Recent News & Accomplishments
2013
Three hundred young women (middle-school students) filed into the Riggs Alumni Center on Wednesday, November 13, 2013 for the Cool Careers in Cyber Security for Girls Workshop . Sitting at tables covered with computer parts, padlocks, cryptology puzzles and other cybersecurity paraphernalia, the girls tried to pick locks with shims made from soda cans, decrypt a secret message, and identify missing parts in a disassembled computer. Women who work in cybersecurity and computer science guided the girls through these activities and introduced concepts such as penetration testing, cryptography,... read more
Marco Adelfio and Hanan Samet received the Best Paper Award for their paper, Structured Toponym Resolution Using Combined Hierarchical Place Categories , at the 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR'13). Their paper presents a “novel technique for place name disambiguation that uses Bayesian inference to assign categories to lists or tables containing place names, and then interprets individual toponyms based on the most likely category assignments.” Learn More The Paper Marco Adelfio’s Personal Website Hanan Samet’s Website read more
Recognizing Department Achievements, New Advances, and Distinguished Alumni
The Department of Computer Science, founded in 1973, celebrated its 40th anniversary on Oct. 18, 2013. Alumni, former and current faculty and staff members as well as corporate representatives from around the United States gathered in College Park to celebrate the achievements of the department and to reunite with one another. In addition to setting up a website to document the evolution of Computer Science at the University, the department hosted an afternoon event in the Computer Science Instructional Center. That afternoon, nearly 200 guests gathered to learn the history of the department... read more
This summer the Computer Science department will once again host a summer research experience for undergraduates program: the Combinatorial Algorithms Applied Research Experience for Undergraduates (CAAR REU). This REU is a 10-week summer NSF funded program that aims to expose undergraduate students to applied research projects in algorithmic design. Faculty members in a variety of research areas will advise students in their discoveries of algorithmic solutions to real world problems. The summer 2014 research projects: Security in Cloud Computing (advised by Dr. Jonathan Katz and Dr. Elaine... read more
Graduate students Jeffrey Stuckman and Kent Wills and Professor Jim Purtilo have won the Best Short Paper award at the 7th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement for their paper “Evaluating software product metrics with synthetic defect data.” Their work was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. read more
Sophomore Computer Science major Laura Dally was recognized and honored by the University of Maryland Athletics Department as a recipient of the 2013-2014 Student Athlete Honor Roll during the halftime show of the homecoming football game on October 12th. Laura is a member of the University of Maryland Track and Field team; her events are hurdles and sprints. read more
The New Initiative for Women in Computing will host Janet Campbell for a “Women Only, Women in Science” Breakout session this Thursday, November 7 at 6pm. Members from the Association of Women in Computing, Women in Math, and Women in Physics student groups, and all other women in STEM fields are invited to attend and bring their questions for a female Senior Developer. Janet Campbell has worked at Epic for the past 10 years and will lead an interactive session on building and maintaining a successful science-based career. Students’ personal questions will be answered as... read more
Jay Pujara, and Hui Miao, 4 th and 2 nd year Ph.D. students in computer science, respectively, received the Best Student Paper Award at the International Semantic Web Conference. Their paper, entitled “Knowledge Graph Identification” presents an approach for transforming massive collections of uncertain, interrelated facts, collected from texts and webpages, into a knowledge graph using the probabilistic soft logic framework. Both students are excited to have received this honor. Hui, says he has been “fortunate to work with Jay Pujara and Prof Lise Getoor on this exciting... read more
Reprinted from VisualisingData.com Written By: Andy Kirk Details of a Treemap Art Project have come to my attention, showcasing data-generated artwork from one of the most influential names in data visualisation, Ben Shneiderman . The project has the compelling strapline ‘Every A lgo R i T hm has ART in it’. B en has had a hugely distinguished career and is responsible for a host of notable achievements in this field, along with Human Computer Interaction. His ‘ Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design ‘ and ‘ Visual Information-Seeking Mantra ‘ are but two... read more
On October 30, 2013, Ben Shneiderman, Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and founder of the Human Computer Interaction Lab was featured on the NPR Kojo Nnamdi Show on Improving Electronic Health Records. Shneiderman conducts numerous research projects and has garnered many awards for his work in human-computer interaction, user interface design, information visualization and social media. One of his projects is User Interface Designs for Electronic Health Record Systems, which studies and proposes novel... read more