News & Events
April 20, 2018
College of Information and Computer Sciences researcher Daniel Sheldon has been awarded a five-year, $550,000 faculty early career development (CAREER) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to design and test new mathematical approaches... more
April 19, 2018
International Business Machines (IBM) has awarded College of Information and Computer Sciences PhD Candidate Clemens Rosenbaum a 2018 IBM PhD Fellowship.
April 19, 2018
On Friday, April 27, the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst will celebrate the college's Outstanding Achievement and Advocacy (OAA) award recipients during the 10th annual banquet and award... more
April 13, 2018
Philip Thomas' and Shannon Roberts' collaborative project, "Improving Warning Systems of Driving Automation Systems Through Reinforcement Learning," has been selected to receive this year's Armstrong Fund for Science award.
The Armstrong Fund for... more
April 11, 2018
Justin Svegliato, a second-year Ph.D. student in the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), has been awarded a highly competitive 2018 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship.
The NSF fellowship program recruits... more
April 11, 2018
Mark Guzdial, professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, will give two public talks at UMass Amherst April 25 and 26.
On Wednesday, April 25 at 4:00 p.m., Guzdial will present "... more
April 07, 2018
Congratulations to College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) undergraduate students Harris Daniel Koumjian ('18), Itamar Levy-Or ('19), James Reedie ('19), and Cole Reilly ('19) who have recently received 2018 University of Massachusetts... more
April 05, 2018
College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) graduate student Rachee Singh, a third-year Ph.D. student, has received a 2018 Google Ph.D. Fellowship in recognition of her promising research in improving the performance of wide-area networks (... more
March 27, 2018
On Feb. 28, 2018 seven out the twelve teams participating in the Innovation Challenge semi-finals advanced to the final round.
The Innovation Challenge, put on by Isenberg School of Management's Berthiaume Center for Entrepreneurship, is a four-part... more
March 22, 2018
James Allan, professor and chair of the faculty in the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), was recently elected as a member of the Computing Research Association (CRA) Board of Directors.
March 20, 2018
The College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is ranked among the top twenty graduate computer science programs in the country according to U.S. News and World Report's 2019 edition of Best... more
March 07, 2018
The Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance, part of the University of Massachusetts Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences, held its Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Ga. January 26-27. The meeting gathered nearly 90... more
March 02, 2018
Georges Grinstein, research professor in UMass Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), passed away unexpectedly on Monday, February 26, 2018.
Grinstein joined the UMass Amherst community in spring 2016 after over 30 years at... more
February 14, 2018
“I thought initially that I would want to be in San Francisco, the tech-hub of the world, but UMass has really made me think about being here on the east coast,” Jeremy Kelleher ‘18 said. “I really want to be at the juncture between health and... more
February 06, 2018
The Center for Data Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been selected by IBM to join the company's AI Horizons Network, an international consortium of leading universities working with IBM to develop technologies needed to help... more
January 29, 2018
CICS professor and chair of the faculty, James Allan, is featured in a new video highlighting his work in information retrieval and the importance of data science education. Watch it below.
January 23, 2018
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest professional organization for the advancement of technology, has elevated UMass Amherst computer science professor Hava Siegelmann to the honorary position of Fellow... more
January 16, 2018
Distinguished scientist and professor Andrew McCallum, director of the Center for Data Science in UMass Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences, will lead a new partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to accelerate science and... more
December 13, 2017
College of Information and Computer Sciences undergraduate Xin Liu ('18) has been named a 2017-2018 Rising Researcher in recognition of his ambitious pursuit of research and scholarly activity.
