Director's Message to UMIACS February 2026

Welcome to our Spring 2026 semester, even though the weather for the past several weeks has been anything but spring-like. There is a lot of newsworthy activity in UMIACS, as always, but I first wanted to take a moment to acknowledge several faculty who have joined our institute within the past few months.

Sarah Wiegreffe and Han Shao received affiliate appointments to UMIACS last fall; Can Firtina and Yaodong Yu were named affiliate UMIACS faculty in January. These four—all tenure-track assistant professors in the Department of Computer Science—bring a wealth of knowledge and research expertise to the university and to our institute.

Sarah focuses on the interpretability and transparency of language models and other neural networks, with the goal of increasing their reliability, safety and performance. Han’s research spans machine learning theory, economics and computation, as well as algorithmic game theory.

Can’s research bridges computer engineering and bioinformatics, with a broader goal of expanding his research into actionable solutions to improve human health. Yaodong’s focuses on theoretical foundations and applications of machine learning, spanning the science of deep learning, reinforcement learning, and reasoning for language models.

It’s worth noting that Sarah and Han first came to the University of Maryland as participants in our Center for Machine Learning’s “Rising Stars in Machine Learning” program—Sarah in the 2024 cohort and Han in 2023.

We look forward to working closely with our new colleagues as they and their research groups engage with our robust research community.

Other items in this month’s newsletter include an overview of humans interacting with AI systems as seen through the viewpoint of Jordan Boyd-Graber; the announcement of a partnership between tech giant NVIDIA and a music streaming company that is based on innovative AI technology developed by Ramani Duraiswami; Dinesh Manocha; graduate student Sreyan Ghosh and others; and recognition of a new role for longtime UMIACS faculty member Leila De Floriani, who began a two-year term in January as the Division V Director with the IEEE Board of Directors.

We look forward to sharing more updates with you in next month’s newsletter. Until then, keep up the great work!

Best,

Andrew Childs, Interim UMIACS Director