Date: Tue, 14 Jan 1997 19:57:52 GMT Server: Apache/1.1.1 Content-type: text/html Content-length: 46646 Last-modified: Tue, 26 Nov 1996 19:28:45 GMT About the Graduate Program

About the Graduate Program

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Admission to the graduate program is highly competitive. There are currently about 250 students enrolled, of which about 75 are part-time students and 175 are full-time students. Graduates are heavily recruited by industry and academic institutions. Many highly regarded technical organizations in the area encourage their employees to take advantage of the opportunities for graduate study at UMCP.

These pages are intended to provide information about graduate study in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. For more information about the campus, a copy of the Graduate School Catalog may be obtained from the office of Graduate Studies and Research.

If you need additional information or advice, feel free to contact us.

You can request an application form for Graduate School at UMCP by filling out this form. (NB: this is maintained by the Academic Data Systems group on campus)

Additional Information


A Quick Introduction

With an annual research budget of several million dollars, the department's research projects are at the cutting edge of computer science innovation and discovery. Faculty are working in nearly every area of computer science, and there are seven active, well-established research groups in:

A list of faculty and research areas is available.

Facilities

The Computer Science Department and its research computing facilities are located in the A. V. Williams Building. Completed in January, 1988, this building was one of the first on campus to accommodate computing and network connectivity. Each room contains wall plates providing connections to Ethernet, terminal, telephone and video cables. Gateways connect the building's cables to the campus fiber optic network. The department has full Internet access and is a major electronic mail and UUCP server for the Washington, D.C. area.

The backbone of research activities is a Unix-based network of close to 300 workstations, primarily Sun SPARCstations running SunOS, DECstations running Ultrix, and DEC Alphas running OSF/1. The network includes an increasing number of Macintoshes. In addition, students use machines in various research institutes, which have nearly two hundred additional workstations, a 32 node CM-5 Connection Machine, a 16-node IBM SP-2, and a

The "Junkfood" Lab

10-node quadprocessor DEC Alpha Farm. The department operates two Unix-based open laboratories, which students may use both for research and course work. The Department of Electrical Engineering also administers Unix-based laboratories that are available for use by computer science students, and the Computer Science Center operates open worksation labs across the campus.

An annex to the campus Program Library is located in the A. V. Williams Building and provides easy access to current journals and technical reports. The Engineering and Physical Science Library is nearby, and the campus boasts many other important research libraries.

More Research Opportunities

Several independent research units on the College Park campus have strong ties to the Department of Computer Science. The Center for Automation Research (CfAR) includes the well-known University of Maryland Computer Vision Laboratory. The University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) is the focus for computer-related research throughout the University of Maryland System. The Institute for Systems Research (ISR) is a center of excellence established by a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center grant. Research support from these research units supplements the Computer Science Department's resources and helps to attract some of the brightest and best young computer scientists to College Park.

The Baltimore-Washington area is a major center for technological development, and collaborations with industrial and government partners in the area has spurred additional research. For example, the Center for Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences (CESDIS) at NASA has expanded opportunities for collaborative research. Also, the University of Maryland's Engineering Research Center (ERC), which fosters cooperative research projects between industry and the University, has provided opportunities for collaborative research.

Lecture Series

The Computer Science Department, CfAR, and UMIACS jointly sponsor the Computer Science at College Park DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES. Contributions by corporate members of the Computer Science Industrial Associates Program (IAP) make it possible to present distinguished computer scientists who are working at the forefront of the field. The lectures are held weekly during the academic year and are open to the public.


Applying for Admission

Eligibility

Our admissions decisions are based on the policies outlined below. However, each applicant is considered individually, and reasonable exceptions can be made in particular cases.

To be eligible for consideration for admission to our graduate program, your background should include much of the material covered in the following courses (Numbers correspond to UMCP Course Listings):

You must take both general and advanced Graduate Record Examinations (GREs). Your quantitative GRE score should be at least 700, and you should have at least a B+ average in your undergraduate course work.

