Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

A free screening of the new film Codebreaker will be shown on Thursday, November 29 at 5:30pm in Hodson Auditorium at johns Hopkins University. The screening will be followed by a reception and question and answer session with the film's executive producer, Patrick Sammon.

Codebreaker tells the remarkable and tragic story of one of the 20th century's most important people. Alan Turing set in motion the digital revolution and his World War II codebreaking helped turn the tide of war. This maverick British genius is one of the most important scientists ever, yet few people have heard his name, know his story, or understand his legacy. Historians say by breaking the Nazis' Naval Enigma code, Turing helped shorten the Second World War by two years, saving millions of lives. As the founding father of computer science and artificial intelligence, Alan Turing envisioned our digital world long before anyone else. Built on a solid historical foundation of true events, Turing is our storyteller as he defiantly searches for answers. Documentary elements seamlessly interconnect with drama scenes to offer a three dimensional picture of Turing, his accomplishments, his tragic end, and his lasting legacy. (Running time 81 minutes). Learn more about Codebreaker and view a two-minute trailer at www.turingfilm.com.

Dr. Anthony Johnson, a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and Physics, was elected to serve on the American Physical Society’s (APS) Executive Board. With over 50,000 members, APS is one of the world’s leading organizations of physicists. It is dedicated to advancing research in the field through journals, scientific meetings, education, outreach, advocacy and international activities.

This one year term will be Dr. Johnson’s second appointment on APS’s Executive Board. He previously served nearly twenty-years ago while working for AT&T Bell Laboratories.

Dr. Johnson is the director of UMBC’s Center for Advanced Studies in Photonics Research (CASPR). His research is in the area of ultrafast optics and optoelectronics- the ultrafast photophysics and nonlinear optical properties of bulk, nanoclustered, and quantum well semiconductor structures, untrashort pulse propagation in fibers and high-speed lightwave systems.

Earlier this month SPIE (The International Society for Optics & Photonics) interviewed Dr. Johnson and his colleague Dr. Elaine Lalanne about their research in the UMBC/ CASPR Ultrafast Optics & Optoelectroncis Lab during the SPIE 2012 Defense, Security + Sensing Conference. You can watch the video below:

Originally from Glen Burnie, Julia is a Computer Science major. For Halloween she made her own set of cobalt armor inspired by the video game Terraria.

About Julia

When did you become interested in Computer Science? After my freshman year at UMBC. I was a CMPE major for my first year, but I decided that I enjoyed CMSC more.

What area of Computer Science interests you the most? I just really love writing code.

What are your plans after graduation? I plan to get a job in the industry, possibly a defense contractor position. 

What is your dream job? Any job that lets me be creative with my coding and gives me interesting problems to solve.

About being a CS major

Who is your favorite professor or course? Dr. Park is an amazing professor. He's really great about making his subject matter interesting, no matter what class he's teaching.

Are you part of any on-campus clubs, organizations, teams, or labs?  I'm an active member of Humans versus Zombies club.

What is the best part about being a CWIT Scholar/ Affiliate? The support network. I don't know how I would've gotten as far as I have without their help.

What advice would you give to other females entering the field? Adversity toward women in computer science has really died down, and there are a lot of support groups out there for women in technology now. That doesn't mean you'll never encounter adversity, but it does mean that you can do something about it, and there are lots of people–like those at CWIT–who will be glad to help you.

What advice would you give to incoming students? Get plenty of sleep!

About life at UMBC

What is the best part about campus life at UMBC? Everything is within a few minutes walking distance. That means you don't have to get up really early to get to class, you can go get food between classes without being late, and you can grab a bunch of people and go to late night at the dining hall.

What is your favorite spot on campus? The commuter lounge in the Commons is almost always full of cool people. It's a great place to hang out between classes.

Where can you get the best coffee/lunch/ food or beverage of choice? The sandwich shop in the Administration building probably has the best lunch-type food. The Skylight lounge is another often-overlooked place with really good food, too.

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Advanced Computer Systems (ACS)
Machine Learning program

Mark McLean
Senior Researcher, Advanced Computer Systems group

1:00pm Friday, 30 November 2012, ITE 227, UMBC

My talk will discuss the ACS Machine learning program. The ACS ML program's focus is on three main areas; algorithm development, applied research and integration into efficient hardware. Our algorithm development work has created the Concurrent Learning Algorithm and Importance Map technologies. These technologies were developed in-house and have some unique capabilities which make it ideal for our purposes. I'll give some demos of these technologies learning on datasets from the UCI repository. For our current research effort, I will discuss our ideas of using neural networks to process complex digital algorithms, which is not a traditional focus for neural networks. Here, I will discuss our efforts to make a neural network learn the Advanced Encryption Standard encryption functionality and why this could impact the way we design digital systems in the future. For our hardware focus, I'll talk about our efforts to develop a Memristor-based neuromorphic processor and why we hope to succeed where others have failed.

