ranking in Probabilistic Databases". Barna's graduate advisor is Samir Khuller and Jian has been working with both Samir and Amol. The paper is the result of a project begun in one of Amol's classes. The students continued to work on the project following the class's completion and submitted the paper covering their results.  read more