NSA will be at the Commons for this year's CryptoChallenge competition. Stop by and test your skills against their cryptographic brain teasers and maybe score some great giveaways. Join them for some friendly competition from 11:00am to 5:00pm on Friday 30 September at the Commons Outside Terrace or Main Street if it rains.

Bring your resume — NSA recruiters will be on hand to discuss career opportunities for the best codemakers and codebreakers in the business. You can hone your cryptographic skills before the event by downloading the free NSA CryptoChallenge from the Apple App Store for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

NSA CryptoChallenge is a game that tests your pattern recognition skills through a series of cryptographs. Your mission is to decipher encrypted quotes, factoids, historical events and more. It’s you against the clock to see how fast you can crack the code. Or, you can challenge a friend with the multiplayer interface. In that instance, it's a one-on-one race to see who can correctly solve the puzzle first.

NSA executes some of the nation’s most important and sensitive intelligence operations. To help us accomplish our mission, we’re looking for the best and the brightest problem solvers to join our team. If you can solve these puzzles, you just might have what it takes to help NSA keep America safe.

Joshua Sunday is a Senior majoring in Computer Engineering. He has been doing research in Dr. Slaughter's Bioelectronics Laboratory since last Spring. To learn more about Joshua's research pursuits, read his research profile.

EE Graduate Seminar

Intelligent Agents in the OntoAgent Cognitive Architecture

Professor Sergei Nirenburg
Director, Institute for Language and Information Technologies
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

11:30am-12:45pm Friday 30 September 2011, ITE 231

OntoAgent is a constantly evolving cognitive architecture that facilitates development of and experimentation with artificial intelligent agents (ontoagents). Distinguishing characteristics of Ontoagents include the following.

• They model human information processing capabilities by simulating conscious perception and action, which involves reasoning and decision-making;
• They are intended to operate in a hybrid network of human and artificial agents; and
• They incorporate: (a) an ontological world model and a memory (fact repository) of instances of ontological objects, events and properties; (b) OntoSem, a natural language processing module that supports two-way translation between texts (including dialog turns) and their semantic and discourse/pragmatic meanings; (c) a goal- and plan-oriented reasoning module; (d) a decision theory for choosing goals, plans and individual actions that relies on knowledge (beliefs) about self, other agents, the ontological world model, the current world state and memory of past world states and past actions; (e) a capability for verbal, mental and simulated physical action; (f) (optionally) a physiological model, making them what we call double agents with simulated bodies as well as simulated minds and providing an additional channel of perception; and (g) (optionally) personality traits, preferences and psychological states that influence their overtly perceived or subconscious preferences in decision-making.

OntoAgent has so far provided the basis for two proof-of-concept systems:

• Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP) modeling a patient and a tutor to help training in medical diagnostics and treatment; and
• CLinicians ADdvisor (CLAD) assisting clinicians by reducing their cognitive load.

This talk will give a brief introduction to OntoAgent functionalities implemented in MVP and CLAD.

Professor Nirenburg has worked in the areas of cognitive systems, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing (NLP) for over 30 years. His professional interests include developing computational models of human cognitive capabilities and implementing them in hybrid-engine models of societies of human and computer agents; computational studies of meaning in natural languages; and representation and management of knowledge about the world and about language. He is Member of the Intl Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL) and Honorary Editor of Machine Translation (served as Editor-in-Chief in 1987-96). He has been Program Committee Chair for: Machine Translation Summit III (Washington, DC, 1991), the Conference on Applied NLP sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics (Seattle, WA, 2000), and COLING 2004 in Geneva, Switzerland. He served as a director of two NATO-sponsored Advanced Studies Institutes on Language Engineering for Lesser-Studied Languages (Ankara, Turkey, 2000 and Batumi, Georgia, 2007).

Host: Professor Joel Morris

The Computing Community Consortium has a new web site for undergraduates in computing fields hoping to learn more about doing research, summer research opportunities, and the process for applying to graduate school. The website contains:

• A section on what graduate school in computer science is all about, including frequently asked questions with answers by current graduate students and faculty
• Information, advice, and insights on how to apply to graduate school in computer science including a FAQ by students who have just been through the process as well as faculty
• A set of pages with information on undergraduate research and summer research positions nationwide.