The admissions process is competitive, and satisfying the minimum requirements will not guarantee you admission to the program. We admit about one out of every ten applicants, and the average quantitative GRE score for those who have entered in recent years has been much higher than the minimum required.

The application deadline for Fall Semester admission is January 15. Your application must be received by the Graduate School on or before that date or it will not be processed. We urge foreign students to submit their applications early, because it takes longer to process them. For your GRE scores to reach us in time, you should take the GRE examinations no later than December.

The Spring Semester application deadline is October 15, but Spring Semester admission is available only if you are already a student at the University of Maryland, College Park.

If we admit you to the graduate program starting in a given semester, we cannot defer your starting date to a subsequent semester. If you do not enter our program in the semester you are admitted, we will withdraw our offer of admission, and you will have to apply again.

Application Procedures

Please read the instructions very carefully. You must submit the following materials:

  1. A completed application form. Forms are available from the Graduate School and also from the Computer Science Graduate Office.
  2. 2 copies of transcripts for all previous academic study.
  3. GRE and Advanced GRE test scores. The scores must be less than two years old. The GRE Computer Science advanced test is preferred but a related subject area is sometimes accepted.
  4. Recommendation letters from three individuals - preferably faculty members - who can judge your academic qualifications and research potential. Letters from supervisors in non-academic settings usually are not very helpful.
  5. A Statement of Goals and Research Interests.
  6. Form for Merit Based Financial Aid if you are requesting aid.
  7. An English proficiency test report (i.e., a TOEFL score) if you are a foreign applicant.
  8. A check or money order for $50.00. Without this fee, the Graduate School will not process your application. We cannot waive this fee under any circumstances.

Some of the above materials must be sent to the Graduate School and some to the Department of Computer Science (see below).

All applicants must send the white copy of the two-page Application for Graduate Admission (see application booklet), as well as:

to the Office of Graduate Admissions.

International applicants should also submit a Certification of Finances form to the Office of Graduate Admissions.

Send the above materials to the:

    Office of Graduate Admissions
    Lee Building
    University of Maryland
    College Park, MD  20742

    telephone: (301) 405-4198

All applicants must send the yellow copy of the Application for Graduate Admission, as well as:

to the Department of Computer Science.

It is best to have each reference submit a Recommendation Form (see application booklet) directly to the Department.

Send above materials to:

    Computer Science Graduate Admissions
    Computer Science Department
    A. V. Williams Building
    University of Maryland
    College Park, MD  20742

    telephone: (301) 405-2664
    e-mail: csgradof@cs.umd.edu
    (The e-mail address is for inquiries, not for application submission.)

Financial Aid

The application form for admission to graduate study includes a place to specify whether you want financial aid or not. Most financial aid consists of research assistantships, teaching assistantships, or fellowships.

Assistantships

Approximately 48 teaching assistantships are available. First-year teaching assistants normally conduct laboratory sections of introductory computer science courses, and second-year students usually help in upper-level courses, mostly as graders. Teaching assistantships usually cover only the academic year, but a few assistantships are available during the summer as well.

Approximately 130 students are supported by graduate research assistantships on research grants and contracts. This usually allows work which leads to the student's thesis or dissertation topic. Most faculty members currently have research grants, and the department's research budget is stable.

Brett Milash, Outstanding T.A. in the CMPS College for 1995-96, Holding Office Hours

Current stipends range from $9,900 to $13,437, depending upon a graduate assistant's educational background and experience and whether the stipend is for ten or twelve months. In addition, assistantships cover tuition for up to 10 credits per semester and provide health insurance coverage under the University benefits plan.

Fellowships

In addition to assistantships, fellowships are available for students who are particularly talented or who satisfy special qualifications. Unlike assistantships, fellowships usually do not require the student to perform any particular duties. The monetary award varies depending on the fellowship but is generally similar to the amount of money provided by an assistantship. The department may supplement fellowships by offering the student one-half of an assistantship in addition to the fellowship.

