Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Each year, UMBC's Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD) gives hardworking undergraduate researchers from all disciplines an outlet for presenting the findings of their unique research projects. On April 25th, 2012, a handful of students from the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department (CSEE) will be part of that motley crew. Click on the photos below to learn about the research projects of a few CSEE students which you wont want to miss. You can also check out this complete list of CSEE students presenting research at URCAD this year.

Multiclass Datasets, Their Predictions, and Their Visualization

Wallace Brown and Alexander Morrow
Faculty Mentors: Dr. Marie desJardins + Dr. Penny Rheingans

Analyzing Social Media Data

Morgan Madeira
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Anupam Joshi

The Greater Baltimore Technology Council is hosting a very interesting event on Friday, April 20th called BmoreFail — a conference celebrating failure. Entrepreneurs, investors, developers, students, designers, and others from across the innovation and creative communities will come together to learn from their failure and that of others. BmoreFail is modeled after San Francisco's famous FailCon conference.

The first 20 UMBC students who register using the promotion code XYZZYXYZZY will get the registration waived. (We've redacted the promo code in this post — CSEE students should check their email.) If you're not one of the first 20, you'll have to pay an unlucky $13 to get in.

The event will be held from aa:00am to 5:00pm in Baltimore's Du Burns Arena, located in the Canton neighborhood at 1301 South Ellwood Avenue.

BmoreFail will bring together more than 300 entrepreneurs, investors, developers, students, designers, and others from across the innovation and creative communities to share their failures and learn from the failures of others. It promises to be an exciting event that will help build momentum in Baltimore's entrepreneurial, innovation community.

Register and get more information at the BmoreFail web site.

The CSEE Department will hold its annual CSEE Research Review day from 9:00am to 4:00pm on Friday, May 4, 2012. Faculty, research staff and students from the Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering programs will present and discuss their latest research results via short oral presentations and a poster session.

The event is open to the public and is a good way for prospective collaborators and students to find out about the research our department is doing and meet and network with current faculty and students. See pictures from CRR-06, CRR-08, CRR-09, CRR-10 and CRR-11 to get an idea of what goes on at this event.

The 2012 CSEE Research Review (CRR-12) will take place in the large conference room of the UMBC Technology Center's business Incubator and Accelerator building on South Campus. There is ample free parking and refreshments and a free buffet lunch will be provided.

CSEE faculty, staff and students are encouraged to submit papers and posters for possible presentation by the April 12 deadline. See the CRR-12 Call for Submissions for details on how to submit research work. Awards with cash prizes will be given for the best research paper submitted by a undergraduate, M.S. and Ph.D. student and for the best three posters.

For more information, contact the CRR-11 General Chair, Professor Alan Sherman, .

This Saturday, April 14, 2012, students in the ENES101 Introduction to Engineering Science course will be competing in UMBC's second AROW competition. AROW, which stands for Academy Robotics on the Water, is an introductory engineering design experience developed by Captain Jonathan Russell, Lt. Cmdr. Brian Maggi and Stephen Grenier at the US Coast Guard Academy.  Students are tasked with the design, implementation, test and operation of a robotic vessel to perform simulated tasks representing activities of the U.S. Coast Guard. 

Working in teams of three to five, the students must design the propulsion, mechanisms, and programming necessary to accomplish simulated Coast Guard tasks, such as tending a light house, placing navigation buoys, cleaning and recycling and oil spill – represented by ping-pong balls – and rescuing Lego fishermen who have fallen overboard. Each team is given a budget and permitted to "purchase" structural elements for their design from a common supply. The competition will be judged on the basis of the cost-effectiveness of the various team designs.

The UMBC AROW competition will be held in the Atrium on the second floor of the Engineering building on Saturday, April 14. Each team will have four minutes to accomplish as many tasks as possible. A single competition session will start at 10 AM.  Approximately 24 teams of ENES101 students will compete. The UMBC community is invited to view the competition from the third floor balcony of the Engineering building.

Saturday's event is the second AROW competition at UMBC. It is supervised by the ENES101 instructors, Dr. Anne Spence, Professor of the Practice of Mechanical Engineering and Dr. Chuck LaBerge, Professor of the Practice of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and assisted by the ENES101 Teaching Fellows: Mathew Kurtz, Julia Lopez, and Elliot Mooney.

What: UMBC's Second Academy Robotics on the Water (AROW) Competition
When: Saturday, April 14, 2012. 10:00 a.m.
Where: Engineering/ Computer Science (ECS) Building: 3rd Floor Balcony
 

EE Graduate Seminar

On Far-End Crosstalk Mitigation in VDSL Systems

Dr. Amitkumar Mahadevan
Ikanos Communications Inc., Red Bank, NJ

11:30am-12:45pm, Friday 13 April 2012, ITE 237, UMBC

Very-high-speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) is a last mile communications access solution that exploits the existing copper infrastructure to deliver high-speed internet access to homes and businesses. Far-end crosstalk (FEXT), i.e., interference seen at a VDSL receiver due to leakage from extraneous transmitters located at the other end (far end) of the line, is by far the most dominant impairment in VDSL. Left untreated, FEXT results in a considerable reduction in the service rates than can be delivered to users, or equivalently, a considerable reduction in the range over which a given service rate can be guaranteed. In this presentation, we will discuss the characteristics of FEXT in DSL systems and techniques employed in the industry to mitigate the impact of FEXT. Substantial attention will be devoted to 'vectoring': a per-frequency active FEXT mitigation scheme involving signal cooperation across different users at the central-office end of the system.

