Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

CSEE Colloquium

Energy Efficiency in Large-Scale Computing

David Prucnal, PE
Advanced Computing Systems

*TO BE RESCHEDULED, ITE 227, UMBC

Data center power demand and energy consumption have grown substantially over the past 10-20 yrs. For high performance computing, power has become one of the main limiting factors. The Supercomputing Top500 List is now dominated by individual machines that demand nearly 10MW, which is equivalent to the technical load of an entire data center just 10 yrs ago. In addition these machines require another 5-10MW to power the necessary cooling systems. This talk will examine the power problem, and discuss some approaches to improving energy efficiency in large scale computing environments. In particular, it will look at demand side techniques for fully exploiting existing infrastructure, and at the use of immersion cooling.

Mr. Prucnal has been active as a Professional Engineer in the field of power engineering for over 25 yrs. Over the past 15 yrs. he has been involved with designing, building, and optimizing high-reliability data centers. He joined the Agency as a power systems engineer and was one of the first to recognize the power, space and cooling problem in high performance computing. He moved from the facilities engineering directorate to the research directorate to pursue solutions to the HPC power problem from the demand side versus the infrastructure supply side. Mr. Prucnal leads the Energy Efficiency Thrust within the Advanced Computing Systems research team. His current work includes Power-Aware Data Center Operation, and Immersion Cooling. He also oversees projects investigating single/few electron transistors, 3D chip packaging, low-power electrical and optical interconnects, and power efficiency through enhanced data locality.

more information and directions

Maryland and Baltimore are top places for cybersecurity jobs according to the Cyber Jobs Report released earlier in January. The report includes a snapshot of the industry, its job openings and educational opportunities, and a proposed standardized cyber security nomenclature for this emerging industry.

The study searched approximately 340,000 cybersecurity jobs offered by more than 18,000 companies across the country and found that Maryland had 19,413 job openings in the industry. With more than 13,000 of these job openings located in Baltimore City, the city placed third among major cyber hot beds, behind only Palo Alto and San Francisco in the number of available cybersecurity positions.

Letting the data speak — from blind to semi-blind source separation

Dr. Ronald Phlypo
Research Associate, MLSP lab, UMBC

1:00pm Friday, 1 February 2013, ITE 227, UMBC

Blind source separation has known a vivid and rapid expansion during the nineties. Alleviating the need for prior physical knowledge—such as the geometry of the antenna array—allowed for data-driven exploration of the data, based on the sole, but natural assumption of independence. In this talk, I will focus on blind source separation, with specific applications in biomedical signal processing. Since independence allows to have an identifiable model under very few assumptions on the data, it is indeed widely praised as a candidate objective for source separation. However, it will be shown that independence alone is not always sufficient to permit for a physically or physiologically interpretable signal. During this talk, I will show some proposed solutions that add minimal extra assumptions on the data, allowing to identify physiological "sources" from electroencephalography, electrocardiography, and functional magnetic resonance imaging. I will also shortly demonstrate why the linear mixture model is indeed an appropriate model for these biophysical signals.

Ronald Phlypo obtained a degree in industrial engineering at the KHBO, Ostend, Belgium ('03) and a master in artificial intelligence at the KULeuven, Leuven, Belgium ('04) where he completed his master's thesis under the supervision of prof. S. Van Huffel. While pursuing his PhD degree at the University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium, he visited the I3S lab and worked with P. Comon, M. Antonini and V. Zarzoso. From Jan'10 to Feb.'12 he was a research associate at GIPSA lab, Grenoble, France and since April'12 a research associate at the UMBC -MLSP lab, Baltimore, USA. His research interests are in blind source separation, statistical signal processing, and machine learning.

One the hottest topics in computing today is data science — how we can exploit the massive amounts of data now available to discover knowledge and solve problems. Data science touches on many computing areas (e.g., databases, machine learning, high performance computing, visualization, cloud computing, text analysis and graph analytics) and has many applications.

If you are interested in this, you might consider joining the new Mid-Maryland Data Science Meetup.

"The Mid-Maryland Data Science group is intended to be a gathering of professionals, students, and enthusiasts in the area to discuss diverse topics related to data science. We aim to have frank discussions on all topics related to the field of data analytics. No subject is too big or too small, as we believe analytics can operate on any scale. We plan to mix education with practical examples, helping users make the most of their time."

An initial meeting will be held next Tuesday (January 29) from 6:00-8:00pm at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. You can find out more about the event and reserve a spot on the meetup site. You can expect the meetings to be held about once a month in the early evening at various sites, feature one or more speakers, and provide some refreshments (e.g., pizza, soda).

These meetup events are a great way to learn about emerging technologies as well as connect with people and organizations working with them. Attending such meetings can also lead to opportunities for internships and full time jobs.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's DEVELOP program is looking for several interns to assist with Earth Science research projects during Summer 2013 for a 10 week paid internship, working 30-35 hours a week. The summer 2013 term will start on Monday, June 3, 2013 and end on Friday, August 9, 2013.

