Recent News & Accomplishments

 2015

CS alumus Dr. Manoel Gomes Mendonça was recently appointed Secretary of Science, Technology and Innovation of his home state of Bahia in Brazil. The state is one of the largest in the country with a population of 15 million people. Dr. Mendonca was appointed for a four year term. Prior to his appointment, Mendonça was a professor at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), where he was heading the Fraunhofer Project Center for Software and System Engineering. Mendonça received his Ph.D. in 1997. His advisor was Victor Basili.  read more

 2014

Assistant Professor Zia Khan's co-authored " Impact of regulatory variation from RNA to protein " was recently published in Science magazine's ScienceExpress section. This his second publication in Science , the first being published in November of 2013. The paper presents an analysis of the association of genetic variation with transcript expression, ribosome profiling and steady state protein levels.  read more
The department is pleased to announce the appointment of three new affiliate faculty members: Niklas Elmqvist, Vanessa Frias-Martinez, and Richard Marciano.  read more
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In an article addressing the future of artificial intelligence, Tanya Lewis of Live Science.com turned to Professor Don Perlis for insight on the history and developments that have taken place in AI over the last several years. Perlis explained to Lewis that humans have eagerly anticipated the development of 'conscious machines' since the inception of Artificial Intelligence studies in the 1950s. The research that Perlis conducts with his colleagues and students include artificial intelligence: commonsense reasoning; flexible, domain-general, self-adjusting autonomous systems; and...  read more
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The department is pleased to announce that Marine Carpuat will join the faculty in the Spring of 2015 as an Assistant Professor. Carpuat's main research areas are multilingual natural language processing and statistical machine translation. She designs computational models that use second languages as meaning annotation to make language processing applications more accurate, more robust, and more useful. She is currently a researcher with National Research Council Canada . Prior to NRC, Carpuat was a postdoctoral researcher at the Columbia University Center for Computational Learning Systems...  read more
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Horace Ip's dissertation entitled: " Towards Data-Driven Large-Scale Scientific Visualization and Exploration" has won the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC)'s Best Dissertation of the Year award. Horace's advisor is Amitabh Varshney. IEEE VGTC sponsors the annual Best Doctoral Dissertation Award program to recognize outstanding academic research and development in visualization and visual analytics. The competition is administrated by the IEEE Visualization Pioneers Group (VPG) under the auspices of IEEE VGTC. The IEEE VGTC VIS Pioneers Group Doctoral Dissertation...  read more
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Associate Professor Andrew Childs is a new co-director of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS). Childs says he is determined to help the university make strides in the field of quantum information. "At QuICS, we will try to better understand the power of quantum computers, enabling revolutionary information processing technologies," Childs says. "Maryland is already a major player in quantum information, and through QuICS, we will grow into a leading center for quantum computer science." QuICS is the latest addition to the university’s commitment to securing a...  read more
Assistant Research Scientist Dave Levin (CS) and Assistant Professor Tudor Dumitras (ECE) worked with a team of computer scientists from Northeastern and Stanford universities on "Analysis of SSL Certificate Reissues and Revocations in the Wake of Heartbleed." Their paper, presented at the ACM 2014 Internet Measurement Conference in Vancouver, BC, addresses the difficult task of measuring whether or when a systems administrator should have revoked a certificate (for the secure operation of a public key infrastructure or PKI) in the wake of a security threat--in this case, Heartbleed. Both...  read more
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Provided by Funds from BRAID Initiative Grant
Last October, over 30 women students and faculty attended the Grace Hopper Celebration held in Phoeniz, AZ. With funding from the recently-formed BRAID Initiative, they were able to travel to the world's largest gathering of women technologists free of charge. The University of Maryland will receive $30,000 per year for three years to support efforts to increase the number of women and students of color who major in computer science. UMD is one of 15 universities that will be supported by the Building Recruiting And Inclusion for Diversity (BRAID) initiative led by the Anita Borg...  read more
Descriptive Image for UMD and NIST Announce the Creation of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (16359)
Center researchers aim to understand how quantum systems can store, transport, process information
The University of Maryland (UMD) and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced today the creation of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS), with the support and participation of the Research Directorate of the National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS). Scientists at the center will conduct basic research to understand how quantum systems can be effectively used to store, transport and process information. This new center complements the fundamental quantum research performed at the...  read more