By design, vectoring necessitates the use of a pre-coder for downstream FEXT mitigation and a post-canceller for upstream FEXT mitigation. Low-complexity adaptive schemes for estimating the off-diagonal downstream FEXT pre-coder and the upstream FEXT canceller based on independent minimization of the per-frequency user error variances will be presented. These schemes do not involve any matrix inversion and are shown to achieve almost FEXT-free performance. We will also discuss key features of the recently published G.vector (G.993.5) ITU standard that allows for rapid and non-disruptive estimation of new elements of the pre-coder and canceller matrices when users join the vectored system.

Short Bio: Amitkumar Mahadevan was born in Mumbai, India. He received the B.E. degree in electrical engineering in 1998 from Sardar Patel College of Engineering, Mumbai University, India, and the MSEE degree in 2002 and the Ph.D. (EE) degree in 2005 from UMBC. In 2005, he joined Conexant Systems Inc., Red Bank, NJ, (now Ikanos Communications, Inc.) as a firmware engineer and has worked on advanced technology development for various flavors of DSL communication systems. More recently, he has been working on algorithm development and implementation for active crosstalk cancellation or 'vectoring' in VDSL systems. His research interests include discrete multi-tone and orthogonal frequency-division-multiplexing based communication systems, error correction codes, importance sampling techniques, and quantum information theory.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

More infoformation

The Virtual Human Simulator:
Computer-aided Exploration of Human Biology

Professor Andreas Linninger
Laboratory for Product and Process Design
University of Illinois at Chicago

1:00pm Friday, 13 April 2012, 227 ITE, UMBC

Engineering has substantially impacted the world by creating material wealth through design of chemical production plants, synthesis of specialty chemicals and pharmaceuticals and sustainable processes for energy and the environment. Systematic engineering methods are also driving a transformation in biomedicine. We will present developments in advanced scientific computing for discovering the fundamental transport and reaction mechanisms in biological systems.

Novel medical imaging modalities open unprecedented views into organ function and cellular chemistry of whole organisms in vivo. The quantitative investigation of spatio-temporal reaction and transport phenomena opens a path for the rational design of drug delivery therapies to specific target areas of the human central nervous system. Image-based computational fluid dynamics (iCFD) will be introduced as a new methodology integrating medical imaging modalities with rigorous transport principles. System dynamics and control theory are centerpieces in the prediction of cerebral hemodynamics towards better treatment options for stroke. Non-linear mathematical programming techniques developed by chemical engineers for large scale process optimization are key to parameter estimation in pharmacokinetic and toxicity studies as well as novel techniques for design optimization of gene therapies. The integration of transport and reaction phenomena with anatomical and physiologically consistent computer models spanning the molecular, cellular through the macroscopic length scales lead us to progressively accurate predictions of metabolic functions in the normal and pathological conditions. Prototype developments of the virtual human simulator to engineer design solution in-silico will be demonstrated. Case studies will illustrate the state-of-the-art in computing cerebral blood flow patterns, computer-aided design of drug administration therapies and physiologically-based pharmacokinetic modeling for new drug leads.

Dr. Andreas A. Linninger is Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering and Director of the Laboratory for Product and Process Design at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He received Diploma and PhD degrees in Chemical Engineering from the Vienna University of Technology. He received postgraduate training at the Rijksuniversiteit Gent, the University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests in process system engineering include computer-aided process synthesis, mathematical modeling of complex systems and design under uncertainty. He has published more than 100 papers on parameter estimation in distributed systems, synthesis of distillative separation networks, integrated design and control, process design for the environment and computational fluid mechanics methods in biological systems.

Host: Yelena Yesha

Cyber-Physical Social Systems: Research Challenges

Ram D. Sriram
Chief, Software and Systems Division
Information Technology Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology

1:00pm 6 April 2012, ITE 325 227 UMBC

We are witnessing a new revolution in computing and communication. The Internet, which has spanned several networks in a wide variety of domains, is having a significant impact on every aspect of our lives. The next generation of networks will utilize a wide variety of resources with significant sensing capabilities. Such networks will extend beyond physically linked computers to include multimodal information from biological, cognitive, semantic, and social networks. This paradigm shift will involve symbiotic networks of people (social networks), intelligent devices, and mobile personal computing and communication devices (mPCDs), that will form net-centric societies (NCS) or cyber-physical social systems (CPSS). mPCDs are already equipped with myriad sensors, with regular updates of additional sensing capabilities. Additionally, we are witnessing the emergence of “intelligent devices,” such as smart meters, smart cars, etc., with considerable sensing and networking capabilities. Hence, these devices – and the network — will be constantly sensing, monitoring, and interpreting the environment; this is sometimes referred to as the Internet of Things (IOT). The symbiosis of IOT and social networks will have significant implications for both the market for advanced computing and communication infrastructure and the future markets – for nearly 4.5 billion people — that CPSS will create. In this seminar, I will provide an overview of the Software and Systems Division at NIST, followed by a discussion of research challenges for CPSS with a specific focus on smart healthcare.

