UMBC's Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (CSEE) Department has research active graduate progams in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Currently, our department has over 250 graduates students who hail from all parts of the globe. To learn more about our graduate programs, take a look at our new graduate program brochures:

Computer Engineering Graduate Program Brochure

Electrical Engineering Graduate Program Brochure

Computer Science Graduate Program Brochure

The Atlantic has a short article on estimating the cost to the US economy of the popular angry birds game available on most smartphones.  Their estimate?  $1.5 billion dollars a year.

"Every March, it is a requirement that every newspaper and website in every town in the United States run a story about how much money American companies lose because people watch the NCAA basketball tournament instead of working. Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, the consulting firm that makes such estimates, has tried their hand at other games recently, too. A couple years ago, they gave a number for fantasy football, saying the hobby costs companies $10.5 billion in lost wages. So, when I heard today that people play 200 million minutes of Angry Birds a day, I wanted to know if the company had ever looked into lost productivity resulting from those dastardly pigs and their winged assassins. Sadly and inexplicably, they haven't. So, after looking at their methodology, I came up with my own estimate. Here it is."

You can read the full article here.

The Atlantic has a short article on estimating the cost to the US economy of the popular angry birds game available on most smartphones.  Their estimate?  $1.5 billion dollars a year.

"Every March, it is a requirement that every newspaper and website in every town in the United States run a story about how much money American companies lose because people watch the NCAA basketball tournament instead of working. Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, the consulting firm that makes such estimates, has tried their hand at other games recently, too. A couple years ago, they gave a number for fantasy football, saying the hobby costs companies $10.5 billion in lost wages. So, when I heard today that people play 200 million minutes of Angry Birds a day, I wanted to know if the company had ever looked into lost productivity resulting from those dastardly pigs and their winged assassins. Sadly and inexplicably, they haven't. So, after looking at their methodology, I came up with my own estimate. Here it is."

You can read the full article here.

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Cloud Computing

Henry J. Sienkiewicz

Chief Information Officer
Defense Information Systems Agency

11:30-12:30 Friday, 16 September 2011
Room 231, ITE Building

Mr. Henry Sienkiewicz will discuss the opportunities and challenges for using cloud computing in government agencies.

Henry J. Sienkiewicz is the Chief Information Officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency. As the DISA CIO he is responsible for developing, maintaining, and facilitating the implementation of the Agency's information technology (IT) architecture, enabling DISA to accomplish its critical combat support missions. As CIO, he ensures that agency IT and information assurance programs and policies are fully coordinated, integrated, and effectively implemented and are aligned with the Agency's strategy. Mr. Sienkiewicz joined DISA in 2008 as the Technical Program Director for DISA Computing Services before moving to the CIO position. He is a founding member of George Washington University's technology transfer council, retired from the US Army Reserves, and has been involved in many academic and entrepreneurial pursuits throughout his extensive IT career.

Hosts: Professor Yelena Yesha and Joel Morris

– directions — upcoming talks –

Ugonna Ohiri is a first year Senior majoring in Computer Engineering. A URA scholar, Ugonna's research deals with standoff chemical detection. To learn more about Ugonna's research pursuits, read his research profile.   

The Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department made significant accomplishments during the 2010-2011 school year. Our undergraduate enrollment grew to 886 students and our graduate enrollment grew to 271 students. Our department produced a total of 16 Ph.D’s during that time period. Our research productivity in terms of research expenditures has reached the level of our departmental budget at nearly $6 Million. In addition, Professor Hillol Kargupta was elevated to the level of IEEE fellow, and Professor Marie desJardins was promoted to full Professor.

Last year also marked a number of changes within the department. I became the Chair in October of last year after Professor Anupam Joshi ably served the department as interim chair, following Professor Charles Nicholas stepping down from the position.

We have also gained three new Computer Engineering faculty members: Assistant Professors Tinoosh Mohsenin, Chintan Patel, and Gymama Slaughter. Most recently, Shawn Lupoli joined the department as a lecturer in Computer Science.

Last year was also a time of transition. We had a number of faculty members retire: Sue Evans, senior lecturer in Computer Science, Professor John Pinkston, and Professor Zary Segall. We will miss their contributions to the department. In order to compensate for these losses, I am pleased to report that we have been authorized to search for a new Computer Science Assistant Professor.