Students will work with NASA scientists and partner organizations to learn about the use of NASA remote sensing imagery for use in water resources, disaster management, and ecological forecasting applications to address environmental community concerns.

Requirements: U.S. Citizens. 3.0 GPA minimum. High School, Undergraduate, and Graduate Students with majors/skills in GIS, Remote Sensing, Cartography, Geography, Earth Science, Environmental Science, Computer Science, Web Programming, Web Development/Design, Database Management, Spatial Statistics, Hydrology, Ecology, Atmospheric Science, and/or Environmental Engineering are encouraged to apply. Knowledge of forest dynamics, fire ecology, satellite image processing, ENVI/IDL, Python, web development, GIS (ArcGIS, qGIS, SAGA) and database management (PostGIS/PostGresql, Geoserver, OpenLayers) are highly desirable.

The deadline to apply is Monday, February 4, 2013 (postmarked). Students need to visit the DEVELOP website, click on "Apply", download application, and choose Summer 2013 term at GSFC in Greenbelt, Maryland.

For more information contact Melissa Oguamanam: melissa (dot) i (dot) oguamanam (at) nasa (dot) gov

Applications are now being accepted for the Information Assurance Scholarship Program (IASP) and the Federal Cyber Service: Scholarship for Service (SFS). US citizens capable of receiving security clearances are eligible.  The deadline for both programs in February 8, 2013.

These scholarships require the recipient to work for the government following graduation. The awards include full tuition, stipend ($30k/year for PhD students, $25k/year for MS/MPS students, and $20k/year for BS students), and more.

(1) Information Assurance Scholarship Program (IASP)

The Information Assurance Scholarship Program is a yearly awarded Department of Defense sponsored scholarship/fellowship program to promote the education, recruitment, and retention of rising junior and senior undergraduate, MS, MPS, or PhD student status in CMSC, CYBR, or related field at UMBC (including IS, Math, EE, CE, physics, public policy).

(2) Federal Cyber Service: Scholarship for Service (SFS)

The Scholarship for Service is a yearly awarded National Science Foundation sponsored scholarship program to promote the education, recruitment, and retention of rising junior and senior undergraduates and graduate students in cybersecurity-related studies. See https://www.sfs.opm.gov/ for more SFS details. (We have 2 CYBR MPS, 1 BS in CS, and 1 PhD in CS, students presently in this program.)

Completed applications for both programs are due by 12:00 (noon) on February 8, 2013.  The same application form is used for each program.  This deadline is strict.

More information, points of contact, and application instructions for both programs can be found at http://www.cisa.umbc.edu/scholarships.php.

The UMBC Center for Information and Assurance (CISA) was created in 2001 as the central point of contact at UMBC for Information Assurance (IA) including  research, teaching, and best practices.  It is because of CISA that UMBC has been recognized as a national center of academic excellence in IA education and research (CAE/CAEr).

Ph.D. Defense

Multi-Source Option-Based Policy Transfer

James MacGlashan

10:00am Friday, 25 January 2013, ITE 325B

Reinforcement learning algorithms are very effective at learning policies (mappings from states to actions) for specific well defined tasks, thereby allowing an agent to learn how to behave without extensive deliberation.  However, if an agent must complete a novel variant of a task that is similar to, but not exactly the same as, a previous version for which it has already learned a policy, learning must begin anew and there is no benefit to having previously learned anything. To address this challenge, I introduce novel approaches for policy transfer. Policy transfer allows the agent to follow the policy of a previously solved, but different, task (called a source task) while it is learning a new task (called a target task). Specifically, I introduce option-based policy transfer (OPT). OPT enables policy transfer by encapsulating the policy for a source task in an option (Sutton, Precup, & Singh 1999), which allows the agent to treat the policy of a source task as if it were a primitive action. A significant advantage of this approach is that if there are multiple source tasks, an option can be created for each of them, thereby enabling the agent to transfer knowledge from multiple sources and to combine their knowledge in useful ways. Moreover, this approach allows the agent to learn in which states of the world each source task is most applicable. OPT's approach to constructing and learning with options that represent source tasks allows OPT to greatly outperform existing policy transfer approaches. Additionally, OPT can utilize source tasks that other forms of transfer learning for reinforcement learning cannot.

Challenges for policy transfer include identifying sets of source tasks that would be useful for a target task and providing mappings between the state and action spaces of source and target tasks. That is, it may not be useful to transfer from all previously solved source tasks. If a source task has a different state or action space than the target task, then a mapping between these spaces must be provided. To address these challenges, I introduce object-oriented OPT (OO-OPT), which leverages object-oriented MDP (OO-MDP) (Diuk, Cohen, & Littman 2008) state representations to automatically detect related tasks and redundant source tasks, and to provide multiple useful state and action space mappings between tasks. I also introduce methods to adapt value function approximation techniques (which are useful when the state space of a task is very large or continuous) to the unique state representation of OO-MDPs.

