The Office of Science and Technology Policy is currently accepting applications for its Spring 2014 Internship Program. The application deadline is 11:59pm Friday, October 4, 2013. Students who are U.S. citizens and who will be actively enrolled during the Spring 2014 semester are welcome to apply. 

About OSTP. The Office of Science and Technology Policy advises the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. The office serves as a source of scientific and technological analysis and judgment for the President with respect to major policies, plans and programs of the Federal Government.

About the Internship Program. Interns are accepted for one of three annual terms (Spring, Summer, or Fall), which each last no more than 90 days. While these positions are without compensation, the assignments provide educational enrichment, practical work experience, and network opportunities with other individuals in the science and technology policy arena.

More information about the OSTP Internship Program is available online.  For questions, contact Rebecca Grimm rgrimm at ostp.eop.gov.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy is currently accepting applications for its Spring 2014 Internship Program. The application deadline is 11:59pm Friday, October 4, 2013. Students who are U.S. citizens and who will be actively enrolled during the Spring 2014 semester are welcome to apply. 

About OSTP. The Office of Science and Technology Policy advises the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. The office serves as a source of scientific and technological analysis and judgment for the President with respect to major policies, plans and programs of the Federal Government.

About the Internship Program. Interns are accepted for one of three annual terms (Spring, Summer, or Fall), which each last no more than 90 days. While these positions are without compensation, the assignments provide educational enrichment, practical work experience, and network opportunities with other individuals in the science and technology policy arena.

More information about the OSTP Internship Program is available online.  For questions, contact Rebecca Grimm rgrimm at ostp.eop.gov.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy is currently accepting applications for its Spring 2014 Internship Program. The application deadline is 11:59pm Friday, October 4, 2013. Students who are U.S. citizens and who will be actively enrolled during the Spring 2014 semester are welcome to apply. 

About OSTP. The Office of Science and Technology Policy advises the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. The office serves as a source of scientific and technological analysis and judgment for the President with respect to major policies, plans and programs of the Federal Government.

About the Internship Program. Interns are accepted for one of three annual terms (Spring, Summer, or Fall), which each last no more than 90 days. While these positions are without compensation, the assignments provide educational enrichment, practical work experience, and network opportunities with other individuals in the science and technology policy arena.

More information about the OSTP Internship Program is available online.  For questions, contact Rebecca Grimm rgrimm at ostp.eop.gov.

Professor Curtis R. Menyuk of the UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department has been awarded the 2013 IEEE Photonics Society William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award. The award recongnizes Dr. Menyuk

"For seminal advances in the fundamental understanding and mitigation of polarization effects in high-performance optical fiber communication systems."

He will receive the award at presentation during the awards Ceremony at the 2013 IEEE Photonics Conference at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue, Bellevue, Washington in September.

The William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award is given to recognize an exceptional single scientific contribution which has had a significant impact in the field of lasers and electro-optics in the past 10 years. The award is given for a relatively recent, single contribution, which has had a major impact on the Photonics Society research community. It may be given to an individual or a group for a single contribution of significant work in the field.

Professor Curtis Menyuk was born March 26, 1954. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from MIT in 1976 and the Ph.D. from UCLA in 1981. He has worked as a research associate at the University of Maryland, College Park and at Science Applications International Corporation in McLean, VA. In 1986 he became an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and he was the founding member of this department. In 1993, he was promoted to Professor. He was on partial leave from UMBC from Fall, 1996 until Fall, 2002. From 1996 – 2001, he worked part-time for the Department of Defense, co-directing the Optical Networking program at the DoD Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences in Adelphi, MD from 1999 – 2001. In 2001 – 2002, he was Chief Scientist at PhotonEx Corporation. In 2008 – 2009, he was a JILA Visiting Fellow at the University of Colorado.

For the last 25 years, his primary research area has been theoretical and computational studies of lasers, nonlinear optics, and fiber optic communications. He has authored or co-authored more than 230 archival journal publications as well as numerous other publications and presentations, and he is a co-inventor of 5 patents. He has also edited three books. The equations and algorithms that he and his research group at UMBC have developed to model optical fiber systems are used extensively in the telecommunications and photonics industry. He is a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the IEEE. He is a former UMBC Presidential Research Professor.

Dr. Richard Forno, Director of UMBC's Graduate Cybersecurity Program and Assistant Director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity, appeared on WEAA (88.9FM) Baltimore's 'The Marc Steiner Show' as part of a long-form panel discussion on assorted cybersecurity issues.   He was joined by Edward Erickson of the Baltimore City Paper and Stephen Bono, CEO of Baltimore-based Independent Security Evaluators.

