Recent News & Accomplishments
2026
New majors aim to ethically advance AI tech, prepare students to address Its societal impact.
The University of Maryland will launch two new undergraduate degrees in artificial intelligence (AI), including one of the nation’s first interdisciplinary majors focused on the impact of AI on humans, with courses spanning philosophy, ethics, public policy and more. And with a second degree focused on computational structures for AI systems, UMD will continue to build on its more than 60-year history developing the foundations of AI technology, plus a No. 9 ranking among public institutions in AI. Together, these degrees further strengthen UMD’s role in preparing the next generation of AI... read more
The senior computer science and music double major never performed publicly before coming to UMD. Now, she’s eyeing a career as a professional opera singer.
Unlike most music majors at the University of Maryland, Yasmine Tajeddin had never performed in front of a crowd before arriving on campus. She never had vocal lessons, took a music class in high school or sang in a choir. That’s because in Iran, where she grew up, women can’t sing in public. “If I wanted to major in something like music, I would need to go outside my country,” she said. So, during her senior year of high school, she decided to audition for the UMD School of Music . One reason Tajeddin was drawn to Maryland was family support—her aunt lives in the state. The other reason was... read more
Jordan Boyd-Graber uses a fast-paced trivia competition to study how people decide when to trust AI and when to rely on their own judgment.
Artificial intelligence has rapidly transformed from a novelty into a powerful tool capable of outperforming even expert humans in some knowledge-based tasks. In “Can AI and People Play Nice?,” Terp explores how University of Maryland computer science professor Jordan Boyd-Graber is using the fast-paced trivia game quizbowl to better understand the evolving relationship between people and AI. Boyd-Graber, who has an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) , has spent more than a decade developing QANTA, an AI system designed to answer... read more
Computer science Ph.D. student Simge Tekin led the study, which analyzed more than 750,000 container images and found gaps that can leave cloud systems exposed.
A software patch may be available, but that doesn't mean it's protecting the systems that need it. A new study from the University of Maryland and Google Research reveals that critical security updates often become trapped in the software supply chains that power modern cloud computing, leaving known vulnerabilities exposed for weeks—or even permanently. The research team analyzed more than 750,000 software container images—the standardized digital packages used to deploy modern applications—over six years to understand how security fixes move through the cloud ecosystem. Their findings... read more
Mohammad Hajiaghayi , the Jack and Rita G. Minker Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, will be recognized with two Test of Time Awards from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Economics and Computation ( ACM SIGecom ) for papers that helped shape the modern field of algorithmic economics and online mechanism design. Hajiaghayi co-authored two papers that will each receive an ACM SIGecom Test of Time Award, one of the field’s highest honors recognizing research that has had a lasting impact on the intersection of computer science and... read more
Led by Soheil Feizi, researchers developed a method that can remove specific information from AI models without diminishing their broader abilities.
Imagine trying to remove a single drop of red dye from a gallon of purple paint without ruining the color entirely. For developers of large language models (LLMs), that has long been the challenge of “unlearning”—the process of removing specific information from an AI system after it has already been trained. Once sensitive personal information, copyrighted text or harmful misinformation becomes embedded in an AI model, it spreads across billions of internal connections. Until now, the most reliable solution was often the most extreme: discard the model and retrain it from scratch, a process... read more
The five-year project will develop new telemetry methods to help operators monitor large-scale AI and cloud systems more efficiently.
Alan Liu , an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award to advance research on telemetry and observability for large-scale AI and cloud infrastructure. Liu, who also has appointments in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2) and the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM), is the principal investigator on the award, which is expected to total about $700,000... read more
Agrawala’s career spans the department’s early years, decades of work in systems, networking and mobile computing, and the program’s growth into a top-ranked computer science program.
When Ashok Agrawala arrived at the University of Maryland in 1971, computer science at the university was still taking institutional shape. The Department of Computer Science had not yet been formally established, the personal computer era had not yet begun and many of the systems that now support daily communication remained research questions. More than five decades later, Agrawala is preparing to retire after 55 years at UMD, closing a faculty career that began before the department’s founding in 1973 and continued through major changes in computing research, education and infrastructure... read more
He discusses his path into computing, his work in computational genomics and advice for students interested in computational biology.
University of Maryland Associate Professor of Computer Science Rob Patro works in computational genomics, where his research addresses the growing need to process and interpret large amounts of biological sequencing data. He leads the COMBINE Lab , a group that develops computational methods, software tools and data structures for studying gene expression and making biological data easier to organize, search and analyze. His work aims to give scientists better ways to search biological data, similar to how search engines help users find information across the internet. In this Q&A, Patro... read more
The awards recognize undergraduate double majors in computer science and mathematics and doctoral research in human-computer interaction.
The University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science recognized four undergraduate students and one doctoral student with awards honoring work across computer science, mathematics and human-computer interaction. Recent computer science and mathematics majors Nishkal Hundia (B.S. '26, computer science; mathematics) , Gary Peng (B.S. '26, computer science; mathematics) , Anirudh Satheesh (B.S. '26, computer science; mathematics) and Tahmid Zaman (B.S. '26, computer science; mathematics) received the Grant Family Outstanding Achievement Undergraduate Student Award in Computer Science and... read more