News and Events
Recent News & Accomplishments
2026
The annual hackathon brought students together to develop technology projects, explore new skills and connect with industry mentors.
Students gathered at the College Park Marriott Hotel and Conference Center on Oct. 17-18 for Technica 2026, a student-organized hackathon that brought together participants with different levels of programming experience for a weekend of coding, workshops and collaboration. Now in its 12th year, the University of Maryland event welcomed over 1,000 in-person and virtual participants under the theme "Dare to Dive." Technica is the world’s largest hackathon celebrating underrepresented genders, giving beginners and experienced programmers a space to build projects and learn from one another... read more
How Phil Crosby (B.S. ’06, computer science; B.A. ’06, economics) made his lifelong tech startup dream a reality as co-founder of the mobile advertising platform Liftoff.
In June 2026, California tech company Liftoff went public on the Nasdaq Stock Market. For the company, it was a milestone 14 years in the making. For Phil Crosby (B.S. ’06, computer science; B.A. ’06, economics), the company’s co-founder, the adventure started way before that. “In middle school and in high school, I always knew I wanted to do a startup, so starting the company came naturally from my childhood and my early work experience at the University of Maryland. I just couldn't imagine life without it,” Crosby said. “What I did not imagine was that it would come this far, that this... read more
For Jacqueline Deprey (B.S. ’20, computer science; B.S. ’20, operations management and business analytics), a personal loss and a passion for problem-solving inspired Perpetua, a digital toolkit designed to simplify estate settlement.
From her first coding experience in high school, Jacqueline Deprey (B.S. ’20, computer science; B.S. ’20, operations management and business analytics) has always been drawn to the problem-solving power of computing. “I don't know that I ever loved coding, but once I understood the impact it could make on other people, I just developed a passion for it that I couldn't give up,” she said. “And that's what motivated me to major in computer science at Maryland.” This year, leveraging the software engineering and business expertise she built over the past decade at the University of Maryland and... read more
He will collaborate with the University of Melbourne on artificial intelligence risks, national security and policy development.
As artificial intelligence becomes more widely used in national security, government operations and other critical areas, questions about its safety and reliability are drawing increased attention. University of Maryland computer science Professor William Regli (Ph.D. '95, computer science) will examine these challenges through an international collaboration in Australia. Regli has received a Fulbright Specialist Program award from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board . Through the program, he will conduct educational and training activities in computer... read more
A glass wall can look like an open path to a robot. Reflections and transparency can fool its sensors, leaving it with a faulty map—and a route that could end in a collision. University of Maryland computer science doctoral student Naitri Rajyaguru and collaborators are helping robots recognize those barriers using information ordinary cameras miss: the polarization of light. Their work earned two honors at workshops associated with the 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), held Sept. 27–Oct. 1 in Pittsburgh. In all, UMD’s Perception and Robotics... read more
Eric Gilerson’s single-author paper explores a method for performing exact arithmetic within language models.
When asked to multiply two numbers, a language model may predict the answer based on patterns in its training data rather than perform the calculation directly. University of Maryland undergraduate Eric Gilerson is investigating a way to change that. Gilerson, a junior computer science major, has had a single-author paper accepted for a poster presentation at the 2026 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems , known as NeurIPS. He will present his findings in Sydney, Australia, in December. The conference brings together researchers in artificial intelligence and machine learning... read more
Huang develops methods to reduce data demands and address hardware errors in scientific computing and artificial intelligence systems.
As scientific facilities and artificial intelligence systems process growing amounts of data, researchers must contend not only with computing speed but also with the cost of moving and storing information and the possibility of hardware errors affecting results. Yafan Huang , who joined the University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor in fall 2026, studies those challenges through high-performance computing, or HPC. “I am very excited to join the Department of Computer Science,” Huang said. “UMD has a strong tradition in high-performance computing,... read more
The four-year initiative will use AI and automation to support remotely accessible biomanufacturing experiments, with Liu co-leading the lab's data and AI systems.
Biomanufacturing underpins products ranging from vaccines to cancer therapies, but developing those products can require experiments that are time-consuming, costly and difficult to reproduce. A new University of Maryland-led project is bringing together artificial intelligence, robotics and real-time biological measurements to examine how those experiments can be designed and carried out differently. UMD Department of Computer Science Assistant Professor Alan Zaoxing Liu is a co-principal investigator on the Collaborative for the Realization of Autonomous Biomanufacturing (CRAB) Lab, a four-... read more
The projects aim to predict hospital readmissions in high-risk heart failure patients and establish reliable methods for evaluating the safety and performance of AI-enabled medical imaging systems.
University of Maryland computer scientist Heng Huang is part of two new federally funded projects aimed at improving the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare: a four-year, $1.2 million award to develop a wearable device that predicts hospital readmission in high-risk heart failure patients and a $750,000 contract to create a platform for evaluating AI-enabled medical imaging systems. “AI has so much potential to help us address human health problems, and developing these kinds of real-world tools is one important way forward,” said Huang, the Brendan Iribe Endowed Professor of... read more
Watch someone pour almonds into a bowl, and the action is easy to follow: a container moves, tilts and releases its contents. Teaching a robot to do the same can require costly demonstrations specifying how its joints and gripper should move. University of Maryland researchers have developed an artificial intelligence model that learns from videos how hands, tools and objects move and then uses those patterns to help robots perform tasks. Called μ₀, or Mu Zero, it is a type of AI called a world model, which predicts how a scene will change during an activity. Given an image and an instruction... read more
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