Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Professor Nilanjan Banerjee's Introduction to Mobile Computing class will hold a poster and demonstration session showcasing student class projects from 12:30 to 2:00 on Tuesday, May 14 in room 210 of the ITE building. The projects inlcude mobile apps, games, and systems that have built during the semester.  Pizza will be served.

The course was partially sponsored this year by Microsoft Research's Hawaii Initiative, which provided students with hardware and access to cloud services for storage, computing and data.

Anyone who is interested in mobile technology is welcome to attend and intereact with Professor Banerjee and the students, who include both upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. See the event flyer for more information.

Here are the systems that will be demonstrated:

• Food Life-cycle Manager: Reduce food waste, Save your money
• Home Guard: The easiest way to protect your home from anywhere without compromise
• JUMP: Keep Jumping up
• DIY Picture Dictionary: making learning Fun Multiple Places Near you Trackit: Anytime anywhere
• SpotOrNot: A crowdsourced parking app for UMBC
• Build-A-Bill: An easy to use bill splitting app (even after you've had a few drinks)
• Pocket Philosopher: What would YOU do?
• Golf score browser
• Math Path
• Community: Share whats on your mind 
• System Android Powered Telepresence: Accessible and Low-cost Telepresence with Android
• Beat Box: tap and mix your musical mind
• PillNote: Capturing user's interaction with medication
• YASLA (Yet Another Shopping List App): app that saves the day by saving your lists and suggesting stores.

For more information, contact Prof. Banerjee at nilanb at umbc.edu.

Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal

A Rapidly Deployable Image
Classification System Using Multi-Views

Adrian Rosebrock

11:00am Friday, 10 May, ITE 325, UMBC

Constructing an image classification system using strong, local invariant descriptors is time consuming and tedious, requiring many experimentations and parameter tuning to obtain an adequately performing model. Furthermore, training a system in a given domain and then migrating the model to a separate domain will likely yield poor performance. As computer vision systems become more prevalent in the academic, government, and private sectors, it is paramount that a framework to more easily construct these classification systems be created. In this work we present a rapidly deployable image classification system using multi-views, where each view consists of a set of weak global features. These weak global descriptors are computationally simple to extract, intuitive to understand, and require substantially less parameter tuning than their local invariant counterparts. We demonstrate that by combining weak features with ensemble methods we are able to outperform the current state-of-the-art methods or achieve comparable accuracy. Finally, we provide a theoretical justification for our ensemble framework that can be used to construct rapidly deployable image classification systems called "Ecosembles".

Committee: Dr. Tim Oates (chair), Dr. Jesus Caban, Dr. Tim Finin, Dr. Charles Nicholas

CSEE graduate student Asmita Korde will present a paper on her research with Professor Tinoosh Mohsenin tomorrow at the the SPIE Defense Security and Sensing Conference in the Baltimore Convention Center. Asmita was a UMBC CWIT Scholar and received a BS degree in Computer Engineering in 2011. She is now finishing her MS degree at UMBC in the Electrical Engineering program.

Her paper, Detection Performance of Radar Compressive Sensing in Noisy Environments, describes research done in collaboration with her mentor, Tinoosh Mohsenin, and Damon Bradley of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Here is the abstract.

In this paper, radar detection via compressive sensing is explored. Compressive sensing is a new theory of sampling which allows the reconstruction of a sparse signal by sampling at a much lower rate than the Nyquist rate. By using this technique in radar, the use of matched filter can be eliminated and high rate sampling can be replaced with low rate sampling. In this paper, compressive sensing is analyzed by applying varying factors such as noise and different measurement matrices. Different reconstruction algorithms are compared by generating ROC curves to determine their detection performance. We conduct simulations for a 64-length signal with 3 targets to determine the effectiveness of each algorithm in varying SNR. We also propose a simplified version of Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP). Through numerous simulations, we _nd that a simplified version of Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP), can give better results than the original OMP in noisy environments when sparsity is highly over estimated, but does not work as well for low noise environments.

