EE Graduate Seminar

Research vs. Development: Building a
Career in the Modern Tech Industry

Christopher Morris
Fellow Engineer, Northrop Grumman Corp
PhD (CS) Student, CSEE Dept/UMBC

11:30am-12:45pm, Friday, 4 May 2012, ITE 237, UMBC

With the uncertainty present in todays job market, technical college graduates are under increasing pressure to choose a career path that not only fits their personal strengths and interests. but is sustainable. Jobs and employees are becoming more transient and it is seemingly more difficult to establish a career with longevity. In this talk, we will discuss what a recent graduate can look forward to in various technical career paths, specifically a career in research versus a career in development. I will draw upon personal experience to provide an overview of what a student may expect when entering these careers. Lastly, we will discuss how one can prepare to make the most out of their career choice and handle the volatility of the industry.

Christopher (Chris) Morris is currently a Fellow Engineer at the Northrop Grumman Corporation where he is a member of the Teton Project team. The team is charged with research and development of Open Architecture (OA) Processing solutions for distributed, real-time, embedded (DRE) systems. Prior to joining Northrop Grumman in 2009, Chris was an Advisory Staff Engineer in the Visualization Systems Group at IBM Research in Westchester County, New York, where he researched and developed distributed rendering and visualization systems. He holds a BSME from UMBC (`96), a MSME in from Stanford University (`98), and a MSCS from UMBC (`01). Currently, he is a PhD (CS) Candidate at UMBC. His research interests are computer graphics and scientific visualization.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

Judy Woodruff interviews Harvey Mudd College president Maria Klawe on PBS NewsHour.

Watch Why More Women Aren't Computer Scientists, Engineers on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Harvey Mudd College president Maria Klawe is seeking to close the gender gap in the hard sciences, which she attributes to young women's perception of such fields as uninteresting, beyond their capabilities, and being conducive to unappealing people. The concept of computing and other hard sciences as a strictly male-oriented domain is a major impediment, Klawe notes. However, she says hard science careers are actually very appealing to women for a number of reasons, including the incredible opportunities for jobs that pay very well, and with the flexibility to balance work and family. Klawe also notes that products and innovations stand to benefit from a feminine perspective. One key to attracting more women into science and engineering careers is changing the image of such careers as promoted and entrenched by the popular media, according to Klawe. She recommends that young women's interest in hard sciences should be nurtured when they enter college. "You get them into an intro computer science course that is absolutely fascinating and fun and creative," Klawe suggests. "And you have them have so much fun, that they just can't believe that this is really computer science."

summary via ACm news

photo courtesy Nintendo

What do The Legend of Zelda, Halo 2, and Super Mario World have in common?

They're all featured video games in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's latest exhibition The Art of Video Games.

The exhibition–which celebrates 40 years of video game history–takes a look at 80 video games that pushed the artistic and technological boundaries of their era. The ubiquitous Atari VCS classic Pac-Man makes the list, along with standbys like Tomb Raider, Fable, and Myst. Games were chosen by a public vote from a list of 240 titles compiled by exhibit curator Chris Melissinos, and come from twenty gaming systems ranging from the SNES to Playstation 3. In an NPR interview, Melissinos, founder of Past Pixels and an avid video game collector, demystifies why Mario resembles an Italian plumber, and offers a theory about how Pac-Man was conceived.

A select five games can be played during the exhibit: Pac-Man, Super Mario Brothers, The Secret of Monkey Island, Myst, and Flower. The exhibition also features video interviews with video game developers and artists, historic game consoles, and photos of in-game screen shots.

Catch the exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum until September 30, before it heads out on an across-country tour. On May 4, the museum is hosting Beyond Play: Video Games at Work, a series of free exhibition-inspired talks. At 1 p.m. "Video Games at Work" looks at the influence of video games on areas like health care, education, civics, journalism, and national defense. At 3 p.m. "Game Change: Society and Culture" looks at the impact of video games on our society and culture.

For more information about The Art of Video Games, visit www.americanart.si.edu

The CSEE Department will hold its annual CSEE Research Review day from 9:30am to 4:00pm on Friday, May 4, 2012. Faculty, research staff and students from the Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering programs will present and discuss their latest research results via short oral presentations and a poster session.

The event is open to the public and is a good way for prospective collaborators and students to find out about the research our department is doing and meet and network with current faculty and students. See pictures from CRR-06, CRR-08, CRR-09, CRR-10 and CRR-11 to get an idea of what goes on at this event.

The 2012 CSEE Research Review (CRR-12) will take place in the large conference room of the UMBC Technology Center's business Incubator and Accelerator building on South Campus. There is ample free parking and refreshments and a free buffet lunch will be provided.

Schedule
9:30-10:40	Talks
11:00-12:00	Poster Session
12:00-1:00	Lunch (free)
1:00-2:10	Talks
2:30-3:40	Talks

For more information, contact the CRR-11 General Chair, Professor Alan Sherman, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

MS Thesis Defense

An Efficient Network on Chip (NoC) for a Low-Power,
Low-Area Homogeneous Many-Core DSP Platform

James Chandler

10:30am Monday, 30 April 30 2012, ITE 325b

This thesis presents an NoC architecture that is optimized for a course-grained, deterministic many core DSP platform supporting up to 256 cores. The proposed network supports both local and long-distance communication in the event that large applications or multiple smaller applications are mapped onto the platform by means of a hierarchical cluster topology. The NoC is designed to optimize the area- and power-to-performance ratio through implementing the following key characteristics: low hop-count long distance communication, optimized flit buffer size, efficient virtual channel implementation, and a highly restricted virtual channel flow control.

