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Join the CWIT Scholars and Affiliates to learn more about the internships and research projects of nine members of our CWIT Community. Dinner will be served following the conclusion of the presentations.

Presetations:

Jessica Izumi (Chemical Engineering) Investigating the relationship between microstructure and charge transport in P3HT films. Research. During the summer of 2011, I participated in a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at the Georgia Institute of Technology where I investigated how changing the crystallinity of poly3hexylthiophene films affected their mobility. To examine the various structures of each film, the film processing method was changed as well as the semiconductor dielectric interface. In addition, regioregularity and the testing material was also changed.

Lilian Johnson (Chemical Engineering). Nanofluidics of Polymer Chains Under Confinement. Research. Nanofluidic devices can be used to manipulate and transport individual biomolecules, typically, single strands of DNA.  A device under study at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a nanofluidic staircase which consists of an array of nanoslits arranged in steps.  Experimental observations show that a DNA molecule will diffuse down the staircase in an effectively one-dimensional path.  The molecular dynamics simulator LAMMPS was used to simulate the behavior of a DNA molecule in the staircase.  The model will be evaluated for its ability to correspond to experimental data and to elucidate the behavior of the polymer in various levels of confinement.

Sam Celmer (Chemical Engineering). Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center Internship An introduction of the work I performed at Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center for two years.  Will contain brief descriptions of what I worked on, what I learned and my favorite part of working with the government.  It will also contain a brief description of the organization itself, what I did after I stopped working there and hopefully my plans to continue to work there.
   
Rachel Sweeton (Computer Science) Hacking the Network Internship. During my internship at SAIC in the summer of 2011, I worked with a group to research different ways to hack 2G mobile phones and then looked into intercepting phone calls using a modified femtocell. My presentation will briefly discuss this project and our findings.

Amy Ciavolino (Computer Science). Getting a cool Job: A How-To Guide Professional Development. Awesome jobs are hard to find, and applying to them can be a little intimidating, but once you know where to start, it gets a lot easier. Since I just looked for and found exactly the job I wanted, I'll share the tips and tricks I picked up along the way.

Morgan Madeira (Computer Science). The Perks of Being a Google Intern. Internship. I will talk about my internship at Google in Kirkland, WA during the summer of 2011. My talk will include details about applying for the position, the BOLD program, my project, and life as a Googler.
   
Alec Pulianas (Computer Engineering). Access MT: A Multi-touch Tabletop Built with Accessibility in Mind. Research AccessMT is a an accessible multi-touch table designed with accessibility in mind. AccessMT is a self-contained hardware prototype consisting of a projector, computer, infrared lights, and a modified camera. Users can interact with AccessMT using simple touches, gestures, and tagged objects. Using the open source software packages Community Core Vision and BSQSimulator, we are able to track a user’s fingers and translate each of them into touch events. AccessMT builds upon prior multi-touch tables, but was designed to enable it to be easily adapted for use by people with disabilities. This presentation describes the challenges we’ve encountered and overcome in developing this new prototype. Research is being conducted in UMBC’s Department of Information Systems with Dr. Shaun Kane.

Emily Scheerer (Computer Science). Booz Allen Hamilton Internship Report InternshipThis presentation reports my learning experience during the course of a summer internship at Booz Allen Hamilton, during which I worked as part of the team building an automated testing capability for the E-Space project enabling repeatable, autonomous testing with a deep regression suite. In addition, I obtained Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) and EC-Council Certified Security Analyst (ECSA) certifications, and will be discussing the benefits of obtaining these certifications.

Shreya Mohan (Information Systems) Mobile Touch and Gesture Interactions for Children. Research With the popularity of mobile devices increasing, their respective audiences are expanding as well. Many of today's mobile devices require touch input and are designed primarily for adults. However, recently, it's been seen that children are starting to use these devices more- be it cell phones, tablets, or etc. Children have a variety of limitations that can affect their user experience with touchscreens. This study seeks to determine what differences lie in adults and children's touch interactions with mobile devices. The overall goal is to provide research findings that will help application developers create better touch user interfaces for children. Research is being conducted in UMBC’s Department of Information Systems with Dr. Lisa Anthony.