Within the University of Maryland, fellowships are available from UMIACS, ISR, and the Graduate School. To apply for these fellowships, indicate that you need financial aid when you fill out the application for admission and complete the Merit Based Financial Aid form. The department will nominate the best-qualified applicants. Instructions on how to apply for the ISR fellowships are available separately.

A number of fellowships from outside of the University of Maryland are also available. For example, several of our students have had National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowships, Fulbright Fellowships, or other fellowships. To apply for such fellowships, you should contact the agency which administers them, check with the financial aid office in your current university, or contact the Fellowship Office at the University of Maryland.


Degree Requirements

Below is a summary of the graduate degree requirements. Details are available on request from the Computer Science Department Graduate Office. For full-time students starting with a B.S. degree, it usually takes 1-1/2 to 2 years to complete the M.S. degree and 5 years to complete the Ph.D. degree.

Master Of Science

The department offers both thesis and non-thesis options for the Master of Science (M.S.) degree. The following requirements apply to all M.S. students:

  1. Coursework. Students must complete at least 30 credit hours with an average of B or better. All courses must be at the 400 level or higher, with at least 18 credit hours at the 600-800 level. At least 21 credit hours must be CMSC courses.
  2. Breadth. The coursework must include regular 600 or 700-level courses from four of the department's seven research groups.
  3. Transfers. No more than six credit hours may be transferred from another university or another program at UMCP.
  4. Time limit. All degree requirements must be completed within five years.

Marsha Chechik (Ph.D., 1996) in Her Office

Additional requirements for the M.S. with thesis are as follows: coursework must include six hours of CMSC 799 (Master's Thesis Research), a thesis must be prepared that presents an independent accomplishment in a research, development, or application area of computer science, and there will be a final oral examination on the thesis research.

Additional requirements for the M.S. without thesis are as follows: written M.S. comprehensive examinations must be taken in each of the four areas used to satisfy the breadth requirement, and a scholarly paper, which includes an abstract and references to the relevant literature, must be prepared.

Doctor of Philosophy

Requirements for the Ph.D. degree include the following:
  1. Students must complete a 10-course qualifying sequence covering five out of the department's seven research areas (at least one course in each area must be at the 600-800 level).
  2. Full-time students who have completed the qualifying sequence must meet Graduate School requirements with respect to the number of credits they take each semester. With their advisors' consent, they may choose to register for regular courses, independent study, or dissertation research credits. An overall average of B or better must be maintained.
  3. Students must pass an oral Ph.D. Preliminary Examination on a research proposal and prepared readings, as well as demonstrate competence in a foreign language. Students must satisfy these requirements within five years after entering the program and complete the degree within four years after satisfying these requirements.
  4. Students must prepare a dissertation representing an original contribution to the field of computer science and pass a final oral examination on the dissertation research. At least twelve hours of CMSC 899 (Dissertation Research) must be completed.

Profiles of Faculty Research

Research in our department covers almost all computer science fields. The descriptions here are just a sample of research activities.

