Director's Message to UMIACS September 2025

As announced earlier in the summer, Mihai Pop completed his term as the director of UMIACS on June 30, having served in that role since 2018. I'm deeply grateful to Mihai for his steadfast leadership of the institute. As interim director, I look forward to working with faculty, students, and staff affiliated with UMIACS as we continue to advance cutting-edge computational science.

UMIACS was chartered in late 1984 and began operations in 1985. This year marks 40 years of research, scholarship, and innovation that is based on interdisciplinary teamwork backed by powerful computing resources.

The institute has grown significantly in the past four decades. We currently have 120-plus faculty from 16 departments on the UMD campus that bring in an average of $30 million each year in research funding.

Our work is driven by unrelenting passion to make new discoveries and develop new technologies that will have a positive impact on science and society.

This month’s newsletter highlights those efforts, including a feature story on UMIACS postdoc Kyle Brumfield, working closely with Distinguished University Professor Rita Colwell. Their team is using DNA sequencing and other technologies to track and help mitigate waterborne pathogens. 

Other work led by Heng Huang is combining advanced AI techniques with massive streams of environmental data to improve how we forecast, track, and manage dangerous wildfires in the U.S.

I also encourage you to read the article on five undergraduates who worked in our TRAILS institute over the summer with members of the blind and low-vision community to develop a mobile app that adds verification layers to AI responses to make them more reliable and trustworthy.

These are just a few examples of positive outcomes from UMIACS research, with many more to come. Keep up the great work, and I hope to see many of you around the institute this fall.

Best,

Andrew Childs, Interim UMIACS Director

 

Director's Message to UMIACS October 2025

At the end of October, the University of Maryland plans to publicly launch its next capital campaign. One major fundraising priority focuses on raising the university’s reputation as a top-tier institution for research and scholarship in artificial intelligence.

I'm pleased to see UMIACS faculty and students actively contributing to this effort.

In addition to participating in a recent media event that included interviews and demos, the institute is well represented on a new website that was launched in September to promote AI at UMD.

The depth and breadth of our work listed on that site’s “experts” section is impressive. From Soheil Feizi’s research in trustworthy and reliable AI, to Heng Huang’s expertise in AI used for health informatics and precision medicine, to the collaboration between Cornelia Fermüller and Irina Muresanu and their use of computer vision software to improve violin pedagogy, our faculty experts continue to bring new knowledge and innovative technology to this ever-expanding discipline.

Some of that new knowledge is highlighted in this month’s newsletter, including a feature story on ongoing work by Jordan Boyd-Graber that is intended to better gauge trust and collaboration between humans and AI.

Jordan is also featured in an engaging Q&A with a reporter from The Baltimore Sun, exploring the concept of the AI singularity, a hypothetical point where AI surpasses human intelligence and begins to improve itself at an uncontrollable and irreversible pace.

I also encourage you to check out the interesting Maryland Today Q&A with Philip Resnik, where he discusses the unconventional theory that biases in AI chatbots reflect how large language models learn, rather than being just a simple technical problem.

These recent news stories are but a small fraction of the extensive media coverage showcasing our work in UMIACS, both in AI and the many other scientific disciplines where we excel.

Keep up the great work, everyone, and let me know how UMIACS can assist in your efforts.

Best,

Andrew Childs, Interim UMIACS Director

Director's Message to UMIACS December 2025

As 2025 draws to a close, I want to thank our entire UMIACS community of faculty, students, and staff for a job well done. Your efforts continue to advance science, education, and innovation on a broad scale.

Space constraints don’t allow a listing of all our accomplishments for the past 12 months. Instead, I encourage you to visit our newsfeed, which shows the breadth and depth of research and scholarship undertaken by UMIACS.

This month’s newsletter further highlights our endeavors, including a feature video on the UMD Center of Excellence in Microbiome Sciences, novel research that uses AI to advance sustainable, biodegradable plastics, and AI-powered tech that helps us better understand music.

All these activities involve powerful computing resources that UMIACS provides. They also rely on human talent—from faculty to graduate students to our superb technical and administrative staff—all working together to advance scientific discovery and cultivate new knowledge.

While our success is certainly a group effort, I want to take this opportunity to single out an individual. At the end of December, Yerty Valenzuela will retire after almost 30 years with the institute.

As most of you already know, Yerty has been invaluable in helping manage our research enterprise, handling multiple senior-level administrative duties for many of the major centers in UMIACS. On behalf of our entire community, thank you, Yerty, for all that you have done!

