Recent News & Accomplishments

 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. See http://www.botball.org/season/2008/  read more
Derek Juba and Adam O'Donovan have received NVIDIA Fellowships for 2008-2009.  read more
Make sure to visit our events on Saturday, April 26, 2008 at the 10 th 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...  read more
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.  read more
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...  read more
Ben Shneiderman will give a keynote speech at the ACM SIGMOD conference titled, "Extreme Visualization: Squeezing a Billion Records into a Million Pixels".  read more
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.  read more
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.  read more
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  read more
Jonathan Katz was invited to speak at the Fifth Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC) 2008  read more