MS Thesis Defense

Distributed Model Consensus for Models of Locally
Biased Measurements in Wireless Sensor Networks

Jacob Thompson

4:00pm Wednesday, 25 April 2012, ITE 325B, UMBC

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of interconnected microsensors, each of which collects measurements from its local environment, which are often used in monitoring and control applications. These applications make inferences about the global and local states of the deployment environment. However, due to the limited communication and energy resources at the sensors, gathering all the raw data at a central fusion/control point is impractical.

Hence, it is essential to have distributed learning and inference in WSNs, such as learning a consensus model from the locally learned models. Consensus is challenging due to the limited resources of the sensors and the inherent bias of the individual sensor models learned from their local sensing environments. Two leading approaches for this problem are the approach by Zheng et al which uses loopy belief propagation on a certain graphical model based on the WSN topology and the local models, and the approach by Xiao et al which relies on gossip averaging of the parameters of the local models.

We focus on multivariate linear regression models, such as Bayesian, Ridge, and Lasso regression models. We analyze and extend the loopy Gaussian belief propagation (GaBP) approach to model consensus, and compare its performance to the gossip averaging approach. We experimentally find that GaBP tends to converge much faster than gossip averaging, but to a less accurate estimated consensus model (especially in the presence of multiple cycles in its corresponding graphical model). We also find that gossip averaging along paths in the WSN, tends to provide much faster convergence to more accurate estimated consensus models as compared to GaBP.

Committee: Professors Kostas Kalpakis (chair), Tim Oates and Yun Peng

photo courtesy www.umbc.edu/gsa

More than two-dozen Computer Science and Electrical Engineering graduate students are slated to present at the Graduate Student Association's annual Graduate Research Conference (GRC). The GRC will be held this Friday, April 27 and features a keynote presentation from Dr. Michael I. Nishimura, a UMBC alumnus who now works at Loyola University Chicago as a professor in the Department of Surgery, the Associate Director of the Oncology institute, the Associate Director of the Cancer Center Translations Research, and as Program Director of Immunologic Therapeutics.

This year, the CSEE presence at the GRC is even stronger than it was last year, when three CSEE students were awarded for outstanding presentations. The honorees were Varish Mulwad who received an award for an outstanding oral presentation on his dissertation research entitled "Generating Knowledge from Tables," Kavita Krishnaswamy who received an award for an outstanding oral presentation on her thesis research entitled "Path planning a roboticarm efficiently," and Akshya Iyengar who received an award for an outstanding poster presentation for her thesis research entitled "Estimating Temporal Boundaries of Events using Social Media Data".

Take a look at the list below, which includes the 27 CSEE graduate students who will present at the GRC this year.

Check out some photos from last year's conference.

Click here for a printable list of CSEE presenters.

Oral Presentations
Location: Sondheim 203

“Noise Reduction in AIRS Infared Earth Observing Radiance Grids using the Obscov Algorithm”
David Chapman, Milton Halem, Phuong Nguyen, and Jeff Avery
Time: 9:00 a.m.

“Heart Disease Prediction Model: A Data Mining Approach”
Soma Das
Time: 9:15 a.m.

“Measuring the Pulse Duration of Ultrafast Lasers”
Jared Dixon
Time: 9:30 a.m.

“Using Deceptive Packets to Increase Base-Station Anonymity in Wireless Sensor Network”
Yousef Ebrahimi and Mohamed Younis
Time: 9:45 a.m.

“SmartRate: A Rating Interpretation Mechanism for Agents in Smart Grid Markets”
Yasaman Haghpanah
Time: 10:00 a.m.

“Visualizing Changes to Directory Structure to Support Digital Forensics”
Timothy Leschke
Time: 10:15 a.m.

“Extracting Semantic Linked Data from Tables”
Varish Mulwad
Time: 10:30 a.m.

“Automatic Identification of Prescription Drugs Using Shape, Imprint, and Color”
Adrian Rosebrock
Time: 11:00 a.m.

“An Optical Sensor for a Ceramic Water Filtration System for the Detection of E.Coli Using a Microfluidic Chip”
Serina Woods
Time: 11:15 a.m.

Poster Presentations
Location: Albin O. Kuhn Library: 7^th Floor

“Witness-based Saboteur Detection in Multi-agent Systems”
Petr Babkin
Time: 11:00 a.m.

