Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

UMBC has been named an NVIDIA CUDA Teaching Center following the submission of a proposal by Dr. Marc Olano, professor, and Dr. Shujia Zhou, research associate professor of the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department. The NVIDIA CUDA Teaching Center Program will provide UMBC with enough high-end GPUs to upgrade the UMBC GAIM (Games, Animation and Interactive Media) Lab, as well as a Tesla GPU-based computing processor.

Dr. Olano was familiar with NVIDIA’s grant programs through previous equipment grants, and last February, he spoke with David Luebke, Director of Research at NVIDIA, about the CUDA Teaching Center Program. His decision to submit a proposal weighed heavily upon the increasing interest in GPU computing around the UMBC community.

“It’s an important skill for game programming,” says Dr. Olano, who is the director of the Computer Science program’s Game Development Track. He adds that UMBC’s Multicore Computational Center (MC2) and High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) are also moving toward nodes with GPU computing capability and could benefit from the upgrade.  

UMBC is now one of thirty-six NVIDIA CUDA Teaching Center within the U.S., joining schools such as Florida A&M University, Hood College, Purdue University and UCLA. Apart from the generous equipment donation, UMBC’s distinction as a NVIDIA CUDA Teaching Center provides the university with recognition on NVIDIA’s website, access to teaching materials, and the opportunity to receive discounts on some NVIDIA equipment purchases.

Dr. Olano predicts that the newly-enhanced GAIM lab will be usable by the beginning of the Spring semester. The new equipment will enhance game development and parallel programming classes in upcoming semesters, such as CMSC 483: Parallel and Distributed Processing, which will be taught by Dr. Shujia Zhou in the upgraded lab this Spring. 

NSA will be at the Commons for this year's CryptoChallenge competition. Stop by and test your skills against their cryptographic brain teasers and maybe score some great giveaways. Join them for some friendly competition from 11:00am to 5:00pm on Friday 30 September at the Commons Outside Terrace or Main Street if it rains.

Bring your resume — NSA recruiters will be on hand to discuss career opportunities for the best codemakers and codebreakers in the business. You can hone your cryptographic skills before the event by downloading the free NSA CryptoChallenge from the Apple App Store for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

NSA CryptoChallenge is a game that tests your pattern recognition skills through a series of cryptographs. Your mission is to decipher encrypted quotes, factoids, historical events and more. It’s you against the clock to see how fast you can crack the code. Or, you can challenge a friend with the multiplayer interface. In that instance, it's a one-on-one race to see who can correctly solve the puzzle first.

NSA executes some of the nation’s most important and sensitive intelligence operations. To help us accomplish our mission, we’re looking for the best and the brightest problem solvers to join our team. If you can solve these puzzles, you just might have what it takes to help NSA keep America safe.

EE Graduate Seminar

Intelligent Agents in the OntoAgent Cognitive Architecture

Professor Sergei Nirenburg
Director, Institute for Language and Information Technologies
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

11:30am-12:45pm Friday 30 September 2011, ITE 231

OntoAgent is a constantly evolving cognitive architecture that facilitates development of and experimentation with artificial intelligent agents (ontoagents). Distinguishing characteristics of Ontoagents include the following.

• They model human information processing capabilities by simulating conscious perception and action, which involves reasoning and decision-making;
• They are intended to operate in a hybrid network of human and artificial agents; and
• They incorporate: (a) an ontological world model and a memory (fact repository) of instances of ontological objects, events and properties; (b) OntoSem, a natural language processing module that supports two-way translation between texts (including dialog turns) and their semantic and discourse/pragmatic meanings; (c) a goal- and plan-oriented reasoning module; (d) a decision theory for choosing goals, plans and individual actions that relies on knowledge (beliefs) about self, other agents, the ontological world model, the current world state and memory of past world states and past actions; (e) a capability for verbal, mental and simulated physical action; (f) (optionally) a physiological model, making them what we call double agents with simulated bodies as well as simulated minds and providing an additional channel of perception; and (g) (optionally) personality traits, preferences and psychological states that influence their overtly perceived or subconscious preferences in decision-making.

OntoAgent has so far provided the basis for two proof-of-concept systems:

• Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP) modeling a patient and a tutor to help training in medical diagnostics and treatment; and
• CLinicians ADdvisor (CLAD) assisting clinicians by reducing their cognitive load.

This talk will give a brief introduction to OntoAgent functionalities implemented in MVP and CLAD.

