Recent News & Accomplishments
2014
Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe appeared on Bloomberg West to discuss his recent donation to the University , his vision for the Iribe Center, and the future of consumer virtual reality. Iribe described his motivation behind his recent $31 million donation to construct a new Computer Science building and provided his thoughts on recent efforts by several major corporations - including Samsung and Sony - to develop consumer-grade virtual reality devices. read more
Students and Companies meet and network
On Thursday Sept. 18, 2014, The Department of Computer Science hosted its 10 th bi-annual Computer Science Department Career and Internship Fair at the XFinity Center, the largest venue for the event yet. Representatives from 122 companies, including corporate partners, attended the fair in hopes of attracting students for internships and full-time positions. The diverse companies in attendance included start-ups, government agencies, mid-size tech companies in financial, environmental, and security industries, as well as tech giants. Many representatives from the companies were alumni from... read more
The Corporate Partners in Computing Program, jointly supported by the Department of Computer Science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) has experienced tremendous growth over the past six months. The program has reached current capacity with twenty five members including the addition of our newest partners: Leidos, Adobe India, Capital One, AQR Capital Management, and NSA. Partners have engaged in a variety of department events this semester including the Daemon Dash Hackathon, CS Career and Internship Fair, Resume Workshop, and Technical Interview... read more
The University of Maryland will receive $30,000 per year for three years to support efforts to increase the number of women and students of color who major in computer science. UMD is one of 15 universities that will be supported by the Building Recruiting And Inclusion for Diversity (BRAID) initiative led by the Anita Borg Institute and Harvey Mudd College. The initiative—which is funded by Facebook, Google, Intel and Microsoft—was announced on Sept. 24, 2014 by Hillary Clinton as part of a Clinton Global Initiative commitment that supports programs for women and girls. Lack of diversity in... read more
The Department of Computer Science hosted its third annual Daemon Dash Hackathon from September 13-14, 2014. Approximately 100 undergraduate students from a variety of majors including Computer Science, Engineering, Biology, and Math spent twenty-four hours building software projects around the theme of sustainability--echoing the University’s commitment to a greener future. The Daemon Dash Hackathon’s opening ceremony on Saturday afternoon included an address from Oculus VR co-founder, Brendan Iribe, as well as visits from his co-founder Michael Antonov, and Professor Samir... read more
The Department is pleased to announce that Brendan Iribe and Michael Antonov have contributed greatly to our future with a combined gift of $38 million to build The Iribe Center for Computer Science and Innovation. read more
On August 19th, 2014, during the ACM SIGCOMM meeting in Chicago, two members of the Department of Computer Science received awards for their contributions to the field of Networking and Data Communication. Professor Neil Spring was awarded the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award for his paper with Ratul Mahajan and David Wetherall on "Measuing ISP Topologies with Rocketfuel." His paper, published in 2004, has been recognized for its ongoing, significant contribution to research conducted in this field. During the same ceremony, Aaron Schulman (Ph.D. ’13) accepted the SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation... read more
While interning in the AI group at Rocket Fuel in Silicon Valley this summer, PhD student Florin Chelaru saw his paper with Professor Hector Bravo entitled "Epiviz: interactive visual analytics for functional genomics data" published in Nature Methods . Chelaru is a graduate of the University Alexandru Ioan Cuza of Iași in Romania, and is a third year PhD student in the Computer Science Department. Chelaru took time out of his busy schedule to sit down for an interview and tell us a bit about his research in bioinformatics and genomic research, his work with Hector Bravo, and his experiences... read more
The Department is pleased to announce that the university has named two faculty members, Dr. Bonnie Dorr and Dr. Dianne O'Leary, as Professors Emeritae of the university. Dr. Bonnie Dorr is now Professor Emerita in both computer science and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Dr. Dorr came to the university in 1990, and her research includes many areas of broad-scale multilingual processing, including machine translation, summarization and cross-language retrieval. She is also associate director of the Institute for Human Machine Cognition, which is a non-profit research institution... read more
Two University of Maryland Ph.D. students, David Harris in applied mathematics (advised by Dr. Aravind Srinivasan) and Vahid Liaghat in computer science (advised by Dr. MohammadTaghi HajiAghayi) have been appointed to speak at China Theory Week 2014. China Theory Week is an annual workshop that has been held since 2007 under the sponsorship of Professor Andrew Chi-Chih Yao of IIIS at Tsinghua University. It provides opportunity for the most accomplished Ph.D. students to meet, as well as to present and discuss their research. The workshop will be held from September 8-12, 2014 in IIS,... read more