The Computer Science Department's graduate program is ranked among the top in the nation and in the top ten among public universities. Both M.S. and Ph.D degrees are offered, and almost all full-time students receive financial aid in the form of assistantships, fellowships, and grants. The Department has strong research programs in the following areas: artificial intelligence, computer systems and networking, database systems, programming languages, software engineering, scientific computing, algorithms and computation theory, computer vision, geometric computing, graphics, human-computer interaction, and bioinformatics.<br><br>Programming languages are our means of expressing computations. Thus, programming languages are a powerful locus of research toward building high-quality software, i.e., software that is flexible, secure, reliable, available, efficient, reusable, and more. We can design new languages, or we can build tools that analyze programs in existing languages, toward maximizing quality. The Lab for Programming Languages and the University of Maryland (PLUM) is engaged in exciting research that aims to improve software quality through new languages and software tools. Our work involves formalism and proof (e.g., to show that a particular analysis establishes a certain property of the programs it considers) as well as implementation and evaluation (e.g., to show that our ideas work on real software at reasonable cost). Current interests focus on cloud computing, mobile computing, high-availability systems, static analysis, functional programming, debugging, and privacy-preseving computation.