The United States Secret Service, Baltimore Field Office  is currently accepting applications for Summer 2013 Student Volunteer Service Program (Internship) through January 4, 2013.

Our Student Volunteer Service Program (Internship) offers many advantages, including career exploration early in a student’s academic studies, exposure to new and emerging occupations/technologies,  and offers academic credit for the work performed, as well as  work experience that may be considered relevant if the student later applies for permanent employment.  The program, however, is not intended to provide the intern with investigative or protective experience.

To be considered, a student must:

1.       Be a U.S. Citizen

2.       Be at least 16 years of age at the time of appointment

3.       Be enrolled or accepted for enrollment during the upcoming semester or quarter as a diploma/certificate/degree seeking student in high school,  or in an educational institution not above the baccalaureate level that is accredited by a recognized body

4.       Obtain an agreement from the institution to participate

5.       Maintain a satisfactory academic record of a 2.5 or better cumulative grade point average

6.       Not be a son or daughter of a current Secret Service employee

7.       Be able to obtain a Top Secret clearance

To apply, student should complete the attached PDF Forms consisting of:

1.       Student Volunteer Service Program Application

2.       OF 306 – Declaration for Federal Employment

In addition, students should submit  the following with the above Forms:

3.       Resume

4.       Unofficial transcript (official transcript required at time of interview)

Completed application may be submitted to: BAL.Recruitment@usss.dhs.gov with attachments  or may be faxed to:  443-263-1100, ATTN:  RECRUITMENT no later than JANUARY 4, 2013.  No application will be accepted for Summer 2013 Program after close of business (cob) January 4, 2013.         

Let the Quests Begin!

The Industrial Internet. The Internet of Things. What
does it all mean? In a nutshell, it’s internet-connected devices collecting data and communicating to make industries smarter. This data is then used to anticipate and avoid problems, instead of fixing things after
the fact.

 As we continue to look for different ways to analyze
data we need, we’re looking for people who know how
to analyze and interpret data. Like finding an algorithm
that can reduce air travel delays, or a solution to streamline a patient’s experience in the hospital.

 To get started, choose your quest. Or, to learn more, watch the intro videos for the Flight Quest and the Hospital Quest. Go to www.gequest.com

 GE Flight Quest Challenge

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFZ4hWzsunc&feature=player_embedded

 GE Hospital Quest Challenge

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-HBZkBLcEdY

New Industrial Internet Service Technologies From GE Could Eliminate $150 Billion in Waste,http://www.gereports.com/new_industrial_internet_service_technologies_from_ge_could_eliminate_150_billion_in_waste/

Seven German Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS7) is pleased to announce that in addition to the Study and Internship Program (SIP), in 2013-14 we will offer two new competitive programs that include scholarships for all successful applicants.  The Study Program (SP) includes a semester on one of our member campuses, and our Internship Program (IP) includes a 2-6 month research internship at a laboratory or research institute on one of our campuses. 

IP projects will be offered in the following fields:  aeronautical engineering, architecture, biomedical and bioengineering, chemical engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, energy engineering, ergonomics, life sciences, logistics and management, materials science, mechanical engineering and mechatronics, nanoscience, and physical metrology and applied physics.  This is a unique opportunity for students in the U.S. and Canada to experience research at a German university of applied sciences, where faculty research is based on strong connections to regional companies that depend on academic researchers for R&D. 

SIP students may intern in these or in other fields through off-campus internships, and is therefore suited for a wider range of applicants. 

Further details and application forms for all three programs and associated scholarships are available at http://www.uas7.org/scholarships/.  The deadline for all three programs is February 15. 

Please contact us and refer your students to us with any questions. Our New York office can be reached at info@uas7.org and during regular business hours (EST) at (212)758-3369.

UMBC will once again host the Global Game Jam. The weekend-long game development event will be held this year from January 25-27. UMBC is one of hundreds of host sites around the world. Other local sites include College Park, the Universities at Shady Grove, and George Mason.

“I expect an exciting mix of students, friends, alumni, and game developers for a weekend of creative fun,” says Dr. Olano, director of UMBC’s Game Development Track. Last year he and Visual Arts professor Neal McDonald ran the event out of UMBC’s GAIM Lab where game developers of all levels gathered to conceive and create video games around a common theme.

