Recent News & Accomplishments
2025
New tenure-track and professional-track faculty bring expertise in AI policy, robotics, data visualization and other areas.
The University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science will welcome eight new faculty members over the next year, expanding research and teaching capabilities across a range of disciplines. Their work spans natural language processing, bioinformatics, robotics, computer vision and sound design for interactive media. These appointments include tenure-track faculty joining in fall 2025 and 2026, as well as professional-track educators supporting instructional needs across computer science and immersive media. “We’re pleased to welcome these talented scholars to our department,” said... read more
His work explores how extended reality and sensory stimuli affect learning and cognition.
Logan Stevens , a Ph.D. student in the University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. He is one of a select group of graduate students nationwide awarded this year as part of the 2025 cohort. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) provides three years of support over a five-year period to students pursuing full-time research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) or STEM education. The program is intended to help ensure the vitality of... read more
The TRAILS project is an extension of previous work done by Gao, Huaishu Peng, an assistant professor of computer science at UMD, and Jiasheng Li , a fourth-year computer science doctoral student at UMD advised by Peng. That project, called Calico, involved a miniature wearable robotic system that moved along the human body on a cloth track, using magnets and sensors to position itself for optimal sensing for various physical activities. Peng says that TRAILS seed funding has allowed the UMD researchers to expand the Calico project and collaborate with Malte Jung , an associate professor of... read more
University of Maryland computer scientists share research on AI robustness, interpretability and human-AI interaction at the annual International Machine Learning Conference.
Researchers from the University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science are presenting 16 papers at the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025), which will take place from July 13 to 19 in Vancouver, Canada. Many of the participating UMD faculty—including Heng Huang , Dinesh Manocha , Ming Lin , Nirupam Roy , Han Shao , Sarah Wiegreffe , Yaodong Yu and Tianyi Zhou —collaborated with graduate students and external partners on the work being presented. Projects include both foundational machine learning methods and application-driven approaches. The work explores a... read more
Laxman Dhulipala, Justin Olav Wyss-Gallifent, Shaobo Cui, Christina Xu and Christian Nygard recognized for their instructional impact as faculty and teaching assistants in the 2024–25 academic year.
The University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science has announced the recipients of its 2024–25 teaching awards, honoring excellence across tenure-track, professional track and instructional assistant roles. This year’s awardees include Assistant Professor Laxman Dhulipala , Principal Lecturer Justin Olav Wyss-Gallifent , graduate teaching assistant Shaobo Cui , and undergraduate teaching assistants Christina Xu and Christian Nygard . The department presents these awards annually to recognize instructors, teaching assistants and STIC facilitators who make consistent contributions to... read more
A University of Maryland graduate student specializing in cryptography has been recognized for his outstanding academic achievements and research. Alexander “Sasha” Frolov, a first-year computer science doctoral student working in the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2), has been named a 2025–26 scholar by the Metropolitan Washington Chapter of the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Foundation. The $15,000 award honors exceptional graduate students pursuing degrees in science, engineering and biomedical research. Frolov, who previously worked as a software engineer on the... read more
If you've ever used an AI chatbot, you may have noticed something strange. Sometimes, when you ask it to 'try again' or 'think harder,' the answers don't get better, they just get weirder. Now, a team of researchers has discovered why: Generative AI systems can 'overthink' themselves into making mistakes. A collaborative project between the UMD GAMMA Lab (Geometric Algorithms for Modeling, Motion, and Animation) and former GAMMA lab associates and external collaborators recently released a paper on reasoning in large language models. The main results were developed by Soumya Suvra Ghosal and... read more
The program aims to prepare industry-ready AI leaders.
The University of Maryland will offer a new Master of Science in artificial intelligence (AI) this fall to teach the fundamentals of this transformative technology while giving students the expertise needed to address important questions about the interaction between AI, people and society. The interdisciplinary program is administered by the Science Academy , in conjunction with the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM), and adds to the academy’s existing M.S. programs in applied machine learning, data science, bioinformatics and computational biology, and... read more
Ding aims to align intelligent systems with human intent through multimodal research.
University of Maryland Department of Computer Science Ph.D. student Yuran Ding has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP), one of the most competitive honors available to graduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields in the United States. Advised by Professor Ashok Agrawala , and Dr. Paul Strohmeier (MPI) Ding is among a select group of students nationwide chosen for the 2025 cohort of the GRFP, which offers three years of financial support over a five-year fellowship period. The program is designed to promote... read more
At the University of Maryland Institute for Health Computing (IHC), medical researchers, clinicians, mathematicians, and computational and physical scientists are working together across campuses to tackle urgent medical challenges with advanced technologies. Teams are using ultra-large-scale machine learning to analyze vast quantities of medical imaging and genomics data for signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Others are developing predictive AI models that can alert surgeons one minute before a patient experiences a potentially fatal heart rhythm anomaly. Another group is inventing personalized... read more