Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

EE Graduate Seminar

Physical Layer Wireless Network Modeling and Simulation
and my Technical Publishing Experience

Jon R. Ward
EE PhD Student, UMBC and
the Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory

11:30 – 12:45, Friday, 17 February 2012, ITE 237

Jon Ward, and coauthors Jack Burbank and Bill Kasch, recently wrote a book for IEEE Press/Wiley entitled "An Introduction to Network Modeling and Simulation for the Practicing Engineer." In this talk, Jon will provide a biographical summary of his UMBC research, the path that led to the book, and the technical publishing process. The talk will then transition to a technical discussion that highlights physical layer wireless network modeling and simulation from Chapter 3 of the book.

Jon R. Ward, PE graduated from NCSU in 2005 with an MSEE. He currently works at The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) on projects focusing on wireless network design and interference testing of standards-based wireless technologies such as IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15.4, and IEEE 802.16. He has experience in wireless network modeling and simulation (M&S) and in test and evaluation (T&E) of commercial wireless equipment. He is currently a student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), pursuing a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

A Self-Powered In-Vitro Biosensing Microsystem

Dr. Gymama Slaughter

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

11:30am-12:45pm Friday, 10 February 2012, ITE 237

Recent studies on biofuel cells have shown that energy can be harvested from biological compounds. Because of the recent biofuel cell discoveries, it possible to use inertial power scavenging design by converting interstitial glucose into energy through the coupling of enzymes and three-dimensional nanowire arrays. This talk will discuss our own contribution to identifying a pathway to embed sensing by eliminating the need for a potentiostat circuit and an external power source.

The self-powered biosensing microsystem consist of massively dense 3D nanowire cell structures fused with an energy harvesting circuit that maximizes power and energy densities while maintaining short ion transport distances, thus leading to dramatic improvement in both speed and energy efficiency of biofuel cells. Not only is such a paradigm extremely fast because of absence of a potentiostat circuit, but it is also extremely energy-efficient since the device operates at low voltage and current levels. As a result, the biosensing microsystem generates a drive signal in real-time and periodically powers an electrical device by generating and accumulating electrical power as a result of the catalysis of glucose.

Gymama Slaughter received her B.S. in Chemistry in 2001, M.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2003, and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the Virginia Commonwealth University in 2005. She then joined Virginia State University as an Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering and Director of the Center for Biosystems and Engineering University. Finally, she joined the UMBC as Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering in August 2010.

Dr. Slaughter is currently the Director of the Bioelectronics Laboratory Group and oversees research and research outreach programs in the BEL Group. She develops and applies sensor-processor platforms, focusing on innovative contributions to identifying a pathway to embed sensing and processing functions in the same device to eliminate bottlenecks arising from communication between the sensor, transducer, and processor, thus, resulting in ultra-fast and ultra-low power devices.

Her research has been supported by the NSF for her diabetes research that focuses on the design and development of glucose biosensor, especially in relationship to monitoring blood glucose in diabetics. Her research interests include biosensors, microsensors, microfabrication technology, and BioMEMS and design.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

If you have good programming skills and are looking for an interesting alternative to the usual summer internship, you might check out the Google Summer of Code program. It pays student developers $5000 stipends to write code for various open source projects over the summer. Over the past seven years, it's brought together over 6,000 students with over 300 open source projects to create millions of lines of code.

A set of open source projects (aka mentoring organizations) will be selected and announced in mid-March. Students apply to work on one of more of these and each mentoring organization ranks the students interested in working with them. Google facilitates the final selection and pairing. The mentoring organization works closely with the student to define tasks, check progress, help solve problems, etc. Typically the student works remotely, interacting with his or her mentor via email, chat, skype, etc.

Students can submit applications via the Google Summer of Code 2012 site from March 26 to April 6. Google says that that the best applications they receive are from students who took the time to interact with one of the participating mentoring organizations and discuss their ideas before submitting an application. About 1,100 students are expected to be funded this year.

You can get more information on the 2012 GSoC site, an associated Google+ page, or by subscribing to a mailing list.

UMBC Cyber Defense Lab Research Meeting

Using data visualization techniques to support digital forensics

Tim Leschke

11:00am-12:15pm, Friday, Feb 3, 2012
ITE Room 228

Digital forensic examiners explore large datasets in search of evidence of a crime. In order to keep pace with the growing amount of data that is subject to a forensic examination, digital forensic examiners need to be more selective about the data they examine. One way to be selective about data is to focus attention at data that has changed-over-time. We present Change-Link, a data exploration tool which allows the user to see directories that have changed within an operating system. Our novel contributions are 1) the development of a segmented-box-and-whisker icon for representing change to individual directories, and 2) the first data visualization tool developed specifically for the domain of digital forensic data. We show that by using Change-Link to view change to a directory-tree structure, digital forensic examiners can enhance their ability to perform forensic examinations.

