Exploring the Web, Beyond Document Search

Professor Yi Chen
Computer Science, Arizona State University

1:00pm Friday 24 February 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

Today we rely on Web Search Engines, like Google or Bing, to find relevant documents among trillions or quadrillions of documents on the Web. The Web also contains a vast amount of structured data in a variety of domains, such as travel, products, bibliographies, finance, and social networks. Current Web search engines and web database query interfaces are insufficient to satisfy the diverse search needs of web users. The information discovery processes are further complicated by the prevalence of uncertain data. At the same time, it is infeasible to request a web user to design clean databases and write precise SQL queries. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges, opportunities, and then some of the solutions that we have developed for empowering web users for effective information search on structured data. Furthermore, I will discuss how to enable successful social search so that complex computation tasks can be accomplished by leveraging social computing.

Yi Chen is an Associate Professor in Computer Science and an affiliate faculty in Biomedical Informatics at Arizona State University (ASU). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.S. from Central South University in 2005 and 1999, respectively. Her research interests include keyword search on structured data, learning uncertain data, workflow management and social computing, with applications in Web, social computing and healthcare. She is a general chair for SIGMOD'2012, a PC chair for KEYS’2009 and DBRank’2012. Yi Chen is a recipient of Outstanding Researcher Award in ASU CSE (2011), a Google Research Award (2011), IBM Faculty Award (2010) and an NSF CAREER Award (2009).

Host: Anupam Joshi

Amazon, one of the most innovative and fastest growing technology companies, will hold a technical talk and information session at 7:00pm this Thursday (2/23) for UMBC students interested in full-time positions or internships. The meeting will be in the Skylight Room of the Commons.

UMBC Alumna Akshaya Iyengar (MS CS '11) joined Amazon last year and will talk about what it's like to work at there as a software development engineer. Amazon recruiter Makenzie LaCount will talk about employment at Amazon and accept resumes from students interested in a full time position or internship.

Pre-registration is not required, but come early to enjoy the food and get an Amazon t-shirt.

As we are entering the second semester of the 2011-2012 academic year, we are preparing for changes and new opportunities. Associate Professor Brooke Stephens has retired and we are preparing to interview candidates for two open tenure track positions in Computer Science. CSEE has just received permission to search for a Professor of Practice in Computer Science. In addition to assisting our CS instruction, the Professor of Practice will be affiliated with our Cyber Security Program which is rapidly growing.

In the Kudos department: Professor Tim Finin was named UMBC Presidential Research Professor for 2012; Professor Anupam Joshi was recently appointed as the Oros Family Professor of Technology, a five year endowed professorship; UMBC’s 2012 Alumnus of the Year for Engineering and Information Technology is Ralph Semmel (’92 Ph.D., Computer Science).He is currently the Director of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory; the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has recognized CSEE Professor Marie desJardins as a Distinguished Member for her contributions to the field of computing; Professor Yelena Yesha was awarded the 2011 IBM Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) Faculty Fellow of the Year; the IEEE Signal Processing Society has named Professor Tulay Adali a Distinguished Lecturer.

CSEE was visited during Fall 2011 by ABET as part of the accreditation process for the Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs. Richard Chang, Tim Oates, Chuck LaBerge, and Mohammed Younis guided us through this process.

Have a great Spring Semester. Keep up to date by visiting www.csee.umbc.edu

-Gary

EE Graduate Seminar

Physical Layer Wireless Network Modeling and Simulation
and my Technical Publishing Experience

Jon R. Ward
EE PhD Student, UMBC and
the Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory

11:30 – 12:45, Friday, 17 February 2012, ITE 237

Jon Ward, and coauthors Jack Burbank and Bill Kasch, recently wrote a book for IEEE Press/Wiley entitled "An Introduction to Network Modeling and Simulation for the Practicing Engineer." In this talk, Jon will provide a biographical summary of his UMBC research, the path that led to the book, and the technical publishing process. The talk will then transition to a technical discussion that highlights physical layer wireless network modeling and simulation from Chapter 3 of the book.

