The CRA reports that total enrollments among U.S. computer science undergraduates increased 10% in 2010 based on data from its most recent annual Taulbee Survey. This is the third straight year of increases in total enrollment and indicates that the post “dot-com crash” decline in undergraduate computing program enrollments is over. The Taulbee Survey is conducted annually to document trends in student enrollment, degree production, employment of graduates, and faculty salaries in Ph.D-granting departments of computer science, computer engineering and information systems in the United States and Canada. You can find the data in a CRA report on Computing Degree and Enrollement Trends.  The full data from the Taulbee report will be available later in May from the CRA Web site.

The data for UMBC computing majors shows similar increases in the past three years.

UMBC Linux Users Group

SELinux Talk and Tutorial

David Quigley
Advanced Engineering & Development, Keyw Corporation

4:00pm Friday, 1 April 2011
Room 229 ITE, UMBC

Over a decade ago researchers at the National Information Assurance Research Lab at the NSA identified a need for flexible mandatory access controls to help provide a solid foundation for secure systems. This resulted in the development of the FLASK architecture, which has seen implementation in a number of operating systems. The most prominent implementation of FLASK is in the form of SELinux. Since the early days of SELinux adoption much work as been done to improve the utility and usability of SELinux. These enhancement have turned SELinux from a prototype research implementation into a robust access control mechanism that is used by a variety of customers world wide.

This talk is a from the ground up journey through SELinux. It starts with why do we need this technology and then moves through where to obtain it, how it works, and how to identify and solve problems associated with SELinux. In addition to these basics the talk also covers slightly more advanced topics such as hot to construct policy for new applications and hot to address customizations particular to your deployments.

David Quigley started his career as a Computer Systems Researcher for the National Information Assurance Research Lab at the NSA where he worked as a member of the SELinux team but has since left that position. David leads the design and implementation efforts to provide Labeled-NFS support for SELinux. David has previously contributed to the open source community through maintaining the Unionfs 1.0 code base and through code contributions to various other projects. David has presented at conferences such as the Ottawa Linux Symposium, the StorageSS workshop, LinuxCon and several local Linux User Group meetings where presentation topics have included storage, file systems, and security. David currently works as a Computer Science Professional for the Advanced Engineering and Development division at Keyw Corporation.

This talk is sponsored by the UMBC Linux Users' Group.

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The Ph.D. programs for Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering have adopted a new comprehensive portfolio process that replaces the old comprehensive examinations process. The requirements and associated forms can be found in the following document: CMPE/ENEE Ph.d. Comprehensive Portfolio Policy Implementation Guidelines.

Current and prospective undergraduate Computer Engineering majors are invited to an informal open house meeting from 11:30am to 12:50pm on Wednesday, March 2nd in ITE 456. CSEE chairman Gary Carter and CMPE faculty will present information on the undergraduate program and its tracks and courses as well as offer academic and career advice. There will be ample time for questions, feedback, comments and discussion. Lunch will be provided.

We are also recruiting current majors for a student advisory panel to review the CMPE program and courses. To volunteer for the panel, please attend the meeting or contact the CMPE undergraduate program director, Professor Curtis Menyuk (menyuk at umbc.edu).

The 11th Annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing has opened its Call for Participation. The annual conference, presented by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, is the world's largest gathering of women in computing. The 2011 CHC will take place from 9-12 November 9-12 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. This year's theme "What if?" recognizes that innovation in technology arises from the question What if a culture of technology that encourages participation and inquiry from a diverse workforce leads to greater levels of innovation.

The GHC is designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. Leading researchers present their current work, while special sessions focus on the role of women in today's technology fields, including computer science, information technology, research and engineering. The technical conference features well known keynote speakers and invited technical speakers, panels, workshops, new investigator technical papers, PhD forums, technical posters, birds of a feather sessions, the ACM Student Research Competition and an Awards Celebration.

Submissions on both technical and professional topics are encouraged. The GHC committee requests submissions reflecting the conference theme "What if?" in the areas of innovation within a company, from academia, or from individual contributors. Technical submissions that cross disciplines and other boundaries are encouraged. The submission deadline is March 15, 2011.

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.