UMIACS Researchers Honored with Best Paper Awards

Researchers in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) were recently recognized for several academic papers presented at prestigious conferences and workshops.

Hanan Samet, a Distinguished University Professor of computer science with an appointment in UMIACS, was part an international team honored with the Best Vision Paper at the 2024 ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems.

The paper, “Beyond the Commute: Unlocking the Potential of Electric Vehicles as Future Energy Storage Solutions,” outlines the bold concept of using electric vehicles (EVs) as energy storage devices in addition to their use for transportation. The researchers describe innovative bidirectional charging technology, which would allow EVs to simultaneously draw power from, and feed power back into, the grid, homes or other vehicles. This capability would enable EVs to reduce emissions, optimize costs, and support the grid by storing energy during periods of high production and supplying it when demand is high.

Samet was joined on the paper by researchers from Australia and China.

Another paper—“Can Watermarking Large Language Models Prevent Copyright Text Generation and Hide Training Data?”—received Best Paper recognition at the AdvML-Frontiers workshop, part of the larger 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024).

Using theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation, the researchers demonstrate that incorporating watermarks into large language models (LLMs) significantly reduces the likelihood of generating copyrighted content, thereby addressing a critical concern in the deployment of LLMs. Additionally, thy explore the impact of watermarking on membership inference attacks (MIAs), which aim to discern whether a sample was part of the pretraining dataset and may be used to detect copyright violations.

Michael-Andrei Panaitescu-Liess, a doctoral student in computer science, was lead author on the paper, joined by co-authors and fellow graduate students Zora Che, Bang An, Yuancheng Xu, Pankayaraj Pathmanathan, Souradip Chakraborty and Sicheng Zhu, as well as UMIACS faculty members Tom Goldstein and Furong Huang.