Jon R. Ward, PE graduated from NCSU in 2005 with an MSEE. He currently works at The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) on projects focusing on wireless network design and interference testing of standards-based wireless technologies such as IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15.4, and IEEE 802.16. He has experience in wireless network modeling and simulation (M&S) and in test and evaluation (T&E) of commercial wireless equipment. He is currently a student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), pursuing a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

A Scalable, Fault Tolerant Programming Model for
Developing Data Intensive Parallel Applications

Tyler A. Simon
Faculty Research Scientist
UMBC Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research

1:00pm Friday 17 February 2012, ITE 325b

Future exascale computing systems will have to execute a single program on the order of 10^8-10^9 individual, low powered processing elements. These processors need to be fed data efficiently and reliably through the duration of a parallel computation. The current methods for explicit message passing between processors provide little in terms of fault tolerance support and the overheads of system level and application checkpoint/restart incur unreasonable overheads for exascale class computing systems.

We propose the development of novel autonomic execution model and an Adaptive Runtime Resource for Intensive Applications (RRIA), which improves application reliability, scalability and performance while freeing the programmer from explicit message passing. Experiments were conducted to evaluate ARRIA's capabilities on data intensive applications, those where the majority of execution time is spent reading and writing either to local or remote memory locations. In our approach, we focus on managing data movement both on a compute node and across a cluster of nodes for the application during runtime. We use a hybrid "threaded data parallel" model in which message passing is hidden entirely from the programmer and parallel tasks are bundled and farmed to a dynamic resource pool for execution.

Tyler Simon is a Faculty Research Assistant and PhD student working for the Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He is also a computational scientist at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard Space Flight Center. Tyler is interested in the theoretical and practical aspects of concurrency and parallel computation in general. His research is focused on what can be done with the effective application of distributed, parallel algorithms in high performance computing environments, particularly in parallel numerical methods and data movement.

Host: Yelena Yesha

Google is holding a contest to encourage students in the US and Canada to use Google Map Maker to improve the maps of their campus areas. You can add  2.5D and 3D models of building and interior floor plans. Registration started on Monday February 13 and the contest runs through March 9.

"Be a part of a university mapping contest open for US and Canadian students who currently study at a university in these two countries! From February 13, 2012 to March 9, 2012, improving the maps of your campus can give you a chance to be a local hero and the highest scoring entries will win prizes like Samsung Galaxy tablets, Samsung Android phones, Google Map Maker messenger bags, and more!

Submit your entry for a chance to win and help your university at the same time! Join together with up to three other student mappers to add high quality edits like university buildings, walking paths, public spaces, or restaurant hangouts near your campus using Google Map Maker, and your efforts could win a grand prize package worth more than $5,000 USD for your team."

Google maps and Google Earth now support Web GL, "a software library that extends the capability of the JavaScript programming language to allow it to generate interactive 3D graphics within any compatible web browser." The new interface requires Chrome 14 or Firefox 8 (beta), Windows Vista/7 or Mac OS 10.6+ or Linux and a graphics card that supports WebGL.

See the contest site for the full details.

A Self-Powered In-Vitro Biosensing Microsystem

Dr. Gymama Slaughter

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

11:30am-12:45pm Friday, 10 February 2012, ITE 237

Recent studies on biofuel cells have shown that energy can be harvested from biological compounds. Because of the recent biofuel cell discoveries, it possible to use inertial power scavenging design by converting interstitial glucose into energy through the coupling of enzymes and three-dimensional nanowire arrays. This talk will discuss our own contribution to identifying a pathway to embed sensing by eliminating the need for a potentiostat circuit and an external power source.

The self-powered biosensing microsystem consist of massively dense 3D nanowire cell structures fused with an energy harvesting circuit that maximizes power and energy densities while maintaining short ion transport distances, thus leading to dramatic improvement in both speed and energy efficiency of biofuel cells. Not only is such a paradigm extremely fast because of absence of a potentiostat circuit, but it is also extremely energy-efficient since the device operates at low voltage and current levels. As a result, the biosensing microsystem generates a drive signal in real-time and periodically powers an electrical device by generating and accumulating electrical power as a result of the catalysis of glucose.

