Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

UMBC CSEE Ph.D. student Kavita Krishnaswamy was featured in an NSF article Balancing life, health and research.

Balancing life, health and research, graduate student perseveres to increase access for persons with severe disabilities.

Kavita Krishnaswamy's doctoral dissertation defense at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), was fairly typical. Dissertation committee, doctoral candidate, explanatory slides, questions from the committee.

When it was over and time to deliberate, Tim Oates, Kavita's advisor, asked her to leave the room. Because Kavita delivered her presentation via a Beam Smart Presence System (BeamPro), she powered down the computer screen beaming her into the meeting.

This was business as usual for the computer science student whose research involves developing robotic prototypes to transfer, reposition and perform personal hygiene tasks for those with severe disabilities. She is also studying how to improve control over robotic interfaces for these individuals. Her tool kit includes elements of machine learning, artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces and other communication technologies.

You can read the rest on the NSF Discovery site.

CSEE Ph.D. student Alexander Nelson and faculty Ryan Robucci and Nilanjan Banerjee participated in the monthly TechBreakfast MeetUp where they demonstrated the research on developing 'invisible' sensing systems that can be embedded into fabrics.

Their Inviz system, developed in the UMBC Eclipse cluster of laboratories,  uses textile-based capacitive sensor arrays and micro-doppler radars embedded into bed sheets, pillows, wheelchair pads, and clothing, for environmental control and physical therapy for such paralysis patients. The sensors detect gestures regardless of evolving environmental and patient conditions and provides explicit real-time feedback to the user. Using low-cost and ultra-low power capacitive sensing and micro-radars built into headgear, the Inviz system can reduce hospital visits and therapy costs.

You can read more about the work in a paper that was awarded the best demonstration runner-up prize at the 2015 conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom).

Gurashish Singh, Alexander Nelson, Ryan Robucci, Chintan Patel and Nilanjan Banerjee, Inviz: Low-power Personalized Gesture Recognition Using Wearable Textile Capacitive Sensor Arrays, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, IEEE, March 2015.

The Baltimore TechBreakfast is a free monthly demo-style event where entrepreneurs, techies, developers, designers, business people, and interested people see showcases on cool new technology and interact with each other. "Show and Tell for Adults" is how it's sometimes described. Each TechBreakfast begins at 8:00am and goes until 10:00am, although people usually hang around later.

The 13th IEEE Intelligence Security Informatics Conference will be held May 27-29 at the Royal Sonesta Harbor Court Hotel in Baltimore's inner harbor.  The conference covers research spanning information technologies, computer science, public policy, bioinformatics, and social and behavior studies. It will bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry and government agencies.

The program includes 45 technical paper presentations, a poster session, a panel on security and privacy on the Internet of Things, social events, several invited talks and five keynotes by distinguished speakers:

• Mark E. Segal, Chief of Computer and Information Sciences Research in the National Security Agency Research Directorate
• Jeremy Epstein, lead program officer for the National Science Foundation’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program
• Jay F. Nunamaker, Regents and Soldwedel Professor of MIS, Computer Science and Communication, University of Arizona
• Donna Dodson, Deputy Cyber Security Advisor at National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Alan Sherman, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance

The full program description is available here.

For more information and to register, see http://2015.ieee-isi.org or contact .

Earlier this week, UMBC CyberDawg Christopher Gardner took first place out of approximately fifty competitors at Booz Allen Hamilton's Kaizen Capture The Flag event held at the Jailbreak Brewing Company in Laurel, MD.

The event focused around navigating through a series of progressively harder cybersecurity obstacles. The challenge's theme centered around a narrative that competitiors were assisting the FBI in finding and then defusing a bomb. Competitors needed to complete a series of increasingly harder challenges to locate clues and other information, such as examining an Android .apk to find a wireless access point password, finding the login page for an website's administration panel, and gaining access to a web server's log directory.

Congratulations again to Christopher and to all of the CyberDawgs who competed!

Interested in joining the CyberDawgs? Contact Julio Valcarcel () for more information — they’re always looking for new members heading into the 2015-2016 season!

In today's Baltimore Sun, CSEE's Rick Forno offers some early thoughts on yesterday's announced data breach at CareFirst, which affects 1.1 million insurance customers.

According to company officials, attackers gained access to names, birth dates, email addresses and insurance identification numbers. However, the database did not include Social Security or credit card numbers, passwords or medical information.

The information also could be sold on what is known as the dark web, parts of the Internet that cannot be found by search engines, and combined with other data, said Richard Forno, director of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County's graduate cybersecurity program.

"The information they got may or may not be useful directly, but it could help a bad guy get more clues about a person's identity," he said. "That could be useful to an adversary."

In many cases, data breaches can be larger than originally apparent, Forno added.

"As time goes on and the investigation continues, you never know if you'll find other leads that may change your initial assumptions," he said.

The UMBC Game Developers Club will hold its annual Summer Game Jam Friday, June 5 to Sunday June 7 in the GAIM lab in Engineering 005. The game jam theme is Art and Code out of a Hat.