Mark McLean has been a senior researcher in the Advanced Computer Systems group Since 2009. His main area of research is on neural network algorithms, application and neuromorphic processor development. Mr. McLean has done post-graduate work at UMD, Holds a MS degree in Computer Engineering from Loyola College and a BS degree in Computer Science. Previously, he held the position of technical director for the microelectronics and reverse engineering group in the DOD. He has work in industry as lead designer for re-configurable computing at Annapolis Micro-Systems and is a retired officer from the USAF.

— more information and directions —

Join a webcast of the Federal government's cybersecurity research and development strategies from 1:00pm to 3:00pm EST on Tuesday 27 November 2012. Senior Federal representatives will review Government activities in implementing the Federal cybersecurity R&D strategic plan and discuss emerging areas in cybersecurity research that may warrant further focus. The webcast session is part of the National Science Foundation's Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace PI Meeting. Addional information about the Federal Cybersecurity R&D program is available online.

MS Thesis Defense

Smartphone Application and Data Privacy Control Using Semantically Rich Reasoning and Context Modeling

Dibyajyoti Ghosh

9:00am Tuesday, 20 November 2012, ITE 325B, UMBC

We present our ongoing work on user data and contextual privacy preservation in mobile devices through semantic reasoning. Recent advances in context modeling, tracking and collaborative localization has led to the emergence of a new class of smartphone applications that can access and share embedded sensor data. Unfortunately, this also means significant amount of user context information is now accessible to applications and potentially others, creating serious privacy and security concerns. Mobile OS frameworks like Android lack mechanisms for dynamic privacy control. We show how data flow among applications can be successfully filtered at a much more granular level using semantic web driven technologies that model device location, surroundings, application roles as well as context-dependent information sharing policies.

Committee members:

• Prof. Anupam Joshi (Chair)
• Prof. Tim Finin
• Prof. Yelena Yesha
• Prof. Shujia Zhou

Ph.D. Thesis Defense Announcement

Data Intensive Scientific Compute Model for Multicore Clusters

Phuong Nguyen

10:00am 21 November 2012, ITE 325B

Data intensive computing holds the promise of major scientific breakthroughs and discoveries from the exploration and mining of the massive data sets becoming available to the science community. This expectation has led to tremendous increases in data intensive scientific applications. However, data intensive scientific applications still face severe challenges in accessing, managing and analyzing petabytes of data. In particular, workflow systems to support such scientific applications are not as efficient when dealing with thousands and even more of complex tasks within jobs that operate across high performance large multicore clusters with very large amounts of streaming data. Scheduling, it turns out, is an integral workflow component in the execution often of thousands or more tasks within a data intensive scientific application as well as in managing  the access and flow of many jobs to the available resource environment. Recently, MapReduce systems such as Hadoop, have proven successful for many business data intensive problems. However, there are still many limitations in the use of MapReduce systems for data-intensive scientific problems mainly because they do not support the characteristics of science such as data formats, specialized data analytic tools (e.g. math libraries), accuracies, and interfaces with non MapReduce components.

This thesis addresses some of these limitations by proposing a MapReduce workflow model and its runtime system using Hadoop for orchestrating MapReduce jobs for data intensive scientific workflows. Novel heuristic based scheduling algorithm is proposed in the workflow system to manage the parallel execution of data intensive scientific applications. This thesis has developed a hybrid MapReduce scheduling algorithm based on dynamic priorities, proportional resource sharing techniques that reduce delays for variable length concurrent tasks, and takes advantage of data locality. As a result, a new scheduling policy, Balanced Closer to Finish First (BCFF), is proposed as solutions for some problems of scheduling in MapReduce environment. The scheduling algorithm is implemented in Hadoop 1.0.1 framework and is available as a new Hadoop plug-in Scheduler. The evaluations of the workflow system on the climate data processing and analysis application (several TB dataset) show that it is feasible and significantly improved compared to traditional parallel processing method. The scientific results of the application provide new source of monitoring global climate changes for the near decade 2002-2011.

