Recent News & Accomplishments

 2013

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
 (14966)
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
 (14953)
This summer the Computer Science department will once again host a summer research experience for undergraduates program: the Combinatorial Algorithms Applied Research Experience for Undergraduates (CAAR REU). This REU is a 10-week summer NSF funded program that aims to expose undergraduate students to applied research projects in algorithmic design. Faculty members in a variety of research areas will advise students in their discoveries of algorithmic solutions to real world problems. The summer 2014 research projects: Security in Cloud Computing (advised by Dr. Jonathan Katz and Dr. Elaine...  read more
Graduate students Jeffrey Stuckman and Kent Wills and Professor Jim Purtilo have won the Best Short Paper award at the 7th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement for their paper “Evaluating software product metrics with synthetic defect data.” Their work was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research.  read more
 (14948)
Sophomore Computer Science major Laura Dally was recognized and honored by the University of Maryland Athletics Department as a recipient of the 2013-2014 Student Athlete Honor Roll during the halftime show of the homecoming football game on October 12th. Laura is a member of the University of Maryland Track and Field team; her events are hurdles and sprints.  read more
 (14938)
The New Initiative for Women in Computing will host Janet Campbell for a “Women Only, Women in Science” Breakout session this Thursday, November 7 at 6pm. Members from the Association of Women in Computing, Women in Math, and Women in Physics student groups, and all other women in STEM fields are invited to attend and bring their questions for a female Senior Developer. Janet Campbell has worked at Epic for the past 10 years and will lead an interactive session on building and maintaining a successful science-based career. Students’ personal questions will be answered as...  read more
Jay Pujara, and Hui Miao, 4 th and 2 nd year Ph.D. students in computer science, respectively, received the Best Student Paper Award at the International Semantic Web Conference. Their paper, entitled “Knowledge Graph Identification” presents an approach for transforming massive collections of uncertain, interrelated facts, collected from texts and webpages, into a knowledge graph using the probabilistic soft logic framework. Both students are excited to have received this honor. Hui, says he has been “fortunate to work with Jay Pujara and Prof Lise Getoor on this exciting...  read more
 (14886)
Reprinted from VisualisingData.com Written By: Andy Kirk Details of a Treemap Art Project have come to my attention, showcasing data-generated artwork from one of the most influential names in data visualisation, Ben Shneiderman . The project has the compelling strapline ‘Every A lgo R i T hm has ART in it’. B en has had a hugely distinguished career and is responsible for a host of notable achievements in this field, along with Human Computer Interaction. His ‘ Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design ‘ and ‘ Visual Information-Seeking Mantra ‘ are but two...  read more