A new partnership between the University of Maryland and Jigsaw, a unit of Google, will create groundbreaking virtual reality training for police officers to learn and evaluate de-escalation and communication skills.

Scientists in the University of Maryland (UMD)’s A. James Clark School of Engineering have reinvented a 26,000-year-old manufacturing process into an innovative approach to fabricating ceramic materials that has promising applications for solid-state batteries, fuel cells, 3D printing technologies, and beyond.

A University of Maryland expert in computational linguistics has received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop computational methods to advance our understanding of how decisions are made, particularly in the context of the political arena.

Navigating the right path forward in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic requires an accurate understanding of its impact. Since April 2020, the COVID-19 Impact Analysis Platform has provided decision makers with a clear view of how the current epidemiological situation affects our society, economy, mobility, and public health.

Dr. Niklas Elmqvist, professor at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies (UMD iSchool) and director of the world-famous UMD Human-Computer Interaction Lab, is co-PI on a $5M NSF Convergence Accelerator grant led by Dr. Karthik Ramani, the Donald W. Feddersen Distinguished Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University.

When the words “artificial intelligence” (AI) come to mind, your first thoughts may be supercomputers, or robots that perform tasks without assistance from humans. Now, a multi-institutional team led by researchers from the University of Maryland (UMD) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) working with collaborators at Stanford University, University of Washington, University of Pennsylvania, and Duke University have accomplished something not too far off.

Fig. 5 from the paper. Depiction of FGIF and coordinate system, where dx, dy, and dz represent displacement in longitude, latitude, and altitude directions, respectively. UAV’s reachable footprint is represented by semicircle contour labeled FGIF.

Linguistics Professor Philip Resnik (below) is testing whether machine learning could help uncover messages and subtle cues in social media postings that could indicate a user is at risk of committing suicide, giving mental health professionals a new tool to monitor patient well-being. (Illustration by Stocksy) Amid the poorly lit food pictures, duck-lipped selfies and political disinformation that swamp social media, imagine something else: a hope for saving lives.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – It feels a little like the Wild West, or the early days of cryptocurrencies. Welcome to the strange new world of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.Sparking a trading frenzy for cryptocurrency investors and collectors alike, NFTs represent unique digital assets, like jpegs and video clips that are bought and sold much like stocks or other physical assets.