Distinguished Lecture Series presents Thomas Malone

Thomas Malone from MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence presents "Classifying and Designing Collective Intelligence".

• Date: November 3, 2008
• Time: 4:00 pm
• Location: CSIC 1115

Some of the most interesting recent Internet applications (like Wikipedia, Digg, and Google) are examples of what is variously called "Web 2.0" or "collective intelligence." Designing such systems well is not just a matter of software design; it's also a matter of organizational design. This talk will describe some examples of these new types of systems and present early results of a project whose goals are to systematically classify them and identify the conditions in which they are useful. One goal of this work is to develop principles for designing both the software and the other organizational elements needed for successful collective intelligence.   Read more...

Video recording

Photos

Colloquium Series presents David Jacobs

David Jacobs continues the 2008 Colloquium Series with his research "Matching Images with Deformations".

• Date: October 20, 2008
• Time: 4:00 pm
• Location: CSIC 1115

When we match images that come from the same object, we must often allow for 2D, non-linear deformations. These can model changes in shape that can occur when an object deforms or an articulated object moves its parts, differences in shape between different instances of the same type of object, or variations in apparent shape due to changes in viewpoint. This talk will provide an overview of several approaches to matching that stress finding problem formulations that yield computationally efficient algorithms.   Read more...

20th Maryland Theoretical Computer Science Day

The University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) is organizing a Theoretical Computer Science Day to be held on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at the University of Maryland, College Park. All talks will be held in room AVW 2460 A.V.Williams Building.

Theory Day webpage...

Colloquium Series presents Bobby Bhattacharjee

Bobby Bhattacharjee continues the 2008 Colloquium Series with his research "Systems without Cooperation".

• Date: October 13, 2008
• Time: 4:00 pm
• Location: CSIC 1115

Early systems on the Internet were exercises in feasibility: institutions and users cooperated to build, deploy, and demonstrate applications and uses of packet switching. Modern Internet protocols must assume a user base that is not necessarily cooperative or altruistic. Fundamental Internet protocols were characterized by cooperative primitives such as voluntary backoff, exchange of accurate local state, and trusted authorities. It is relatively easy to exploit these primitives in non-cooperative settings; instead, researchers are developing new protocols that are characterized by the application of game theory and mechanism design.

I will discuss challenges that arise from mismatched assumptions and describe how to build practical systems that provide strong guarantees, outline fundamental problems with current approaches with regard to information leakage and abuse, and outline our current work addressing these problems. Read more...

Colloquium Series presents Jeff Foster

Jeff Foster starts off the 2008 Colloquium Series with his research "Static Analysis to Improve Software Reliability and Security".

• Date: September 15, 2008
• Time: 4:00 pm
• Location: CSIC 1115

The goal of my research is to discover fundamental new ways to improve software reliability and security. My focus is on developing language-based tools and techniques that find and prevent software defects. In this talk, I will give an overview of this research area and discuss three recent efforts by my research group in more detail: Read more...

HCIL 25th Anniversary and Annual Symposium

Come celebrate the Human-Computer Interaction Lab's 25th anniversary by joining us for a very special Symposium on May 29, 2008. Not only will you hear talks about cutting-edge research being conducted at the HCIL, but this year we will begin the Symposium with a very special keynote panel, "25 Years of HCI, 25 Years of the HCIL." Esteemed colleagues from outside of the HCIL will offer their reflections. In addition, this year we will continue the tradition of demos and posters following the talks, but these will happen as a part of lab tours where you will be able to see our new facilities. The following day, May 30, 2008 there will be a wide variety of tutorials and workshops that can't be missed. Be sure to sign up early, since space is limited.

More information about the Symposium

Department Awards Ceremony, 2008

The Department hosted its 2008 annual Awards Ceremony on April 18, recognizing the achievements of faculty, staff and students over the past year. Congratulations to all recipients on their accomplishments and hard work.