December 11, 2017
Andrew McCallum, computer science professor and director of the Center for Data Science in the University of Massachusetts Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), has been named a fellow by the Association for Computing... more
November 29, 2017
University of Massachusetts Amherst computer science researcher Barna Saha, with colleagues at MIT and elsewhere, are reporting the theoretical solution to a 36-year-old problem in RNA folding predictions, which is widely used in biology for... more
November 22, 2017
One of the newest, most challenging problems facing experts in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is called "explainability," says David Jensen at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. However, it's a problem he is delighted to... more
November 20, 2017
UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) professor Prashant Shenoy has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members... more
November 17, 2017
Laura Haas, dean of the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been awarded a 2017 WITI@UC Athena Award for Executive Leadership from the Women in Technology Initiative at the University... more
November 13, 2017
The Minute Pitch, the first phase of the 2017-2018 Innovation Challenge, kicked-off on October 25, with College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) students participating in teams that won first and third place.
At this first Innovation... more
October 27, 2017
Despite substantial progress in recent years, there are still "considerable barriers" to deploying fully autonomous systems such as self-driving cars or mobile service robots, say computer scientists Shlomo Zilberstein and Joydeep Biswas at the... more
October 04, 2017
A team of computer science researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are part of a four-institution consortium that has been awarded $25 million by the Army Research Labs with $4.5 million slated to go to UMass. The grant will be used... more
September 14, 2017
Prashant Shenoy, professor of computer science and associate dean in UMass Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences, has been named a 2017-2018 Fulbright Specialist Scholar. He will travel to Mumbai, India to work with researchers at... more
September 11, 2017
CICS Professor Ramesh Sitaraman looks back over a career in research and industry and finds that risk-taking, the sorrow of September 11th, and a little bit of luck helped him find his way.
September 06, 2017
The climate for women in STEM fields has been prominently in the spotlight, with stories of challenges and barriers to womens' success in both the academy and in industry increasingly reaching the public consciousness. As the academic year begins,... more
August 24, 2017
The UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences has hired seven new tenure-track and teaching faculty, amplifying its data science and mobile health research areas, and adding teaching capacity to address rapid increases in... more
August 16, 2017
Phillipa Gill, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been named one of MIT Technology Review's "Innovators Under 35" for her groundbreaking work on Internet censorship and network security.
August 14, 2017
Today, banks are increasingly using software to decide who will get a loan, courts to judge who should be denied bail, and hospitals to choose treatments for patients. These uses of software make it critical that the software does not discriminate... more
August 10, 2017
A team of College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) graduate and undergraduate students won their lower bracket tournament in RoboCup 2017, an international tournament of robots playing soccer held July 27-31 in Nagoya, Japan.
July 27, 2017
Every spring and fall, billions of birds migrate across the United States, largely unseen under the cover of darkness. Now a team of researchers led by College of Information and Computer Sciences professor Daniel Sheldon at the University of... more
July 14, 2017
Missed the 2017 CICS Senior Celebration? Or do you just want to relive the day? A video of the 2017 Senior Celebration is now available for viewing here: bit.ly/2uiWSXA
Congratulations once again to all of our 2017 graduates!
June 07, 2017
CICS professor emeritus Andrew Barto is the 2017 recipient of the prestigious International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) IJCAI-17 Award for Research Excellence.
May 02, 2017
On Friday, April 28, the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst celebrated the recipients of the college's ninth annual Outstanding Achievement and Advocacy (OAA) Awards. The OAA banquet was... more
April 21, 2017
CICS professors David Jensen and Brian Levine and alumni John Burgess and Brian Gallagher will receive a 2017 IEEE INFOCOM Test of Time Paper Award for their 2006 paper, "MaxProp: Routing for Vehicle-Based Disruption-Tolerant Networks."
April 20, 2017
The Center for Data Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is organizing its second annual Data Science Research Symposium on Thursday, April 27 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Computer Science Building. In support of the Center's mission... more
April 05, 2017
CICS assistant professor Yuriy Brun and collaborators have been recognized with a Best Paper Award for their paper, Continuous Analysis of Collaborative Design, at the IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2017) in Gothenburg... more
March 24, 2017
The National Science Foundation has awarded its prestigious and highly competitive Graduate Research Fellowship to two CICS students, graduate student Su Lin Blodgett and graduating junior Aaron Weiss.
