Research Centers

The Department of Information Systems is home to six innovative research centers that drive discovery, collaboration, and impact across diverse areas of technology and society. These centers foster interdisciplinary research and innovation, teaching and mentoring, and community-engaged scholarship that extend across campus and beyond. Faculty and students work together with academic, industry, and government partners to address real-world challenges in areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics, data science, climate change, cyber-physical systems, healthcare analytics, and human-centered computing.

From advancing real-time analytics and scalable data science to developing resilient autonomous systems, exploring the effects of climate change in polar regions, and building interactive technologies grounded in user needs, these centers serve as hubs of innovation. Together, they not only push the boundaries of research but also create transformative opportunities for students to engage in cutting-edge projects that connect computing to meaningful impact in the world.

Center for Realtime Distributed Sensing and Autonomy (CARDS) was established in 2021 to develop cutting-edge technologies towards the betterment of society and field robotics. A Project funded by the Army Research Laboratory is supporting a collaboration with University of Maryland College Park, Bowie State University, and the Army Research Laboratory.

Focus Areas:

  • AI and Autonomy
  • Cyber security
  • Swarm Robotics (Multi-Robot Coordination)
  • Smart City (Duckie town)
  • Object detection and Classification
  • Millimeter Wave Radar
  • Spot Robot Navigation Modalities

Visit the CARDS website for additional information

Center for Accelerated Realtime Analytics (CARTA) is a NSF funded Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) that aims to address research challenges in analyzing at real time large Healthcare and Scientific datasets using Accelerated and next generation hardware. Faculty, spread across four University sites of Rutgers, UMBC, U of Miami and ASU participate in collaborative research funded by Industry partners who are members of the Center.

Phase I of the CARTA center included sites from Rutgers, NB, Miami, UMBC, NCSU, and Rutgers, NWK.

CARTA Membership Funded Phase II Projects:

  • Collaborative project (UMiami, UMBC, and Rutgers): Digital Twins, Cyber-physical Vulnerabilities, and Adversarial Attacks; Project Leads: Stephen Dennis and Yelena Yesha (UM), Milt Halem and Yaacov Yesha (UMBC) and Dimitris Metaxas (Rutgers)
  • LLM Integrated Knowledge Graph for Multi-Modal Disaster Data; Project Lead: Karuna Joshi (UMBC)
  • Optimizing Knowledge Graph Reasoning for Accelerated High-Performance Computing Environments Phase 2; Project Leads: Anupam Joshi (UMBC), Tim Finin (UMBC)
  • RISC-V Hardware Architecture Customizations and Evaluation Platforms, Project Leads: Ryan Robucci (UMBC), Mohamed Younis (UMBC)

Visit the CARTA website for additional information

The Center for Research in Use-Inspired Cyber-Physical Systems (CYPRESS) explores multi-domain multimodal sensing, communication, learning, and perception techniques to advance responsible AI and fair machine learning, autonomy and robotics, and edge computing models, tools, and systems. The center investigates cutting-edge scalable, lightweight, and resilient use-inspired machine learning algorithms, computer vision, autonomous navigation in unstructured and digital twin environments, cyber-physical systems for smart and connected health, smart and connected communities, and robotics applications.

Projects:

Visit the CYPRESS website for additional information

The Institute for Harnessing Data and Model Revolution in the Polar Regions (iHARP) conducts data intensive research, education, outreach, and cyberinfrastructure development that will transform understanding of the effects of climate change in polar regions. This institute brings together stakeholders and leading scholars in data science and polar science to reduce uncertainties in projecting Greenland and Antarctica’s future mass balance, associated sea-level rise, and impacts on global communities.

Focus Areas:

Data: Develop fundamental, transformative, and integrative solutions to prepare data for use by ML and physical models

Data & Model: Integrate data with numerical and physical models via physics informed ML and causal AI

Prediction: Develop spatial-temporal algorithms to forecast the future changes to the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets

Scalability: Build scalable algorithms to apply our solutions on a global scale.

Visit the iHARP website for additional information

The Interactive Systems Research Center (ISRC) acts as a bridge for faculty across the UMBC campus with expertise in designing, building or studying uses of interactive computing systems. It facilitates the sharing of resources and experience in solving computing problems from a user-centered perspective grounded in user needs and not in simply applying previously designed solutions to new domains.

Projects:

  • University Mobility Challenge: Designing Wayfinding Technologies that Blind and Older Individuals Can Trust
  • Tactile Authentication Methods for Mobile Devices in Cyber-Security Settings
  • Online searching in a foreign language
  • CHS: SMALL: Stress Reflection Systems in Medical Team Training
  • CDI-Type II: GLOBE: Evolving New Global Workflows for Land Change Science
  • EAGER: Exploring Appropriate 3D Printing Paradigms in Special Education

Visit the ISRC website for additional information

Computing and data science are considered as the third and fourth pillars of scientific study. Many data and computational science related studies generate data in high volume/velocity and require advanced computing environments including high-performance computing, cloud computing and edge computing. This center focuses on emerging scalable architectures and algorithms that can utilize such computing environments for big data generated from different science disciplines (e.g., Earth, manufacturing and medicine), and interdisciplinary research on how such data and computational science advances can help scientific applications. The center will connect faculty who work on scalable data/computing techniques with faculty who work on related scientific applications. It will form interdisciplinary teams, conduct research with greater impacts and pursue related funding opportunities. The center will also collaborate with centers including UMBC Center for AI, iHARP, CARTA and CARDS for joint activities and research.

Visit the ScaleS website for additional information