• Awards Ceremony Brochure
• Pictures from the event

Botball Robotics Contest 2008

The annual Botball Robotics contest for the DC region will be held in Ritchie Coliseum on May 3. Botball engages students of all backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) as they work together as a team to achieve a long-term goal. Botball gives students the opportunity to be on the creative side of technology as they design, build, program, and document a pair of autonomous mobile robots to play in a competition.

See http://www.botball.org/season/2008/

Maryland Day - April 26, 2008

Make sure to visit our events on Saturday, April 26, 2008 at the 10^th Annual Maryland Day.

Kriegspiel Chess

See Kriegbot, our Artificial Intelligence Program, in action on the game of Kriegspiel Chess -- a version of chess in which most of your opponent's actions are hidden from you.

The Audio Camera

We have developed an audio camera that allows us to display the sound as an image. Each pixel of this image represents the intensity of sound from a particular direction. Audio images can be compared with visual images in a number of interesting applications, including noise supression, imaging of room acoustics, and video-conferencing.

MyeVyu: Making Campus Safer and Improving Campus Life

Come see the future of mobile devices and campus information technology! We will show not only what you can find on campus web sites in an integrated view, but also the location, audio, and video of roaming users running around campus.

More information about Maryland Day

Graduate Visit Day 2008

The Computer Science Department's annual Graduate Visit Day was held on March 28, 2008. Visit Day began with a welcome/information session, continued with lunch followed by a poster session, included individual meetings with faculty and a campus tour, and concluded with dinner out in small groups, hosted by faculty and current students. The entire department pitched in to help make Visit Day a great success.

Visit Day pictures

High School Programming Contest

The UMD High School Programming Contest brings talented students from high schools throughout the DC metropolitan area to the campus to participate in a three hour competition. Students competing in teams of four demonstrate their programming skills and problem solving abilities by attempting to solve eight programming problems in Java, using the Eclipse programming environment, on Apple MacBooks.

The 2008 Contest took place Saturday, March 8, at the CSIC Building at the University of Maryland, College Park. 39 teams from Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia competed in the contest.

Contest information and results

HCIL UX (User Experience) Laboratory

Increasingly, rigorous evaluations of software with human subjects are expected in computer science research. Computer science researchers are also studying how humans perform tasks so that they can evaluate how best to augment these tasks with technology.

To support these research needs, we have built a usability lab as a service to the Computer Science department and UMIACS in room 3452 of A.V. Williams. This lab is equipped with many things needed to conduct a user study, including video recording, screen capture and analysis software.

The HCIL UX lab was dedicated March 12^th, 2008. More pictures and information will be posted.

Meet the Family

Newly-admitted Terps from the class of 2012 were welcomed at a "Meet the Family!" reception held on the evening March 13th. These students and their families are deep in the springtime ritual of comparing schools to which they have been accepted, and were greeted by faculty, students and alum all eager to have them confirm with College Park. The event included presentations by faculty on the wide variety of research opportunities open to undergrads in our program, plus 'student only' panels conducted by present CS majors.

Translation Edit Rate plus (TERp)

Bonnie Dorr and her students, Matthew Snover and Nitin Madnani (in collaboration with Rich Schwartz at BBN Technologies) participated in the first ever NIST Metric MATR workshop to evaluate and compare automatic machine translation evaluation metrics. Their submission, TERp (Translation Edit Rate plus), was noted for its ability to automatically predict the quality of a translation.

TERp was one of the top performing metrics at the workshop, and had the highest Pearson correlation coefficient, with human judgments in 9 of the 45 test conditions -- more than any other metric. In addition, in 33 of the 45 test conditions, TERp was statistically indistinguishable from the top metric -- again more than any other metric. Overall, TERp was consistently one of the best performing metrics in the workshop.