Christos Faloutsos

Searching by content in multimedia databases examines fast methods for approximate matching. Typical queries are as follows: "in a collection of product photographs, find products that look like tennis shoes;" "in a collection of medical X-rays, find ones that look like the X- ray of the current patient and list the corresponding diagnoses." The main idea is to extract n features from objects of interest (typically, with the help of a domain expert), thus mapping each object into a point in n-dimensional feature space. Subsequently, we can use state-of-the-art database technologies (like 'R-trees') to store and retrieve these n- dimensional points. The philosophy is to provide a 'quick-and-dirty' filter to eliminate the vast majority of irrelevant objects. Some false alarms are acceptable, because they can be easily discarded by an elaborate test or even by the user. We already have sets of features for 2-d color images, 2-d shapes, and 1-d time series. We are experimenting with modern signal processing techniques, such as the discrete wavelet transform for sound and images with mathematical morphology for shapes and with the discrete cosine transform for stock-price time series. The method is generic and can be applied for ANY collection of multimedia objects, as long as there are some good feature extraction functions. Potential applications include: 1) Medical databases: For diagnostic, research and teaching purposes, patient records can be supplemented with electrocardiograms, X-ray images, MRI scans, etc. 2) 'Edu-tainment': Students, researchers, and video-on- demand customers can search databases of video clips, art images, etc. 3) Scientific databases: Collections of NASA photographs, of meteorological/geological maps, etc. can be used to aid in forecasting weather, etc. 4) Electronic commerce: Users want to search electronic catalogues with product photographs, in addition to other attributes (price, maker, availability, etc).

Pete Keleher

In Spring 1995, Dr. Keleher won an NSF CAREER award, which will fund research on high-performance synchronization in distributed systems. Software distributed shared memory (DSM) systems provide the abstraction of shared memory to networks of workstations and distributed memory machines such as the Paragon, CM-5, or SP-2. Unfortunately, the latencies for global operations in either environment are several orders of magnitude more expensive than on tightly-coupled multiprocessors. The result is that current DSMs perform well for only a restricted class of applications. Sparks, a protocol construction library that will allow improved performance of DSM systems to within a few percent of tightly-coupled multiprocessors, is currently being designed. Sparks' abstractions will allow clean and systematic explorations of the design space of high- level synchronization operations, rather than proposing and implementing new operations in an ad hoc fashion. Sparks' basic abstraction is the coherence "history," an object that summarizes past coherence actions to shared segments. The emphasis is more on creating and investigating the abstractions that make a broad variety of optimizations possible, rather than on the individual optimizations themselves. However, the performance gains allowed by the synchronization types created via the Sparks library will be thoroughly quantified.

Chau-Wen Tseng

Dr. Chau-Wen Tseng won an NSF CAREER award in Spring 1996, which will allow him to pursue research in the area of efficient machine-independent programming of high-performance multipro- cessors. Parallel computing can provide the next great leap in the computation power scientists and engineers need to solve many important problems. Multiprocessor workstations are becoming common and already provide a valuable resource for scientists in areas such as physics, biology, and chemistry. Experience has shown that simply finding parallelism is not always sufficient for obtaining good performance from today's multiprocessors. The goal of this project is to develop advanced compiler analysis of data and computation decompositions, thread placement, communication, synchronization, and memory system effects needed in order to take advantage of performance-critical elements in modern parallel architectures. Locality and interprocessor communication are the key performance issues for multiprocessors. To achieve high performance, the compiler will apply communication analysis to determine sources of commu- nication and guide optimizations for locality and communication. The compiler follows two basic guidelines. First, it uses compilation techniques for message-passing machines to retain most of the benefits of explicit messages. Second, it exploits architectural and operating system support available in shared-memory multiprocessors to im- prove flexibility and performance. A novel characteristic of the compiler will be its ability to take advantage of the multiple coherence protocols and hybrid message-passing support found in software Distributed-Shared-Memory (DSM) systems and Flexible-Shared- Memory (FSM) machines.

