Recent News & Accomplishments
2013
Treemaps is a popular visualization tool developed in the Department's HCIL Lab. While originally conceived to map functional things like hard drives, the tool often produces aesthetically pleasing results. The Treemap Art Project, curated by Prof. Ben Shneiderman, aims to highlight visualization's artistic side with a collection of framed prints that will be displayed on the 3rd floor of CSIC. read more
Rick Kuhn (MS '85), a computer scientist in the Computer Security Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has recently co-authored "Introduction to Combinatorial Testing". For more information: http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466552296 read more
Jason B. Ellis (B.S. '95) is a recipient of the 2013 Black Engineer of the Year Awards Career Achievement Award. He was honored at the annual BEYA STEM Conference held in Washington D.C. in February. Ellis is a Research Staff Member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center. read more
The Department extends congratulations to Prof. Atif Memon, the recipient of the "retrospective" award for the most influential paper among the papers of 2003 Working Conference on Reverse Engineering. The title of the paper is "GUI Ripping: Reverse Engineering of Graphical User Interfaces for Testing" by Memon, Banerjee and Nagarajan. This award is selected by the program committee of WCRE 2013 as the most influential paper from WCRE 2003. As part of this, they plan to give Prof. Memon a physical award at the conference, as well as to invite him to give a retrospective talk as part of a... read more
In June, Dianne O' Leary gave two plenary talks. She delivered "Eckart-Young Meets Bayes: Optimal Regularized Low-Rank Inverse Approximation" at the International Linear Algebra Society Meeting , held in Providence, RI. At the 25th Biennial Numerical Analysis Conference held in Glasgow, Scotland, she was invited to give "Image Restoration and Uncertainty Quantification". read more
Lise Getoor gave a keynote speech titled "Probabilistic Soft Logic: A Scalable Approach for Markov Random Fields over Continuous-Valued Variables" at the 7th International RuleML Symposium held July 11-13 in Seattle, WA. On July 15, she was an invited speaker for the Interaction for Machine Learning Panel at the annual Microsoft Faculty Summit held in Redmond, WA. read more
A team representing UMD took home the "First to Solve Problem J" Award, in the 37th world final ACM ICPC programming contest , held in St. Petersburg, Russia over the July 4th weekend. The team, comprised of graduate students Hossein Esfandiari, Ang Li and Shangfu Peng and coached by Mohammad Hajiaghayi was the first to solve the problem among the 120 participating teams. Overall the team solved 5 problems and ranked 27 in the World Finals. It was one of only two North American teams to win an award, the other being Carnegie Mellon University, who placed 11th and won a Bronze Medal. read more
The Department is pleased to announce that Professor Eytan Ruppin will join us as the Director of the Center for BioInformatics and Computational Biology (CBCB), starting in July, 2014. Ruppin is currently a professor in the Schools of Computer Science and Medicine at Tel-Aviv University. He is world-renowned for his research involving neural networks, systems biology and personalized cancer research. His current focus involves systems biology, which works to construct empirical models of protein interactions within a cell. Professor Ruppin graduated from Tel-Aviv University with his Ph.D. in... read more
Paul Capriolo (B.S. '06) has been named the winner of the Maryland Region Ernst & Young "Entrepreneurs of the Year 2013 - Emerging" award. Capriolo founded Social Growth Technologies (SGT) with Patrick Jenkins (B.S. '06) in 2009, and in May 2010 the company was the top winner at the 5th annual Cupid’s Cub Business Challenge. The awards winners were announced at the Awards Gala held June 26 in Baltimore, MD. read more
Dr. Azarakhsh Malekian (Ph.D. '09) is joining the University of Toronto Business School as an Assistant Professor. Malekian recently completed a postdoc at MIT. Her research is in algorithms, social networks and game theory. She was advised by Samir Khuller. read more