Recent News & Accomplishments
2013
Professor Dana Nau has been named a 2014 ACM fellow for his contributions to automated search and planning. ACM recognizes fellows for their significant contributions to computing. Dr. Nau's research is in artificial intelligence, with a focus on automated planning and game theory. Learn More: Dana Nau's Website: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~nau/ Press Release: http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2013/fellows-2013 read more
Computer Science senior undergraduate student Vicky Lai is a Finalist in the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards for 2014. The CRA's Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards recognize undergraduate students who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research. The January 2014 issue of Computing Research News will include an article on the award and an announcement of the awards will be posted on CRA's website ( www.cra.org ) later this week. Learn More: http://cra.org/awards/undergrad/ read more
Computer Science undergraduate student Sam Feldman is the CEO and Founder of Quickmailcheck. Quickmailcheck is a service that allows users to access their email via text message without the need for a smart phone interface or the Internet. Sam and Quickmailcheck received the 2nd Place Award and the Audience Choice Award at the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship’s Pitch Dingman Competition. Learn More: Quickmailcheck.com Digman Center Website read more
The HotNets-XII Workshop Is Taking Place at UMD Nov. 21-22, 2013
The Twelfth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-XII) workshop is being held at the University of Maryland from November 21-22, 2013. Sponsored by UMIACS, ACM SIGCOMM, Cisco, Microsoft Research, Google and vmware, the HotNets workshop was created as a forum for discussing early-stage, creative networking research. Dr. Dave Levin of the Computer Science Department and UMIACS is the General Chair for HotNets-XII. To follow the workshop live, visit the Live Blog of HotNets-XII on layer9 . Learn More: HotNets-XII Homepage Information from SIGCOMM on the HotNets Workshops read more
Fawzi Emad and Michelle Hugue honored as Maryland Faculty Mentors
Computer science senior undergraduate students Luke Valenta and Graham Welch were named 2013-2014 Philip Merrill Presidential Scholars. The Merrill Presidential Scholars Program honors Maryland’s most successful seniors and their designated University faculty and K-12 teachers for their mentorship. As a Merrill Presidential Scholar, Luke selected CS faculty member Fawzi Emad as his university mentor and his father Dr. Van Valenta as his K-12 mentor. Graham selected CS faculty member Dr. Michelle Hugue as his university mentor and Dae Yi, his high school teacher, as his K-12 mentor. To learn... read more
Dr. Catherine Plaisant, Dr. Ben Shneiderman and their research team received a Distinguished Paper Award at the American Medical Informatics Association Conference in Washington D.C. The award was given to only 5 full-length research papers out of the 330+ papers submitted to the conference. The award winning paper is entitled " Twinlist: Novel User Interface Designs for Medication Reconciliation." Twinlist is an interface for medication reconciliation that alleviates the tediousness of manual reconciliation without diminishing a clinician's decision making ability . The award winning paper... read more
3rd Place Team Advances to World Finals
A team consisting of UMD undergraduate students Scott DellaTorre, Dylan Ladwig, Rizeng Zheng and reserve member Ashton Webster advanced to the World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC) after placing 3rd in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Contest. The second UMD student team, made up of Melika Abolhasani, Anu Bandi, Milad Gholami and reserve member Alex Alberg placed 9th in the competition. The Mid-Atlantic regional contest had a record high of more than 190 teams from regions including District of Columbia, East Pennsylvania,... read more
Three hundred young women (middle-school students) filed into the Riggs Alumni Center on Wednesday, November 13, 2013 for the Cool Careers in Cyber Security for Girls Workshop . Sitting at tables covered with computer parts, padlocks, cryptology puzzles and other cybersecurity paraphernalia, the girls tried to pick locks with shims made from soda cans, decrypt a secret message, and identify missing parts in a disassembled computer. Women who work in cybersecurity and computer science guided the girls through these activities and introduced concepts such as penetration testing, cryptography,... read more
Marco Adelfio and Hanan Samet received the Best Paper Award for their paper, Structured Toponym Resolution Using Combined Hierarchical Place Categories , at the 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR'13). Their paper presents a “novel technique for place name disambiguation that uses Bayesian inference to assign categories to lists or tables containing place names, and then interprets individual toponyms based on the most likely category assignments.” Learn More The Paper Marco Adelfio’s Personal Website Hanan Samet’s Website read more
Recognizing Department Achievements, New Advances, and Distinguished Alumni
The Department of Computer Science, founded in 1973, celebrated its 40th anniversary on Oct. 18, 2013. Alumni, former and current faculty and staff members as well as corporate representatives from around the United States gathered in College Park to celebrate the achievements of the department and to reunite with one another. In addition to setting up a website to document the evolution of Computer Science at the University, the department hosted an afternoon event in the Computer Science Instructional Center. That afternoon, nearly 200 guests gathered to learn the history of the department... read more