Rich Gerber

The TimeWare group is currently carrying out projects in the areas of real-time software development, automated verification and digital video systems. The real-time software project is called "end-to-end design;" its objective is to automatically map high-level, end-to-end timing requirements into a fully realized, multi-streamed implementation. Real-time designs are entered in terms of task graphs possessing end-to-end requirements (i.e., delay, jitter, etc.); and intermediate data rates and buffer sizes are then maintained parametrically, in terms of equations based on the high-level design. Once the hardware-specific details are known, the application is integrated, and the intermediate parameters are automatically calibrated to achieve the end-to-end requirements. The payoff is that software designers can have the buffer sizes and intermediate data rates assigned for them -- thereby minimizing the degree of low-level tuning required. The verification project consists of automatically checking large specifications for subtle safety and liveness errors by compiling individual tasks into simple state-transition models and compositionally checking the entire program for nonconformance to its specification. Thus the verification is done in an iterative, piece-by- piece manner, in that local analysis is first performed on the individual tasks, and as tasks are composed, more analysis is carried out. This allows progressive deletion of states that are known to disprove the specification, so that the generated state-space is kept to a minimum. Work on media systems includes applying static and dynamic tuning solutions to help master and then play back stored digital video. Static tuning takes place during the production phase; it is the process of adjusting the video's intrinsic quality before it is exported. The group has studied results of many different static tuning alternatives by altering key parameters and then charting their effects at playback. Dynamic tuning occurs during playback itself; the idea is to process a video stream as smoothly and deterministically as possible. OS-level software built by the group supports this; it periodically estimates the playback requirements of a particular video, and then allocates buffers, prefetch window sizes, IO bandwidth, and CPU utilization so that the computer can best meet the video's requirements. This technique significantly outperformed the movie-playing procedures supplied by Apple's Quicktime API.

Hanan Samet

The representation of spatial data is an important issue in computer graphics, computer vision, geographic information systems (GIS), and image processing. Once the representation has been chosen, users must be given the ability to access it, and most importantly, perform operations on it. The utility of this data is maximized if it can be integrated into a database management system. This is a difficult problem as most conventional systems in use today are mainly designed to deal with alphanumeric data. Our approach to solving this problem is based on the observation that the problem is really one of sorting. The difference from other approaches is the realization that the geometric data must be sorted on the basis of its extent (i.e., the fact that it occupies space) and with respect to the space that it occupies. This is instead of parametrizing the spatial data and treating it as points in a higher dimensional space which is what is done by many researchers. Representations that take the extent of the data into account enable us to perform proximity queries efficiently. We are working on the integration of non-point representations of spatial and image data as well as nonspatial data into a conventional database management system. This research is backed up by the QUILT GIS which is a working geographic information system and the SAND system for integrating spatial and nonspatial data. A principal goal is to be able to extend this system to handle arbitrary spatial indices rather than just arbitrary spatial data types. Another goal is the development of a query optimizer which takes into account characteristics of the spatial data and chooses an efficient execution plan for the queries. One of the main results of this research has been the development of a browser that enables posing queries that combine spatial and nonspatial data. Most noteworthy is the user interface which enables spatial queries to be specified graphically instead of requiring the use of SQL. Work is also being conducted in image databases to deal with symbolic image and the development of data-parallel representations and algorithms for spatial problems.

Satish Tripathi

Mobile/Wireless Networking: Mobile computers equipped with wireless communication devices frequently change point of attachment to the network. Providing continuous networking services to mobile hosts is a challenging task. We are developing communication protocols to provide location independent networking services to such mobile hosts. This work primarily involves designing MAC protocols for wireless channels, developing packet routing schemes for mobile hosts and writing applications for mobile clients. Multimedia Networking: Multimedia applications, such as video-on-demand, video conferencing, etc., generate hundreds of megabits of time sensitive data, posing serious problems to the current networking infrastructure. We are developing protocols for real-time transport of video and audio data over high-speed ATM networks. The work involves: 1) design and implementation of protocols at all layers of the protocol stack from network interface drivers to transport protocols, and 2) developing multimedia applications such as multimedia conferencing, distributed learning, etc. Testbed: The networking laboratory is equipped with state of the art equipment. At present the testbed consists of Thinkpads 750C, three RS/6000 power servers and several IBM PCs. Network support includes 1MB/sec Infrared Wireless LAN, 100MB/sec high-speed ATM LAN and Ethernet. The testbed is also equipped with specialized hardware for video/audio capture, compression and playback.