I look forward to seeing all of you in 2026 when we return from a well-deserved break. I hope you have a restful holiday!

Best,

Andrew Childs, Interim UMIACS Director

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

Director's Message to UMIACS March 2026

Artificial intelligence continues to have a profound and far-reaching impact on our lives. From health care and education to autonomous robotics and beyond, AI-infused systems are enhancing efficiency, expanding knowledge, and improving medical diagnostics and patient outcomes.

This month’s feature story highlights a new initiative from the Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS), a coalition of four academic institutions led by the University of Maryland. TRAILS recently unveiled 11 broader impact awards designed to incentivize and engage a diverse range of stakeholders in shaping the future of AI.

Notably, UMIACS was selected to provide administrative and technical support for TRAILS—recognition of our deep expertise in managing large, multi-institutional research initiatives.

This month also showcases important work by Heng Huang, who is leveraging AI and machine learning to rapidly analyze vast datasets—including genomic, biomarker, and cognitive data—to identify early indicators of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

I was especially pleased to see a research profile on one of our newest UMIACS members, Sarah Wiegreffe. Her work explores the inner workings of large language models, with a focus on AI safety, reliability, and giving users more meaningful control over how these systems generate text.

Additional highlights include a collaboration between faculty at UMD and MIT to develop AI-driven “co-authors” that can assist mathematicians in breaking down complex problems and uncovering new insights. Mohammad Hajiaghayi serves as the lead principal investigator on this project.

We are also advancing research on the socio-cultural dimensions of AI. Ph.D. student Maria Isabel Magaña is conducting mixed-methods research to better understand how AI systems both shape, and are shaped by, the communities they impact.

These examples represent just a small sampling of the many ways UMIACS researchers are leading innovation in artificial intelligence.

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 Director, UMIACS

University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies

Research

Two research centers in UMIACS—the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science and the NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation—are helping make the University of Maryland a leader in quantum research, education and innovation. UMIACS faculty, postdocs and graduate students conduct research covering a broad range of areas, addressing both fundamental core computer science topics and new challenges at the interface between computer science and other disciplines. Our researchers regularly partner with federal scientists and medical professionals from nearby government agencies and academic institutions. The stimulus for all of our work is to take on grand challenges that can best be solved by the use of powerful computing resources, and then find solutions that will have a positive impact on science and society. Since, 2015, UMIACS has consistently brought in more than $25 million each year in research funding. The bulk of those external awards come from the numerous federal labs and agencies that dot the region.

Infrastructure

Powerful computational tools are essential to our research enterprise. The computing environment in UMIACS includes over one thousand supported computers running a variety of operating systems including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Solaris, macOS, and Windows. Our networks service more than six thousand active ports, and we manage over four Petabytes of data. All faculty, postdocs and graduate students in UMIACS are supported by a dedicated team of computing engineers and technology specialists that can design, build and maintain computing infrastructures that utilize the latest advances in technology. Our staff enables high speed data transfers and multicast applications through the Mid Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), the Next Generation Internet Exchange (NGIX), and the Internet2 with peers at several remote sites including NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NOAA, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Specific high-end research computing needs are available to UMIACS faculty and students working in data-intensive areas that include machine/deep learning toolkits and the toolchains they require like PyTorch, Caffe, Torch, TensorFlow and CNTK. We also support numerous domain-specific applications for researchers. For example, the systems support applications like OpenCV for computer vision, Gurobi Solver for linear programming in Natural Language Processing, and TecPlot for visualizing fluid dynamics models. Iribe Center In 2019, UMIACS moved into the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering, a stunning 215,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility that encourages research, collaboration and innovation. The building allows UMIACS faculty from distinct academic disciplines—biologists, linguists and engineers, for example—to easily collaborate with our computer science faculty. Our Advantageous Location The University of Maryland is the flagship campus of the state’s higher education system and a top-ranked public research university. Our advantageous location—just outside of Washington, D.C.—is a short commute to numerous federal agencies and research labs, giving our faculty and graduate students the opportunity to interact with government experts in cybersecurity, computer vision, geospatial visualization, big data analytics, high performance computing, and more.

Partnerships

Industrial collaborations with UMIACS take many forms, including cash donations, gifts of software and hardware, research projects funded directly by industry, and joint projects between UMIACS and industry funded by government agencies. Our Industrial Affiliates Program is structured to give maximum flexibility for organizing collaborations between the UMIACS faculty and industry.

Affiliate Faculty