Recent News & Accomplishments
2022
Alum Peter Ersts creates software and solutions for the American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation
For Peter Ersts (B.S. ’97, computer science), working for the American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) in New York City has meant some extraordinary opportunities and experiences—wild adventures that have taken him all over the world. “One of my favorite places is Palmyra Atoll, which is way out in the middle of the Pacific, and there we were doing sea turtle research, looking at green sea turtles, capturing them and tagging them and taking skin samples for genetic analysis,” Ersts explained. “My other favorite project was in Madagascar, and I was... read more
The Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2) has established a new travel awards program to support students and postdocs traveling to academic conferences, workshops or other research events focused on cybersecurity or privacy. “Through this award, MC2 is encouraging students and postdocs to think broadly, inspire other communities through their research and be inspired themselves,” says Andreea Alexandru , a postdoc and first recipient of the new award. “This initiative is commendable and can only lead to more impactful research.” The $5K award will support her trip to the IEEE Conference on... read more
Two faculty members in the department of Computer Science have each received an award from Meta Research , the science and innovation arm of the social media giant that has more than 2.85 billion users worldwide. Jordan Boyd-Graber , an associate professor of computer science, and Nirupam Roy , an assistant professor of computer science, will each use their Meta funding to further projects that are based in artificial intelligence (AI). Boyd-Graber’s project, “ A Leaderboard and Competition for Human-Computer Adversarial Q&A ,” seeks to create challenging human-in-the-loop (HITL) examples... read more
Course Prepares Students to Identify and Halt Internet Threats
The article is republished from Maryland Today. Students sign up for a class with the reasonable expectation that they’ll learn skills they can later practice in their daily lives. In one popular course at the University of Maryland, however, they’re advised to leave some of those practices in the classroom. The one-credit “Intro to Ethical Hacking” teaches undergraduates to break into websites as part of their exploration into the world of cybersecurity—not so they can be online villains, but so they can develop the knowledge needed to defend against malicious hackers. Cybercrime is a severe... read more
Researchers affiliated with the Geometric Algorithms for Modeling, Motion, and Animation (GAMMA) group at University of Maryland (UMD) have received a Best Paper Award for their work on a data-driven model and algorithm that can perceive the emotions of individuals based on their walking motion or gait. The paper, “ Learning Gait Emotions Using Affective and Deep Features ,” was presented at the 15th Annual Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games ( MIG 2022 ), held from November 3–5 in Guanajuato, Mexico. It describes an innovative method... read more
A University of Maryland expert in machine learning has been awarded significant funding by two separate entities to tackle pressing problems in the field. Soheil Feizi , an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies , is principal investigator of two $300K awards. The first comes from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Computing and Communication, with the goal of understanding robustness via parsimonious structures. Although deep neural networks have led to significant... read more
A University of Maryland expert in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) has been selected for MIT Technology Review’s Asia Pacific “ Innovators Under 35 ,”an annual list recognizing 35 of the brightest young minds working in technology today. Furong Huang , an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), was among the 35 entrepreneurs, humanitarians, inventors, and researchers honored for their groundbreaking work in biotech, AI, materials science, energy, computing... read more
Growing up with professors for parents, junior and computer science major Ipsa Mittra was immersed in academia from the get-go. She knew from a young age that she wanted to conduct research to make a difference. In high school, Mittra found her niche in computational biology through the STEM magnet program at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md. This spark of interest eventually led her to a prestigious summer fellowship this year conducting research at the Broad Institute and presenting at the 2022 National Diversity in STEM Conference. “SACNAS was my first time presenting my... read more
Researchers affiliated with the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2) had six papers accepted to the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS), including two that received honorable mention awards. The annual conference brings together information security researchers, practitioners, developers and users from around the world. It was held this year from November 7–11 in Los Angeles. “It's great to see MC2 faculty, students and postdocs continue to produce strong work on so many important topics, from the web’s certificate... read more
This article is republished from CMNS website. University of Maryland Department of Computer Science Professor Rance Cleaveland has been named associate dean for research in the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS), effective immediately. Cleaveland, who also has joint appointments in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and the Institute for Systems Research , joined UMD in 2005 and served as executive and scientific director of the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering from 2005 to 2014. From... read more