There will be one "hat" from which a team will pull three random art assets, and another "hat" from which they will pull three random code samples. Then, the team must use as many of those six items as possible in their game!! Here's the catch: At some point, you'll have to decide on a game idea and form a team around it.

If you pull from the hats before you make the idea, you have to use four of the six items. If you pull from the hats after you form the idea and team, you only have to use two of the items. The team that receives an item is free to do whatever they want with the art and code they receive.

Transforming big data into smart data:
deriving value via harnessing volume, variety
and velocity using semantics and semantic web

Professor Amit Sheth
Wright State University

11:00am Tuesday, 26 May 2015, ITE 325, UMBC

Big Data has captured a lot of interest in industry, with the emphasis on the challenges of the four Vs of Big Data: Volume, Variety, Velocity, and Veracity, and their applications to drive value for businesses. In this talk, I will describe Smart Data that is realized by extracting value from Big Data, to benefit not just large companies but each individual. If my child is an asthma patient, for all the data relevant to my child with the four V-challenges, what I care about is simply, "How is her current health, and what are the risk of having an asthma attack in her current situation (now and today), especially if that risk has changed?" As I will show, Smart Data that gives such personalized and actionable information will need to utilize multimodal data and their metadata, use domain specific knowledge, employ semantics and intelligent processing, and go beyond traditional reliance on Machine Learning and NLP. I will motivate the need for a synergistic combination of techniques similar to the close interworking of the top brain and the bottom brain in the cognitive models. I will present a couple of Smart Data applications in development at Kno.e.sis from the domains of personalized health, health informatics, social data for social good, energy, disaster response, and smart city.

Amit Sheth is an Educator, Researcher and Entrepreneur. He is the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, an IEEE Fellow, and the executive director of Kno.e.sis – the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing a Wright State University. In World Wide Web (WWW), it is placed among the top ten universities in the world based on 10-year impact. Prof. Sheth is a well cited computer scientists (h-index = 87, >30,000 citations), and appears among top 1-3 authors in World Wide Web (Microsoft Academic Search). He has founded two companies, and several commercial products and deployed systems have resulted from his research. His students are exceptionally successful; ten out of 18 past PhD students have 1,000+ citations each.

Host: Yelena Yesha, yeyesha2umbc.edu

UMBC's College of Engineering and Information Technology will hold an Alumni Happy Hour on Wednesday, June 17 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm at Union Jack's (10400 Little Patuxent Pkwy, Columbia, MD 21044). Join fellow COEIT graduates, COEIT faculty and those who now work in those fields for a networking happy hour. Enjoy fabulous food and drinks while connecting with other Retrievers. Please RSVP online.

The event is sponsored by the UMBC Alumni Association and the UMBC Training Centers.

If you have any questions, contact Amy Dalrymple at or 410-455-2276.

UMBC's Imaging Research Center worked more than two years recreating how Baltimore would have looked in the early 1800s. The goal is to create an accurate 3D model of the city, its terrain, land use, and buildings. In September of 2014, the first and major phase of this effort opened to the public at the Maryland Historical Society as part of their bicentennial celebration of the War of 1812 and Baltimore’s pivotal role in it.

BEARINGS of Baltimore, Circa 1815 is an interactive 2.5 billion pixel image that visualizes Baltimore City in 1815 – right after the attack by the British. UMBC's Imaging Research Center, in collaboration with the Maryland Historical Society and its network of historical scholars, has created an interactive touch-screen display at the Historical Society that allows viewers to tour the early city and understand its history.

This project was funded with generous support from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation and from the Maryland Division of Tourism 1812 Bicentennial Commission.

CSEE faculty member Tulay Adali has been appointed as a Distinguished University Professor for UMBC. Professor Adali is being recognized for:

“…outstanding theoretical contributions to the field of signal processing that have enabled significant advances in medical imaging, and excellence in teaching and mentoring the next generation of engineers and scholars who continue to advance the field of signal processing.”

Professor Adali started teaching at UMBC in 1992, the same year that she received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Shortly after joining UMBC, she began forging lasting collaborations, first locally, and then nationwide and internationally. This resulted in the steady buildup of a research program, with continuous and growing funding from major federal agencies, including the prestigious NSF CAREER grant, the U.S. Army, and industry. She took full advantage of UMBC’s advantageous position, with respect to proximity to major medical institutions. She moved her application domain to biomedical data analysis early in her career, where she helped define the field of data-driven image analysis and fusion, an area that continues to grow in importance. She is a very popular teacher and is mentor to an impressive number of Ph.D students, several of whom have assumed faculty positions at institutions such as Virginia Tech, the University of New Mexico, and Yale.

Professor Adali has been also active within her professional community, having chaired the Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and having served on a number of boards of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She has also assisted in the organization of numerous international conferences and workshops, including the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), the IEEE International Workshop on Neural Networks for Signal Processing (NNSP), and the IEEE International Workshop on MLSP. She has been on the editorial boards of a number of transactions and journals and is currently serving on the Editorial Board of the Proceedings of the IEEE, among others.

In addition, Professor Adali is a Fellow of the IEEE and the AIMBE, and has received the following awards: the 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, the 2013 University System of Maryland Regents’ Award for Research, and an NSF CAREER Award. She was also an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2012 and 2013.