It's a good resource if you want to get involved in research and/or considering going on to graduate school. If you are interested in grad school and graduating this Spring, now is the time to start thinking about it. A way to start is by talking with your adviser.

Cybersecurity Lecture

Modern Threat Environment and the Impact of Technology Shifts

Neal Ziring
Information Assurance Technical Director
National Security Agency

6-7pm Tuesday 20 September 2011 in ITE 102 (LH 8)

Neal Ziring will give a special guest lecture in CYBR620 (Introduction to Cybersecurity) on the modern threat environment and the impact of shifts in technology, such as the move from IPv4 to IPv6 and the security of systems and networks topics.

Mr. Neal Ziring is currently a technical director in the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD), at NSA. The IAD provides cryptographic, network, and operational security products and services to protect and defend national security systems. Prior to his role at the IAD level, Neal with a technical director for the Vulnerability Analysis and Operations Group, which provides technology evaluations, defensive operations, and secure configuration guidance for the DoD and the IC. During that time, Neal also served as security architect for two major NSA mission systems programs, collaborated with NIST on the Security Content Automation Protocol (S-CAP) specifications, and lead analysis efforts for Cloud Computing technology and IPv6. Neal has degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Washington University. Before coming to NSA in 1989, he worked at AT&T Bell Labs.

Patrick Macatangga is a Senior majoring in Computer Engineering. Currently, he is working on an interdisciplinary research project that combines the areas of chemistry, biology, and electrical engineering. To learn more about Patrick's research pursuits, read his research profile.

EE Graduate Seminar

Thesis/Dissertation Accomplished: How To Do It!

Wendy Y. Carter-Veale, Ph.D.

Program Coordinator, PhD Completion Project/PROMISE
Director, Educational Research Institute
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11:30am-12:45pm, Friday 23 September 11, ITE 231

It is very important for graduate students, MS/PhD, to understand and be prepared for the thesis/dissertation process. The structure of and writing the thesis/dissertation is a major component of this process, and usually not given adequate attention until much later in the educational program.

Dr. Wendy Carter, as Program Coordinator for the PhD Completion Project/PROMISE here at UMBC, leads workshops on the thesis/dissertation process, both at UMBC and UMCP, and at various professional meetings. She will provide an overview of the tools, strategies, and resources that she has designed (www.tadafinallyfinished.com) to empower students to complete their thesis/dissertation based on the individual's schedule and temperament.

Dr. Carter has a BA and MA from Stanford University, a MS in Management and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, and a MS and the PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

UMBC's Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (CSEE) Department has research active graduate progams in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Currently, our department has over 250 graduates students who hail from all parts of the globe. To learn more about our graduate programs, take a look at our new graduate program brochures:

Computer Engineering Graduate Program Brochure

Electrical Engineering Graduate Program Brochure

Computer Science Graduate Program Brochure

The Atlantic has a short article on estimating the cost to the US economy of the popular angry birds game available on most smartphones.  Their estimate?  $1.5 billion dollars a year.

"Every March, it is a requirement that every newspaper and website in every town in the United States run a story about how much money American companies lose because people watch the NCAA basketball tournament instead of working. Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, the consulting firm that makes such estimates, has tried their hand at other games recently, too. A couple years ago, they gave a number for fantasy football, saying the hobby costs companies $10.5 billion in lost wages. So, when I heard today that people play 200 million minutes of Angry Birds a day, I wanted to know if the company had ever looked into lost productivity resulting from those dastardly pigs and their winged assassins. Sadly and inexplicably, they haven't. So, after looking at their methodology, I came up with my own estimate. Here it is."

You can read the full article here.

The Atlantic has a short article on estimating the cost to the US economy of the popular angry birds game available on most smartphones.  Their estimate?  $1.5 billion dollars a year.

"Every March, it is a requirement that every newspaper and website in every town in the United States run a story about how much money American companies lose because people watch the NCAA basketball tournament instead of working. Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, the consulting firm that makes such estimates, has tried their hand at other games recently, too. A couple years ago, they gave a number for fantasy football, saying the hobby costs companies $10.5 billion in lost wages. So, when I heard today that people play 200 million minutes of Angry Birds a day, I wanted to know if the company had ever looked into lost productivity resulting from those dastardly pigs and their winged assassins. Sadly and inexplicably, they haven't. So, after looking at their methodology, I came up with my own estimate. Here it is."

You can read the full article here.