The UMBC Review is a journal for undergraduate research done at UMBC. CMSC and CMPE majors who have recently finished a research project or paper or plan to do so before the fall should consider submitting it for volume 15, which will be published next April. The Review publishes papers in all disciplines, including the computing sciences.

Papers may be submitted at any time between now and 13 September 2013 for consideration in the next volume. Students graduating this spring or summer are eligible to submit papers on work completed as an undergraduate. See the table of contents of the current issue to get an idea of the range and length of published papers.

If you are interested, fill out this online form to get additional information.

Congratulations to Omar Shehab (CS Ph.D.), who has been awarded two NSF travel grants to attend research conferences this June.

First, Omar has received an NSF travel grant to attend the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity. The conference celebrates research in all areas of computation complexity theory, taking a look at the absolute and relative power of computational models under resource constraints. Specific topics include probalistic and interactive proof systems, proof complexity, and descriptive complexity. The conference will be held in Palo Alto California, June 5-7.

Omar has also received an NSF travel grant to attend the 45^th ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC 2013). Here, he will be presenting a poster entited: "Hamiltonian complexity of Trefoil knot transformations." The conference is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT). It will explore original research on the theory of computation. The conference will be held in Palo Alto California, June 1-4.

Omar started UMBC’s Computer Science Ph.D. program in 2010. He is currently pursuing research under the supervision of Dr. Samuel J. Lomonaco Jr. Omar’s doctoral work exlpores adiabatic quantum Hamiltonian complexity, quantum computational simulation of topology and use of quantum optics to understand device independent cryptography. He is currently a Teaching Assistant for CMSC 641: Design and Analysis of Algorithms.

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 eight years, it has brought together over 6,000 students with over 300 open source projects to create millions of lines of code.

Students who are accepted into the program will put the skills they have learned to good use by working remotely on an actual software project over the summer. Students are paired with mentors to help address technical questions and concerns throughout the course of the project. With the knowledge and hands-on experience students gain during the summer they strengthen their future employment opportunities in fields related to their academic pursuits.

Students should submit applications via the Google Summer of Code 2013 site by May 3. 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 1,200 students are expected to be funded this year.

UMBC's cyber defense team, the Cyber Dawgs, will host an interdisciplinary talk and screening of the film Game of Pawns at 7:00pm on Tuesday, April 30, 2013 in room 102 of the ITE building (LH8). The film is a true story of an American student who was recruited by the Chinese government to infiltrate a U.S. intelligence agency.

The event is sponsored and run by InfraGuard, an organization that acts as a partnership mediator between the FBI and US businesses. The talk will be nontechnical and will present an overview of the dangers that might arise when dealing with foreign businesses or representatives. It should be of interest to students considering studying abroad, pursuing international relations or business, or anticipating working for a government agency.

Baltimore Chapter of Electron Devices and Solid-State Circuits

Quantum Engineering of Semiconductor Atomic Structures for Biosensing

Dr. Manijeh Razeghi
Center for Quantum Devices
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Northwestern University

5:30pm Tuesday, 30 April 2013
206 Technology Research Center, UMBC

5:30pm social hour, talk begins at 6:15pm. Free but please RSVP to by Monday, April 29

Nature offers us different kinds of atoms, but it takes human intelligence to put them together in an elegant way in order to realize functional structures not found in nature. III-V semiconductors are made of atoms from column III (B, Al, Ga, In, Tl) and column V (N, As, P, Sb, Bi) of the periodic table, and constitute a particularly rich variety of compounds with many useful optical and electronic properties. Guided by highly accurate simulations of the electronic structure, modern semiconductor optoelectronic devices are literally made atom by atom using advanced growth technology such as Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) and Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD). Recent breakthroughs have brought quantum engineering to an unprecedented level, creating light detectors and emitters over an extremely wide spectral range from 0.2 µm to 300 µm. Nitrogen serves as the best column V element for the short wavelength side of the electromagnetic spectrum, where we have demonstrated III-nitride light emitting diodes and photo detectors in the deep ultraviolet to visible wavelengths. In the infrared, III-V compounds using phosphorus, arsenic, or antimony from column V with indium, gallium, aluminum, or thallium from column III can create lasers and detectors based on quantum-dot (QD) or type-II superlattice (T2SL). These are fast becoming the choice of technology in crucial applications such as environmental monitoring and space exploration. Last but not least, on the far-infrared end of the electromagnetic spectrum known as the terahertz (THz) region, III-V semiconductors offer a unique solution of generating THz waves in a compact device at room temperature. Continued effort is being devoted to all of the above areas with the intention of developing smart technologies which meet the current challenges in environment, health, security, and energy. This talk will highlight contributions to the world of III-V semiconductor nano-scale optoelectronic devices from deep UV to THz.