Tim Leschke is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science program at UMBC.

Host: Professor Alan Sherman

UMBC is a host for the 2012 Global Game Jam which takes place this coming weekend, January 27-29. This is a 48 hour event, where teams from around the world work to develop a complete game over one weekend. The first year had 54 sites in 23 countries. The second year had 124 sites in 34 countries. Last year was up to 169 sites. The UMBC site is open to participants at all skill levels and affiliations. Thanks to generous sponsorship by Next Century, there's no registration fee and food will be provided all weekend. However, you DO need to sign up in advance, just log into globalgamejam.org and select UMBC as your site.

The jam will start at 3:00pm on Friday, January 27th in the UMBC GAIM lab, room 005 in the ECS building with presentations by Microsoft about developing for the Windows Phone.  There will be some spiffy giveaways at the end of the weekend for teams that choose make a Windows Phone game.  The main event starts at 5:00pm with video keynote talks by Will Wright, Baiyon, Gonzalo Frasca, Brenda Garno Brathwaite and John Romero.  After these presentations, the theme for this year’s games will be announced, and participants will brainstorm game ideas and form into teams. For the rest of the weekend, each team will work to build a brand new computer game around the theme. At 3:00pm on Sunday, the final games must be uploaded and from 3-5, the group will review what was accomplished over the weekend.

For more information on the jam and how to participate, see the UMBC GAIM site.

Attention rising Junior and Senior Undergraduate and Graduate students interested in Information Assurance: Thursday, January 12 is the deadline to apply for a scholarship through the Information Assurance Scholarship Program (IASP).

The scholarship is great for students who are interested in pursuing careers in Information Assurance for the Federal Government.  Each recipient will receive full tuition, room and board, books,and stipend.  In return, the recipient must  work for DoD (for pay) for one year for year of scholarship.  Each recipient will also engage in a summer internship at DoD  (for pay).

Interested applicants should contact Dr. Alan Sherman () to be guided through the application process. For more information about the program, and for an application form, visit UMBC's Center for Information Security and Assurance website.

An article in last week's Wall Street Journal, Interns Are Latest Target In Battle for Tech Talent, focused on the increased interest in hiring summer interns in the Bay area.

"Bay Area tech companies, already in a fierce fight for full-time hires, are now also battling to woo summer interns. Technology giants like Google Inc. have been expanding their summer-intern programs, while smaller tech companies are ramping up theirs in response—sometimes even luring candidates away from college."

The motivation for companies is simple. Their growth depends on a steady stream of new hires with good skills and work habits. Hiring prospects as summer interns is a "try before you buy" strategy, giving the company lots of information to decide whether to extend an offer for a full-time position after graduation.

Meanwhile, Facebook Inc. plans to hire 625 interns for next summer, up from 550 this year. Google hired 1,000 engineering interns this past summer, up 20% from the previous year. Yolanda Mangolini, Google's director of talent and outreach programs, says the company is still figuring out its target for 2012, based on its overall staffing plan. Google generally extends offers to the majority of its intern class, Ms. Mangolini says. "It is one of the primary ways we find full-time hires."

While the WSJ story focused on Bay area companies, the situation is similar throughout the country and applies not only to companies, but also government agencies. It you are pursuing a computing-related program, now is the time to aggressively explore internship opportunities for the summer.

Graduate students and undergraduates who are currently juniors or seniors planning on going into graduate school will get the most interest, but there will be opportunities for current sophomores and even freshmen as well. If you want start working on lining up a great summer internship, your first stop should be the Career Services Center.

We congratulate the 114 students who graduated from our programs in December 2011. Three students received Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, 58 received M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, and 53 got B.S. degrees in Computer Engineering and Computer Science. We wish all of our new alumni happiness and success as they moved on to new challenges in 2012. Please stay in touch by keeping your contact information current on the UMBC Alumni Association site.

If you’re at loose ends for the semester break and want to sharpen your programming slils, you might try competing in the ACM Queue Magazine online programming competition. You will program a player that will compete with others in the game of Coercion. The competition opens January 15 and closes at midnight GMT on February 12.

“The game of Coercion takes place on a square field that is divided into regions, which vary by height and slope of the field. Each player controls three movable playing pieces called pushers, using them to push little doughnut-shaped markers around. Players use the markers to claim new territory on the playing field. The player with the most territory at the end of the match wins. The game rules will describe how to control your team, score points, and win. A double elimination tournament follows the coding phase, to determine the top four places.”

You can create your entry in in C++, C#, Java, Python or JavaScript. Preliminary matches will take place during the one-month coding phase will that will let you know how well your player is doing. A final double-elimination competition among all the submitted players will decide whose player is best.

Queue is the ACM’s magazine for practicing software engineers. Written by engineers for engineers, it focuses on the technical problems and challenges that loom ahead, helping readers to sharpen their own thinking and pursue innovative solutions.