March 24, 2017
Pengyu Zhang, a 2016 graduate of the UMass CICS PhD program advised by Professor Deepak Ganesan, now a postdoctoral researcher in Stanford University's Computer Science Department, has been named a winner of the 2017 ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral... more
March 13, 2017
Conrad "Connie" Wogrin, 92, emeritus professor of computer science, died peacefully Wednesday, March 8, 2017, surrounded by his family.
February 21, 2017
University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences researcher Barna Saha has been awarded a five-year, $549,986 faculty early career development (CAREER) grant from the National Science Foundation, the agency's most... more
February 15, 2017
Laura M. Haas, an IBM Fellow at IBM Research - Almaden known for her foundational research on information integration technology, has been named dean of the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at the University of Massachusetts... more
February 08, 2017
With a new cluster of specialized graphics processing units (GPUs) now installed, the University of Massachusetts Amherst is poised to attract the nation's next crop of top Ph.D. students and researchers in such fields as artificial intelligence,... more
February 01, 2017
Learn how the University of Massachusetts and the Commonwealth are responding to the Trump administration's executive order restricting immigration.
January 31, 2017
Assistant Professor Arjun Guha looks to programming languages to manage complex computing infrastructures.
December 14, 2016
Nearly 100 educators, researchers, non-profit and industry leaders and government officials from 16 states and Puerto Rico recently attended a two-day summit of the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) project in Washington, D.C., organized... more
December 07, 2016
Hundreds of elementary, middle and high school students and many at colleges and universities across Massachusetts are taking part in classroom and after-school activities this week to observe Computer Science Education Week, Dec. 5-11, a nationwide... more
November 16, 2016
Nabanita De, a second-year CICS master's student, is part of a team that has developed an algorithm, in the form of a Chrome extension, to filter the authenticity of Facebook posts.
The work is in response to a proliferation of fake news posted on... more
November 14, 2016
In support of the President's recent Computer Science For All announcement, the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance pledged to grow the alliance by five states.
The ECEP Alliance, part of the University of Massachusetts Amherst's... more
November 04, 2016
The UMass Amherst Institute for Teaching Excellence & Faculty Development (TEFD) has selected Michelle Trim, a member of the CICS teaching faculty, as one of twelve 2016-2017 Teaching for Inclusiveness, Diversity and Equity (TIDE) Ambassadors.... more
November 04, 2016
Brant Cheikes joined the Center for Data Science (CDS) on August 1, 2016 as the Center's first executive director. Cheikes will be working with Professor Andrew McCallum, director of the Center, on the full range of CDS activities, including the... more
November 04, 2016
The David Mix Barrington Scholarship in Computer Science has been established in the College of Information and Computer Sciences. This endowed scholarship will provide annual support to a rising senior who is pursuing a second major in addition to... more
November 04, 2016
CICS researcher Beverly Woolf and colleagues have received a four-year, $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a "smart tutor" that will use a computer's camera and visual recognition software to detect student feelings,... more
November 03, 2016
In a paper presented on Nov. 3 in Amsterdam, computer science researchers Emery Berger of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Sam Guyer of Tufts University described a new programming language feature they say will help to make software... more
November 02, 2016
Charlie Curtsinger, a 2016 graduate of the UMass CICS PhD program advised by Professor Emery Berger and now a faculty member at Grinnell College, has been awarded an Honorable Mention for the Dennis Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award.
October 26, 2016
A paper written by CICS alum Boulat Bash (Ph.D. '15) and CICS distinguished professor Don Towsley recently received one of two honorable mentions in the National Security Agency (NSA) 4th Annual Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition.
September 21, 2016
The College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) has announced the five lecturers to speak in the college's annual Distinguished Lecturer Series.
