News & Events
February 09, 2022
The Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN) recently announced that UMass Amherst will become a member of the consortium, which includes more than 40 universities across the U.S.
February 09, 2022
An interdisciplinary research team has received an NSF grant to design and test a new generation of AI-driven conversational agents, or chatbots, for public data collection, with the goal of understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic—and... more
February 01, 2022
Assistant Professor Hui Guan and Zhou Lin, assistant professor of chemistry, have been awarded a 2021–2022 ADVANCE seed grant for their project, “Accelerating Fragment-Based Quantum Chemistry via Machine Learning.”
January 28, 2022
Doctoral candidates Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar and Manish Motwani have been selected by the university's graduate school to receive Spring 2022 Dissertation Completion Fellowships. Each fellowship provides a $12,000 stipend aimed at assisting the work... more
January 19, 2022
Professors Shlomo Zilberstein and Deepak Ganesan have been named Fellows by the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, bringing the total number of current CICS faculty with the honor... more
January 14, 2022
New work, led by Research Professor Francine Berman, proposes a novel framework, the “impact universe,” that can help policymakers keep the public interest in focus amidst the rush to adopt ever-new digital technology.
January 14, 2022
Eileen Hamel, graduate programs manager and doctoral advisor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, UMass Amherst, was recently selected to receive the 2021 Outstanding Staff Award, given annually to an individual or team at... more
January 05, 2022
Doctoral candidates Hamed Bonab and Raghav Addanki have been selected to receive the college's Spring 2022 Dissertation Writing Fellowships. Each fellowship provides a $16,500 stipend, granted to students who are nearing the end of their... more
December 15, 2021
The Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences (CICS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced that it has received a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help expand access to high-... more
December 10, 2021
A group of students representing the inaugural cohort of Digital Ready's Year 13 program visited the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus on December 1. The Boston non-profit offers this program as a fellowship year that aims to provide... more
December 10, 2021
UMass Amherst computer scientist among team awarded $1.1 million grant to advance mobile health research
A research team including a University of Massachusetts Amherst computer scientist has received a $1.1 million grant to further develop a... more
November 19, 2021
Doctoral student Kalpesh Krishna has been announced as a 2021 Google PhD Fellowship recipient in recognition of his research work in the field of natural language processing. Krishna’s proposal presents his research towards making text generation AI... more
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November 17, 2021
Five graduate students at the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst have received Outstanding Graduate Awards for the 2020-2021 academic year.
November 10, 2021
New Program at CICS Will Meet the Demand for Graduates Prepared to Work at the Intersection of Computing, Data, and Health ... CICS is expanding its undergraduate informatics major with a new concentration in Health and Life Sciences, and is... more
November 01, 2021
Professor Deepak Ganesan is co-leader and Associate Professor Ben Marlin is associate director of a new center at UMass Amherst to improve in-home care for older adults and individuals with Alzheimer’s disease through the use of AI-enhanced... more
October 27, 2021
Transformative gift from Robert and Donna Manning and major state capital investment by Baker-Polito Administration will further the college’s vision of Computing for the Common Good™.
