Amazon has announced a new program allowing students to rent textbooks.

“Kindle Textbook Rental is a flexible and affordable way to read textbooks. You can rent for the minimum length, typically 30 days, and save up to 80% off the print list price. If you find you need your textbook longer, you can extend your rental by as little as 1 day as many times as you want and just pay for the added days.”

Amazon’s typically sells its kindle textbooks for nearly the same as the hardcopy ones, so renting a textbook may be attractive. We’ve not yet seen any Computer Science or Computer Engineering kindle books for rent, so can’t say how much of a discount there is if you rent for a semester.

By the way, the format that Kindle uses is based on Mobipocket, which is based on HTML. There are some good open source systems that you can use to create kindle-compatible documents from various sources.

The Community College of Baltimore County this month held a five-day cybersecurity camp for teenagers who may be on track to becoming cyber experts. Twenty-two students from Baltimore and Howard counties took part in the camp, which was intended to get high school students interested in security, and to consider pursuing college degrees or entry-level positions in the field. WBAL has a short article and video.

The Community College of Baltimore County this month held a five-day cybersecurity camp for teenagers who may be on track to becoming cyber experts. Twenty-two students from Baltimore and Howard counties took part in the camp, which was intended to get high school students interested in security, and to consider pursuing college degrees or entry-level positions in the field. WBAL has a short article and video.

While you can find a treehouse to rent using Airbnb, they also have a mockup of one for their employees to chill in.

Last week’s Wall Street Journal had a story, The Perk Bubble Is Growing as Tech Booms Again, on how technology companies compete for employees by offering more and more extravagant perks.

“Here in the capital of the latest tech boom, engineers and product developers work late into the night creating the next big thing. But they take office culture just as seriously, fueling behavior that is reaching a level of froth not seen in a decade.

Some Web start-ups are partying like it’s 1999. Airbnb’s housewarming later this month is to include a visit by rapper and occasional tech investor M.C. Hammer. The party room at reviews site Yelp Inc. has three beer kegs with built-in iPads to offer information about what’s on tap. Last month, start-ups Peanut Labs Inc. and AdParlor Inc. sponsored the sold-out “Pirates of Silicon Valley Cruise,” a $600-per-person seafaring party.

While you can find a treehouse to rent using Airbnb, they also have a mockup of one for their employees to chill in.

Last week’s Wall Street Journal had a story, The Perk Bubble Is Growing as Tech Booms Again, on how technology companies compete for employees by offering more and more extravagant perks.

“Here in the capital of the latest tech boom, engineers and product developers work late into the night creating the next big thing. But they take office culture just as seriously, fueling behavior that is reaching a level of froth not seen in a decade.

Some Web start-ups are partying like it’s 1999. Airbnb’s housewarming later this month is to include a visit by rapper and occasional tech investor M.C. Hammer. The party room at reviews site Yelp Inc. has three beer kegs with built-in iPads to offer information about what’s on tap. Last month, start-ups Peanut Labs Inc. and AdParlor Inc. sponsored the sold-out “Pirates of Silicon Valley Cruise,” a $600-per-person seafaring party.

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

Finding a Temporal Frame Comparison Function
for the Metacognitive Loop

Dean Earl Wright III

9:00am Wednesday 26 July 17 August 2011, ITE325 UMBC

The field of Artificial Intelligence has seen steady advances in cognitive systems. However, many of these systems perform poorly when faced with situations outside of their training. And as the real world is dynamic, this brittleness is a major problem in the field today. Adding metacognition to such systems can improve their operation in the face of perturbations found in dynamic environments. The Metacognitive Loop (MCL) works with a host system, monitoring its sensors and expectations. When a failure is indicated, MCL advises the host system on corrective actions.

Differing amounts of metacognition can be made available to the host system. At the lowest level no assistance is given. Above that are rule-based systems with hard-coded responses to stimulations. Next are evaluative systems that weigh multiple inputs using neural network or other techniques. At each level, the metacognition system can provide useful assistance in more situations.

The next level of metacognition adds a temporal dimension. A metacognitive system that has no concept of time has to either treat each new problem as (1) a symptom of previously encountered problems or (2) a completely new problem. Both of these extremes lead to providing poor advice to the host system. Thus, the temporal level of metacognition needs a more discriminating test to compare the current situation encountered by the host system with previous problems.

Several algorithms were developed to find the one that would provide the best performance for a simulated Mars Rover that faced with a dynamic environment with multiple perturbations. Several methods were found that allow MCL to provide good advice most of the time and allow the Mars Rover to successfully complete complex tasks.

Committee:

• Dr. Tim Oates (chair)
• Dr. Marie desJardins
• Dr. Tim Finin
• Dr. Anupam Joshi
• Dr. Don Perlis (UMCP)

Software Development Times reports that Computer Science is the top major for job offers.

“Computer science graduates now get more offers of employment than any other major. This is the first time since 2008 that computer science has topped the list: previously, accounting majors had the highest offer rate. In 2011, 56.2% of computer science majors received job offers, compared to only 53.8% of accounting majors. The offer rate for computer science majors increased 13.8% this year from the previous year.”

Software Development Times reports that Computer Science is the top major for job offers.

“Computer science graduates now get more offers of employment than any other major. This is the first time since 2008 that computer science has topped the list: previously, accounting majors had the highest offer rate. In 2011, 56.2% of computer science majors received job offers, compared to only 53.8% of accounting majors. The offer rate for computer science majors increased 13.8% this year from the previous year.”

MS Thesis Defense

Distributed Approach for Mitigating Coverage Loss
in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor networks

Kavin Rathinam Kasinathan

10:00am 15 July 2011, ITE 325b

In a heterogeneous wireless sensor network, nodes with different sensing capabilities are dispersed throughout an area of interest. Nodes with similar capabilities are not necessarily collocated. When a node fails, the area in the vicinity of such a node is left uncovered and the application may be negatively impacted. In this paper, we present a distributed algorithm for mitigating the coverage loss caused by the failure of a sensor node. The proposed algorithm looks for one or multiple nodes that can be repositioned in order to fill the coverage gap. A search is conducted within the 2-hop neighborhood to identify a node or a combination of more than one node that can collectively possess the capabilities of the failed node. In order to maximize the performance of the network, the replaceable nodes are chosen such that there is a minimum coverage and connectivity impact on the network after replacement. In the addition, the distance a node will travel to replace the failed node is also taken into consideration to limit the recovery overhead.

Committee members:

• Dr.Mohamed Younis (Chair)
• Dr.Charles Nicholas
• Dr.Tinoosh Mohsenin

Today’s Washington Post article, As smartphones proliferate, some users are cutting the computer cord, describes how smartphones are enabling a “always-on, Internet-on-the-go society”.

“A third of all American adults own a smartphone and for many minority and low income users, those mobile devices have replaced computers for Internet access. The findings released Monday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project highlight the breakneck speed consumers are adopting smartphones — faster than just about any high-tech product in history. … Of those who solely rely on smartphones to surf the Web, most are minorities, younger than 30 and have low incomes. They’ve found mobile devices as a suitable replacement for buying expensive computers and paying DSL or cable modem bills every month, Smith said. Cable and DSL remain faster, but that difference may not be big enough to justify their high costs for some consumers.”

How many UMBC students use a smartphone for a significant part of their access to the Internet? What are you using: iPhone, Android, Blackberry, WebOS? Please share your experience as a comment.