Recent News & Accomplishments
2025
The University of Maryland will host an international conference this week that explores the latest in computational tools and methods used for research involving genomics and systems biology. The 25th annual Wonderful Algorithms for Bioinformatics conference ( WABI 2025 ) joins 65 researchers from around the world for a series of talks and networking events focused on discrete algorithms and machine learning tools that can address important challenges in molecular biology. Held every other year in the United States, this year’s conference will take place in the Brendan Iribe Center for... read more
He joins the inaugural cohort in a new B.S.-M.D. program, aiming to apply computational skills to emergency and neurological care.
I n a small gym in College Park, between sets on the bench press, Neal Vittal Rangarajan opened an email that would change the course of his academic career. It was confirmation of his acceptance into the University of Maryland’s inaugural B.S.-M.D. cohort, a newly launched program that integrates engineering, data science or computer science backgrounds with medical training. Rangarajan, a computer science major at UMD, had followed the program’s development through a pre-med Canvas page. The message marked more than just an academic milestone; it opened the door to a path he had long been... read more
CS Ph.D. student Vishnu Dorbala and UMD researchers advance embodied AI with situational queries for smarter household robots.
A team of researchers from the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) has introduced a pioneering approach that helps robots understand the world more like humans do, by taking context into account. Their paper, Is the House Ready For Sleeptime? Generating and Evaluating Situational Queries for Embodied Question Answering has been accepted to the prestigious 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), which will be held in Hangzhou, China. The work began during an internship in Summer 2023 when UMD computer science Ph.D. student Vishnu Dorbala worked with... read more
The Cambridge University Press release examines essential cognitive functions for artificial intelligence systems.
Artificial intelligence systems are becoming increasingly capable of making decisions, adapting to new information and performing complex actions. Behind these abilities are fundamental processes such as planning, acting and learning, functions that researchers are working to better understand and integrate. A new book by University of Maryland Professor Emeritus Dana Nau and his colleagues examines these processes and the challenges involved in uniting them. The release of Acting, Planning, and Learning builds on this exploration, examining how artificial intelligence systems can better... read more
The third-year Ph.D. student advances context-aware, efficient multimodal audio-visual learning for fine-grained understanding and reasoning.
Imagine an artificial intelligence system that can not only watch and listen at the same time, but also deeply understand and generate rich, coherent responses by fusing information from both sight and sound. That vision drives the research of University of Maryland Department of Computer Science Ph.D. student Sanjoy Chowdhury , whose work advances audio-visual representation learning, cross-modal generative modeling and the development of next-generation audio-visual large language models. Beyond his academic work at Maryland, he has collaborated with industry research labs including Meta... read more
Her research focuses on developing the next generation of secure large language models for programming.
University of Maryland computer science faculty member Yizheng Chen has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award to support research on improving the security of artificial intelligence tools used to write computer code. Chen, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), is the principal investigator on the award, which is expected to total just under $573,000 over the next five years. The CAREER award is among the foundation... read more
In a Q&A, George reflects on his path from UMD to founding Georgetown Software House.
Hands-on experience often determines the difference between a theory and a practice, especially in the world of startups. While classrooms provide the foundation, it’s real-world trial and error that informs how to build a product, serve customers and weather uncertainty. Bediako George (B.S. '03, computer science), a computer science alum of the University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science, took that lesson to heart. After years in technology consulting, he launched Georgetown Software House in Washington, D.C., in 2017. The company now supports major financial institutions... read more
Donation from alum Brendan Iribe honors Jandelyn Plane, who pioneered the university’s K-12 outreach programs in computing.
A $2.85 million donation from University of Maryland alum Brendan Iribe will support UMD computing majors and local middle and high school students through experiential learning, scholarships and professional development programs. The new University of Maryland Computing Catalyst will continue the university's efforts to cultivate an inclusive computing community at UMD. “Our team is embracing the action and energy behind the ‘Catalyst’ name as we launch into a bright future for computing at Maryland,” said Computing Catalyst Director Tamara Clegg , an associate professor in the College of... read more
Her work focuses on interpretability in language models and interdisciplinary research.
Sarah Wiegreffe will join the University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor in fall 2025, bringing with her a research focus on the transparency and interpretability of language models. Her work investigates how these increasingly prominent systems function, why they produce the outputs they do and how users interact with them. Language models are becoming embedded in everyday technologies, from chatbots to search engines. As their influence grows, Wiegreffe’s research addresses concerns about false outputs, anthropomorphic behavior and unattributed... read more
A University of Maryland team was recently honored for impactful research uncovering global privacy risks in Wi-Fi-based Positioning Systems (WPS). Dave Levin , an associate professor of computer science, and Erik Rye, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science in May, received the prestigious 2025 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. The award is named in memory of Caspar Bowden, a dedicated privacy advocate and former chief privacy adviser at Microsoft. It recognizes and celebrates research that embodies Bowden’s vision of safeguarding civil... read more