Gymama Slaughter received her B.S. in Chemistry in 2001, M.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2003, and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the Virginia Commonwealth University in 2005. She then joined Virginia State University as an Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering and Director of the Center for Biosystems and Engineering University. Finally, she joined the UMBC as Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering in August 2010.

Dr. Slaughter is currently the Director of the Bioelectronics Laboratory Group and oversees research and research outreach programs in the BEL Group. She develops and applies sensor-processor platforms, focusing on innovative contributions to identifying a pathway to embed sensing and processing functions in the same device to eliminate bottlenecks arising from communication between the sensor, transducer, and processor, thus, resulting in ultra-fast and ultra-low power devices.

Her research has been supported by the NSF for her diabetes research that focuses on the design and development of glucose biosensor, especially in relationship to monitoring blood glucose in diabetics. Her research interests include biosensors, microsensors, microfabrication technology, and BioMEMS and design.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

UMBC invites applications for a non-tenure track position in Computer Science at the rank of Professor of the Practice to begin August 2012. All CS areas will be considered, but we are especially interested in security related areas. Applicants should have a Ph.D. or equivalent stature by virtue of experience. Ideal candidates will have a history of research, publication, teaching, and industry experience. Duties include teaching both graduate and undergraduate courses and helping develop cyber security programs. For best consideration, apply by March 15, 2012. Reviews will begin immediately and applications will be accepted until the position is filled. For more information and to apply, see http://bit.ly/UMBCPoP. UMBC is an AA/EOE.

Innovating for Society: Realizing the
Promise and Potential of Computing

Dr. Farnam Jahanian

Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
National Science Foundation

10:30am Thursday, 9 February 2012, ITE 456, UMBC

The computing discipline is at the center of an ongoing societal transformation. The explosive growth of scientific and social data, wireless connectivity at broadband speeds for billions of mobile endpoints, and seamless access to computational resources in the “cloud” are transforming the way we work, learn, play, and communicate. Advances in computation and data-enabled techniques will continue to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and engineering innovation, with the impact becoming more pervasive throughout society for decades to come.  Dr. Jahanian will focus his talk on some of the technological and societal trends that are shaping our future and providing new opportunities for foundational research and education. He will describe how these advances influence the portfolio of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at NSF and, therefore, also serve as key drivers of economic competitiveness and are crucial to achieving national priorities.

Farnam Jahanian serves as the National Science Foundation Assistant Director for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. He guides CISE, with a budget of over $635 million, in its mission to uphold the nation’s leadership in computer and information science and engineering through support of fundamental and transformative advances that are a key driver of economic competitiveness and that are crucial to achieving national priorities. Dr. Jahanian is also co-chair of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council Committee on Technology, providing overall coordination for the activities of 15 government agencies.

Dr. Jahanian is on leave from the University of Michigan, where he holds the Edward S. Davidson Collegiate Professorship and served as Chair for Computer Science and Engineering from 2007 – 2011 and as Director of the Software Systems Laboratory from 1997 – 2000. His research on Internet infrastructure security formed the basis for the Internet security company Arbor Networks, which he co-founded in 2001. He served as Chairman of Arbor Networks until its acquisition by Tektronix Communication in 2010. Dr. Jahanian holds a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Host: Prof. Anupam Joshi

If you have good programming skills and are looking for an interesting alternative to the usual summer internship, you might check out the Google Summer of Code program. It pays student developers $5000 stipends to write code for various open source projects over the summer. Over the past seven years, it's brought together over 6,000 students with over 300 open source projects to create millions of lines of code.

A set of open source projects (aka mentoring organizations) will be selected and announced in mid-March. Students apply to work on one of more of these and each mentoring organization ranks the students interested in working with them. Google facilitates the final selection and pairing. The mentoring organization works closely with the student to define tasks, check progress, help solve problems, etc. Typically the student works remotely, interacting with his or her mentor via email, chat, skype, etc.

Students can submit applications via the Google Summer of Code 2012 site from March 26 to April 6. Google says that that the best applications they receive are from students who took the time to interact with one of the participating mentoring organizations and discuss their ideas before submitting an application. About 1,100 students are expected to be funded this year.

You can get more information on the 2012 GSoC site, an associated Google+ page, or by subscribing to a mailing list.