MS Thesis Defense

Semantic Light: Building Blocks

Charles Lohr

2:15pm Thursday, 12 May 2011, ITE 346

The concept of Semantic Light is simply that lighting systems can be aware of what they are lighting. This offers a number of potential advantages over conventional lighting in quality and efficiency. Semantic Light requires fine grained control of the output of many lights and requires sensors to take in information about what is being lit. It uses this information to control the output lighting in great detail. By running various algorithms, Semantic Light can provide information to the user and has a number of applications including augmented reality.

Traditional lighting that is currently in wide use has limited control of quality and quantity of the light produced. Few lights for large-scale use are intended to control their output in any kind of detailed manner. Most area lighting only has a switch that must be manually turned on or off. While there are many commercial systems that allow for more fine grained control, they are typically limited to remote control, motion control and extra manual controls. These systems can be wasteful, or they may provide inappropriate amounts of light, or they may be on when no one is using them.

While other Semantic Lighting systems may focus on "green" or powern saving aspects, we concentrate instead on innovative roles Semantic Light could play as well as on the technology to make it possible to fill those roles. By emphasizing new utility and maximizing our speed to prototype, we have made several tradeoffs that will cause our system to be less efficient than it could be, even less efficient than traditional lighting systems. The ideas and concepts covered, however, could be adapted to different underlying technologies to produce a product that could provide considerable power saving over conventional lighting.

It is important to think of the many concepts covered as primary building blocks, rather than a complete commercial system. A number of refinements and extensions will be needed to produce a commercial viable product. We demonstrate all of the needed building blocks in a concise, prototyped system.

Committee:

• Mark Olano
• Yelena Yesha
• Zary Segall (advisor)

2011 CSEE Research Review

photos · program · posters · location · call for papers

The 2011 research review event was the largest to date, with more than eighty people attending. You can see pictures from the poster session and some of the presentations online.

The CRR-11 program committee selected students for best research based on submitted papers.

• Amy Ciavolino, Eliana Feasley, and Robert Deloatch were selected for best undergraduate research for their work Playing to Program: Towards an Intelligent Programming Tutor for RUR-PLE
• Pramod Jagtap was chosen for best research by a Masters student for his thesis work on Privacy Preservation in Context Aware Geosocial Networking Applications.
• Richard Carback won best research by a PhD student for his research on Scantegrity II Municipal Election at Takoma Park: The First E2E Binding Governmental Election with Ballot Privacy.
• Wenjia Li was selected for honorable mention for his PhD research on A Holistic Framework for Securing Mobile Ad Hoc Networks.

CSEE faculty who attended used range voting to honor three students for best poster presentations.

• First place was awarded to Justin Martineau for his work on Domain Independent Textual Sentiment Analysis.
   
• Second place was given to Charles Lohr for his work on Semantic Light: Building Blocks.
   
• Third place was awarded to Varish Mulwad for his work on Generating Linked Data by Inferring the Semantics of Tables.

MS Thesis Defense

Group Centric Information Sharing
using Hierarchical Models

Amit Mahale

10:00am Tuesday, 10 May 2011, ITE 346, UMBC

Traditional security policies are often based on the concept of “need to know” and are typified by predefined and often rigid specifications of which principals and roles are pre-authorized to access what information. A recommendations of the 9/11 commission was to find ways to move from this traditional perspective toward one that emphasizes the “need to share”. Ravi Sandhu and his colleagues have developed the Group centric secure information sharing model (gSIS) as a new model that is more adaptible to highly dynamic situations requiring information sharing. We present an implementation of gSIS and demonstrate its usefulness to usecases in information sharing in social media. Our contributions include the prototype implementation, extension to the model such as hierarchical groups and necessary and sufficient conditions, and the use of the semantic Web language OWL for representing the central gSIS concepts and associated data. Our framework uses a pragmatic approach of using semantic web technology to represent and reason about the hierarchy and procedural method to compute access decisions relying on the gSIS semantics.

Thesis Committee:

• Dr. Tim Finin (chair)
• Dr. Anupam Joshi
• Dr. Yelena Yesha
• Dr. Laura Zavala