Next week IBM's Watson system will try to establish its claim to be the world's smartest computer in a Jeopardy! challenge against two of the best human players. The three matches will be broadcast on CBS on February 14, 15 and 16. Watson's competition will be the biggest all-time Jeopardy money winner Brad Rutter ($3.2M) and Ken Jennings, who holds the record holder for winning the most consecutive games (74). See the Jeopardy! for their perspective on this match.

Watson and the match was the subject of PBS NOVA episode #3808, Smartest Machine On Earth which was broadcast last night. If you missed it as I did :-( you can see it tonight (Thursday February 10) in the Baltimore-DC area at 11:00pm on WETA2.

Watson is a result of IBM's DeepQA Project whose goal is to develop "a computer system that can directly and precisely answer natural language questions over an open and broad range of knowledge". According to IBM:

"Watson is an application of advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering. At its core, Watson is built on IBM's DeepQA technology for hypothesis generation, massive evidence gathering, analysis, and scoring. Watson is a workload optimized system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and the IBM DeepQA software to answer Jeopardy! questions in under three seconds. Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. Each Power 750 server uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight core processor, with four threads per core. The POWER7 processor's massively parallel processing capability is an ideal match for Watson's IBM DeepQA software which is embarrassingly parallel (that is a workload that executes multiple threads in parallel).

Add your comments to say who you think will win the Jeopardy! IBM Challenge and if this is a good test of intelligence.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Team is looking for new members. Cyber security is all over the news, and UMBC is right in the middle of it. Join the UMBC team to learn more about this exciting and fast growing field, and to gain access to the best competitions, such as CCDC, the DC3 DFC, and the recently announced MDC3, as well as networking opportunities with all the key players, from government agencies to private industry.

When and where?

Join us for a presentation followed by a discussion next Monday, February 14th from noon to 1.00PM, in room ITE 235.

Who should attend?

We are inviting everyone who has an interest in cyber security, regardless of your major or current knowledge level. Most of our team members are undergraduate IS or CS majors, but we also have graduate CE and EE majors.

Why?

Because we want your help to grow within both UMBC and Maryland.

In Spring 2010 our team competed in the regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Championship (CCDC) for the east coast. In this competition, each team defended a mock corporate network against a horde of professional hackers in a fast-paced, real-time event over the course of two days. During Fall 2010 we participated in a scrimmage hosted at Towson University and became an official student organization recognized by SGA, consolidating both our technical and organizational skills. For 2011, we are upgrading our whole network/computing infrastructure and expanding to new competitions such as DC3 and MDC3.

In summary, the UMBC Cyber Defense Team is a great opportunity to gain real world security experience. We practice both penetration and defense of isolated networks similar to real business environments and plan on tackling more research-oriented problems as well. No experience is required, but you must be motivated to learn about computer networks and systems security.

If you have any questions, please email Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address and we’ll help you out.

UMBC, SAIC, the National Cyber Security Alliance, the Tech Council of Maryland, and the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development have joined to hold the Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference on October 21-22, 2001. The event is designed to increase cyber awareness as a career choice in Maryland, improve the appreciation for cyber oriented curriculum in college and high schools, and convey cyber defense as a sport to increase interest in careers involving cyber security.

The competition will be divided into high school, collegiate and professional divisions. Qualifying rounds take place over the Internet between April and August 2011 using SAIC's Cyber Network Exercise System (CyberNEXS), a scalable training, exercise and certification system.  The top eight teams in each division will meet at the MDC3 event in October for the final round followed by an award ceremony at UMBC. MDC3 participants will also be able to learn from and network with other cybersecurity professionals, researchers, and scholars at the conference, which will include presentations, a career fair and a vendor exhibition.

For more information see this press release and the SAIC MDC3 site.

The UMBC Linux Users’ Group (LUG) will hold it's Spring Installfest on Friday February 18th from 10:30am to 5:00pm on the Commons Main Street. If you've ever wanted to try Linux but didn't know where to start, bring your computer and LUG members can help you install Linus and ensure that your hardware, including wireless, fingerprint reader, and webcam, is working.

At the Spring 2011 installfest, they will be installing Ubuntu version 10.10. If you would like assistance installing a different release or distribution, bring install media.

The installfest is open to anyone ans people with all skill levels, from complete novice to expert, are welcome. It's a great opportunity to meet people in the local Linux community.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Solitons, Self-Induced Transparency,
and Modelocking in Quantum Cascade Lasers

href="http://www.cs.umbc.edu/people/faculty/sergei-nirenburg/">Professor Curtis Menyuk
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00-2:15pm Friday, 18 March 2011, ITE 227, UMBC

Standard semiconductor lasers operate in a limited wavelength range, below about 4 microns. Quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) that operate in the mid-IR and far-IR have important applications to medicine, environmental sensing, and national security. While short pulse lasers (~100 fs) are available for standard semiconductor lasers, that is not the case for QCLs. Standard passive modelocking is hard to do in QCLs because of their long coherence times and short gain recovery times. We propose a fundamentally different approach, based on the self-induced-transparency (SIT) effect, that turns these weaknesses into strengths. Solitons, modelocking, and SIT are all reviewed at the beginning of the talk.