Committee: Dr. Marie desJardins (Chair), Dr. Tim Finin, Dr. Michael Littman, Dr. Tim Oates, Dr. Yun Peng

Photo: ua-net.eu

The ESNET Lab in UMBC's Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department is looking for qualified undergraduate or graduate students to join and work on an exciting underwater sensor networks project. For more information go to http://esnet.cs.umbc.edu/eduwan.html.

The candidates applying should have experience in (or at least familiar with) some of the following areas:

1. FPGA development using Verilog/VHDL
2. Data Frame synchronization for wireless (or acoustic) communication
3. Doppler resistant compensation for FSK modulated data
4. Digital Signal Processing
   a) Adaptive data equalization (LMS/NLMS)
   b) Error Correction coding on FPGA, i.e. turbo codes, LPDC codes.

To apply please e-mail your resume and a cover letter detailing experience in the above mentioned areas to:

The Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) welcomes Cindy Greenwood as their new Assistant Director. Ms. Greenwood will spearhead the new Cyber Scholars Program which kicks off this fall.

Cindy Greenwood loved college so much that she never wanted to leave.

So she didn’t.  

When an Advertising and Public Relations internship during her senior year of college showed Ms. Greenwood that it wasn’t the career for her, she switched gears. She let her heart decide.

“I felt like I could make more of a difference by going into higher education,” she says.

Greenwood knows first-hand the difference that the college experience can make. Raised in Ishpeming, Michigan–a small town of no more than 7,000 people that is “half the size of UMBC,” she says—Ms. Greenwood thought it would always be her home. That is, until she left for Grand Valley State University.  

“A college campus is like no place else. You can do anything,” says Ms. Greenwood. “You can go from a cultural event where you’re trying food from Cambodia, to a dance party with glowsticks.” The atmosphere of possibility urged her to try new things, like studying abroad in Australia.

Afterwards, a master’s program in Higher Education Administration at the Leadership Center of Washington State University beckoned to her. After graduating, Ms. Greenwood spent eight years working for and with college students, first at Ferris State University in Michigan, and then at the University of South Florida.

In 2011, she joined UMBC as the Alumni Programming Coordinator in the Office of Institutional Advancement. Here, she started the Student Alumni Association to help connect current students with alumni. Hungry for more one-on-one time with undergraduates, Ms. Greenwood volunteered to be the advisor for the UMBC Vegetarian Student Group.

It’s the chance to work with students on a daily basis that drew her to the Assistant Director position in the Center for Women in Technology, she says. Ms. Greenwood will coordinate the new Cyber Scholars Program, which is run in partnership by CWIT and the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity. Her duties include overseeing the Cyber Scholars Living Learning Community, planning events, advising scholars, and teaching a seminar and bridge program for Cyber Scholars.

“The scholars programs are really interesting [at UMBC] because they really touch on every part of students’ lives,” says Greenwood.

An advocate of social justice and equality, Ms. Greenwood says she identifies with CWIT’s mission to bolster support for women in the male-centered fields of Engineering and Information Technology. She is a co-chair of UMBC’s Presidents Commission of Women. In the end it all comes back to her experience in college.

“I’ve had some good female mentors throughout my career,” says Ms. Greenwood, “and I definitely hope to be that to other females as well.”

*Ms. Greenwood joins CWIT as Assistant Director on January 28, 2013.

TL;DR version: if you have Java 7 on your computer, update it. Now.

The Java programming language helped to make the Web popular in the mid 1990s by its invention of the Web applet. The idea was powerful and enabled complex programs to be automatically downloaded when you visited a Web page and run securely on your personal computer in a sandbox. The sandbox prevented any applet running in it from doing the things on your computer you would not want it to do — like accessing your files, sending email, accessing other computers on the Internet, or installing new programs.

If you've read any technology news in the past week you know that several very nasty security vulnerabilities were discovered in Java version 7 that can be exploited by attackers, allowing them to create applets that can execute arbitrary code on your computer.

The exploit applies to Java 7 and not to earlier versions of Java and only when that is used to run a Java applet in your browser. The problem does not affect the use of Java 7 on servers, in Java desktop applications, or embedded Java.

Today Oracle released a security alert to address the vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable without authentication and have the highest CVSS severity score of 10. Oracle recommends that their fix be applied as soon as possible — some exploits are already available in hacking tools like Metasploit, which means that relatively unsophisticated people can use them.

Java developers and programmers should download the latest Java SE JDK and JRE 7 releases from Oracle and users running Java SE with a browser should download the latest JRE 7 from java.com. Windows users can also use automatic updates to get the latest JRE 7 release.

You can test the version of Java available to your browser <a href="http://www.java.com/en/download/installed.jsp">here</a>.  Note that Google's popular Chrome browser does not support Java 7, so Chome users need not update Java unless they also use another browser, such as Firefox or Safai.

Oracle also changed the default security setting for Java to "High," which means that most users will need to approve Java applets before they run.