October 21, 2021
Kevin Spiteri ‘21PhD has been selected for the 2021 ACM SIGMM Outstanding PhD Thesis Award for its potential of very high impact in multimedia computing, communication, and applications. His thesis also received the 2021 DASH Industry Forum Best PhD... more
October 21, 2021
Ten UMass Amherst College of Computer Sciences (CICS) graduate student and faculty teams recently received Computing for the Common Good Fellowships in support of research projects that align with the college’s vision for “computing that enhances... more
October 07, 2021
Professor Erik Learned-Miller will give one of UMass Amherst's Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series talks on November 15 at 4:00 p.m. His lecture will present a regulatory path to managing the trade-offs between the risks and benefits of face... more
September 29, 2021
The University of Massachusetts Amherst is pleased to announce the creation of a seed fund by anonymous donors to support research of quantum information systems, including an anonymous lead gift in the amount of $5 million. The fund aims to bolster... more
September 28, 2021
An interdisciplinary team of researchers at UMass Amherst, including College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Associate Professors Ethan Zuckerman and Brendan O’Connor, has received a $129,000 National Science Foundation Convergence... more
September 28, 2021
A team of researchers, including the College of Computer and Information Science’s Ramesh Sitaraman, and Michael Zink, College of Engineering, are working on the next generation of teleconferencing, thanks to a $1.2 million grant from the National... more
September 24, 2021
In the U.S. News & World Report rankings published last week, the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) is ranked in the top 15 of the nation's public computer science undergraduate programs, maintaining its spot at #... more
September 22, 2021
Neena Thota, associate chair of teaching development and senior teaching faculty at CICS, is part of a team led by Ray Laoulache, dean of academic affairs at UMass Dartmouth, that is exploring ways to promote digital literacy and computer science... more
September 17, 2021
The university's Cybersecurity Institute has secured a renewal of its CyberCorps Scholarship for Service (SFS) program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). A team of cybersecurity researchers, led by the College of Information and... more
September 10, 2021
Hang Su ‘20PhD and Aditya Sundarrajan ‘20PhD have been announced as the recipients of the 2021 CICS Outstanding Dissertation Awards, which are given annually to graduating doctoral students in recognition of exceptional work and to encourage the... more
September 09, 2021
Professor Yuriy Brun is one of 26 recipients of a 2021 Amazon Research Award (ARA), which will fund his research on software formal verification via proof synthesis. The winning project, “Formal Verification via Language-Modeling-Based Proof... more
September 02, 2021
Assistant Professor Sunghoon Ivan Lee has been selected as one of 46 UMass Amherst ADVANCE program faculty fellows for 2021–2022. Funded through a five-year, $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, UMass ADVANCE is designed to... more
September 02, 2021
Recently, over 60 college-aged students gathered together in the Applied Science Center at UMass Amherst’s Mount Ida campus in Newton. The first cohort of the Commonwealth Fintech Bootcamp, they were welcomed by Jim Flynn, assistant dean for... more
August 27, 2021
The Computing Research Association has announced their cohort of 2021 Computing Innovation Fellows, including CICS graduates Sainyam Galhotra ‘17MS, ‘21PhD and David Tench ‘20MS, ‘20PhD. As part of the fellowship program, CICS will also host Swapna... more
August 19, 2021
A team of CICS students, led by doctoral student Ryan McKenna and including graduate students Joie Wu, Arisa Tajima, Brett Mullins, Siddhant Pradhan, and Cecilia Ferrando, recently won $43,000 in prize money in the 2020 National Institute of... more
August 06, 2021
Francine Berman, renowned data scientist, researcher and co-founder of the Research Data Alliance, will join the University of Massachusetts Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) faculty in fall 2021 as a research professor... more
August 02, 2021
Seven CICS faculty have recently been promoted or granted tenure: Andrew McGregor, Yuriy Brun, Justin Domke, Tim Richards, Marius Minea, Matt Rattigan, and Justin Obara.
July 29, 2021
Jim Kurose, distinguished university professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences and associate chancellor for partnerships and innovation, is part of the research team recently awarded a $20 million National Science Foundation (NSF... more
July 21, 2021
CICS Assistant Professor Donghyun Kim, a specialist in dynamic, bipedal motion in robots, is helping to build a robot that can take robotic acrobatics to the next level—and he’s making his research publicly available.
July 01, 2021
A UMass Amherst team led by CICS Assistant Professor Sunghoon Ivan Lee has designed a prototype system that uses the human body to continuously charge wearable devices, making it easier for users to monitor their health 24/7.
June 29, 2021
Four UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Science faculty members—Associate Professor Justin Domke, Research Assistant Professor Mohammad Hajiesmaili, Assistant Professor Mohit Iyyer, and Assistant Professor Cameron Musco—have recently... more
June 24, 2021
CICS has joined a just-launched collaboration, called Mass Fintech Hub—a public-private partnership whose aim is to position Massachusetts as a leader in the financial technology industry. Fintech, or applying cutting-edge technology to create... more
June 07, 2021
A group of researchers at CICS led by Assistant Professor Hamed Zamani and doctoral student Helia Hashemi is one of ten teams worldwide selected to compete in the 2021 Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge. Each team receives $250,000 in funding to compete... more
June 01, 2021
CICS Assistant Professor Narges Mahyar, Assistant Research Professor Ali Sarvghad, and Associate Professor Ethan Zuckerman, along with Distinguished Professor Jane Fountain of the School of Public Policy, have received a seed grant from the UMass... more
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May 25, 2021
Congratulations to UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) undergraduate students Alexandra Brandl '22, Serena Chan '21, Saicharan Dadireddy '22, Brijesh Vyas '24, and Renos Zabounidis '22, who recently received 2021... more
May 14, 2021
Philip Thomas, an assistant professor at the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), has been selected to receive the college’s 2021 Outstanding Teacher Award. The award is granted annually to a faculty member who demonstrates... more
May 14, 2021
Eight graduating seniors have been chosen by the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) to receive 2021 Outstanding Undergraduate Achievement Awards, the college's highest honor given to undergraduates. This year's... more
May 05, 2021
UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Associate Professor Yuriy Brun has been selected by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Council on Software Engineering (TSCE) to receive the 2021 Distinguished New Directions Award... more
April 28, 2021
A multi-university team of researchers, led by Prashant Shenoy, distinguished professor in the University of Massachusetts Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), is aiming for zero-carbon computing thanks to a $3 million... more
April 22, 2021
CICS students, faculty, and staff,
Last year, George Floyd was killed at the hands of a Minnesota police officer while bystanders, helpless to intervene, documented the tragedy. George Floyd's murder reignited the Black Lives Matter movement,... more
April 22, 2021
A University of Massachusetts Amherst biomedical informatician will use a $436,836 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore the use of "serious games" played independently on computer tablets to improve brain function in older... more
April 15, 2021
College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Assistant Professor Sunghoon Ivan Lee has been selected as a 2021–2022 University of Massachusetts Amherst Lilly Teaching Fellow, a program that enables promising early-career faculty to develop... more
April 14, 2021
UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences Professor Brian Levine and Research Fellow Jagath Jai Kumar, along with Professor Hany Farid of the University of California Berkeley were awarded a $250,000 grant by the Oak Foundation to... more
April 12, 2021
The UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) community mourns the passing of alumnus Lee Delaney '93BS, president, chief executive officer and director of BJ's Wholesale Club.
"By all accounts, Lee was an intelligent and... more
April 08, 2021
Renos Zabounidis '22, a junior majoring in computer science, mathematics, and a Bachelor's Degree with Individual Concentration (BDIC) in computational and cognitive science, recently received a UMass Amherst Rising Researcher Award and a Goldwater... more
April 01, 2021
Mohit Iyyer and Justin Domke have just received CAREER grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), among the most prestigious grants that the NSF offers. This makes four CAREER awards for CICS this year—so far.
March 25, 2021
The UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) is proud to announce the recipients of its 2021 Outstanding Achievement and Advocacy (OAA) awards.
Now in its twelfth year, the OAA Awards program celebrates the remarkable... more
March 23, 2021
The University of Massachusetts Amherst has announced that it will offer an online master of science in computer science to complement its nationally recognized computer science graduate programs. UMass is accepting applications now for the first... more
March 19, 2021
As colleagues in the College of Natural Sciences, College of Engineering, and College of Information and Computer Sciences, we feel compelled to speak out about the surge in acts of racial violence against members of the Asian community. Between our... more
March 18, 2021
Mohammad Hajiesmaili and Cameron Musco, both of UMass Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences, have received CAREER grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), among the most prestigious grants that the NSF offers.
March 16, 2021
Distinguished University Professor James Kurose has received the CRA 2021 Distinguished Service Award, an honor granted annually to one person or organization that has made an outstanding service contribution to the computing research community.
March 10, 2021
Associate Professor Mike Zink of the Electrical and Computing Engineering Department and CICS Professor Ramesh Sitaraman, along with colleagues from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Texas at Tyler, recently... more
March 05, 2021
DARPA has awarded the BINDS Laboratory the DARPA Ditto - Intelligent Auto-Generation and Composition of Surrogate Models project. This is one of the agency's AI Explorations. UMass's co-PI on this award is Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology... more
March 04, 2021
James Allan, chair of the faculty at CICS, and alum Jamie Callan '93PhD, now a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, have been selected to join the inaugural class of inductees into the ACM Special Interest Group on... more
February 26, 2021
Last weekend, over 200 current and aspiring data scientists participated in Voices of Data Science, a student-run conference co-sponsored by CICS and the Center for Data Science. The conference aims to provide a platform to amplify the voices of... more
February 12, 2021
Professor Charles Weems has been selected by the IEEE Computer Society to receive the Taylor L. Booth Education Award for 2021. The awards committee cited Weems, co-author of 28 textbooks who has taught computer science at UMass Amherst for 41 years... more
February 09, 2021
CICS has released results from its "Student Pulse Survey" administered through the Fall 2020 semester. The survey, created to help academic leaders at CICS understand how students feel about their overall experience and classroom experiences while... more
February 02, 2021
Assistant Professor Narges Mahyar and Research Assistant Professor Ali Sarvghad have been selected to receive a 2020 ADVANCE seed grant for their project, “Mapping Instability: The Effects of the Pandemic on the Civic Life of a Small Town.”... more
January 27, 2021
Prashant Shenoy, a distinguished professor and associate dean in the College of Information and Computer Sciences, UMass Amherst (CICS), has been named the founding chair of the new Special Interest Group on Energy (SIGENERGY) of the Association for... more
January 15, 2021
Emma Anderson, director of inclusive education and teaching support, and Erika Dawson Head, director of diversity and inclusive community development in the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), were recently announced... more
January 15, 2021
A team of researchers led by CICS doctoral student Amee Trivedi received the 2020 Best Paper Award at the International Green and Sustainable Computing Science Conference for the paper, “Phone-based Ambient Temperature Sensing Using Opportunistic... more
January 14, 2021
Professors James Allan and Brian Levine of the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) have been named Fellows by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing... more
January 04, 2021
UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences Professor and Chair of the Faculty James Allan and Postdoctoral Fellow Razieh Negin Rahimi have been selected to receive a 2020 Manning/IALS Innovation Award to develop and explore the... more
December 21, 2020
Dear CICS Community:
With the end of the semester upon us, this is a great time to look back and to look ahead.
December 18, 2020
Associate Professor Andrew McGregor has been named as a 2020 Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
December 10, 2020
When an international student arrives on campus, she is a bundle of emotions - including a big willingness to try hard and give it her best shot, recalls computer science major Thao Trinh, who arrived as a first-year student from Ho Chi Minh City,... more
December 07, 2020
UMass Amherst students and faculty were recognized for innovative research, creativity, and impact for the greater good at Supercomputing 2020 (SC20), the largest international conference for high performance computing (HPC). The theme of the... more
December 03, 2020
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recently named Bruce Croft, first dean and Distinguished Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), a Fellow of IEEE, an honor which recognizes members "with an... more
December 02, 2020
Professor Deepak Ganesan of the College of Computer and Information Sciences (CICS), with former students Pengyu Zhang and Pan Hu, recently received one of the 2020 Boston Patent Lawyers' Association (BPLA) tenth annual "Invented Here!" Awards for... more
November 25, 2020
A startup artificial intelligence company with roots at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently received a coveted two-year, $750,000 Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research program – also... more
November 20, 2020
A team of researchers led by UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) doctoral students Mahmood Jasim and Pooya Khaloo, and master’s student Somin Wadhwa received a best paper award at the ACM Conference on Computer-... more
November 03, 2020
The UMass Amherst provost, in coordination with the chancellor and deans of the university’s colleges and schools, launched a new initiative to support interdisciplinary research in Spring 2020, with the goal of empowering creative collaborations,... more
October 29, 2020
Michelle Trim, senior lecturer II and associate director of the informatics program at CICS, has been selected to receive a 2020 Google exploreCSR award to fund the development of a student engagement workshop program, Energizing Mentoring and... more
October 15, 2020
Assistant Professor Jie Xiong of the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), along with CICS doctoral students Minhao Cui and Yuda Feng, have been recognized with a Best Paper Honorable Mention award for “Sniffing Visible... more
October 07, 2020
A paper by UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) recent doctoral graduate Emma Tosch, co-authored by Eytan Bakshy of Facebook and CICS Professors Emery Berger, David Jensen, and Eliot Moss, was recently selected by the... more
September 18, 2020
Artificial intelligence (AI) experts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Baylor College of Medicine report that they have successfully addressed what they call a "major, long-standing obstacle to increasing AI capabilities" by drawing... more
September 01, 2020
CICS alumna Amy McGovern MS’98, PhD’02 was selected to lead the National Science Foundation (NSF) AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography, part of a $100 million initiative by the NSF to establish... more
August 27, 2020
A University of Massachusetts Amherst health informatician is developing a mobile health (mHealth) system, leveraging a wearable sensor that slips on a finger like a ring, to monitor and encourage movement and activity in the weak upper limb of... more
August 26, 2020
Prashant Shenoy, associate dean of CICS, and director of the Laboratory for Advanced Systems Software and Center for Smart and Connected Society, was appointed Distinguished Professor following approval by the UMass Board of Trustees at its July 20... more
August 21, 2020
From the team that invented physiology-sensing pajamas at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, now comes a new, lightweight eye mask that can unobtrusively capture pulse, eye movement and sleep signals, for example, when worn in an everyday... more
August 21, 2020
Five longtime UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) staff members will be retiring in 2020 as part of UMass Amherst's Voluntary Separation Incentive Program.
August 13, 2020
AMHERST, Mass. – An international task force, including two University of Massachusetts Amherst computer scientists, concludes in new research that mobile health (mHealth) technologies are a viable option to monitor COVID-19 patients at home and... more
August 05, 2020
Researchers at the Center for Smart and Connected Society at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently released a new digital contact-tracing technique, WiFiTrace, that is based on widely-deployed WiFi technology. They intend the open-source... more
August 04, 2020
The National Science Foundation this week announced a five-year, $26 million initial grant to a consortium led by the University of Arizona to form a new Engineering Research Center, the Center for Quantum Networks (CQN), with partners at Harvard,... more
July 23, 2020
As high temperatures become more frequent and intense due to climate change, UMass Amherst scientists are developing interdisciplinary research aimed at helping communities increase resilience to extreme heat by monitoring physiological, mental and... more
July 22, 2020
Updated August 11, 2020
Four CICS faculty members have recently been promoted or granted tenure.
They are:
July 21, 2020
UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Dean Laura Haas was recently interviewed by IEEE Computer Society as a part of their Diversity and Inclusion Task Force's Women in STEM series.
Haas spoke with IEEE regarding her... more
July 10, 2020
Professor and Chair of the Faculty James Allan has recently been chosen to receive an Amazon Research Award, a grant program that funds outstanding, innovative research proposals. Allan was selected for his proposal, “Explanation of Product Facets... more
July 09, 2020
Associate Professor Dan Sheldon, an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, along with colleagues Nicholas Reich, a biostatistician; Andrew Lover, an infectious disease epidemiologist; and biostatistics Ph.D. student Casey Gibson received a $300,... more
July 09, 2020
Award-winning facial recognition expert professor Erik Learned-Miller of the College of Information and Computer Sciences will offer a one-hour Zoom Q&A webinar at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, July 15, where he will explore face recognition research. He... more
June 17, 2020
CICS doctoral candidate Anna Fariha has recently been awarded a 2020 Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant for her proposal, “Enhancing Usability and Explainability of Data Systems.” Fariha’s work focuses on reducing the usability gap between non-... more
June 11, 2020
Throughout the year, the faculty of the College of Information and Computer Sciences fund the Staff Spot Bonus Awards that recognize the outstanding accomplishments of staff members who are important champions of the college. Award recipients are... more
CICS Professor Hava Siegelmann Wins Meritorious Public Service Medal from U.S. Department of Defense
June 10, 2020
Nearly 100 colleagues recently joined an online celebration to honor Professor Hava T. Siegelmann of the University of Massachusetts Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) as she received the rarely awarded Meritorious Public... more
June 08, 2020
A group of artificial intelligence experts including computer vision researcher and lead author Erik Learned-Miller of the University of Massachusetts Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences recently proposed a new model for managing... more
