Applications are now being accepted for the Information Assurance Scholarship Program (IASP) and the Federal Cyber Service: Scholarship for Service (SFS). US citizens capable of receiving security clearances are eligible.  The deadline for both programs in February 8, 2013.

These scholarships require the recipient to work for the government following graduation. The awards include full tuition, stipend ($30k/year for PhD students, $25k/year for MS/MPS students, and $20k/year for BS students), and more.

(1) Information Assurance Scholarship Program (IASP)

The Information Assurance Scholarship Program is a yearly awarded Department of Defense sponsored scholarship/fellowship program to promote the education, recruitment, and retention of rising junior and senior undergraduate, MS, MPS, or PhD student status in CMSC, CYBR, or related field at UMBC (including IS, Math, EE, CE, physics, public policy).

(2) Federal Cyber Service: Scholarship for Service (SFS)

The Scholarship for Service is a yearly awarded National Science Foundation sponsored scholarship program to promote the education, recruitment, and retention of rising junior and senior undergraduates and graduate students in cybersecurity-related studies. See https://www.sfs.opm.gov/ for more SFS details. (We have 2 CYBR MPS, 1 BS in CS, and 1 PhD in CS, students presently in this program.)

Completed applications for both programs are due by 12:00 (noon) on February 8, 2013.  The same application form is used for each program.  This deadline is strict.

More information, points of contact, and application instructions for both programs can be found at http://www.cisa.umbc.edu/scholarships.php.

The UMBC Center for Information and Assurance (CISA) was created in 2001 as the central point of contact at UMBC for Information Assurance (IA) including  research, teaching, and best practices.  It is because of CISA that UMBC has been recognized as a national center of academic excellence in IA education and research (CAE/CAEr).

Heliophysics Summer Research Opportunity for Undergraduates at
UAHuntsville and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center
NSF-REU site

Funded by the National Science Foundation

We will begin accepting applications for the 2013 REU on January 1, 2013

http://www.uah.edu/cspar/research/reu

Overview

Scientist from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center will host a Research Experience for Undergraduates in the summer of 2013. Ten undergraduates will be invited to Huntsville, Alabama for 10 weeks to engage in cutting edge heliophysics research with astrophysicists from UAHuntsville or NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). Students in this program will be paired with mentors specializing in heliophysics research from the solar interior to the heliopause, and include theory, modeling, computer simulations, data analysis and instrument design. At the end of the 10-week program, participants will be required to present their research experience. Additionally, some students may be selected to present their findings at a scientific conference.

• The 2013 REU will run from May 29 - August 3, 2013. Students must be available for the entire 10 weeks in order to participate in the program.
• Students will be provided a $4000 stipend for the summer. Additionally, a travel allowance, housing on UAHuntsville campus, and a $500 meal card will be provided.
• Heliophysics researchers from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and NASA Marshall Space Center are both housed in the National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) located on the UAHuntsville campus in Huntsville, Alabama.

Eligibility

Applicants should be full-time, undergraduate students with a GPA of 2.5 or better and planning to major in science, technology, engineering or mathematics. Students must be US citizens or green card holders in order to be considered for this program. Rising sophomores, women and minorities are encouraged to apply.

Location

Huntsville, "The Rocket City", is an oasis of technology and research in northern Alabama, where cutting edge research has been taking place since the space race. It is home to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center and NASA Marshall Space and three 4-year universities. Huntsville, is consistently names as one of the best places in the country to live by a variety of publications and thus attracts people from all over the world. In addition to the space and rocket center, visitors can enjoy hiking on nearby Monte Sano, caving, camping, museums, historical landmarks and a variety of sanctuaries and parks.

To apply

To apply, fill out the form below and attach two letters of recommendation and unofficial transcripts by April 1, 2013. Alternatively, submit the pdf application under downloads, two letters of recommendation, and transcripts to heliophysicsreu@uah.edu.

Additional Information

If you have any questions, please contact heliophysicsreu@uah.edu.

This REU program is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Ph.D. Defense

Multi-Source Option-Based Policy Transfer

James MacGlashan

10:00am Friday, 25 January 2013, ITE 325B

Reinforcement learning algorithms are very effective at learning policies (mappings from states to actions) for specific well defined tasks, thereby allowing an agent to learn how to behave without extensive deliberation.  However, if an agent must complete a novel variant of a task that is similar to, but not exactly the same as, a previous version for which it has already learned a policy, learning must begin anew and there is no benefit to having previously learned anything. To address this challenge, I introduce novel approaches for policy transfer. Policy transfer allows the agent to follow the policy of a previously solved, but different, task (called a source task) while it is learning a new task (called a target task). Specifically, I introduce option-based policy transfer (OPT). OPT enables policy transfer by encapsulating the policy for a source task in an option (Sutton, Precup, & Singh 1999), which allows the agent to treat the policy of a source task as if it were a primitive action. A significant advantage of this approach is that if there are multiple source tasks, an option can be created for each of them, thereby enabling the agent to transfer knowledge from multiple sources and to combine their knowledge in useful ways. Moreover, this approach allows the agent to learn in which states of the world each source task is most applicable. OPT's approach to constructing and learning with options that represent source tasks allows OPT to greatly outperform existing policy transfer approaches. Additionally, OPT can utilize source tasks that other forms of transfer learning for reinforcement learning cannot.

Challenges for policy transfer include identifying sets of source tasks that would be useful for a target task and providing mappings between the state and action spaces of source and target tasks. That is, it may not be useful to transfer from all previously solved source tasks. If a source task has a different state or action space than the target task, then a mapping between these spaces must be provided. To address these challenges, I introduce object-oriented OPT (OO-OPT), which leverages object-oriented MDP (OO-MDP) (Diuk, Cohen, & Littman 2008) state representations to automatically detect related tasks and redundant source tasks, and to provide multiple useful state and action space mappings between tasks. I also introduce methods to adapt value function approximation techniques (which are useful when the state space of a task is very large or continuous) to the unique state representation of OO-MDPs.

