Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

CSEE Ph.D. student Omar Shehab received a travel grant to present his research, UNKNOTTING as a k-local Hamiltonian problem, at the 2014 Quantum Information Processing conference, which will be held early in February in Barcelona, Spain. Later in February he will also attend the Workshop on Quantum Games and Protocols at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, UC Berkeley.

Omar’s research include adiabatic quantum Hamiltonian complexity, quantum computational simulation of topology and use of quantum optics to understand device independent cryptography. His work on quantum computing is done in collaboration with his mentor, CSEE Professor Samuel Lomonaco.

UMBC’s Mobile Pervasive and Sensor Systems Laboratory is looking for subjects who live in Baltimore City to interview for a study about what influences their energy use at home. The study is part of an NSF-sponsored Green Home Study project that aims to make it easier for off-grid and grid-tied home residents to make smart choices about managing energy.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

Multi-Modal Saliency Fusion for Illustrative Image Enhancement

Christopher J. Morris

10:30-12:30, Wednesday, 15 January 2013, ITE 365 & 352

Digitally manipulated or augmented images are increasingly prevalent. Multisensor systems produce augmented images that integrate data into a single context. Mixed-reality images are generated from insertion of computer generated objects into a natural scene. Digital processing for application-specific tasks (e.g., compression or network transmission) can create images distorted with processing artifacts. Digital image augmentation can lead to the inclusion of artifacts that influence the perception of the image.

Visual cues (e.g., depth or size cues) may no longer be perceptually consistent in an augmented image. A feature deemed important in its local context may no longer be in the broader integrated context. Inserted synthetic objects may not possess the appropriate visual cues for proper perception of the overall scene. Finer cues that distinguish critical features may be lost in compressed images. Enhancing augmented images to add or restore visual cues can improve the image’s perceptibility.

This dissertation presents a framework for illustrating images to enhance critical features. The enhancements improve the perception and comprehension of the augmented image. The framework uses a linear combination of image (2D), surface topology (3D), and task based saliency measures to identify the critical features in the image. The use of multi-modal saliency allows the visualization designer to adjust the definition of critical features based on the attributes of the scene and the task at hand. Upon identification, the features are enhanced using a non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) deferred illustration technique. The enhancements, inspired by an analysis of artists’ techniques, bolster the features’ perceptual cues.

To measure the amount of similar salient features between the enhanced image and the original image, the framework describes the Saliency Similarity Metric (SSM). The SSM is feedback with which to make informed decisions to tune the visualization. The benefits of illustrative enhancement are analyzed using objective and subjective evaluations. Using conventional metrics, illustrative enhancements improve the perceptual image quality of images distorted by noise or compression artifacts. User survey results reveal that enhancements must be carefully applied for perceptual improvement. The framework can be effectively utilized in mobile rendering, augmented reality, and sensor fusion applications.

Committee: Drs. Penny Rheingans (chair), Dan Bailey, Jian Chen, Thomas Jackman (Desert Research Institute), Anupam Joshi and Marc Olano

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal

Functional Reference Ontology Development: a Design Pattern Approach

Yunsu Lee

1:00pm Friday, January 10, 2014, ITE325b, UMBC

The next generation of smart manufacturing systems will be developed by composing advanced manufacturing components and IT services introducing new technologies. These new technologies can lead to dramatic improvements in the ability to monitor, control, and optimize all aspects of manufacturing. The ability to compose advanced manufacturing components and IT services enhances agility, resiliency, and productivity of a manufacturing system. In order to make the composition possible, functional knowledge of manufacturing components and IT services should be captured and shared explicitly. Recent researches have shown that a semantically precise and rich reference functional ontology enables effective composition. However, since domains of factories and production networks are large, evolving, and heterogeneous, developing a reference functional ontology is a challenging task. Specifically, conceptual functionality modeling that characterizes various features of manufacturing components and IT services at different levels of abstraction is a difficult task. Even if the reference functional ontology is developed successfully, there will certainly be interoperability issues between the reference functional ontology and local proprietary information models. Firstly, the conceptual conflict issues may arise primarily from the fact that the reference functional ontology does not reflect actual users’ or providers’ conceptualizations. Secondly, structural conflict issues may arise from diverse modeling choices in local, proprietary information models.

The objective of our research is to assess utility of design patterns in addressing the issues in the reference functional ontology development, specifically OWL ontology design patterns (ODPs). To achieve the objective, we will assess inductive approaches to identifying the ODPs, and explore development of a methodology for resolving structural differences between the reference functional ontology and local proprietary information models. The key potential contributions of this work include 1) new method to identify information patterns of functionalities in manufacturing components and IT services, 2) new inductive ODP development process which starts with the pattern definition of the specific functionality concepts, with subsequent grouping of these patterns into more general patterns, and 3) ODP-based ontology transformation to resolve structural conflicts between the reference functional ontology and local proprietary information models.

Committee: Drs. Yun Peng (chair), Tim Finin, Yelena Yesha, Milton Halem, Nenad Ivezic (NIST) and Boonserm Kulvatunyou (NIST)

The National Security Agency is soliciting nominations for the 2013 Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition. The competition is for scientific papers published between October 1, 2012 and December 31, 2013 that show an outstanding contribution to cybersecurity science. The nomination deadline is March 31, 2014.

The competition was created to stimulate research toward the development of systems that are resilient to cyber attacks. Entries are judged on scientific merit, the strength and significance of the work reported, and the degree to which the papers exemplify how to perform and report scientific research in cybersecurity.