Dr. Ram D. Sriram is currently the chief of the Software and Systems Division, Information Technology Laboratory, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Before joining the Software and Systems Division, Sriram was the leader of the Design and Process group in the Manufacturing Systems Integration Division, Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory, where he conducted research on standards for interoperability of computer-aided design systems. He was also the manager of the Sustainable Manufacturing Program. Prior to joining NIST, he was on the engineering faculty (1986-1994) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was instrumental in setting up the Intelligent Engineering Systems Laboratory. Sriram has co-authored or authored nearly 250 publications, including several books. Sriram was a founding co-editor of the International Journal for AI in Engineering. In 1989, he was awarded a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. In 2011, Sriram received the ASME Design Automation Award for his work on computer-supported collaborative design. Sriram is a Fellow of ASME and AAAS, a member (life) of ACM, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a member (life) of AAAI. Sriram has a B.Tech. from IIT, Madras, India, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA.

Host: Yelena Yesha

UMBC’s legendary chess team tied for second place last Sunday in the 2012 President’s Cup in Herndon, Virginia. UMBC tied with the University of Texas-Dallas with a final score of 7.5 points. Both schools were bypassed for first place by Texas Tech University with a mere ½ point lead.

Started by CSEE professor Dr. Alan Sherman in the early 90’s, UMBC’s chess team has gained a reputation that rivals that of many Ivy League schools. Since its inception, the team has won or tied for first nine times at the Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship (Pan-Am) and six times at the President’s Cup.

When Dr. Sherman started the chess program, he never dreamed that its success would become such an iconic part of UMBC's idenitity. “Eventually, I realized that I was the right person, at the right place, at the right time, to make some significant contributions to college chess, while helping students, the community, and UMBC along the way,” writes Sherman on his website where he chronicles the history of chess at UMBC.

Sherman began by recruiting students with strong backgrounds in chess. Then, in 1994, he convinced Igor Epshteyn, a former coach of the Olympic Reserve Team, to coach at UMBC. From then on, the program continued to gain momentum.

Now, like any other college sport, the program offers prestigious scholarships for its members. The current team members, made up of Grand Master Leonid Kritz, Grand Master Giorgi Margvelashvili, International Master Sasha Kaplan, and Woman Grand Master Sabina Foisor, are all attending the university on chess scholarships.

In a Baltimore Sun article, Dr. Sherman commented on the team's performance last weekend:

"It was an extremely close event, and it could have gone to either of the top teams," Alan T. Sherman, director of UMBC's Chess program, said after the President's Cup. "The team is overall happy with its performance."

Left: Grand Master Giorgi Margvelashvili (right)–a Sophomore majoring in Financial Economics– competes in the President's Cup last Sunday.

Right: International Master Sasha Kaplan (left)–a Junior majoring in Mathematics–at the President's Cup last Sunday.

Next Century Corporation is looking for prospective software engineers to join their team as interns and full time employees. The local technology company was named one of Baltimore Magazine’s “Best Places to Work” in 2011.

“Next Century is driven by something far deeper than software, hardware, and dollars and cents,” says the company’s website. “We believe the solutions we provide have the power to save lives, promote freedom, and improve our world in exponential ways.”

Next Wednesday, April 11, 2012, Next Century staff will arrive at the UMBC campus for Next Century Corporation Corporate Visibility Day. The day will give students an opportunity to network with staff members. At Noon, catch president John McBeth discuss the company’s inception, followed by a lecture by UMBC alumna and Next Century Senior Software Engineering Christine Stepnitz entitled: “High Availability Systems: Planning for Failure. When your system has to be up 100% of the time, what happens when it goes down? And how can you turn that into an OK thing?”

Next Century Corporation Corporate Visibility Day will be held Wednesday, April 11 in the University Center Ballroom Lounge from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

An article in the April 1 edition of New York Times, Computer Science for the Rest of Us, mentions UMBC and Marie desJardins. It describes the idea that our notion of literacy should be exapanded to include an understanding of computational processes and that all college graduates should know the basics of computational thinking.

The article discusses a number of colleges and universities that have introduced new courses to address this challenge, offering non-computing majors a chance to understand how computation can be used to analyze and organizing data, model ideas and systems, evaluate theories and simulate processes in the real world. Often this can be done without trying to train students to use conventional general purpose programming languages like Python or Java.

Professor desJardins was mentioned for her work at UMBC on revamping CMSC 100 to be just such a course.

"Marie desJardins, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, says her department uses Scratch in its 'Introduction to Computers and Programming' course, in which students can try a few basic concepts. About 25 percent of the semester is spent on programming.

Explaining why Scratch is used at the college level, she says that all students arrive on campus having taken high school classes in English, math, biology and so on, but that many have not taken a computer science class."