Huguens Jean, '03, '11, Ph.D., electrical engineering, and Clifford Muse '11, information systems, returned to Haiti in March 2010, after the devastating January earthquake, to fulfill their grandfather's last request of them. As he was dying of cancer, he asked that at his funeral they celebrate his life and "find the joy." "I had no idea what that meant until we encountered these people in Haiti," said Jean, "These images of life continuing on."

The brothers missed their grandfather's funeral when the earthquake made travel to Port-au-Prince impossible, but they resolved to find a way to honor his memory. The new documentary film Lift Up," co-directed by Jean and UMBC alumnus Philip Knowlton, records their journey back home.

The film will be screened at 8:00pm this on Thursday January 27 in the UMBC Commons Skylight room. Admission is free.

Work by Professor Hillol Kargupta and his students and colleagues was recognize as one of the top ten data mining case studies at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. The case study submission cited was described in

Hillol Kargupta, Kakali Sarkar, Michael Gilligan, Parag Namjoshi, Sai Subhash Paruchuru, Thiraphat Pongsudhiraks, and Robert Gilligan, "MineFleet, A Distributed Vehicle Performance Data Stream Mining System"

The MineFleet software was designed for commercial fleet owners and fleet management companies who want the power of advanced predictive vehicle data mining for dramatically reducing the operating costs. It uses powerful data stream mining algorithms for modeling, benchmarking, and monitoring of vehicle health, emissions, driver behavior, fuel-consumption, and fleet characteristics. Work on Minefleet was done at UMBC and Agnik, a a data analytics company for distributed, mobile, and embedded environments based in Columbia MD. You can read more about the Minefleet system here.

The North American electric power system has been called the world's largest interconnected machine and is a key part of our national infrastructure. The power grid is evolving to better exploit modern information technology and become more integrated with our cyber infrastructure. This presents unprecedented opportunities for enhanced management and efficiency but also introduces vulnerabilities for intrusions, cascading disruptions, malicious attacks, inappropriate manipulations and other threats. Similar issues are foreseen for other cyber-physical infrastructure systems including industrial control systems, transportation, water, natural gas and waste disposal.

A one-day Smart Grid Cyber Security Conference will be held at UMBC on February 15, hosted by the UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department and Maryland Clean Energy Technology Incubator. The conference will be a comprehensive presentation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology regarding an Inter-agency Report 7628 (NISTIR 7628) named Guidelines for Smart Grid Cyber Security which is a critically important document for guiding government, regulatory organizations, industry and academia on Smart Grid cybersecurity. This regional outreach conference is valuable to any organization that is planning, integrating, executing or developing cyber technology for the Smart Grid.

The conference is free, but participants are asked to register in advance to help us organize for the correct number of participants.

A full copy of the 600 page report is available here.