Thesis Committee:

• Prof. Milton Halem (Chair)
• Prof. Yelena Yesha (Co-Chair)
• Prof. Tim Finin
• Prof. Yaacov Yesha
• Prof. Tarek El-Ghazawi at George Washington University

Ph.D. Thesis Defense Announcement

A Decadal Gridded Hyperspectral Infrared Record for Climate
Sep 1st 2002 – Aug 31st 2012

David Chapman

2:00pm 20 November 2012, ITE 325B

We present a gridded Fundamental Decadal Data Record (FDDR) of Brightness Temperatures (BT) from the NASA EOS Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) from ten years of hyperspectral Infrared Radiances onboard the NASA EOS Aqua satellite. We show that these results are consistent with the expected greenhouse forcings, and also discovered a drift of ~0.13K/decade in spectrum relative to 4 MODIS-Aqua for Global All-sky Brightness Temperatures. AIRS, operational on September 1, 2002 is the first successful hyperspectral satellite weather instrument of more than 1 year, as well as the longest running global IR hyperspectral measurement. Although global surface temperature data records are available for over 130 years, it was not until 1978 when the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) was the first instrument series to reliably monitor long-term trends of the upper atmosphere. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) provides the first continuous global hyperspectral IR radiance data record from a single satellite for a decade. Our contribution, was to prepare a gridded data record from the AIRS Outgoing Longwave Spectrum (OLS). We have shown high correlations with the GISS global surface air temperatures as well as with the NOAA ONI index of El Niño phase. In addition, we have performed inter-annual inter-comparisons with the Moderate Resolution Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the same satellite to examine the relative consistency of their calibrations. The comparisons of the two instruments for the 4µ spectral channels indicate an inter-annual warming of 0.13K per decade of AIRS more than MODIS. This relative decadal drift is small relative to inter-annual variability but on the order of historic surface temperature trends. In the 12µ window channels we see a relative constant difference of 0.01K over a decade. It is convenient to observe the climate variability by using monthly average lat-lon grid projections. The polar orbiting data projection to a lat-lon grid is a lossy process that invariably introduces aliasing artifacts and noise. We observed an exponential decay between the number of days averaged and the expected noise due to gridding. We have extended the Observation Coverage (Obscov) gridding algorithm, developed for the MODIS instrument that incorporates the Point Spread Function (PSF) and we show the Obscov gridding algorithm reduces the aliasing noise from AIRS grids by nearly 40% by comparing the spatial correlation of gridded MODIS IR data. We also show that the use of a circular approximate PSF is a sufficient representation to obtain the noise reduction of Obscov at the climate resolution 0.5×1 degree monthly average grids. We extended these spatial sampling methods to the AIRS Level 3 retrieval records for which quality filtering due to opaque clouds is an additional spatial sampling challenge. We correct for an observed dry bias in the AIRS Level 3 monthly average gridded moisture retrieval records by means of spatial interpolation with the Nearest Neighbor (NN) strategy.

Thesis Committee:

• Dr. Milton Halem  (Chair)
• Dr. Yelena Yesha
• Dr. Chin-I Chang
• Dr. Shujia Zhou
• Dr. Joel Susskind (NASA Goddard)

Assistant Director, CWIT

 

DATE POSTED: 11/12/12
POSITION TITLE: Assistant Director, CWIT
CATEGORY: Professional
PERSONNEL STATUS: Exempt, Full time, Regular Note:  Position in for a three-year term.
DEPARTMENT: Center for Women in Technology (CWIT)
CLOSING DATE: 11/26/12

RESPONSIBILITIES: The incumbent will provide for the administration of the Cyber Scholars Program and Cyber Living Learning Community (LLC), including all recruitment, retention, and graduation activities. The Cyber Scholars Program is housed in the new Cyber security Center and run in partnership with UMBC's Center for Women in Technology.

Specific duties include: planning and implementation of the Cyber Scholars Program; developing recruitment activities in coordination with UMBC’s Office of Admissions and Orientation, other UMBC Scholar programs, the Cyber Security Center, and departments within College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT); overseeing the Cyber LLC, including coordinating selection initiatives and working closely with the Resident Assistant to encourage community and a supportive learning environment; providing individual and group advising for all Cyber Scholars and LLC members; executing skill-building and professional development events for students; planning and instructing a seminar and bridge program for Cyber Scholars; advising and student planning committees for large events; serving as a liaison between the program and officials within and outside the institution; assisting in the formulation of the organization’s budgets and project proposals; supporting secondary school outreach, including executing CWIT’s annual outreach program, Bits & Bytes; supporting major CWIT and UMBC events to ensure their success; answering mail, phone and walk-in inquiries from prospective students; and performing other duties as assigned.