Recent Seminars and Courses of Interest

Distributed and Concurrent Systems

Instructor: Pete Keleher

This course is intended to be a general systems survey course. However, the central thread is high-performance distributed systems. What hardware support do such systems need, should it all be in hardware? The primary running examples that are used are distributed shared memory systems, (mostly) software systems that present the abstraction of shared memory to a collection of workstations connected by general-purpose interconnect. Such systems are becoming commonplace in the research community, but have yet to achieve the kind of performance and sophistication that causes the marketplace to listen.

Architecture of Object-Oriented Database Systems

Instructor: Michael Franklin

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in research and development activity in the area of object-oriented database management systems (OODBMS). There are now a number of commercial offerings in this area, and these systems are beginning to gain real acceptance for certain classes of commercial applications (e.g., CAD/CAM and CASE). This emerging generation of database management systems is being deployed primarily in distributed, workstation/server-based environments. The combination of distribution and object-orientation gives rise to significant challenges and performance opportunities in many areas, including: distribution of function, replication and caching, fault tolerance, concurrency control, clustering, query processing, persistence, and programming language integration. This seminar began with a survey of some of the basic issues in distributed databases and object-oriented databases. The bulk of the seminar then focused on the investigation of the state-of-the-art with respect to the challenges listed above. Finally, some possible future directions, such as the merging of object and relational technologies and the impact of mobile computing, were discussed.

Topics Covered:

Readings: Recent papers from SIGMOD and VLDB proceedings, etc.;some survey and background articles.

Computer Graphics

Instructor: Dave Mount

This course provided an introduction to the principles of computer graphics, that is, the creation and manipulation of computer generated images. The course covered a wide array of topics from the lowest level issues of rasterization (how to draw lines and circles one pixel at a time) up to shading and hidden surface removal. Emphasis was placed on the mathematics, data structures, and algorithms needed to perform these tasks.

Text: Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, by J. D. Foley, A. van Dam, S. K. Feiner, and J. F. Hughes.

Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of linear algebra, programming, and data structures. Knowledge of C programming language.

Course Work: Course work consisted of a combination of written homework assignments and a number of programming assignments. There were two exams: a midterm and a comprehensive final. Programming assignments were carried out on the graphics workstations supporting the X Window System.


Research Unit Liaisons

The College Park Campus is organized into 13 colleges and professional schools. The Department of Computer Science is in the College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences (CMPS). Both CMPS and the College of Engineering are well-regarded across the U.S. Within these two colleges are several premier research units that offer computer science faculty and students opportunities for collaborative research projects and access to highly specialized research facilities.

Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS)

The University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies was established in 1985 by the State of Maryland. Its goals are to broaden the overall base of support for computing research throughout the University and to focus on interdisciplinary topics in computing. UMIACS supports faculty from many disciplines as diverse as computer science and mathematics to philosophy and linguistics. It attracts visitors of international stature. The Institute has acquired significant research equipment for the campus, most notably, the Connection Machine, a massively parallel computer containing 16,000 individual processors that act together to solve computationally intensive problems. UMIACS also offers workshops on research areas of interest to the computer science community. Professor Joseph Ja'Ja' is the Director of UMIACS.

Center for Automation Research (CfAR)

Established in 1983, the Center for Automation Research is dedicated to research on advanced automation in business and industry. The Center's Computer Vision Laboratory is one of the oldest and largest research groups of its kind and is considered one of the three best vision groups in the world. CfAR also sponsors the Human/Computer Interaction Laboratory, which is housed within the Computer Science Department. A number of Computer Science Department faculty and graduate students are members of CfAR and contribute to the close ties between the two units. Professor Azriel Rosenfeld is the Director of CfAR.

Center for Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences (CESDIS)

The Center for Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences was established in the Fall of 1988 with funds from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA). Its purpose is to sponsor research in areas of computing and information science that will improve the acquisition, analysis and utilization of data from space sensor systems. CESDIS is located at nearby Goddard Space Flight Center, and computer science faculty and students from UMCP, as well as from a number of other universities throughout the country, are participating in its research programs. Dr Yelena Yesha is Director of CESDIS.