Committee: Dr. Marie desJardins (Chair), Dr. Tim Finin, Dr. Michael Littman, Dr. Tim Oates, Dr. Yun Peng

i) The MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP) seeks to promote the value of graduate education; to improve the research enterprise through increased diversity; and to prepare and recruit the best and brightest for graduate education at MIT.

MSRP began in 1986 as an institutional effort to address the issue of underrepresentation of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Puerto Ricans in engineering and science in the United States. Today, this program seeks to identify talented sophomores, juniors, and non-graduating seniors who might benefit from spending a summer on MIT’s campus, working in a research laboratory under the guidance of experienced scientists and engineers who are MIT faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students. Students who participate in this program will be better prepared and motivated to pursue advanced degrees, thereby helping to sustain a rich talent pool in critical areas of research and innovation.

For more information and to apply (Deadline is January 25th, 2013)  http://odge.mit.edu/undergraduate/msrp/

ii) The Columbia University IGERT on Optical Techniques for Actuation, Sensing, and Imaging of Biological Systems (BioIGERT), a National Science Foundation IGERT program, will support outstanding undergraduates as Summer Research Fellows for the period from June 2 through August 3, 2013. This program provides a $4000 stipend for each successful candidate and free campus housing (worth $2700) in which you are expected to reside. Those selected will have an opportunity to participate fully in the interdisciplinary research activities of the BioIGERT faculty across the Departments of Physics, Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering, and includes collaborative research with industry including IBM Yorktown Heights. 

This is the best summer job you'll ever have, apply now: http://www.bioigert.columbia.edu/rpu/apply.html
For details about BioIGERT, please visit: www.bioigert.columbia.edu

iii) The Moncrief Undergraduate Summer Internship Program at the UT Austin Institute for Computational Engineering and Science is organized to provide summer support for qualified undergraduate students of mathematics, science, and engineering to work within the Institute during the summer months.

Moncrief Summer Interns work with faculty and research staff from one of ICES’ sixteen research centers and groups (full listing at: https://www.ices.utexas.edu/research/centers- groups/)
Research activities generally focus on developing modeling and simulation methods to study problems in areas such as:
 energy, advanced materials, biomedical research, nanomanufacturing, and related areas that draw on applied and computational mathematics, computing, fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, mathematical physics, and biology.
Application deadline: February 1, 2013
Application instructions at: http://www.ices.utexas.edu/programs/summer-internship/
Stipend: $6,000
Dates: Jun – Aug 2013 (10 weeks)
Who should apply: Undergraduate students of mathematics, science,or engineering who are entering their junior or senior year in Fall 2013
Requirements: 3. 0 GPA; U.S. citizens or permanent residents only


iv) The Nebraska Summer Research Program is a consortium of NSF funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) and other summer research opportunities programs (SROP).

One unique feature of the Nebraska Summer Research Program is the partnership between the REU and SROP programs and the Office of Graduate Studies. Students benefit in having a community of scholars in which to learn and to share research with.

This intensive summer research experience provides mentoring and research experiences while allowing scholars to preview graduate school life. Students with a strong interest in graduate programs are particularly encouraged to apply, as are those from populations traditionally underrepresented in graduate education.

For information on individual programs go to: http://www.unl.edu/summerprogram/

Programs: Bioenergy Systems, Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Applied Mathematics, Nanomaterials & Nanoscience,Optics and Laser Physics, Redox Biology,Virology

Application Dates
We plan to begin accepting applications on November 14, 2012.
The priority deadline is February 1, 2013.
Complete applications are due on February 15, 2013.

Program Dates
10-week program: June 3 - August 7
8-week program: June 3 - July 26

Travel Dates
Arrival (all): Sunday, June 2
8-week program departure: Saturday, July 27
10-week program departure: Thursday, August 8

The Domestic Violence Center of Howard County will be hosting a free event at Howard Community College on Feb 19th about preventing dating violence.

Topics will include:

• Effects on health and academic achievement
• Dating and campus life
• Men and Boys taking action to end violence

Free refreshments will be provided... folks pre-registered will be eligible for prize drawings.

Photo: ua-net.eu

The ESNET Lab in UMBC's Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department is looking for qualified undergraduate or graduate students to join and work on an exciting underwater sensor networks project. For more information go to http://esnet.cs.umbc.edu/eduwan.html.

The candidates applying should have experience in (or at least familiar with) some of the following areas:

1. FPGA development using Verilog/VHDL
2. Data Frame synchronization for wireless (or acoustic) communication
3. Doppler resistant compensation for FSK modulated data
4. Digital Signal Processing
   a) Adaptive data equalization (LMS/NLMS)
   b) Error Correction coding on FPGA, i.e. turbo codes, LPDC codes.

To apply please e-mail your resume and a cover letter detailing experience in the above mentioned areas to: Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Photo: ua-net.eu

The ESNET Lab in UMBC's Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department is looking for qualified undergraduate or graduate students to join and work on an exciting underwater sensor networks project. For more information go to http://esnet.cs.umbc.edu/eduwan.html.

The candidates applying should have experience in (or at least familiar with) some of the following areas:

1. FPGA development using Verilog/VHDL
2. Data Frame synchronization for wireless (or acoustic) communication
3. Doppler resistant compensation for FSK modulated data
4. Digital Signal Processing
   a) Adaptive data equalization (LMS/NLMS)
   b) Error Correction coding on FPGA, i.e. turbo codes, LPDC codes.

To apply please e-mail your resume and a cover letter detailing experience in the above mentioned areas to: Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.