Professor Nirenburg has worked in the areas of cognitive systems, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing (NLP) for over 30 years. His professional interests include developing computational models of human cognitive capabilities and implementing them in hybrid-engine models of societies of human and computer agents; computational studies of meaning in natural languages; and representation and management of knowledge about the world and about language. He is Member of the Intl Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL) and Honorary Editor of Machine Translation (served as Editor-in-Chief in 1987-96). He has been Program Committee Chair for: Machine Translation Summit III (Washington, DC, 1991), the Conference on Applied NLP sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics (Seattle, WA, 2000), and COLING 2004 in Geneva, Switzerland. He served as a director of two NATO-sponsored Advanced Studies Institutes on Language Engineering for Lesser-Studied Languages (Ankara, Turkey, 2000 and Batumi, Georgia, 2007).

Host: Professor Joel Morris

Cybersecurity Lecture

Modern Threat Environment and the Impact of Technology Shifts

Neal Ziring
Information Assurance Technical Director
National Security Agency

6-7pm Tuesday 20 September 2011 in ITE 102 (LH 8)

Neal Ziring will give a special guest lecture in CYBR620 (Introduction to Cybersecurity) on the modern threat environment and the impact of shifts in technology, such as the move from IPv4 to IPv6 and the security of systems and networks topics.

Mr. Neal Ziring is currently a technical director in the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD), at NSA. The IAD provides cryptographic, network, and operational security products and services to protect and defend national security systems. Prior to his role at the IAD level, Neal with a technical director for the Vulnerability Analysis and Operations Group, which provides technology evaluations, defensive operations, and secure configuration guidance for the DoD and the IC. During that time, Neal also served as security architect for two major NSA mission systems programs, collaborated with NIST on the Security Content Automation Protocol (S-CAP) specifications, and lead analysis efforts for Cloud Computing technology and IPv6. Neal has degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Washington University. Before coming to NSA in 1989, he worked at AT&T Bell Labs.

EE Graduate Seminar

Thesis/Dissertation Accomplished: How To Do It!

Wendy Y. Carter-Veale, Ph.D.

Program Coordinator, PhD Completion Project/PROMISE
Director, Educational Research Institute

11:30am-12:45pm, Friday 23 September 11, ITE 231

It is very important for graduate students, MS/PhD, to understand and be prepared for the thesis/dissertation process. The structure of and writing the thesis/dissertation is a major component of this process, and usually not given adequate attention until much later in the educational program.

Dr. Wendy Carter, as Program Coordinator for the PhD Completion Project/PROMISE here at UMBC, leads workshops on the thesis/dissertation process, both at UMBC and UMCP, and at various professional meetings. She will provide an overview of the tools, strategies, and resources that she has designed (www.tadafinallyfinished.com) to empower students to complete their thesis/dissertation based on the individual's schedule and temperament.

Dr. Carter has a BA and MA from Stanford University, a MS in Management and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, and a MS and the PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

Six CSEE graduate students will present their research First Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning is a one-day event to be held at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on Friday, 23 September 2011. Its goal is to bring together students taking computational approaches to speech, language, and learning, so that they can introduce their research to the local student community, give and receive feedback, and engage each other in collaborative discussion. The students and the titles of their presentations are:

• Niyati Chhaya, Joint Inference for Extracting Text Descriptors from Triage Images of Mass Disaster
• Lushan Han, GoRelations: An Intuitive Query System for DBpedia
• Niels Kasch, Concept Modeling for Scripts
• Justin Martineau, DIVA: Domain Independence Verification Algorithm for Sentiment Analysis
• Varish Mulwad, Automatically Generating Linked Data from Tables
• Jennifer Sleeman, A Streaming Approach to Linking FOAF Instances
• Xianshu Zhu, Finding Story Chains in Newswire Articles

Attendance is open to all and free but space is limited, so online registration is requested by September 16. The program runs from 10:00am to 5:00pm and will include oral presentations, poster sessions, and breakout sessions.

CSEE Graduate Seminar

Nonlinear Optical Signal Processing in
Optical Fibers and Waveguides

Dr. Gary M. Carter
Professor of Electrical Engineering
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1-2pm Friday, 16 September, 2011, ITE 227

postponed until later in the Fall

Advances in optical fiber and semiconductor technology have progressed to the degree that nonlinear optical signal processing can be demonstrated at extraordinarily high data rates. This talk will review some of the work of Dr. Carter's research group in photonic crystal fibers, silicon nano wires, and AlGaAs optical waveguides.