Please look at our new website which contains a wealth of information for students, faculty, staff, visitors, and prospective students. You can visit it at www.csee.umbc.edu

-Gary
 

Six CSEE graduate students will present their research First Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning is a one-day event to be held at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on Friday, 23 September 2011. Its goal is to bring together students taking computational approaches to speech, language, and learning, so that they can introduce their research to the local student community, give and receive feedback, and engage each other in collaborative discussion. The students and the titles of their presentations are:

• Niyati Chhaya, Joint Inference for Extracting Text Descriptors from Triage Images of Mass Disaster
• Lushan Han, GoRelations: An Intuitive Query System for DBpedia
• Niels Kasch, Concept Modeling for Scripts
• Justin Martineau, DIVA: Domain Independence Verification Algorithm for Sentiment Analysis
• Varish Mulwad, Automatically Generating Linked Data from Tables
• Jennifer Sleeman, A Streaming Approach to Linking FOAF Instances
• Xianshu Zhu, Finding Story Chains in Newswire Articles

Attendance is open to all and free but space is limited, so online registration is requested by September 16. The program runs from 10:00am to 5:00pm and will include oral presentations, poster sessions, and breakout sessions.

CSEE Graduate Seminar

Nonlinear Optical Signal Processing in
Optical Fibers and Waveguides

Dr. Gary M. Carter
Professor of Electrical Engineering
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1-2pm Friday, 16 September, 2011, ITE 227

postponed until later in the Fall

Advances in optical fiber and semiconductor technology have progressed to the degree that nonlinear optical signal processing can be demonstrated at extraordinarily high data rates. This talk will review some of the work of Dr. Carter's research group in photonic crystal fibers, silicon nano wires, and AlGaAs optical waveguides.

Hosts: Profs. Joel M. Morris and Yelena Yesha

Upcoming CSEE talks

Genetic information for chronic disease prediction

Michael A. Grasso, MD, PhD
University of Maryland School of Medicine

1:00pm Friday 23 September 2011, 227 ITE

Type 2 diabetes and coronary artery disease are commonly occurring polygenic-multifactorial diseases, which are responsible for significant morbidity and mortality. The identification of people at risk for these conditions has historically been based on clinical factors alone. However, this resulted in prediction algorithms that are linked to symptomatic states, which have limited accuracy in asymptomatic individuals. Advances in genetics have raised the hope that genetic testing may aid in disease prediction, treatment, and prevention. Although intuitive, the addition of genetic information to increase the accuracy of disease prediction remains an unproven hypothesis. We present an overview of genetic issues involved in polygenic-multifactorial diseases, and summarize ongoing efforts use this information for disease prediction.

Michael Grasso is an Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and an Assistant Research Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He earned a medical degree from the George Washington University and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. He is a member of the Upsilon Pi Epsilon Honor Society in the Computing Sciences, the Kane-King-Dodec Medical Honor Society, and the William Beaumont Medical Research Honor Society. He completed a residency at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and currently works in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Maryland Medical Center. He has been awarded more than $1,200,000 in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Bureau of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Defense, and has authored more than 35 scholarly papers and abstracts. His research interests include clinical decision support systems, clinical data mining, clinical image processing, personalized medicine, software engineering, database engineering, and human factors. He is also a semi-professional trumpet player and is interested in the specific medical needs of performing artists, especially instrumental musicians.

Host: Yelena Yesha

MS Thesis Defense

Numerical Integration Techniques for Volume Rendering

Preeti Bindu

10:00am Wednesday, 7 September 2011, ITE 234

During the quick advancements of medical image visualization and augmented virtual reality applications improvements in the performances of Volume Rendering Algorithms need significant attention. Real-time visualization of 3D image data set is one of the key tasks of Augmented Reality Systems required by many medical imaging applications. Over past five years the development of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) has proved beneficial when it comes to Real Time Volume Rendering. We propose a GPU based volume rendering system for medical images. Our toolkit independent system is able to read DICOM images, implementing better integration technics that increase frame rate for volume rendering with the same quality of output images.

Committee

• Dr. Marc Olano (advisor)
• Dr. Penny Rheingans
• Dr. Samir Chettri