Terps place first in ACM programming contest

Congratulations to Matt McCutchen, Mitchell Katz and Alan Jackoway for placing first in the Mid-Atlantic ACM programming contest. The team was advised by Amol Deshpande. Score summary

Ashok Agrawala

Effective January 1, 2009 Professor Ashok Agrawala will become a Life member of the IEEE, a distinguished status reserved for those with a long association with the IEEE. Life members contribute greatly to the fortunes of the IEEE through their service on committees and boards, involvement with local activities, and their contributions to the technical vitality of the IEEE.

Mihai Pop

CBCB faculty member Mihai Pop receives funding from NIH for a new R01 basic research grant, "Assembly and analysis software for exploring the human microbiome.

Amitabh Varshney elected Chair of IEEE VGTC

Amitabh Varshney has been elected as the Chair of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC) for 2008 - 2011 term. VGTC provides technical leadership and organization for technical activities in the areas of visualization, computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality, and interaction.

RFF receives award

Ugur Kuter, Florent Teichteil-Konigsbuch, Guillaume Infantes developed a new planning algorithm called RFF which won the Fully Observable Probabilistic track of the 2008 International Planning Competition.

http://ippc-2008.loria.fr/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Professors receive NSF award

SK Gupta (Mechanical Engineering) and Amitabh Varshney have been awarded a NSF CDI Type I award on Nano Assembly Planning.

Best student paper award, 14th ACM SIGKDD

Mustafa Bilgic, advisor Lise Getoor, received the best student paper award at the 14th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD) for the paper Effective Label Acquisition for Collective Classification.

Amitabh Varshney

Amitabh Varshney delivered the keynote address on "Salient Visualization" at the 3D Data Processing Visualization and Transmission 2008 conference in Atlanta, GA

Rance Cleaveland

Rance Cleaveland was quoted in the Baltimore Sun on the use of static analysis methods for testing medical devices

View the full article

Best paper award, SIGMOD 2008

Professor Hanan Samet, Jagan Sanakaranarayanan and Houman Alborzi received the best paper award at SIGMOD 2008 for their paper entitled "Scalable Network Distance Browsing in Spatial Databases".

Jeff Hollingsworth

Jeff Hollingsworth has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA), an association of more than 200 North American academic departments of computer science, laboratories and centers engaging in basic computing research.

Dana Nau

Dana Nau was the invited speaker at ProMAS-2008 in Portugal.

Jonathan Katz

Jonathan Katz was one of the invited lecturers at the Summer School on Rational Cryptography in Bertinoro, Italy

Governor recognizes HCIL's 25th Anniversary and Symposium

Maryland Governor O'Malley proclaimed May 29-30, 2008 as the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory '25th Anniversary and Annual Symposium Days.' According to the proclamation, "The sparks of innovation have been steadily emerging for 25 years from the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. Founded in 1983, this group of devoted faculty, outstanding staff, and energetic students has a remarkable record of innovative contributions that have influenced most modern information and communications technologies."

CMPS Commencement Address 2008

Professor Emeritus Jack Minker delivered the 2008 Commencement Address to the Graduates of the College of Computers, Mathematics and Physical Sciences.

Transcript of the Commencement Address

Ben Shneiderman

Ben Shneiderman was the Symbolic Systems Distinguished Speaker at Stanford University May 20 through 23.

Emeritus Professor Jack Minker honored in Special Issue

In honor of Emeritus Professor Jack Minker's many scientific contributions and his 80th birthday, many of Professor Minker's colleagues and academic descendants recently published a special festschrift volume of the Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (Vo. 51, Nos. 2-4, 2008). V.S. Subrahmanian was the guest editor for this issue.

Special Issue in honor of Professor Jack Minker's 80th birthday

David Jacobs

Congratulations to David Jacobs on a recent article in the Smithsonian magazine about his work on developing a botanical field guide that uses image processing methods.

Article

UM Gets Only U.S. Lab for WiMAX Next Generation Wireless Applications

"The University of Maryland will be the home to North America's first, and the world's second, laboratory dedicated to creating applications for WiMAX, a next generation technology for Web, phone and other wireless communications. ... The MAXWell Lab will provide developers of WiMAX compatible hardware and software with a large test bed and support of faculty and students in university's highly-ranked computer science and computer and electrical engineering departments."