Last year the theme was Ouroboros, a symbol of perpetual renewal. The theme inspired games like Bit Exhaust, a space-invaders-esque Windows phone game and Snake ‘N Bake (pictured above), a two-player game where a snake must help a cupcake make it to the oven before the tasty confection gets hit by a fireball.

The theme for this year’s competition will be announced at 5 p.m. on January 25^th so that all parts of the game development process—from coming up with a game concept to finishing a playable video game–will have to be carried out during one single adrenaline-filled weekend.

Visit globalgamejam.org to register for the event. Thanks to support from Next Century Corporation, registration for the UMBC site is free and open to anyone 18+.

Paid summer internship opportunity

http://www.orau.gov/dhseducation/internships/

MS Thesis Defense

Simultaneous Feature Acquisition and Cost Estimation

Zachary Kurtz

11:00am Thursday, 6 December 2012, ITE 325b

This thesis will address classification problems with two sources of cost: the cost of acquiring feature values and the cost of incorrect classifications. In particular, I address problems with feature costs and instance-dependent misclassification costs. Many real-world applications, such as medical diagnosis, contain both feature acquisition costs and instance-dependent misclassification costs. The goal of my research is to minimize the total cost of classifying an unknown instance. This goal is accomplished with a new approach: Simultaneous Feature Acquisition and Cost Estimation (SFACE), which combines feature acquisition methods with a regression algorithm that estimates misclassification costs. The estimated cost values are used to estimate the expected cost reduction for the acquisition of each feature. SFACE is evaluated by comparing the total cost of operation to the cost incurred by existing cost-insensitive, cost-sensitive, and feature acquisition algorithms. The results show that SFACE results in lower total cost for the tested datasets.

Committee: Dr. Marie desJardins (Chair), Dr. Tim Oates and Dr. Michael Grasso

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Energy Efficient Platforms for
High Performance and Embedded Computing

Dr. Tinoosh Mohsenin
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00pm Friday, 7 December 2012, ITE 227, UMBC

Future embedded, high performance, and cloud computing must meet limited energy capacity, cost, and sustainability. These devices will regularly execute over one tera-operations per second (TOPS) with a variety of diverse workloads—from baseband communications to wearable medical devices—while operating on a 5 to 25 Watt-hour cellphone/tablet battery. The need for greater energy efficiency, smaller size and improved performance of these devices demands a co-optimization of algorithms, architectures, and implementations. This talk presents several programmable and application specific solutions that illustrate the cross-domain optimization.

The design of system-on-Chip blocks becomes increasingly sophisticated with emerging real-time computational and limited power budget requirements. Two such algorithms, Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) decoding and Compressive Sensing (CS), have received significant attention. LDPC decoding is an error correction technique which has shown superior error correction performance and has been adopted by several recent communication standards. Compressive sensing is a revolutionary technique which significantly reduces the amount of data collected during acquisition. While both LDPC decoding and compressive sampling have several advantages, they require high computational intensive algorithms which typically suffer from high power consumption and low clock rates. We present novel algorithms and architectures to address these challenges.

As future systems demand increasing flexibility and performance within a limited power budget, many-core chip architectures have become a promising solution. The design and implementation of a programmable many-core platform containing 64 cores routed in a hierarchical network is presented. For demonstration, Electroencephalogram (EEG) seizure detection and analysis and ultrasound spectral doppler are mapped onto the cores. The seizure detection and analysis takes 900 ns and consumes 240 nJ of energy. Spectral doppler takes 715 ns and consumes 182 nJ of energy. The prototype is implemented in 65 nm CMOS which contains 64 cores, occupies 19.51 mm2 and runs at 1.18 GHz at 1 V.

Dr. Tinoosh Mohsenin is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County since 2011. Prior to joining UMBC, she was finishing her PhD at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Mohsenin’s research interests lie in the areas of high performance and energy-efficiency in programmable and special purpose processors. She is the director of Energy Efficient High Performance Computing (EEHPC) Lab where she leads projects in architecture, hardware, software tools, and applications for VLSI computation with an emphasis on digital signal processing workloads. She has been consultant to early stage technology companies and currently serves in the Technical Program Committees of the IEEE Biomedical Circuits & Systems Conference (BioCAS), Life Science Systems and Applications Workshop (LiSSA), International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED) and IEEE Women in Circuits and Systems (WiCAS).

More information and directions: http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks