UMBC’s legendary chess team tied for second place last Sunday in the 2012 President’s Cup in Herndon, Virginia. UMBC tied with the University of Texas-Dallas with a final score of 7.5 points. Both schools were bypassed for first place by Texas Tech University with a mere ½ point lead.

Started by CSEE professor Dr. Alan Sherman in the early 90’s, UMBC’s chess team has gained a reputation that rivals that of many Ivy League schools. Since its inception, the team has won or tied for first nine times at the Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship (Pan-Am) and six times at the President’s Cup.

When Dr. Sherman started the chess program, he never dreamed that its success would become such an iconic part of UMBC's idenitity. “Eventually, I realized that I was the right person, at the right place, at the right time, to make some significant contributions to college chess, while helping students, the community, and UMBC along the way,” writes Sherman on his website where he chronicles the history of chess at UMBC.

Sherman began by recruiting students with strong backgrounds in chess. Then, in 1994, he convinced Igor Epshteyn, a former coach of the Olympic Reserve Team, to coach at UMBC. From then on, the program continued to gain momentum.

Now, like any other college sport, the program offers prestigious scholarships for its members. The current team members, made up of Grand Master Leonid Kritz, Grand Master Giorgi Margvelashvili, International Master Sasha Kaplan, and Woman Grand Master Sabina Foisor, are all attending the university on chess scholarships.

In a Baltimore Sun article, Dr. Sherman commented on the team's performance last weekend:

"It was an extremely close event, and it could have gone to either of the top teams," Alan T. Sherman, director of UMBC's Chess program, said after the President's Cup. "The team is overall happy with its performance."

Left: Grand Master Giorgi Margvelashvili (right)–a Sophomore majoring in Financial Economics– competes in the President's Cup last Sunday.

Right: International Master Sasha Kaplan (left)–a Junior majoring in Mathematics–at the President's Cup last Sunday.

The CSEE Department will hold its annual CSEE Research Review day from 9:00am to 4:00pm on Friday, May 4, 2012. Faculty, research staff and students from the Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering programs will present and discuss their latest research results via short oral presentations and a poster session.

The event is open to the public and is a good way for prospective collaborators and students to find out about the research our department is doing and meet and network with current faculty and students. See pictures from CRR-06, CRR-08, CRR-09, CRR-10 and CRR-11 to get an idea of what goes on at this event.

The 2012 CSEE Research Review (CRR-12) will take place in the large conference room of the UMBC Technology Center's business Incubator and Accelerator building on South Campus. There is ample free parking and refreshments and a free buffet lunch will be provided.

CSEE faculty, staff and students are encouraged to submit papers and posters for possible presentation by the April 12 deadline. See the CRR-12 Call for Submissions for details on how to submit research work. Awards with cash prizes will be given for the best research paper submitted by a undergraduate, M.S. and Ph.D. student and for the best three posters.

For more information, contact the CRR-11 General Chair, Professor Alan Sherman, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Next Century Corporation is looking for prospective software engineers to join their team as interns and full time employees. The local technology company was named one of Baltimore Magazine’s “Best Places to Work” in 2011.

“Next Century is driven by something far deeper than software, hardware, and dollars and cents,” says the company’s website. “We believe the solutions we provide have the power to save lives, promote freedom, and improve our world in exponential ways.”

Next Wednesday, April 11, 2012, Next Century staff will arrive at the UMBC campus for Next Century Corporation Corporate Visibility Day. The day will give students an opportunity to network with staff members. At Noon, catch president John McBeth discuss the company’s inception, followed by a lecture by UMBC alumna and Next Century Senior Software Engineering Christine Stepnitz entitled: “High Availability Systems: Planning for Failure. When your system has to be up 100% of the time, what happens when it goes down? And how can you turn that into an OK thing?”

Next Century Corporation Corporate Visibility Day will be held Wednesday, April 11 in the University Center Ballroom Lounge from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

An article in the April 1 edition of New York Times, Computer Science for the Rest of Us, mentions UMBC and Marie desJardins. It describes the idea that our notion of literacy should be exapanded to include an understanding of computational processes and that all college graduates should know the basics of computational thinking.

The article discusses a number of colleges and universities that have introduced new courses to address this challenge, offering non-computing majors a chance to understand how computation can be used to analyze and organizing data, model ideas and systems, evaluate theories and simulate processes in the real world. Often this can be done without trying to train students to use conventional general purpose programming languages like Python or Java.

Professor desJardins was mentioned for her work at UMBC on revamping CMSC 100 to be just such a course.

"Marie desJardins, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, says her department uses Scratch in its 'Introduction to Computers and Programming' course, in which students can try a few basic concepts. About 25 percent of the semester is spent on programming.

Explaining why Scratch is used at the college level, she says that all students arrive on campus having taken high school classes in English, math, biology and so on, but that many have not taken a computer science class."

EE Graduate Seminar

Unsupervised Multispectral Image Classification

Shih-Yu Chen
PhD (EE) Student, CSEE Dept/UMBC

11:30am-12:45pm, Friday, 6 April 2012, ITE 237

This seminar presents a new approach to unsupervised classification for multispectral imagery. It first uses a Gaussian pyramid multi- resolution technique to reduce image size from which the pixel purity index (PPI) is implemented to find regions of interest (ROIs) with PPI counts greater than zero. These PPI-found samples are further used as support vectors for a support vector machine (SVM) to classify data. The resulting SVM-classified data samples are further processed by a newly designed iterative Fishers linear discriminant analysis (IFLDA), which implements FLDA in an iterative manner to refine classification results. The experimental results show the proposed approach has great promise in unsupervised classification.

Shih-Yu Chen received the BSEE degree from Da-Yeh University in 2005, and the MSEE 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.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

Photo Courtesy CSC.com

Graduating in May? Just started Graduate School? Interested in Cybersecurity? CSC is looking for interns and that means you.

Headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, CSC provides IT services for a broad range of clients. According to CSC’s company profile, the company specializes in areas including Cloud Computing, Mobility Solutions, Network Management, Value Chain Optimization, and, of course, Cybersecurity. In 2010, CSC was named “One of the World’s Most Admired IT Services Companies” by FORTUNE magazine.

CSC is looking for recent graduates and graduate students with technical backgrounds in Computer Security and Computer Networking who have a passion for cybersecurity. The internship will give students the opportunity to help develop online training content and perform quality assurance on training materials. In addition, students will acquire technical training in cybersecurity and will have the chance to gain certifications like CISSP, CCNA, and Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH).

Full time summer internships and part-time internships running from September to March 2012 are available. For a complete outline of requirements and qualifications, go here.

To apply, send your resume to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. . Make sure to put “Cybersecurity Internship” in the subject line of your e-mail.

Next Monday, April 2^nd is the deadline to register for the Center for Women in Technology’s (CWIT) 2^nd annual Spring Into Leadership event.

This year’s theme is “What’s Your Story?” CWIT invites undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff to this interactive night where students can meet industry experts like featured speaker Wendy Martin, a Project Management expert from the Harris Corporation, a Florida-based company that makes wireless equipment, electronic systems and antennas.

All students—especially those pursuing majors in IT or engineering fields—are invited to attend the event which features a light dinner.

CWIT’s 2^nd Annual Spring Into Leadership takes place next Wednesday, April 4^th from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. in the University Center Ballroom.

To register for the event, click here.

To see photos from last year's Spring Into Leadership event, click here.

Rising sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduate students interested in cognitive radios and wireless networking might want to take a look at Virginia Tech’s Cognitive Communications Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU).

This summer, the program will enlist ten undergraduate students for a nine-week research program that explores problems related to software defined radios, cognitive radios, wireless networks, wireless communication circuits, and human factors engineering in communications. Students will be mentored by Virginia Tech faculty members, and will participate in weekly research meetings and informal brown-bag lunches to discuss research progress.

Each student will be awarded a $4,500 stipend, a housing and food allowance up to $2,000, and travel assistance up to $600. Eligible undergraduates must be majoring in electrical engineering, computer engineering, or computer science, and hold an overall G.P.A. of 3.0. All applicants must be U.S. citizens, and minorities, women, handicapped students, and students from schools without undergraduate research opportunities are especially encouraged to apply.

Application Deadline: Friday, April 13, 2012

To apply for the program, click here.

For more information, click here.

               Photo Courtesy robotonomous.com

It’s time to start thinking about summer research opportunities. And, If Robotics is what you love, then you’re in luck. In June, the University of Pennsylvania’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) Laboratory is offering a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site called “Perception, Planning, Mobility, and Interaction for Next Generation Robotics.”

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the program will support eight undergraduate students studying engineering or computer science who are interested in pursuing research in the field of robotics. The paid ten-week program will immerse students in ongoing research projects in the GRASP Lab by pairing them with a GRASP faculty member and student mentor to work on a research project that matches their interests.

In addition to offering students a $5,000 stipend, the research program provides travel reimbursement, free housing on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia, and partial support for meals. Students will also be eligible for a $250 prize awarded to the best REU research project of the summer.

All undergraduate students who are U.S. citizens are encouraged to apply. The program is especially interested in applicants who are generally underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, and engineering, including: women, racial minorities, low-income, and first generation college students.

Priority Deadline: Wednesday, April 4, 2012

To apply for the program, click here.

For more information, click here.

Be sure not to miss CSEE alumnus Delali Dzirasa speak during the Raymond V. Haysbert, Sr. Entrepreneurship Lecture tomorrow, March 28, at noon in Commons 329.

After graduating from UMBC with a B.S. in Computer Engineering in 2004, Dzirasa went on to found Fearless Solutions, LLC, a team of software engineers and web developers that help clients solve problems through Data Visualization, Web Application Development, Software Engineering, and Rapid Prototyping.

Located in UMBC’s cybersecurity incubator at Bwtech, Fearless Solutions functions according to the values of “The “Fearless 5”: Passion, Excellence, Integrity, Improvement, and Innovation. The company currently employs UMBC alumni and students. In 2011, Dzirasa’s success earned him the Alumni Association’s Young Alumni Rising Star award.

Another speaker of note is Ryan Bricklemyer, co-founder of BeerGivr.com. Bricklemyer graduated from UMBC in 2006 after receiving a B.S. and M.S. in Information Systems. Last October, he and business partner Sean Kennedy launched the website BeerGivr.com, which allows you to virtually buy your friends a drink.

If you owe your pal a drink but can't join him at the bar, BeerGivr sends him a text message with a gift code that can be redeemed for a frothy brew. BeerGivr currency is already accepted at sixteen local haunts, including Alewife and Bond Street Social in Baltimore and Frisco Taphouse & Brewery in Columbia.

Sponsored by UMBC’s Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship, the Raymond V. Haysbert, Sr. Entrepreneurship lecture also features Dr. Sheldon Broedel (Ph.D. and M.S., Microbial and Molecular Genetics, ’90), Chief Executive and Science Officer of Athena Environmental Sciences, Inc. and Nancy Krebs (B.A. Theatre, ’72), founder of The Voiceworks Studio.

For more information, see the event flyer.