The three winning papers from the 2012 cometition can be viewed at the Cyber-Physical Systems website.

This year’s nominations will be reviewed by a panel of distinguished experts including Dr. Whitfield Diffie, Dr. Dan Geer (In-Q-Tel), Dr. John McLean (NRL), Professor Angela Sasse, (University College London), Prof. Fred Schneider (Cornell), Mr. Phillip Venables (Goldman Sachs), Prof. David Wagner (UC Berkeley), and Dr. Jeannette Wing (Microsoft Research).

The contest winner and honorable mentions will be announced on the NSA external web site and the winner will be invited to present the winning paper to an audience of cybersecurity experts. For more information on eligibility criteria, criteria for judging and nomination procedures, see the 2013 Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition site.

The Baltimore Code Craftsmanship meetup group will hold its monthly meeting at 7:00pm on Thursday, January 16 in the ITE building on the UMBC Campus. The meetup is for the students and software developers in the Baltimore area that care about the quality of their work and want to practice and improve their programming skills, share what they know and learn new things from others.

This is a hands on coding user group with no presentations. Each meeting will be a dojo where we will go through a challenging software craftsmanship exercise that focuses on clean code, test-driven development, design patterns, and refactoring. We will pair up and practice on a kata in order to learn and apply the values, principles, and disciplines of software craftsmanship. Come with your laptop equipped with your favorite programming and automated unit testing environment. If you don’t have a laptop, come anyway, we will need only one laptop for every two people. Be prepared to pair up, learn, share and have fun!

Join the meetup and register to attend here.

The Fall 2013 edition of the Center for Women in Technology’s newsletter, CWIT Update, describes CWIT’s recent events and initiatives, highlighting accomplishments of the CWIT students, updates from CWIT alumni, and information on two scholar programs that CWIT helps to manage: Transfer Scholars in Information Technology and Engineering and Cyber Scholars.

Professor Charles Laberge, director of UMBC’s undergraduate Computer Engineering program, was recently recognized by the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RCTA) for more than thirty years of service helping to develop technical standards critical to aviation safety. RTCA is a private, not-for-profit association founded in 1935 to provide a public-private partnership venue for developing consensus among diverse, competing interests on critical aviation modernization issues in an increasingly global enterprise.

Dr. Laberge’s work was cited in an article the December issue of the RTCA digest, Spotlight on Volunteers: Communications Expert Advances Aviation Safety, for his leadership and contributions to standards for aviation communication. “Chuck has been invaluable to RTCA’s work for many years – we could not have accomplished what we have without his expertise and the long hours he has spent advancing aviation safety,” said RTCA President Margaret Jenny.

“Chuck LaBerge serves as Chair of RTCA’s SC-222, Inmarsat AMS(R)S, which has been working since October 2008 to produce several guidance documents focused on satellite systems capability. Chuck is known industry-wide for his expertise in radio signal processes and interference and brings a wealth of knowledge to the Committee’s work. Chuck has a long and active history of contributing to RTCA products and first became involved with RTCA in the late 70s, helping to produce DO-177, a MOPS document focusing on Microwave Landing System (MLS) Airborne Receiving Equipment. He has made substantial contributions to 20 RTCA documents, not including document updates.”

Dr. LaBerge describes the the work of the RTCA Special Committee 222 as defining the standards for satellite communication services that allow aircraft passengers to place telephone calls and access the Internet while in flight, especially in oceanic airspace. His previous RTCA work had focused on the special constraints that support pilot and controller communications related to the safety and regularity of flight along national and international air routes.

Professor LaBerge began working on RTCA standards at the Honeywell Aerospace Research & Technology Center, where he worked from from 1975 to 2008, achieving the position of Senior Fellow. While there, he completed a PhD in Electrical Engineering at UMBC in 2003. In 2008, he joined UMBC as Professor of the Practice, where he currently teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in computer engineering, helps teach the popular Introduction to Engineering class (ENES 101) and directs the undergraduate computer engineering program.

This week it was revealed that Target suffered a data breach that involved more than 40 million credit and debit card accounts. Target reports that “The unauthorized access may impact guests who made credit or debit card purchases in our U.S. stores from Nov. 27 to Dec. 15, 2013.”

Director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity and CSEE Professor Anupam Joshi discussed the possible consequences of the breach in video reports by local affiliates for both ABC and NBC. Dr. Joshi outlined some of the possible ways that the data breach might have happened and pointed out that while the lost data could be used to make illegal charges to the accounts, it was unlikely to lead to larger identity theft problems.

UMBC Training Centers received a $5,000 grant financed by the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore (EAGB) that will be used to defer tuition costs for students in the Cyber Operations Program. According to Tom Sadowski, President and CEO of EAGB:

“This contribution reflects EAGB’s commitment to growing the cybersecurity industry and talent base within the Greater Baltimore region. There are thousands of cybersecurity jobs available for highly motivated and trained individuals. The students that complete the Certificate in Cyber Operations program at UMBC Training Centers Cybersecurity Academy are ready to analyze complex network architectures, determine threat exposure and implement appropriate defenses.”

The Certificate in Cyber Operations, starting on January 21, 2014, is an intensive 9-month, part-time program. Cyber Operations features a rigorous curriculum that delivers a focused set of skills reinforced by multiple industry certifications, including CompTIA Network+, CompTIA Security+, Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) and Certified Ethical Hacker. This program is closely aligned with the recent National Institute of Standards and Technology release of the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education framework.