Hosts: Profs. Joel M. Morris and Yelena Yesha

Upcoming CSEE talks

Genetic information for chronic disease prediction

Michael A. Grasso, MD, PhD
University of Maryland School of Medicine

1:00pm Friday 23 September 2011, 227 ITE

Type 2 diabetes and coronary artery disease are commonly occurring polygenic-multifactorial diseases, which are responsible for significant morbidity and mortality. The identification of people at risk for these conditions has historically been based on clinical factors alone. However, this resulted in prediction algorithms that are linked to symptomatic states, which have limited accuracy in asymptomatic individuals. Advances in genetics have raised the hope that genetic testing may aid in disease prediction, treatment, and prevention. Although intuitive, the addition of genetic information to increase the accuracy of disease prediction remains an unproven hypothesis. We present an overview of genetic issues involved in polygenic-multifactorial diseases, and summarize ongoing efforts use this information for disease prediction.

Michael Grasso is an Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and an Assistant Research Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He earned a medical degree from the George Washington University and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. He is a member of the Upsilon Pi Epsilon Honor Society in the Computing Sciences, the Kane-King-Dodec Medical Honor Society, and the William Beaumont Medical Research Honor Society. He completed a residency at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and currently works in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Maryland Medical Center. He has been awarded more than $1,200,000 in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Bureau of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Defense, and has authored more than 35 scholarly papers and abstracts. His research interests include clinical decision support systems, clinical data mining, clinical image processing, personalized medicine, software engineering, database engineering, and human factors. He is also a semi-professional trumpet player and is interested in the specific medical needs of performing artists, especially instrumental musicians.

Host: Yelena Yesha

EE Graduate Seminar

Analysis of Brain Network Connectivity
in fMRI Data using Spatial Dependence

Sai Ma
EE PhD Candidate, CSEE Dept, UMBC

11:30-12:45 Friday 9 September 2011, ITE 231

Due to low invasiveness and high spatial resolution, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has become popular in neuroimaging field to determine where activity occurs in brain as a result of performing cognitive tasks or merely being at rest.  One of the most active areas in current fMRI research involves exploring functional connectivity, i.e., statistical interactions, among distributed neural units. Understanding connectivity elucidates how functional systems process information in brain. More interestingly, disorganized connectivity has shown to be related to various kinds of mental disorder.

Data-driven methods, especially independent component analysis (ICA), have been successfully applied to fMRI data analysis and provided an opportunity to study brain functional connectivity on a network, hence multivariate scale. However, independence is a strong assumption which is not necessarily nor typically satisfied in real applications. For this reason, dependent component analysis (DCA) has emerged to generalize ICA by grouping components into independent subsets while within subset dependence is allowed.

Based on ICA and motivated by DCA, we aim to develop effective and efficient analysis schemes to extract, characterize, and quantify network connectivity pattern in fMRI data. We define functional network connectivity as spatial dependence among ICA-derived components, instead of second-order temporal correlation between time courses, to capture high-order statistics. According to this definition, we present our work on the study of network connectivity by several data-driven methods, including ICA, DCA, hierarchical clustering, hypothesis testing, and graph theoretical analysis.

seminar Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal

Citizen Science on the Social and Semantic Web

Joel Sachs

9:00-11:00am Friday 9 September 2011

Room 325b, ITE Building, UMBC

A question faced by semantic web developers is how much explicit semantics to include in their ontologies. A typical answer is that it depends on the use case, since different use cases demand different thicknesses for the semantic layer. This suggest several questions, including: What types of patterns in the rdf graph make a semantic layer "thick" or "thin"? What does it mean for an ontology to support a use case? and Can we create ontologies that support multiple use cases, in situations where those use cases have conflicting ontology-design requirements?

I explore these questions in the domains of biodiversity informatics and citizen science, and propose to evaluate the extent to which a variety of social and semantic computing use cases can be supported within a common ontological framework. Broadly speaking, these use cases involve social computing mechanisms for publishing ecological observations on the semantic web, with the goal of integrating them with other sources of biodiversity and biocomplextity data (range maps, food webs, evolutionary and taxanomic trees; conservation and invasiveness status, etc.). My hypothesis is that relatively flat and minimally constrained representations are not only sufficient, but often necessary to enable integration with other biodiversity resources on the Semantic Web.

I also explore the related issue of establishing working relationships between expert-engineered ontologies and tag-based folksonomies. I seek to demonstrate that, in many cases, the types of ontologies that are well-suited for biodiversity data integration are also well-suited to tag-driven evolution.

Committee

• Tim Finin (chair)
• Anupam Joshi
• Tim Oates
• Cynthia Parr
• Yelena Yesha
• Laura Zavala