“Entity Linking and Disambiguation for Smartphone Platforms”
Anurag Korde
Time: 11:00 a.m.

“Third-order Quadratically Converging, Quasi-Newton Optimization”
Rory Mulvaney
Time: 11:00 a.m.

“Supervised Learning Techniques for Predicting Risk of Breast Cancer using Genetic Information”
Aniket Bochare
Time: 11:12 a.m.

“Prostate Cancer Prognosis using Genomic Data”
Rohit Kugaonkar
Time: 11:12 a.m.

“Using Supervised Techniques for Classification of Conventional Data Items”
Nikhil Puranik
Time: 11:12 a.m.

“Surface Emitting Quantum Cascade Laser Array”
Xing Chen, Liwei Cheng, Dingkai Guo, and Fow-Sen Choa
Time: 11:24 a.m.

“Learning Sensitive to Multiple Sources of Costs”
Zachary Kurtz
Time: 11:24 a.m.

“Exploring Hidden Markov Model for Semantic Activity Prediction”
Amey Sane
Time: 11: 24 a.m.

“Calculating Representatives of Geographic Sites across the World”
Ashwinkumar Ganesan
Time: 11:36 a.m.

“Older Adults Interactions with a Touch Table Top Display Space”
Galina Madjaroff
Time: 11:36 a.m.

“Rendering of Smoke and Fire in a 3D Volume with Multiple Scattering”
Taekyu Shin
Time: 11:36 a.m.

“Chronic Disease Prediction: An Experimental Analysis Using the K-nearest Neighbor Algorithm”
Matthew Gately
Time: 11:48 a.m.

“Situation Aware Intrusion Detection Model”
Sumit S. More
Time: 11:48 a.m.

“Unsupervised Coreference Resolution for FOAF Instances”
Jennifer Sleeman
Time: 11:48 a.m.

“Towards an Intuitive Query System for DBpedia”
Lushan Han
Time: 12:00 p.m.

“Link Prediction Using Frequent Subgraphs”
Maksym Morawski
Time: 12:00 p.m.

“Modeling Motheye Antireflective Structures for Increased Coupling through As2S3 Optical Fibers”
Robert J. Weiblen
Time: 12:00 p.m.

Classes each Wednesday evening starting October 17.

This five week workshop prepares participants to take the computer-adaptive Graduate Records Examination. The purpose of the course is to improve students' performance on the GRE by:

• Providing students with successful test management techniques
• Familiarizing students with question types specific to the GRE
• Teaching the logical, rhetorical, and mathematical problem-solving techniques relevant to the GRE
• Teaching essential grammatical and mathematical concepts and techniques in application to real test problems
• Identifying the specific problems posed by the GRE, and analyzing common test-taking errors
• Improving performance and reducing test anxiety through practice testing

This workshop is taught by Dr. Anthony Poplawski, who has helped thousands of students perform better on their GRE examinations. While this workshop provides participants with very valuable information, techniques and strategies for maximizing their potential on the GRE, please note that it does not replace studying. In addition to taking this workshop we recommend that students dedicate significant time to studying for the examination in order to be truly prepared.

Please visit the Graduate Record Examination web site at www.gre.org to view information on the GRE exam.

TO REGISTER AND LEARN MORE ABOUT THE COURSE, PLEASE VISIT:

http://www.umbc.edu/testprep/gre.html

Take advantage of early bird discounts by registering before September 26, 2012!

Come to UMBC and prepare for the types of questions included in the Law School Admissions Test. Designed to improve performance on the competitive LSAT, this intensive course focuses on:

1. Test-taking techniques
2. Time-saving methods
3. Improving logical reasoning
4. Practicing with sample tests
5. Enhancing reading comprehension
6. Reducing test anxiety

Taught by Dr. Anthony Poplawski of Spiegelberg and Associates, UMBC’s Test Preparation Courses are acclaimed for their comprehensiveness, revealing the true character of the test, their focus on maximizing scores, their intellectual seriousness, and reducing the test candidate’s test anxiety. Instruction is at the highest professional level by experienced college faculty.

Please visit The Law School Admission Council at www.lsac.org to view information on the LSAT exam.

TO REGISTER AND LEARN MORE ABOUT THE COURSE, PLEASE VISIT:

http://www.umbc.edu/testprep