Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Outstanding Achievement in Computer Science
Outstanding academic achievement or service in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Clay Alberty

Laura J. Anzaldi

Madeleine R. Sparling-Sedlak

Nathaniel K. Lam

Menal G. Modha

Lauren J. Won

Outstanding Achievement in Computer Engineering
Outstanding academic achievement or service in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Thomas M. Christovich

Stephen G. Harvey

Kristopher N. Lamont

Linh R. Pham

Adam P. Page

Daniel Park
 

Congratulations to graduating seniors Thomas Christovich and Timothy Burke, who were awarded Student Leadership Awards by the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department. The pair was recognized for this honor at yesterday's Pre-commencement Breakfast & Awards Reception.

A Computer Engineering graduate, Thomas Christovich (pictured left) has been part of UMBC's Amateur Radio Club for four years, first as president (2009-2011), and more recently as treasurer (2011-2012).  "Amateur Radio is a good opportunity to play with electronics and understand a little more about how radio works," says Christovich, who especially enjoyed competing in "good-natured" contests like the School Club Round Up, where the goal is to communicate with as many schools across the country as possible. Christovich was also active in athletics, playing intramural flag football every semester.

After graduation, Christovich is embarking on an across-country road trip with some friends–his "last hurrah" before he starts working full-time in Columbia.They plan to visit landmarks like Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, and Yosemite as they make their way to the West Coast for a stop in San Francisco.

As he says goodbye to UMBC, Christovich's advice to other Computer Engineering graduates is to not be afraid to ask for help. "The Computer Engineering department has some of the most approachable professors I have ever known and they are always willing to help people that ask," he says. His second bit of advice is to get to know your classmates. There's nothing more helpful, he explains, than having a friend help you work through a problem from a different perspective.

A Computer Science graduate, Timothy Burke (pictured right) is a Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) Scholars in Information Technology and Engineering (SITE) Scholar, a tutor in the Computer Science Help Center, and a peer mentor.

"Being involved with the CWIT community was an immeasurable benefit to me during my time at UMBC," says Burke, who transferred to UMBC from CCBC Catonsville and found a network of support within the CWIT community. Through CWIT, Burke volunteered with First Lego League and the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Thanks to relationships fostered by CWIT, Burke  was part of the CSEE Department Promotion and Tenure Committee for the 2010-2011 academic year and participated in interviews for new faculty.

Burke also finds his time as a tutor especially valuable. "I greatly enjoyed my time tutoring other students in the Computer Science Help Center–it was great fun helping others learn and understand what they are studying," he explains. "That experience left a strong impression on me and has given me a desire to teach in the future."

After graduation, Burke will begin a full-time position as a software engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. In the Fall, he will begin pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at UMBC. Studying under Dr. Penny Rheingans, Burke's research will focus on Data Visualization and Human Computer Interaction.

Burke's advice to current Computer Science undergraduates includes the old standbys–like start your assignments sooner and ask for help when you need it–paired with a few specific pearls of wisdom: "Go sit by a lake when faced with obscure error codes," "If a job offer comes and you are told you will be working on 'legacy applications,' do not simply walk away, RUN", "Take a class that is way, way out of the major for a change of pace" (in his case HIST 387: Medicine and Healthcare in China), and "Find a slightly smarter friend to take Algorithms with."

Forbes ranked metropolitan areas on increased tech-related jobs based on their employment growth in the sectors most identified with the high-tech economy and STEM. Among the top five are DC at #2 and Baltimore at #5.

• No. 2: Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV
  Amid a surge in government spending, the capital area has enjoyed 20.6% growth in tech employment since 2001 and 20.8% growth in STEM jobs. Over the past two years, employment in both categories expanded about 4%. The Washington area boasts the second-highest proportion of tech and STEM jobs among the cities we surveyed, at 2.9 and 2.2 times the national average, respectively. There is a broadness to the tech economy in the greater D.C. area; as the Valley has become dominated by trends in web fashion, the Washington tech complex include substantial employment in such fields as computer systems design, custom programming, and private-sector research and development.
• No. 5: Baltimore-Towson, MD
  The Baltimore metro area has benefited from the expansion in federal spending, logging 38.8% growth in tech jobs over the past 10 years and 17.2% growth in STEM.

The Sixth UMBC Digital Entertainment Conference (DEC) will be held this Saturday, April 28 from 10:00am to 4:00pm in LH1 in the Biological Sciences building.