Dr. Manijeh Razeghi received the Doctorat d'État es Sciences Physiques from the Université de Paris in 1980. After heading the Exploratory Materials Lab at Thomson-CSF (France), she joined Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, in the fall of 1991 as the Director of the Center for Quantum Devices, where she created undergraduate and graduate programs in solid-state engineering. Dr. Razeghi pioneered the development and implementation of major modern epitaxial techniques such as MOCVD, VPE, gas MBE, and MOMBE for the growth of entire compositional ranges of III-V compound semiconductors. She is on the editorial board of journals such as the Journal of Nanotechnology and the Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, and is an Associate Editor of the Opto-Electronics Review. Dr. Razeghi is on the International Advisory Board for the Polish Committee of Science, and is an Adjunct Professor at the College of Optical Sciences of the University of Arizona in Tucson. She ha s authored or co-authored more than 1000 papers, over 30 book chapters, and fifteen books, including the textbooks Technology of Quantum Devices and Fundamentals of Solid State Engineering, 3rd Edition. Two of her books, MOCVD Challenge Vol. 1 (1989) and MOCVD Challenge Vol. 2 (1995), discuss some of her pioneering work in InP-GaInAsP and GaAs-GaInAsP based systems. [The MOCVD Challenge, 2nd Edition (2010) represents the combined updated version of Volumes 1 and 2]. Dr. Razeghi holds 50 U.S. patents and has given more than 1000 invited and plenary talks. Her current research interest is in nanoscale optoelectronic quantum devices. Dr. Razeghi is a Fellow of MRS, IOP, IEEE, APS, SPIE, OSA, and the International Engineering Consortium (IEC), a Fellow and Life Member of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), and a member of the Electrochemical Society, ACS, AAAS, and the French Academy of Sciences and Technology. She received the IBM Europe Science and Technology Prize in 1987, the Achievement Award from the SWE in 1995, the R.F. Bunshah! Award in 2004, and multiple best paper awards.

Betamore is an urban campus for technology and entrepreneurship that is home to dozens of startups and entrepreneurs and located at 1111 Light St. in Baltimore's Federal Hill neighborhood. They are holding a "startup crawl" on Thusday, 2 May 2013 from 6:00pm to 9:00pm where students and recent graduates can meet with people from the Baltimore technology and startup community.

"Are you a current student or recent graduate looking to enter the startup market through an internship or job? Are you a startup looking for the next best thing? Join us here at Betamore for our first Startup Crawl, an event that puts talented college and graduate students in the same room with the startup / tech community to learn the industry, create beneficial connections and discover what the Baltimore Tech community has to offer.

Shake a few hands, have a couple beers, and experience how fun working for a startup can be. This event is exclusive to students and recent grads (must be less than one year out of school)."

If you are interested, see their Facebook Startup Crawl event page and register for this free event.

Every year, the UMBC Game Developers Club organizes a Digital Entertainment Conference (DEC) with a day of games industry veterans speaking on a variety of topics. This year's is on Saturday, April 27th, starting at 10am in the Engineering Building lecture hall on the UMBC campus.

The DEC is free, open to anyone, and features speakers from Firaxis Games, Zenimax, Pure Bang Games, Bioware Mythic, and Mindgrub. Whether you are a High School student, go to UMBC or another University, or are already working in a different industry, you are sure find interesting information about how the games industry works, how some current developers got started, and what they do. If you are a game developer, you are sure to find High School students, UMBC students and students from other Universities who are interested in jobs in the games industry.

Schedule: