UMD CLIP Lab

Welcome back to @ClipUmd Mohit Iyyer (@MohitIyyer)! After earning his Ph.D. @UofMaryland and working at @UMass, he’s returned as an associate professor, bringing his lab and cutting-edge work on LLMs and web agents. Read more: go.umd.edu/20fy

Researchers @UofMaryland are advancing robotics with a new initiative designed to enable humanoid systems to perform complex, real-world household tasks with greater autonomy and reliability. Built on @NVIDIAAI infrastructure, the project integrates breakthroughs in trustworthy machine learning, sequential decision-making and generative AI to create robotic systems that can reason, adapt and act in dynamic home environments. The effort is led by Furong Huang (@furongh) and Tom Goldstein (@tomgoldsteincs) of @umiacs, which will install and maintain the new computing infrastructure in its high-performance data center. Learn more: umiacs.umd.edu/news-events/ne…

TRAILS is launching 11 Broader Impact Awards to expand access to trustworthy AI. These grants—up to $25K apiece—support projects @UofMaryland, @MorganStateU and @GWtweets to empower diverse stakeholder communities to engage with and influence the future of AI. trails.umd.edu/news/trails-an…

It's not too late to register for #TRAILSCon2026 at George Washington University on Wednesday, March 4. This year, TRAILSCon will explore real-world approaches to evaluating AI performance, risk, and impact. Learn more: trails.umd.edu/trailscon-2026

How do we measure AI’s performance, risk & real-world impact? 🤖 Find out at TRAILSCon 2026, March 4–5 at GW. Panels, roundtables & workshops focused on responsible AI design & governance. 🔗 Register: go.gwu.edu/trailscon #TRAILSCon2026 #AI #ResponsibleAI #FutureOfTech

After nearly 30 years of working in the @umiacs business office, Yerty Valenzuela is retiring. As director of research program administration, Yerty has been a cornerstone of UMIACS operations, supporting research programs and managing key accounts with dedication and expertise. Congratulations to Yerty on her retirement!

We’re excited to welcome Julia Mendelsohn to @umiacs and the CLIP Lab! Mendelsohn investigates how language, politics and AI intersect—examining implicit bias in political discourse and the social risks of large language models like ChatGPT. Learn more: go.umd.edu/23x9

A clever initiative from researchers in @UMDscience and @UMIACS, where humans team up with AI technology in quizbowl competitions to improve collaboration between humans and AI. #AIMaryland go.umd.edu/237g

The @UofMaryland is hosting a media event to showcase a broad range of #AI activities on campus. Several faculty and students @umiacs participated, including Hal Daumé III (@haldaume3) and Naitri Rajyaguru (@naitri_r) from the Perception and Robotics Group.

In this week’s edition of #TrustTRAILS, Susan Ariel Aaronson (@AaronsonSusan) explains the important relationship between data and AI, and the need for more accurate, complete and representative datasets that are used in AI-infused systems. Aaronson is a research professor @ElliottSchoolGW and co-PI @trails_ai.

What does it take to advance AI literacy? Our experts—Virginia Byrne (@VirginiaLByrne) from @MorganStateU, David Broniatowski (@Broniatowski) from @gwuengineering, Hal Daumé III (@haldaume3) from @UofMaryland, and Brandeis Marshall (@csdoctorsister) of @DataedX_—explain how TRAILS is combining better technology with dedicated education and outreach efforts to improve how people understand and interact with AI systems. #TrustTRAILS

“If you look at who is building AI technology in the world today, it tends to be a very narrow slice of the world’s population," says Hal Daumé III (@haldaume3), a professor of computer science @UofMaryland and director of @trails_ai. In this edition of #TrustTRAILS, Daumé examines the need to broaden participation involving research, development and deployment of AI systems, and explains how TRAILS is actively working on solutions to address this challenge.

In a paper just published in Computational Linguistics, @ClipUmd's Philip Resnik (@psresnik) argues that "baked-in" bias in current #AI-infused large language models calls for deeper solutions. today.umd.edu/to-make-better…

“The crowd chuckled when Daumé recalled how 2 early LLMs developed by Terps were named Bert & Elmo in a nod to famed UMD alum & Muppets creator Jim Henson.” Thanks @haldaume3 for mentioning work by @ClipUmd alums Jacob Devlin & Mohit Iyyer (@MohitIyyer)! today.umd.edu/make-ai-a-forc…

A team of @UofMaryland researchers led by Jordan Boyd-Graber (@boydgraber) is using a revamped #quizbowlformat to explore how #AI and humans can best work together. Their goal? Improve the evaluation of AI-infused question and answering systems by comparing how models and human trivia experts respond to challenging prompts about people, places and things. Read the story: go.umd.edu/JBGUMIACS

Two @ClipUmd alums—Weijia Xu(@weijiavxu) & Sudha Rao(@raosudha89)—published a paper @PNASNews quantifying the lack of plot diversity in LLM-generated stories, finding that they often contain idiosyncratic plot elements echoed frequently across generations. microsoft.com/en-us/research…

Philip Resnik (@psresnik) is working with researchers from @umdcommdept, @UMDPublicHealth and @UMmedschool to boost HPV vaccine uptake. Backed by a $2.8M @NIH grant, they’re building an AI chatbot to help parents make informed vaccine choices. Read more: go.umd.edu/21x3

Matthew Baney (pictured far right), is the assistant director of computational systems at UMIACS. In this role, he keeps high-performance computing and data centers running smoothly while mentoring the next generation of tech talent. Learn more: go.umd.edu/21hy

Douglas Oard has stepped in as interim dean @INFOCollegeUMD. He’s driving interdisciplinary research collaborations at the college and @umiacs in AI, language technology, human-computer interaction and more. Read the story: go.umd.edu/21hi @UMDscience @UMDResearch

Glad my small contribution could support Ai2's efforts to rigorously benchmark AI agents 🫡 Huge congrats to the team!!! 🎉

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