The show, Hacking: Implications For Our Privacy and Security, was aired on August 15, 2013.

“We turn to the topic of hacking. At recent hacking conventions in Las Vegas, cybersecurity experts revealed how easy it is to hack everything from cars to pacemakers. General Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency, spoke at one of the conferences about his organization’s use of technology to spy on people.”

Professor Alan Sherman received two research awards from the National Science Foundation to support work at UMBC on cybersecurity.

Sherman is a co-principal investigator on a two year, $300K Eager award to foster research cooperation among four successful and mature Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research: Purdue University, UMBC, UC Davis, and Mississippi State. The project will provide opportunities for students to work on problems proposed and mentored by practitioners in the real world rather than just faculty led research. As a result, more pressing and urgent problems will be addressed, the students will benefit from the guidance of multiple and interdisciplinary research faculty from multiple institutions and the student-lead research may produce solutions for pressing national problems.

Professor Sherman also received a supplement of $271K to his UMBC Cybersecurity SFS Program award to support graduate research assistants who will work on two new projects. One will develop new algorithms for verifiable randomness that can generate random bits in a way that the recipients will have verifiably high assurance that the bits were generated in a truly random fashion. The work will improve upon the (unverifiable) NIST random beacon project. The second project will develop a new security education game, inspired by the UMBC-developed classroom game SecurityEmpire, to be fielded as a Facebook application for free use by anyone. This is joint work with UMBC faculty Marc Olano and Linda Oliva.

The research will be carried out in the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance under Professor Sherman’s supervision.

If you are a senior planning to apply to a graduate program next year or a current graduate student early in your program of study, you should consider applying for a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

NSF has opened the application for the 2014 Graduate Research Fellowship Program. These Fellowships give three years of funding to students in research based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics master’s and doctoral programs.

Funds are awarded to the student and can be used in any appropriate program. If you will be applying to graduate programs for next year, you only need describe the insititutions that you plan to apply to.

NSF's Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate is looking for strong applicants in this year’s program. The deadline for submission is November 4, 2013 and the application can be found here.  If you are interested, you should start by talking with your advisor and or other faculty members about the program and how to submit a strong application.

UMBC's Mobile, Pervasive and Sensor Systems Laboratory focuses on three key areas: renewable energy, healthcare applications and mobile phone systems. Their crowdsourcing-based technology for accurate and low cost detection of weed infestations was cited recently as one of the top ten technologies changing farm machinery by Farm Industry News.

D. Saraswat and N. Banerjee, Crowdsourcing App for Precision Agriculture Decision Making, ASABE Annual International Meeting, Dallas TX, August 2012.

The research was begun while Professor Banerjee was at the University of Arkansas, where the complex software system was  implemented by students Brenna Blackwell and Mahbub Rahman, who is continuing his PhD studies at UMBC.

Like the MPSSL Facebook page to follow their work or visit the MPSSL page

The third Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning (MASC-SLL 2013) is a one day event that will bring together faculty, researchers and students from universities in the Mid-Atlantic area doing research on speech, language or machine learning. The colloquium is an opportunity to present preliminary, ongoing or completed work and to network with other students, faculty and researchers working in related fields.

The first MASC-SLL was held in 2011 at Johns Hopkins University and the second in 2012 at the University of Maryland, College Park. This year the event will be held at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in Baltimore, MD from 9:30 to 5:00 on Friday, 11 October 2013. There will be no registration charge and lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Students and postdocs are encouraged to submit abstracts describing ongoing, planned, or completed research projects, including previously published results and negative results. Research in any field applying computational methods to any aspect of human language, including speech and learning, from all areas of computer science, linguistics, engineering, neuroscience, information science, and related fields, is welcome. All accepted submissions will be presented as posters and some will also be invited for short oral presentations. Student-led breakout sessions will also be held to discuss papers or topics of interest and stimulate interaction and discussion. Suggest breakout session topics via easychair.

A full-time postdoctoral research associate position is available in the Ecosynth Project funded by NSF’s Advances in Bioinformatics Program and led by UMBC Professors Erle Ellis and Marc Olano. The Ecosynth project is developing advanced tools for mapping, measuring, and visualizing vegetation in 3D using off-the-shelf digital cameras from the ground and on low-altitude hobbyist aircraft, coupled with open source and new computer vision algorithms. High resolution 3D scanning and spectral imaging are transforming ecological science, forest inventory, carbon monitoring and biodiversity assessment.

Ecosynth makes these advances accessible broadly to ecologists and citizen scientists on demand by means of low-cost portable 3D observing and visualization systems built on publicly available hardware and open-source software. For more information on the postion see the position announcement.