Institute for Systems Research (ISR)

The Institute for Systems Research was established in 1985 through a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center grant. ISR is committed to developing innovative advances in design methods and software systems which address the basic productivity and competitive challenges facing American industry. Computer Science Department faculty and students work in the Systems Research Center and contribute to research in the areas of automation, database management, and VLSI. Professor Stephen Marcus is the Director of ISR, which is within the College of Engineering.

Engineering Research Center (ERC)

The Engineering Research Center was established to promote industry-university interaction in scientific and technical disciplines. ERC conducts four programs that support transfer of technology. The Center's Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program, which fosters cooperative research projects between industry and the University, has provided a number of opportunities for collaborative research with faculty from computer science. The director of the ERC, which is within the College of Engineering, is Professor Herbert Rabin.


Student Activities

Executive Council

The graduate student body elects seven members to the Executive Council annually. The council plans activities and addresses issues of concern to the student body. The council also allocates funds from the graduate student activities budget. Sponsored activities typically include a departmental picnic, a weekly graduate student seminar, hikes, parties, newspaper subscriptions for the graduate student lounge, and forums.

Department Council

The Department Council advises the chair on issues affecting the department. It is composed primarily of faculty, but two graduate student representatives attend the meetings as non-voting members. They provide graduate student input at the meetings and keep the graduate students informed of issues that affect them.

Educational Affairs Committee

The Educational Affairs Committee is responsible for the undergraduate and graduate academic programs of the department. The committee has two voting graduate student representatives and two voting undergraduate student representatives. They provide student input at the meetings and keep students informed of decisions that are made.

Graduate Student Association

The Graduate Student Association (GSA) is a campus-wide organization of graduate students whose constitution states, "The purpose of the [GSA] is to improve the quality of education and enhance the quality of life of the graduate students, to communicate and support research interests of graduate students, to recommend members for policy-making and administrative committees of the campus, and to be the spokesbody for graduate student concerns." The organization is open to all graduate students at UMCP. Some of the recent activities organized by the GSA were: protest rallies against taxation of scholarships and assistantships, a campus-wide research conference for graduate students (GRID), setting up a legal aid service for graduate students, distributing a newsletter with information for all graduate students, and organizing social events such as dances and weekly "happy hours."

ACM Student Chapter and Programming Contest

The ACM is the principal professional society for computer scientists. Membership is important for maintaining contact with current developments through journal publications, meetings and conferences. Our department has a student chapter of the ACM. Student members of the ACM receive many of the benefits at a reduced rate: journals, conference registration, etc. Among other activities, the ACM student chapter helps to sponsor the University of Maryland ACM Programming Team, which in 1990 took second place in the ACM International Programming Contest sponsored by AT&T.

T-Shirt Contest

Each year graduate students sponsor a department T-shirt contest. T-shirts imprinted with the winning design are sold at a reasonable cost to students, faculty, and staff.

Grad Student Lounge

There is a lounge with a refrigerator and a microwave oven for storing and heating your lunch, as well as tables and chairs for dining. Usually, daily newspapers are there to read but not to remove.

Electronic Newsgroup

csd.grad is the electronic newsgroup on the departmental computer system for announcements and discussions of interest to graduate students. Anyone who has an account on the department computing facilities can read and post messages to the newsgroup.


Computer Science Graduate Courses

In addition to the courses listed below, a large number of seminar courses are given each semester. The content of the seminars varies each semester, depending on the interests of the students and faculty.

Due to heavy demand for Computer Science courses, we strongly advise that after the first semester students preregister for courses. Information about preregistration is provided by the Graduate Office during each semester. Before preregistering, students must consult with their advisors about what courses to take.

A complete listing of all Undergraduate Courses and Graduate Courses is available.

Go back to the UMCP CS home page.
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