Curtis R. Menyuk was born March 26, 1954. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from MIT in 1976 and the Ph.D. from UCLA in 1981. He has worked as a research associate at the University of Maryland, College Park and at Science Applications International Corporation in McLean, VA. In 1986 he became an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and he was the founding member of this department. In 1993, he was promoted to Professor. He was on partial leave from UMBC from Fall, 1996 until Fall, 2002. From 1996 – 2001, he worked part-time for the Department of Defense, co-directing the Optical Networking program at the DoD Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences in Adelphi, MD from 1999 – 2001. In 2001 – 2002, he was Chief Scientist at PhotonEx Corporation. For the last 20 years, his primary research area has been theoretical and computational studies of lasers, nonlinear optics, and fiber optic communications. He has authored or co-authored more than 220 archival journal publications as well as numerous other publications and presentations. He has also edited three books. The equations and algorithms that he and his research group at UMBC have developed to model optical fiber systems are used extensively in the telecommunications and photonics industry. He is a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the IEEE. He is a former UMBC Presidential Research Professor.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

A Cognitive Architecture for
Simulating Bodies and Minds

Professor Sergei Nirenburg
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00-2:15pm Friday, 18 February 2011, ITE 227, UMBC

This talk is an overview of a cognitive architecture that supports the creation and deployment of intelligent agents capable of simulating human-like abilities. The agents, have a simulated mind and may also be supplied with a simulated body. These agents are intended to operate as members of multi-agent teams featuring both artificial and human agents. The agent architecture and its underlying knowledge resources and processors are being developed in a sufficiently generic way to support a variety of applications. In this talk we briefly describe the architecture and two proof-of-concept application systems we have developed within it: the Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP) system for training medical personnel and the CLinician’s ADvisor (CLAD).We organize the discussion around four specific aspects of agent capabilities implemented in MVP and CLAD: physiological simulation, knowledge management and learning, decision-making and language processing.

This is joint work with Marjorie McShane and Stephen Beale, with contributions from Jesse English, Ben Johnson, Bryan Wilkinson and Roberta Catizone.

The UMBC CSEE Department invites applications for a non-tenure track, full-time lecturer position to teach a variety of undergraduate computer science courses. Both a demonstrated ability to teach such courses and a strong interest in teaching undergraduates are essential. Applicants must have, or be about to receive, an M.S. or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science or a related discipline. Applications should be submitted by 15 March 2011 and the position will start on 23 August 2011.

Charles Croom, of Lockheed Martin will talk about "The State of Cyber Security 2011" at the UMBC Visionaries in IT Forum at 8:00am on Wednesday, February 23rd at the BWI Airport Marriott. The event is free but registration requested.

Croom joined Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions as Vice President of Cyber Security Solutions in October of 2008. In this capacity, he shapes the corporation’s cyber security strategy with insight from his 35 years of distinguished service, leadership, and technology experience from the U.S. Air Force. He co-chaired a National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee Task Force on “Strengthening Government and Private Sector Collaboration” which issued a May 2009 report recommending that the President direct the establishment of a Joint Coordinating Center. He currently serves on the Boards of the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and the Internet Security Alliance (ISA).

Croom retired as a U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General, Director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), and the Commander of the Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations in September 2008. While at DISA, he led a worldwide organization of more than 6,600 military and civilian personnel to serve the information technology and telecommunications needs of the President, Secretary of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, combatant commanders, and other Department of Defense stakeholders.

The UMBC Center for Women and Information Technology (CWIT) will hold the second Bits & Bytes event on February 20-21, 2011 for academically talented young women who are juniors in high school and excel in math and science. This year's event is sponsored by Northrop Grumman and is intended to engage local high school girls in the college atmosphere and expose them to the possibilities open to them in Engineering or IT majors in college.

Along with in-depth exposure to life as a college student and UMBC as an institution, the students will participate in an Engineering or IT design competition and will interact with current college students involved in the CWIT Scholars Program, including staying overnight in a residence hall on campus and attending a college class with one of the CWIT students.

CSEE Professor Hillol Kargupta was named a IEEE Fellow for his contributions to distributed data mining. Dr. Kargupta's research focuses on distributed data mining that explores technology for data analysis in distributed environments where data cannot be centralized because of organizational, performance or privacy reasons.

He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996. He is also a co-founder of AGNIK LLC, a ubiquitous data analytics company. His research interests include mobile and distributed data mining, mining in sensor networks, peer-to-peer data mining, privacy-preserving data mining, vehicular sensor networks.

The IEEE elevates a members to the grade of Fellow for "unusual distinction in the profession" and only for people "with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest". The number of new Fellows in any year is limited to at most one-tenth of one percent of the total membership.