Recent News & Accomplishments

 2013

3 new scholarships for students applications due October 4 (14629)
The Department of Computer Science, in conjunction with three of its corporate partners, is pleased to unveil three new scholarships for talented CS students to apply for this fall semester. Applications for all three scholarships are due by October 4 th . For more information, contact Andrew Nolan anolan [-at-] cs [dot] umd [dot] edu . We are extremely appreciative and thankful to our corporate sponsors for their support to CS at UMD: 1. The Appian Scholarship: A $5,000 scholarship is available for junior or senior-level standing (at least at the 300 level of CS coursework) CS majors with a...  read more
Prof. Elaine Shi has been awarded a Google Faculty Research Award for her proposal titled, "Truly Practical Dynamic Proofs of Retrievability." Google Research Awards are one-year awards structured as unrestricted gifts to universities to support the work of world-class full-time faculty members at top universities around the world.  read more
treemap art project example (14599)
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
ACM ICPC team (14532)
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
photo of Eytan Ruppin (14531)
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