The UMBC Center for Cybersecurity is an interdisciplinary university center that unifies UMBC’s many cybersecurity capabilities. The Center aims to provide both Maryland and the nation with academic and research leadership, collaboration, innovation, and outreach in this critical discipline by streamlining our academic, research, workforce development, and technology incubation activities to advance UMBC’s position as a leading research university in cybersecurity-related disciplines.

CWIT is dedicated to increasing the representation of women among those who create technology in engineering and information technology fields. CWIT strives to nurture a strong group of Scholars (including CWIT, T-SITE and Cyber Scholars), build community resources for other women

in these majors, foster a healthy gender climate and ITE pedagogy in College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT) departments, and conducts outreach activities to increase interest in technical careers.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS: Requires a Bachelor’s degree (Master’s degree in a student support or technical field preferred) and student support experience. Strong organizational, writing, and verbal communications skills required. Some experience interacting with organizations in the cyber sector is a plus.

SALARY: Starting salary range at $50,000, commensurate with qualifications and experience.

APPLICATION: For best consideration, submit a cover letter, resume and contact information for three professional references by November 26, 2012 by email to . Resumes will be accepted until the position is filled.

As required by the 1986 Immigration Act, be prepared to present acceptable documentation showing your identity and that you are a U.S. citizen or an alien who is authorized to work.

UMBC IS AN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION/EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Originally from Parnu, Estonia, Anastasia is a Computer Engineering major and a T-SITE Scholar. 

About Anastasia

When did you become interested in Computer Engineering? About two years ago while studying at community college. It was a long decision for me. At first I was majoring in Chemical Technology in Estonia and after a long break, I switched to Computer Engineering. I was always interested and successful in science and math. Understanding how computers operate on a very detailed level is very interesting to me.

What area of Computer Science interests you the most? It is a very large area of study. I do not have any actual experience working in this field, therefore it is hard to say. I think robotics and artificial intelligence sound pretty cool. In general, If I can use my knowledge to help someone, it already sounds interesting to me.

What is your dream job? I would like to work in a research and development laboratory to create new technologies for the world. To be a scientist is very fascinating!

About being a CS major

What courses are you taking? This semester, I am taking Computer Science 201, where we are learning about programming in Python. I like writing a program that actually works, such a satisfaction! It makes me wonder what else I can do?

What classes are you most excited about? I think the capstone design even though I am still far from it. I am looking forward to developing something complicated on my own in a small team.

Are you part of any on-campus clubs, organizations, teams, or labs? I am a T-SITE (Transfer Scholars in Information Technology and Engineering) scholar in the Center for Women in Technology community. I would also like to be a Golden Key honors society member next semester. It is very challenging and I hope I can keep up with it.

What is the best part about being a T-SITE? It is a gift! Besides the financial help, I have advising on any subject related to UMBC including academic and just student life related problems. I met new friends before I even attended my first class, and I felt like part of UMBC thanks to the CWIT community.

What advice would you give to other transfer students? Make sure that classes you are taking are transferable and the earlier you decide on the degree, the better. Make friends at UMBC and join some group before you even start your classes. Having someone as your friend who already had to do first steps into UMBC life and is familiar with the system will help you greatly with many unclear things.

What advice would you give to other females entering the field? Never get discouraged by the difficulty of classes. Be confident in yourself and your abilities. You are smart and can do it better than someone else (even if it doesn't seem like it to you right now!).

About life at UMBC

What is the best part about campus life at UMBC? I am commuting to UMBC and I spend a good part of my day on campus. I like how UMBC looks: very pleasant to walk around. Another great thing about UMBC is everything I might need is available right there. It's like a small town. I could even send priority mail right from campus.

What is your favorite spot on campus? The Women's Center is a great place to relax and have a cup of hot tea (I love hot tea!). There on a very cozy and comforatable couch you can relax and if you have any food with you from home, it is the best place to heat it up and eat it. It is quiet and just perfect. 

Where can you get the best coffee/lunch/ food or beverage of choice? I always go to the Commons. I like the selection that it has: sushi, Asian food, vegetarian food, Spanish, Italian, and of course American subs and burgers. That covers all tastes, I think. I tried most of it and I like it all.