September 08, 2016
For the past 30 years, computer science researchers have been teaching their machines to read, for example, assigning back issues of the Wall Street Journal, so computers can learn the English they need to run search engines like Google or mine... more
August 25, 2016
In a paper presented today at the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest group on data communication (SIGCOMM) conference in Florianopolis, Brazil, a team of computer science researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst led... more
August 17, 2016
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. -Today the Baker-Polito administration announced a $5 million grant to the University of Massachusetts Amherst to establish the UMass Amherst Data Science/Cybersecurity Research and Education Collaborative, a public-private... more
August 08, 2016
The ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) Test of Time Award, established in 2014, "recognizes research that has had long-lasting influence, including impact on a subarea of information retrieval research, across subareas of... more
July 13, 2016
CICS graduate students Kyle Wray and Luis Pineda, with their professor Shlomo Zilberstein, described a new approach to managing the challenge of transferring control between a human and an autonomous system, in a paper they presented at the... more
June 23, 2016
CICS Post Doc Bo Jiang, Distinguished Professor Don Towsley, and alumni Daniel Figueiredo (Ph.D. '05, now at a professor at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) and Bruno Ribeiro (Ph.D. '10, now a professor at Purdue University) won the Best... more
June 23, 2016
Japan's Hokkaido University (HU) and the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) have embarked on a new initiative, part of the Global Institution for Collaborative Research and Education (GI-CoRE), to foster collaborative... more
June 16, 2016
Emery Berger, professor of computer science, has received an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Programming Languages Design and Implementation (PLDI) Most Influential Paper Award for his 2006 paper, "DieHard: Probabilistic Memory Safety for... more
June 14, 2016
The June 2016 issue of the Communications of the ACM (CACM) features a paper by CICS PLASMA Lab researchers Dan Barowy (UMass Amherst CICS PhD student), Charlie Curtsinger (UMass Amherst CICS PhD alum, now a professor at Grinnell College), Emery... more
June 10, 2016
The MassMutual Foundation, Inc.--a dedicated corporate foundation established by Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual)--today announced it is providing the University of Massachusetts Amherst $15 million over 10 years to further... more
June 08, 2016
Prashant Shenoy, professor of computer science, has been awarded the 2016 ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award for his research paper on multi-tier Internet services, which he co-wrote with Ph.D. student Bhuvan Urgaonkar ('02 M.S., '05 Ph.D.) and... more
June 07, 2016
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mount Holyoke College are teaming up to apply recent advances in machine learning, specifically biologically inspired deep learning methods, to analyze large amounts of scientific data from... more
May 27, 2016
CICS Professor Hava Siegelmann, director of the BINDS laboratory, was selected as the 2016 recipient of the International Neural Network Society (INNS) Hebb Award in recognition of her outstanding contributions to biological learning. The award will... more
May 24, 2016
Distinguished Professor Jim Kurose, now the assistant director for NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate, reflects on his Japanese-American heritage in an NSF Discoveries article.
Read the article
May 20, 2016
The College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) honored its graduates during Commencement Weekend 2016, May 6-7, 2016. Below are some photo highlights from the Master's and Doctoral Celebration on May 6th and the undergraduate Senior... more
May 07, 2016
Jim Kurose is leading the Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) as an Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF). He is on leave from his UMass Amherst position as Distinguished Professor of... more
May 06, 2016
Computer Science within UMass Amherst has changed from a school to the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), but one of its strongest characteristics remains the same--the connectivity among its faculty and our commitment to... more
May 05, 2016
Associate Professor Andrew McGregor was selected as the recipient of the 2016 CICS Outstanding Teacher Award. "The CICS Awards Committee selected Andrew based on a number of factors including his excellent teaching evaluations, letters from students... more
May 03, 2016
The Isenberg School of Management's Berthiaume Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently held the 11th annual Innovation Challenge, where six teams of top student entrepreneurs competed for up to $65,000 to help... more
April 20, 2016
Digital health is a rapidly emerging area with the broad goal of improving healthcare delivery, efficiency, and quality by leveraging a diverse array of health data sources including electronic health records, medical claims data, medical imaging... more
April 20, 2016
CICS Assistant Professor Barna Saha was awarded a 2015 Yahoo! Academic Career Enhancement (ACE) Award and a Google Faculty Research Award. Assistant Professor Yuriy Brun and Professor Prashant Shenoy also received Google Faculty Research Awards.
April 20, 2016
During the 2015 Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), Professor Eliot Moss was honored with the prestigious Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS) Hall of Fame Award for his landmark paper... more
April 14, 2016
Alexandra Meliou, assistant professor of computer science, has been awarded a prestigious 2016-2017 Lilly Fellowship from the UMass Amherst Institute for Teaching Excellence and Faculty Development (TEFD).
March 21, 2016
Tracy Mitrano has joined the College of Information and Computer Sciences as the Academic Dean of a new cybersecurity program, the Trust, Assurance and Cybersecurity Certificate, or TACC. A component of the college's Cybersecurity Institute, TACC is... more
March 20, 2016
Some computer data centers see electricity bills in the millions of dollars each month, and costs continue to rise, said CICS Professor Prashant Shenoy, which is why the official opening in February of New England's first experimental solar-powered... more
March 14, 2016
The ancient board game Go, played with black and white stones on a grid, is so complex that experts in artificial intelligence (AI) once believed it would be decades, if ever, before a computer could beat the best human player. But today AlphaGo, an... more
February 20, 2016
UMass Amherst fundraiser Julie Stubbs joined CICS as director of development, effective January 19, 2016. Stubbs brings 12 years of experience in heading the philanthropic efforts at nonprofits and UMass Amherst. Her initial position on campus was... more
February 09, 2016
Internet security expert Amir Houmansadr at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently received a five-year, $581,458 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to combat Internet censorship by analyzing current censor-circumvention... more
January 25, 2016
Successful graduates will enter national service to protect vital assets such utilities, water treatment and military defense systems.
A team of cybersecurity researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst led by computer scientist Brian... more
January 20, 2016
Ramesh Sitaraman, professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences, will receive India's prestigious Hind Rattan Award in recognition of contributions to the field of computer science. This award is given annually to approximately 25... more
January 07, 2016
Thanks to the work of computer science researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the online database of the country's millions of inventors and patents will be much better to navigate for innovators, business and policy makers.
December 17, 2015
Using 20 years of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from tens of thousands of brain imaging experiments, computational neuroscientists Hava Siegelmann and a postdoctoral colleague in UMass Amherst's College of Information and... more
December 16, 2015
Two University of Massachusetts Amherst computer scientists who are helping to shape the intellectual agenda of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Big Data Research and Development Initiative attended the first Northeast Big Data Hub workshop... more
December 14, 2015
The establishment of the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) brings new opportunities and key challenges. Recruiting the best undergraduate and graduate students in an increasingly competitive environment is a pressing issue. In... more
December 11, 2015
For patients with HIV and other chronic conditions, taking medicines daily and exactly as prescribed is crucial for quality of life and long-term health. To support this, a team of University of Massachusetts Amherst computer scientists and... more
November 27, 2015
Encryption of a message to make it undecipherable to an unintended observer is often the goal of modern security research. But what if the mere presence of the message is enough to compromise the security of the transmitting and receiver parties?
November 25, 2015
Last week, The MIT Technology Review spotlighted the work of CICS researchers in an article, "Browser Plug-in Punches an Unfixable Hole in China's Great Firewall." Highlighted was the work of Assistant CICS Professor Amir Houmansadr and former... more
November 02, 2015
Barna Saha, assistant professor of computer science, has been awarded a $10,000 Yahoo Academic Career Enhancement (ACE) Award for her work in algorithm design and analysis, data analytics, and randomization in computation.
October 30, 2015
UMass Amherst receives grant to enhance privacy in smart buildings and homes
As more smart grids and buildings are fitted with digital electric meters, Web-enabled appliances and lighting, programmable outlets and switches, and intelligent HVAC... more
