Summer at MC2

Goodbye party for Andrei, Suleyman, and Eren, our 2024 interns. With bowling, video games, and pool!

2024 intern Süleyman Ateş gives his final project presentation

2023 intern Tasos Toumazatos starts his Ph.D. in the Maryland Cybersecurity Center this Fall.

He is thus inducted into the select group of MC2 padawans who have returned for grad school after their internships. Tasos will work at the intersection of adversarial machine learning and database systems, an emerging area that’s full of research opportunities.

Let’s wish Tasos fair winds over the next years!

Earlier this year: Tasos's goodbye activity, a hike to the summit of Old Rag Mountain.

Tasos is returning this Fall to start his Ph.D. in the Maryland Cybersecurity Center.

With 2024 interns Eren, Süleyman, and Andrei, in MC2.

2017 intern Erin Avllazagaj defended his Ph.D. thesis. He is the third of our former interns to receive a doctorate from the University of Maryland!

https://today.umd.edu/umd-graduate-student-helps-discover-giant-mars-volcano-hidden-in-plain-sight

UMD Graduate Student Helps Discover Giant Mars Volcano Hidden in… Discovery Is Major Step in Search for Evidence of Life on Mars, Provides Possible Destination for Exploration

Summer interns, past and present: Michi (2020), Simge (2022), and Tasos (2023).

2023 retrospective: Arda's goodbye dinner.

Arda's internship project contributed to a paper on understanding, uncovering, and mitigating the causes of inference slowdown for language models. The paper, written together with Kamala and 2017 intern Yigitcan, was accepted at the IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML'24), with enthusiastic support. One of the reviewers commented "I find [the idea] rather fascinating" 😀

That's a great outcome for a summer internship!

2023 retrospective: Simge Tekin, an intern one year ago, returned to start her Ph.D. in Computer Science at UMD.

Our internship program helps undergraduate students, who already have excellent academic results, take their first steps toward doing cutting-edge research. This requires a new skill set, and many of our interns discover here a world of dreams and possibilities. I'm proud that 12 past interns went on to join doctoral programs at leading universities from Europe and the United States, and 2 among them already received their Ph.D.s in Computer Science.

Welcome back, Simge. I look forward to seeing you grow into a world-class scientist.

2023 retrospective: Tasos Toumazatos came from Athens University of Economics and Business to do a 9-month internship. He is working on understanding the new vulnerabilities introduced by the growing adoption of machine learning in database systems, e.g. for query optimization, indexing, cardinality estimation. Tasos's superpower is to investigate a hypothesis in depth, through systematic experimentation, to eliminate all possible alternative explanations and to get to the root cause of the phenomenon.

Tasos is applying to Ph.D. programs this year. Let's wish him good luck!

2023 retrospective: Intern Arda Numanoğlu came from the Middle Eastern Technical University, in Turkey. He worked on demystifying the causes of slowdown in large language models, like GPT-4, Brad, or BERT. During the internship, Arda discovered a superpower to see what's missing from the published research and how to fill those gaps.