The NoC architecture is implemented in 65 nm CMOS technology with a nominal supply voltage of 1V. Place and Route results show that the proposed architecture saves up to 33% in area and up to 87.6% in energy-per-flit in comparison to some currently-implemented NoCs. Through several traffic pattern tests on a network of 16 cores, the NoC attains a throughput of up to 21.7Gbps. A 256-point FFT mapped onto 16 cores executes in 4.3$us and dissipates 0.649W. This is an improvement of 187% and 508% in latency and power dissipation over a 256-point Xilinx FFT IP Core implemented on a Virtex 6 FPGA.

Committee: Professors Tinoosh Mohsenin (chair), Dr. Chintan Patel and Mohamed Younis

MS Thesis Defense

Situation Aware Intrusion Detection Model

Sumit More

9:00am Friday, 27 April 2012, ITE 346, UMBC

Today, information technology and cyber-services have become the foundation pillars of every business and manufacturing industry. The importance of cyber-services and their extensive use by every section of the society has paved the way for cyber-crimes like espionage, politically motivated attacks, credit card frauds, unauthorized infrastructure access, denial-of-service attacks, and stealing of valuable data. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are applications which monitor cyber-systems to identify any malicious activities, generate an alert when such an activity is detected, and redress the problem if possible. Most of the intrusion detection/prevention systems available today are based on rule-based or signature based activity monitoring which detect threats and vulnerabilities by cross-referencing the threat or vulnerability signatures in their databases. These Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) face limitations in detecting newly published attacks or variants of existing attacks. They are also point solutions that focus on a single system/component.

We argue that integrating information coming from multiple data channels can lead to a better threat detection model. Data source of web including blogs, chat-rooms, forums etc. can be a good source of information for upcoming attacks or attacks whose signatures have not yet been tracked for the intrusion detection systems to catch. Semantic integration of the data sources from web, information from IDS/IPS modules at the network and host level, and the expert knowledge can be used to create a ‘Situation Aware Intrusion Detection Model’ which can lead to better intrusion detection and prevention results. In this work, we present such a system which makes use of semantic web technologies to find relationships between the information gathered from the web, sensor data coming from IDS/IPS modules and network activity monitors, and reasons over this data and expert provided rules in-order to detect possibility of a cyber attack.

Thesis Committee: Professors Anupam Joshi (chair), Tim Finin and Yelena Yesha

On Measure Transformed Canonical Correlation Analysis

Dr. Koby Todros, University of Michigan

2:00pm Wednesday, 2 May 2012, ITE 325b

In this work linear canonical correlation analysis (LCCA) is generalized by applying a structured transform to the joint probability distribution of the considered pair of random vectors, i.e., a transformation of the joint probability measure defined on their joint observation space. This framework, called measure transformed canonical correlation analysis (MTCCA), applies LCCA to the data after transformation of the joint probability measure. We show that judicious choice of the transform leads to a modified canonical correlation analysis, which, in contrast to LCCA, is capable of detecting non-linear relationships between the considered pair of random vectors. Unlike kernel canonical correlation analysis, where the transformation is applied to the random vectors, in MTCCA the transformation is applied to their joint probability distribution. This results in performance advantages and reduced implementation complexity. The proposed approach is illustrated for graphical model selection in simulated data having non-linear dependencies, and for measuring long-term associations between companies traded in the NASDAQ and NYSE stock markets.

Koby Todros was born in Ashkelon, Israel, in 1974. He received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering at 2000, 2006, and 2011, respectively, from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, in the University of Michigan. His research interests include statistical signal processing and estimation theory with focus on association analysis, uniformly optimal estimation in the non-Bayesian theory, performance bounds for parameter estimation, blind source separation, and biomedical signal processing.

The Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department wishes to extend its congratulations to Dr. Tim Oates for his promotion from associate professor to full professor.

In 2001, after receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Dr. Oates began teaching at UMBC. His course repertoire includes Introduction to Machine Learning, Discrete Structures, Data Structures, and the ever-popular Robotics.

As the director of UMBC’s Cognition, Robotics, and Learning (CoRal) Lab, his research centers on machine learning. The vision of the lab is to “understand how artificial systems can acquire grounded knowledge from sensori-motor interaction with their environment that enables cognitive activities like natural language communication and planning,” says the lab’s website. More about his research interests can be found in his research profile.  

In addition to his academic work, Dr. Oates contributed to the department last year as chair of the ABET Assessment committee. He is also the advisor for UMBC’s student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.

The Sixth UMBC Digital Entertainment Conference (DEC) will be held this Saturday, April 28 from 10:00am to 4:00pm in LH1 in the Biological Sciences building.

Every year since 2007 the students ofn the UMBC Game Developer's Club has organized the conference and invited speakers from the videogames industry to come in and discuss important topics in the games industry. DEC 2012 is sponsored by Zynga, the studio that developed Farmville and many other Facebook games.  One of the strenghts of the UMBC program in Graphics, Animation and Interactive Media (GAIM) is its strong ties to game development studios in the Maryland, DC and Northern Virginia area.

The 2012 DEC is open to anyone, and features an all-star lineup of speakers from Firaxis Games, Zynga East, Pure Bang, and Mythic Entertainment. Whether you are a high school student, go to UMBC or another university, or are already working in a different industry, you are sure find interesting information about how the games industry works, how some current developers got started, and what they do. If you are a game developer, you are sure to find high school students, UMBC students and students from other universities who are interested in jobs in the games industry.

Here is the schedule.

10:00am – Barry Caudill, Director of Gameplay Development at Firaxis
11:00am – Tim Train, Studio Manager at Zynga East
12:00pm – Lunch Break
1:00pm – Eric Jordan, Programmer at Firaxis
2:00pm – Ben Walsh, CEO of Pure Bang Games
3:00pm – Brian Johnson, Director of Online Operations at Mythic Entertainment