The Computer Science Department's graduate program is ranked among the top in the nation and in the top ten among public universities. Both M.S. and Ph.D degrees are offered, and almost all full-time students receive financial aid in the form of assistantships, fellowships, and grants. The Department has strong research programs in the following areas: artificial intelligence, computer systems and networking, database systems, programming languages, software engineering, scientific computing, algorithms and computation theory, computer vision, geometric computing, graphics, human-computer interaction, and bioinformatics.
The University of Maryland's Graphics and Visual Informatics Laboratory (GVIL) was established in 2000 by the Department of Computer Science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies to promote research and education in computer graphics, scientific visualization, and virtual environments. Here, we work to improve the efficiency and usability of visual computing applications in science, engineering, and medicine. The scope of this laboratory's research covers design of algorithms and data structures for reconciling realism and interactivity for very large graphics datasets, leveraging principles of visual saliency for architecting visual attention management tools, building systems for rapid access to distributed graphics datasets across memory and network hierarchies, and study of the influence of heterogeneous display and rendering devices over the visual computing pipeline. The activities of the laboratory involve development of visual computing tools and technologies to support the following research-driving applications: protein folding and rational drug design, navigation and interaction with mechanical CAD datasets, and ubiquitous access to distributed three-dimensional graphics datasets.