Every year since 2007 the students ofn the UMBC Game Developer's Club has organized the conference and invited speakers from the videogames industry to come in and discuss important topics in the games industry. DEC 2012 is sponsored by Zynga, the studio that developed Farmville and many other Facebook games.  One of the strenghts of the UMBC program in Graphics, Animation and Interactive Media (GAIM) is its strong ties to game development studios in the Maryland, DC and Northern Virginia area.

The 2012 DEC is open to anyone, and features an all-star lineup of speakers from Firaxis Games, Zynga East, Pure Bang, and Mythic Entertainment. 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.

Here is the schedule.

10:00am – Barry Caudill, Director of Gameplay Development at Firaxis
11:00am – Tim Train, Studio Manager at Zynga East
12:00pm – Lunch Break
1:00pm – Eric Jordan, Programmer at Firaxis
2:00pm – Ben Walsh, CEO of Pure Bang Games
3:00pm – Brian Johnson, Director of Online Operations at Mythic Entertainment

What should be in the curriculum for a computer science undergraduate program in the next decade? What knowledge and skills should every CS major learn? What learning objectives should we set? How can we ensure that the field remains focused on the disciplinary core while embracing an outward-looking view that actively seeks to work with and integrate into other disciplines such as Biology, Engineering, linguistics and Sociology.

About every ten years the ACM and IEEE Computer Society jointly sponsor the development of a Computing Curricula volume on Computer Science. Their joint task force has just released a Strawman draft of the the CS2013 report and invites comments from a diverse audience with the goal of broadening participation in computer science. The report seeks to be international in scope and to offer curricular and pedagogical guidance applicable to a wide range of institutions.

We've starting to see advertisements for a new kind of position: privacy engineer.

If you've seen the classic movie, The Graduate, you'll remember the conversation that recent college graduate Benjamin Braddock has with a friend of his father, who says "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. … Are you listening? … Plastics.". Today, 45 years later, that one word might be Privacy.

Our lives are increasingly being lived online through social media systems, cloud based services, smart phones and other ubiquitous computing and sensing devices. Your smart phone, it's common to hear, knows more about you than your spouse or Mom. Data about us is being collected minute by minute, aggregated, integrated, analyzed, bought and sold.  At the same time, we have develped powerful new datamining and machine learning techniques that, together with parallel computing, can  extract surprising amounts of information and knowledge from the data. 

This data can be put to good uses, such as providing you with better services, but can also result in a loss of privacy. Businesses and other organizations want to avoid a backlash in which they lose customers concerned about their privacy. We've seen recent ads for privacy engineers, such as these from Apple , Google and Intel. This is just a sample, many more exist, although the job title may be different.

The job of a privacy engineer doesn't yet have a well defined consensus description, but the focus is on designing an organization's information privacy policy and helping to ensure that it is accurately described and enforced.  High level tasks include (i) protecting data from unauthorized access, use or disclosure (ii) providing users with appropriate tools to both understand and control what information is collected and how it is shared and used; and (iii) recognizing how the data can be usefully mined without revealing private information.

What courses can a UMBC undergraduate take to prepare for positions like these? After getting a good grounding in the required computer science or computer engineering courses, undergrads can take classes in the fundamentals of security (CMSC 426 and CMSC 487), information assurance (CMSC 444), and cryptography (CMSC 443), take a course in databases (CMSC 461),  datamining and machine learning (CMSC 478) and/or visualization (CMSC 436), and perhaps mobile computing (CMSC 628). Interested students should also look for special topics course, like Security and Privacy in a Mobile Social World which is being offered this semester.  We also have several research labs that work in privacy-related areas, including the Cyber Defense, Coral, Ebiquity, Diadic and Maple labs.

Each year, UMBC's Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD) gives hardworking undergraduate researchers from all disciplines an outlet for presenting the findings of their unique research projects. On April 25th, 2012, a handful of students from the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department (CSEE) will be part of that motley crew. Click on the photos below to learn about the research projects of a few CSEE students which you wont want to miss. You can also check out this complete list of CSEE students presenting research at URCAD this year.

Multiclass Datasets, Their Predictions, and Their Visualization

Wallace Brown and Alexander Morrow
Faculty Mentors: Dr. Marie desJardins + Dr. Penny Rheingans

Analyzing Social Media Data

Morgan Madeira
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Anupam Joshi

This Saturday, April 14, 2012, students in the ENES101 Introduction to Engineering Science course will be competing in UMBC's second AROW competition. AROW, which stands for Academy Robotics on the Water, is an introductory engineering design experience developed by Captain Jonathan Russell, Lt. Cmdr. Brian Maggi and Stephen Grenier at the US Coast Guard Academy.  Students are tasked with the design, implementation, test and operation of a robotic vessel to perform simulated tasks representing activities of the U.S. Coast Guard. 

Working in teams of three to five, the students must design the propulsion, mechanisms, and programming necessary to accomplish simulated Coast Guard tasks, such as tending a light house, placing navigation buoys, cleaning and recycling and oil spill – represented by ping-pong balls – and rescuing Lego fishermen who have fallen overboard. Each team is given a budget and permitted to "purchase" structural elements for their design from a common supply. The competition will be judged on the basis of the cost-effectiveness of the various team designs.

The UMBC AROW competition will be held in the Atrium on the second floor of the Engineering building on Saturday, April 14. Each team will have four minutes to accomplish as many tasks as possible. A single competition session will start at 10 AM.  Approximately 24 teams of ENES101 students will compete. The UMBC community is invited to view the competition from the third floor balcony of the Engineering building.

Saturday's event is the second AROW competition at UMBC. It is supervised by the ENES101 instructors, Dr. Anne Spence, Professor of the Practice of Mechanical Engineering and Dr. Chuck LaBerge, Professor of the Practice of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and assisted by the ENES101 Teaching Fellows: Mathew Kurtz, Julia Lopez, and Elliot Mooney.

What: UMBC's Second Academy Robotics on the Water (AROW) Competition
When: Saturday, April 14, 2012. 10:00 a.m.
Where: Engineering/ Computer Science (ECS) Building: 3rd Floor Balcony
 

Multiclass Datasets, Their Predictions, and Their Visualization
Wallace Brown and Alexander Morrow with Kevin Winner
Senior, Computer Science
Sophomore, Computer Science

Many datasets contain a wealth of information. For example, a person may be described by their race, age, gender, income, marital status, nationality, level of education, etc. By analyzing this data, we can form educated and accurate predictions about individuals. We can, for instance, determine that a person with a particular race, age, nationality, and income is likely to be a college undergraduate. Our goal is to develop ways to visualize these predictions and the uncertainty associated with the predictions. Displaying data in a scatterplot is a standard means of describing two-dimensional information. However, displaying high-dimensional data (i.e., data that includes many attributes, such as age, race, and income) is significantly more challenging.  We present a means of visualizing high-dimensional data sets and the predictive models derived from the data, using existing dimension reduction techniques and novel glyph-based displays.

In their own words:

We asked Wallace and Alexander a few questions about their research project, which was funded by an NSF Eager Award and an associated Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) supplement. Here's what they said:

Briefly summarize your research in non-technical terms: This project attempts to both simplify and discover new underlying trends in data through visualization. Often the tools and methods used to analyze data require a high level of technical expertise to understand and implement. Through this work, a framework that simplifies data analysis was developed and is explored to determine how best to provide useful insight to users to help define inherent structure in the data and to provide feedback into what areas there exists various forms of uncertainty.

When did you start this research? We began prior to summer of 2011 after our interest in research prompted involvement with the MAPLE Lab. After becoming involved with the project, we fulfilled a summer position to work on the project further.

Why is your research important? One of the most important aspects we are exploring is making tools more accessible and easier to use. In addition, the framework we have been developing for research will eventually be released for use in the public domain. Hopefully this framework will be useful for people wishing to process and explore large and complex data sets in an intuitive and user friendly way.

What has been the biggest challenge so far? One of the biggest challenges so far has been finding methods by which to quantify results. Since we are working with a visualization, it can be apparent that a particular technique may provide insight to a user, but difficult to quantify just how large or useful the improvement is. A user study is in development that will provide us with feedback on these techniques and help to quantify the improvements.

The biggest reward? Excitement of being involved in research and education. It’s very interesting to develop experimental products with professors, rather than work on established class material.

What advice would you give to students interested in pursuing undergraduate research? Talk to your professors often, put good effort into your courses and let them know you’re putting that effort in. They may have opportunities for you if you stay in contact and develop a strong relationship with them. Additionally, don’t believe there is not a place for yourself in research. Even with little knowledge of the area a task that is both beneficial to the project and to your understanding can usually be found. These tasks are a great way to get started with research.

Don't forget to see Wallace and Alexander's presentation at URCAD on Wednesday, April 25 in the University Center (UC) 312 from 1:15 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.