News

You’re feeling nervous as finals week approaches. A friend passing you on McKeldin Mall stops to ask how you’re feeling. “Good,” you reply with wince and a shrug. The friend can plainly see from your facial expression and body language that “good” alone doesn’t capture the truth about your emotional state. Now, a UMD computer scientist has created a virtual “friend”—an artificial intelligence-driven virtual conversational assistant—which also can understand the subtleties about how you convey emotion.

A $3 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will support a new effort at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD); the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC); and Morgan State University to expand the pipeline of women faculty and Black, Hispanic and American Indian/Alaskan Native faculty in the arts and humanities to the ranks of academic leadership.

In November 2021, NASA extended a cooperative agreement with the University of Maryland, providing $32.5 million for UMD to continue managing and administering the Small Bodies Node (SBN) of NASA’s Planetary Data System. The Planetary Data System program ensures that data collected on NASA missions is cataloged, archived and made publicly accessible for future studies. The SBN is the branch of that system that houses data on asteroids, comets, meteorites and other small objects in space.