UM Press Release

NVIDIA Fellowship Recipients

Derek Juba and Adam O'Donovan have received NVIDIA Fellowships for 2008-2009.

UM Scholarship and Research Celebration

The research accomplishments of Computer Science professors Vic Basili, David Jacobs, Atif Memon, Hanan Samet and Ben Shneiderman will be recognized at the first annual UM Scholarship and Research Celebration to be held May 1st in the Art/Sociology building atrium from 4:00 to 6:00 pm.

UM OTC Announces Inventions of the Year

Adam O'Donovan, Nail Gumerov and Ramani Duraiswami won the UMD 2007 Information Science Invention of the year with their "Audio Camera for Efficient Sound Localization".

Much as an optical camera creates images from captured light intensity to create a real time picture, an audio "camera" creates a real-time audio image out of sound arriving from all directions to a specific point - the location of the camera. The audio images can be projected onto a corresponding video image for a complete understanding of where the sound originates. Audio images are created using a spherical microphone array "beam former" and then related to video images using standard computer vision techniques.

• News Coverage of the Event
• Slide Show of Invention Finalists
• Press Release

Shneiderman receives distinguished faculty award

Professor Ben Shneiderman has been selected as the FY08 winner of the CMPS Board of Visitors Distinguished Faculty Award.

The award is given annually to a tenured faculty member for outstanding accomplishments over the previous five years that have contributed significantly to raising the profile and visibility of the College.

Ben Shneiderman

Ben Shneiderman will give a keynote speech at the ACM SIGMOD conference titled, "Extreme Visualization: Squeezing a Billion Records into a Million Pixels".

Best Paper, SIGMOD 2008

The paper titled "Scalable network distance browsing in spatial databases" authored by Professor Hanan Samet, and his students Jagan Sankaranarayanan and Houman Alborzi (who moved to Google) has been chosen to receive a "best paper" award in the SIGMOD 2008 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, June 2008.

NSF Graduate Fellowship

Jessica Chang, BS '07, received an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Jessica is now at University of Washington (Seattle).

Fast Lane: https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/grfp/AwardeeList.do?method=sort&page=8

Aravind Srinivasan

Aravind Srinivasan was an invited speaker at the Network Design Workshop of the 9th INFORMS Telecommunications Conference.

Dianne O'Leary receives multiple honors from AWM and SIAM

Dianne O'Leary will be the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecturer at the SIAM Annual meeting, July 7, in San Diego.

http://www.siam.org/prizes/sponsored/kovalesky.php

As of January 2009, Dianne will serve as editor-in-chief of SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications.

Dianne is also one of four plenary speakers at the 2008 SIAM Conference on Data Mining, Atlanta, April 25.

http://www.siam.org/meetings/sdm08/invited.php

Jonathan Katz

Jonathan Katz was invited to speak at the Fifth Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC) 2008

Children's Mobile Workshop

HCIL's NSF-funded workshop on Children's Mobile Technologies gathered 45 people from 5 different countries to consider the future in this important research area.

HCIL workshop website: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/childrensmobileworkshop/

STOP featured in several major news media

The Lab for Computational Cultural Dynamics' SOMA Terror Organization Portal (STOP) and social network site for terrorism related analysis and prediction was featured in several major news media. STOP provides methods for reasoning about terror groups and forecasting what they might do in the future. In addition, it contains unique social networking capabilities that allow analysts to effectively cooperate in order to better understand and counteract terror groups. Articles by: Computerworld Magazine, IT week, UPI News, Network World.

Atif Memon

Atif Memon has been invited to give an Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) seminar on "Testing Event-Driven Systems" at the National Institute of Standards & Technology.

Ben Bederson

Ben Bederson co-authors Voting Technology: The Not-So-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot, an investigative study into how voters respond to new equipment.

See also: HCIL news release