One of a Kind

A Computer Science alumna becomes the first African-American woman in history to get a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.

“Bittersweet.”

That’s how Kyla McMullen (CS, B.S. ’05) describes what it feels like to be the first African American woman at the University of Michigan to graduate with a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

“I don’t think there’s anything special about me,” says Kyla with a modest laugh. She explains that while it’s nice to be recognized as a “first”, her accomplishment points out a sad reality: not enough women and minorities are pursuing advanced degrees in Computer Science. Out of the more than 1,400 Americans who received Ph.Ds in Computer Science from 2010-2011, less than a quarter were female, and a mere 1.2 % (or 16 people) were African American, according to the latest Computing Research Association (CRA) Taulbee Survey. It’s a good thing staggering statistics like that didn’t deter Kyla.

Kyla’s passion for Computer Science started early and was nurtured throughout High School. “When I was little, I always liked gadgets,” she says. She remembers being fascinated by her family’s first computer because it seemed like magic. She admits to staying up all night, clicking through file folders, trying to figure out how it worked. Luckily for Kyla, her high school in her hometown of Oxon Hill Maryland had a special Computer Science track. This meant exposure to curriculum that most high schools lack, and the opportunity to take courses in Computer Programming and Engineering early on.

It paid off. One day, Kyla was sitting in Calculus class when the guidance counselor called her to his office. She thought she was in trouble, but he actually wanted to recommend that she apply for UMBC’s Meyerhoff Scholarship program.

“It was an excellent opportunity,” says Kyla of the program. Though tough, Kyla credits the program’s sense of community and her mentors as crucial ingredients of her success. She remembers her time at UMBC fondly; especially the hours spent burning the midnight oil with her two study buddies, Aimee Strang and Nwokedi Idika (who is now, coincidentally, the first African American to get a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University).

As graduation neared, Kyla knew that she was bound for graduate school. She also knew that Michigan was the last place she wanted to live. But, at the insistence of Keith Harmon, the Assistant Director of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, and Lamont Toliver, Meyerhoff Scholars Program Director, she reluctantly made the trip to tour the University of Michigan, where she promptly fell in love.

Here, the graduate students were happy and invested in one another’s success—an atmosphere that mirrored that of UMBC, she says. That, coupled with the school’s high reputation for Computer Science, made her decision to study there a no-brainer. “My time at UMBC prepared me very well for Michigan.”

At Michigan, Kyla explored a little before finding her niche. Drawn to the human aspect of artificial intelligence, she joined the intelligent systems group. Then, in 2007, while pursuing her Master’s, she began working on educational software that taught kids how to make relationships between objects. One of her favorite parts, she admits, was getting to know the kids in the classroom before testing out the software.

After that, Kyla discovered Spatial Audio. Her research involved constructing virtual environments navigable by sound alone. “It’s like searching for a cell phone in the dark,” explains Kyla, who has worked with the Naval Submarine Medical Research Lab on her research. The concept, which can be applied to any domain with a spatial component, is especially being considered for workers in dangerous environments.

Another of Kyla’s passions while at Michigan was promoting the sciences within minorities. During her time, she was both the President and the Vice President of The Society of Minority Engineers and Scientists and the Vice President of the Movement of Underrepresented Sisters in Engineering and Science (MUSES). Though, she recognizes the benefit of the groups, she talks about their limited capacity to help. “You can only influence the people who make it in the doors, but not the people who aren’t in the doors yet.”

That’s why Kyla stresses the importance of relatable role models early on. In High School, hers was Computer Science teacher Mr. Randy Ware, a young and “normal” teacher who challenged the stereotype of what Computer Scientists are supposed to look like. It was at that point that she realized she didn’t have to look a certain way to study Computer Science. She could just be herself.

Kyla hopes she can help others comes to this realization, too. She’s happy to be an example for young girls like her. Even now–with a Ph.D. under her belt, and a new job as an Assistant Professor in the Human-Centered Computing division of Clemson University's School of Computing—Kyla hopes to be a resource for girls like her. Girls who just need to talk to someone that looks like them. You can reach Kyla at: . 

MS Thesis Defense

Using Mobile Data Collectors to Federate Clusters
of Disjoint Sensor Network Segments

Bhuvana Kalyanasundaram

11:00am Tuesday 2 October 2012, ITE 346

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) operating unattended in harsh environments have the higher probability of suffering from large scale damage, where many nodes fail simultaneously and the network gets partitioned into several disjoint segments. Restoring connectivity of structurally damaged WSN’s segments may be very urgent considering that they are employed to assist in risky missions. A similar scenario is when multiple standalone networks are to be federated to serve an emerging event such as an earthquake and conduct search-and-rescue. To deal with these scenarios, Mobile Data Mules (MDMs) are employed to establish intermittent links by moving around and carrying data from one segment to another. To limit data delivery latency and minimize the motion overhead, the travel path of the MDM should be shortened. We present a novel algorithm that groups the segments into k overlapping clusters based on the inter-segment proximity. Each cluster is assigned a distinct MDM to tour its segments. A segment that belongs to two clusters serves as a gateway that enables data transfer across clusters. Our algorithm minimizes the tour length for each MDM and sets the speed of the individual MDMs to rendezvous at the gateway nodes so that buffering space and time for inter-cluster traffic are minimized.

Committee: Drs. Mohamed Younis (chair), Charles Nicholas and Chintan Patel

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department invites applications for several non-tenure track positions in Computer Science at the rank of Lecturer and  Professor of the Practice, to begin in Spring 2013 (January 2013) or Fall 2013 (August 2013). Candidates with interest and experience in all Computer Science areas will be considered. Applicants should have at least a M.S. in Computer Science or a closely-related field. Ideal candidates will have evidence of strong teaching skills as well as academic, industry or government experience. Primary duties will include teaching computer science courses at the undergraduate level.

• Lecturer/Professor of Practice, Computer Science (non-tenure track)

• Lecturer, Computer Science (non-tenure track)

About the department. CSEE is UMBC’s largest department, with 34 tenure-track faculty, six teaching faculty and 16 research faculty. The department currently has about 1100 undergraduate students in two programs, computer science and computer engineering, and 250 graduate students in three core programs, computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering. The department also manages a graduate program in cybersecurity.

About UMBC. UMBC is a selective, medium-sized public research university ranked by the Carnegie Foundation in the category of Research Universities with high research activity. In 2012, for the fourth year in a row, U.S. News & World Report ranked UMBC number one among “Up and Coming” national universities, “schools everyone should be watching.” UMBC also received its fourth consecutive “Top Ten” finish among schools having “a strong commitment to teaching undergraduates.” UMBC is a two-time winner of the U.S. Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.

Our location. UMBC’s convenient, suburban campus is located just minutes off I-95 between Baltimore and Washington DC, and less than 10 minutes from the BWI-Thurgood Marshall International Airport. It is surrounded by one of the greatest concentrations of commercial, cultural and scientific activity in the nation. Located at the head of the Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore has all the advantages of modern, urban living, including professional sports, major art galleries, theaters and a symphony orchestra. The city’s famous Inner Harbor area is an exciting center for entertainment and commerce. The nation’s capital, Washington, DC, is a great tourist attraction with its historical monuments and museums. Just ten minutes from downtown Baltimore and 30 minutes from the Washington Beltway, UMBC offers easy access to the region’s resources by car or public transportation.

To apply. Submit a cover letter, brief statement of teaching experience, academic, industrial or government experience, and complete CV at https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/aaa Only applications submitted via this site will be considered. Applicants should arrange for three letters of reference to be sent via the same website. Applications will be reviewed as they are received. For best consideration, apply by October 30, 2012. Applications will be accepted until the positions are filled.

UMBC is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer and is a recent recipient of a National Science Foundation ADVANCE award to promote hiring and advancement of women in science and engineering. We welcome applications from women, minorities, and individuals with disabilities.

Computer Science alumna (’86) Stephanie C. Hill will be honored at this year’s Outstanding Alumni of the Year Awards on October 11, 7:30 p.m. in the Albin O. Kuhn Library. Hill is the president of Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems & Global Solutions-Civil division. In May, she submitted a guest post to the Washington post entitled “Why the nation needs more female engineers.”

Register for this year's Oustanding Alumni of the Year Awards here.

New Kids on the Block

The Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department welcomes three new professors starting Fall 2012. Learn what makes them tick.

Nilanjan Banerjee

Though technology has become an essential resource for many, it’s using up more and more of another kind of resource: energy. Not only is energy production costly, but it’s not infallible. For a generation that’s come to rely on technology, what do we do when we’re unexpectedly cut off? That’s a question that new Computer Science and Electrical Engineering professor Nilanjan Banerjee, 30, is answering with renewable energy-driven devices that keep us connected, especially when we need it the most. Read More…

Jian Chen

Few things are more daunting than an excel spreadsheet full of data. Even scientists can react to massive data sets with blank stares. That’s where the work of new CSEE assistant professor Jian Chen comes into play. As a designer of visualization and interaction techniques, Chen translates data into symbols that humans are good at interpreting.

“I have been working with biologists, physiologists, neurologists, cognitive scientists, and structural engineers to study cutting edge visualization science,” says Chen. Read More…

John Park

Even though this will be my first real term as a full-time lecturer at UMBC, I'm actually an old hand here.  I have been teaching part-time at UMBC for 4 years, during which I've taken turns at teaching CMSC 104, 202, and 331, in various forms, including developing and teaching CMSC 202H, the new honors section of that course.  I've had extensive industry experience in many subfields of Computer Science, including operating systems, real-time control systems, artificial intelligence/machine learning, digital imaging and graphics, and bioinformatics.  I'm now eager to apply that experience to a much broader range of courses in the department, combining sound theory with practical considerations and applications.  This coming fall, however, I'm easing into the new job by starting with CMSC 104 and 201. Read More…

CSEE professor Hillol Kargupta is one of fifteen Data Mining experts featured in a new book: Journeys to Data Mining: Experiences from 15 Renowned Researchers (Springer, 2012).

The book assembles the career journeys of fifteen experts in the field, answering questions like: “What are your notable success stories”, “What did you learn from your failures”, and “How would you advise a young researcher to make an impact?” Written in a narrative style, the book is a great tool for current Ph.D. students who are trying to find their own success in the field of Data Mining.

Kargupta, who has been teaching at UMBC since January 2001 is also the co-founder of AGNIK INC, a data analytics company for mobile, distributed, and embedded environments. An IEEE fellow, Kargupta has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles. He has a host of awards to his name including the IBM Innovation Award (2008), an NSF CAREER award in 2001 for his research on ubiquitous and distributed data mining, and 2010 IEEE Top-10 Data Mining Case Studies Award for his work at Agnik. More information about Dr. Kargupta’s research accomplishments can be found on his website.

In the book, Kargupta’s personal account is called: “Making Data Analysis Ubiquitous: My Journey Through Academia and Industry.”

His account begins:

“It was one of those late fall mornings in Urbana. I was working on some of the final pages of my dissertation. I got a note from Mike Welge of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) whom I came to know during the course of my work with my Ph.D. advisor David Goldberg. Mike was leading a data mining project for Caterpillar, the US heavy duty equipment manufacturer. Caterpillar clients bring their equipment to their worldwide service center for maintenance and repair. Their service staff types in short descriptions of the work done on the equipment and saves that information in the computer. Caterpillar wanted to link this data from different service centers, analyze, and identify which equipment and parts are failing frequently and related decision support tasks. The problem became more challenging because their employees often used different abbreviations and spelled names incorrectly to describe the work done on the equipment. Mike wanted to address this as an unstructured text data mining problem and asked me if I would like to collaborate. I joined their meetings and started thinking about the problem in a bigger context.”

You can continue reading on Springer’s website.

Introduction to OpenACC

Mark Ebersole, NVIDIA

1:00pm Thursday, 27 September 2012, ENG 005a

Modern GPUs have grown past their graphics heritage and evolved into the world's most successful parallel computing architecture. The introduction of this talk will briefly cover where the GPU came from and how it turned into this processing powerhouse. We will then look into how to access this power by using the relatively new standard called OpenACC. This method is a balance between the maximum flexibility you get by writing your own kernels and the ease of use you get using existing libraries. We will then end the lecture looking at the existing GPU Computing ecosystem that works well with OpenACC.

As CUDA Educator at NVIDIA, Mark Ebersole teaches developers and programmers about the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing platform and programming model, and the benefits of GPU computing. With more than ten years of experience as a low-level systems programmer, Mark has spent much of his time at NVIDIA as a GPU systems diagnostics programmer in which he developed a tool to test, debug, validate, and verify GPUs from pre-emulation through bringup and into production. Before joining NVIDIA, he worked for IBM developing Linux drivers for the IBM iSeries server. Mark holds a BS degree in math and computer science from St. Cloud State University.

Host: Marc Olano,

more information and directions

CSEE Colloquium

Volume Calculation of Magnetic Resonance
Tissues via Image Classification

Shih-Yu Chen
Remote Sensing Signal & Image Processing Laboratory
UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

1:00pm Friday 5 October 2012, ITE 227

Magnetic resonance (MR) tissue volume calculation is very important in medical diagnosis. A general approach is to first perform image classification of desired tissue substances slice by slice and then calculate tissue volumes via classified data samples in each slice. Two issues are generally involved; (1) selection of training samples which are slice-dependent, i.e., each slice requires its own specific training samples and (2) classification which must be carried out slice by slice individually because training samples obtained from one slice are not necessarily applicable to another. We develop a volume sphering analysis (VSA) approach which can process all MR image slices as one single image cube to calculate tissue volumes via image classification using only one set of training samples that is obtained from a single image slice. The proposed VSA using one set of training samples not only performs comparably to that using training samples specifically selected for individual image slices, but also saves significant amounts of selecting training samples and computing time.

Shih-Yu Chen received the BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Da-Yeh University in 2005, and the MS EE degree from National Chung Hsing University in 2010. He is currently a PhD (EE) student at UMBC. Mr. Chen's research interest includes medical image, remote sensing image and vital sign signal processing.

more information and directions

On Tuesday, September 25, professionals from the National Security Agency will visit UMBC for a Computer Science Career Event hosted by NSA's Office of Recruitment and Dr. Claudia Pearce, NSA/CSS Senior Computer Science Authority. The session is geared toward upper divison Computer Science, Engineering, and Information Systems majors, as well as graduate students. It will be held in the University Center Ballroom Lounge (3rd Floor) from 6-8 p.m.

Agenda:

6:00 – 6:15 – Welcome, get refreshments, etc.

6:15 – 6:20 – Opening remarks and introductions

6:20 – 6:30 – NSA Video

6:30 – 6:50 – Cyber Security at NSA
Speaker: Mr. Neal Ziring, Technical Director, Information Assurance Directorate

6:50 – 7:10 – Analytics and Cloud Computing:
Results from JHU Summer Camp in Advanced Language Exploration
Speaker: Dr. Chad Langley, Computer Science Development Program Director

7:10 – 8:00 – Entry-level Development Program Descriptions and Q&A. Speakers include:
Ms. Lucy Zerbe, Information Technology Development Program Director
Ms. Linda Obcamp, Computer Science Development Program Assistant Director
Mr. Ben Cudia, NSA HR Recruiter
Mr. Robert Soos, NSA HR Recruiter

For more information, download the event flyer.

CSEE Colloquium

Geometric Modeling and Visualization for Science

Dr. Liz Marai
Associate Professor of Computer Science
University of Pittsburgh

3:00pm Wednesday 3 October 2012, ITE325b

The incredible array of measurement technologies available to the scientific community is changing fundamentally our understanding of physical and biological processes. However, scientific data acquisition marks only the first step. To turn numbers into insight, computer graphics and visualization help us model complex systems, make predictions about their behavior, and finally harness the immense power of the human visual perception system to make insights into complex processes possible. In this talk I will present several novel geometric representations, computational modeling, and visual analysis tools to facilitate the simulation and analysis of such complex scientific phenomena. These representations and tools were developed at the Pitt Interdisciplinary Visualization Research lab I direct, and have applications in domains as diverse as neuroimaging, astronomy, biology, turbulent combustion, or machine translation.

Liz Marai is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh, with joint and adjunct appointments in the Pitt Department of Computational Biology and at the CMU Robotics Institute. She is the Director of the Interdisciplinary Visualization Research lab at Pitt, featuring interdisciplinary research in computational modeling, data visualization, and computer graphics. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, of a recent Best Paper Award at BioVis 2011, and of multiple teaching awards for courses that blend research and teaching.

Host: Dr. Jian Chen,

More information and directions