The Fourth Trusted Infrastructure Workshop (TIW 2013) will be held at Penn State University in University Park, PA from Sunday afternoon, June 2 to Thursday, June 6.

TIW 2013 is a free premier educational meeting for graduate students with a focus on computer systems security research and research that builds on trusted computing foundations. TIW 2013 will consist of lectures and hands-on labs, enabling the students to learn concepts and apply them in practice. Speakers include world-class experts in their respective fields from industry, government, and academia. See the preliminary program for more information.

The workshop is designed for graduate students with a research interest in computer security. Although the workshop is free for students, students must apply to be selected for TIW 2013. Applications received by April 25 will also receive full consideration for travel support. Applications will continue to be received until May 20 based on space and funds. The workshop may have space for a small number of other attendees, but a fee will be required for other attendees.

The Fourth Trusted Infrastructure Workshop (TIW 2013) will be held at Penn State University in University Park, PA from Sunday afternoon, June 2 to Thursday, June 6.

TIW 2013 is a free premier educational meeting for graduate students with a focus on computer systems security research and research that builds on trusted computing foundations. TIW 2013 will consist of lectures and hands-on labs, enabling the students to learn concepts and apply them in practice. Speakers include world-class experts in their respective fields from industry, government, and academia. See the preliminary program for more information.

The workshop is designed for graduate students with a research interest in computer security. Although the workshop is free for students, students must apply to be selected for TIW 2013. Applications received by April 25 will also receive full consideration for travel support. Applications will continue to be received until May 20 based on space and funds. The workshop may have space for a small number of other attendees, but a fee will be required for other attendees.

The Fourth Trusted Infrastructure Workshop (TIW 2013) will be held at Penn State University in University Park, PA from Sunday afternoon, June 2 to Thursday, June 6.

TIW 2013 is a free premier educational meeting for graduate students with a focus on computer systems security research and research that builds on trusted computing foundations. TIW 2013 will consist of lectures and hands-on labs, enabling the students to learn concepts and apply them in practice. Speakers include world-class experts in their respective fields from industry, government, and academia. See the preliminary program for more information.

The workshop is designed for graduate students with a research interest in computer security. Although the workshop is free for students, students must apply to be selected for TIW 2013. Applications received by April 25 will also receive full consideration for travel support. Applications will continue to be received until May 20 based on space and funds. The workshop may have space for a small number of other attendees, but a fee will be required for other attendees.

CSEE professor Nilanjan Banerjee has received a Microsoft Software Engineering Innovation (SEIF) Award. The award comes with a $25,000 grant to help fund a research project that uses inventive wearable computing devices to help paraplegics and quadriplegics get around their homes. It’s called “Wearable Multi-Sensor Gesture Recognition in Assistive Devices for Paralysis Patients”.

Dr. Banerjee’s proposal was chosen from a pool of more than one hundred. He joins sixteen professors and researchers across the world who are also 2013 SEIF recipients.

The aim of the Microsoft SEIF award is to advance software engineering applications and tools by funding researchers with state of the art ideas. Projects involving devices, services, cloud-computing, and applications based on natural user interface (NUI) are top priority.

Banerjee’s project speaks to this goal. The project proposes a gesture-based system that will allow paralysis patients to do everyday household activities, like watch television, adjust the thermostat, and turn on a lamp. The heart of the system is two wearable devices. A headband with textile-based EOG sensors will capture eye movement. A glove with flex sensors and an accelerometer will capture hand gestures. Once collected, this data that will be analyzed with a smartphone, translating the wearer’s intent.  

Fellow UMBC professors Shaun Kane and Amy Hurst (Information Systems) were also among this year’s SEIF award recipients. Like Banejree, their project deals with improving accessibility for the handicapped. It’s called “Wheeltop Interaction: Full-Body Gesture Control for Power Wheelchair Users”.

Betamore is an urban campus for technology and entrepreneurship that is home to dozens of startups and entrepreneurs and located at 1111 Light St. in Baltimore's Federal Hill neighborhood. They are holding a "startup crawl" on Thusday, 2 May 2013 from 6:00pm to 9:00pm where students and recent graduates can meet with people from the Baltimore technology and startup community.

"Are you a current student or recent graduate looking to enter the startup market through an internship or job? Are you a startup looking for the next best thing? Join us here at Betamore for our first Startup Crawl, an event that puts talented college and graduate students in the same room with the startup / tech community to learn the industry, create beneficial connections and discover what the Baltimore Tech community has to offer.

Shake a few hands, have a couple beers, and experience how fun working for a startup can be. This event is exclusive to students and recent grads (must be less than one year out of school)."

If you are interested, see their Facebook Startup Crawl event page and register for this free event.

Betamore is an urban campus for technology and entrepreneurship that is home to dozens of startups and entrepreneurs and located at 1111 Light St. in Baltimore's Federal Hill neighborhood. They are holding a "startup crawl" on Thusday, 2 May 2013 from 6:00pm to 9:00pm where students and recent graduates can meet with people from the Baltimore technology and startup community.

"Are you a current student or recent graduate looking to enter the startup market through an internship or job? Are you a startup looking for the next best thing? Join us here at Betamore for our first Startup Crawl, an event that puts talented college and graduate students in the same room with the startup / tech community to learn the industry, create beneficial connections and discover what the Baltimore Tech community has to offer.

Shake a few hands, have a couple beers, and experience how fun working for a startup can be. This event is exclusive to students and recent grads (must be less than one year out of school)."

If you are interested, see their Facebook Startup Crawl event page and register for this free event.

The team of Yelena Yesha, Karuna Joshi and Lily Bengfort has been selected for the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program for April.

The NSF I-Corps is a set of activities and programs that prepare scientists and engineers to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and broadens the impact of select, NSF-funded, basic-research projects. Combining experience and guidance from established entrepreneurs with a targeted curriculum, I-Corps is a public-private partnership program that teaches grantees to identify valuable product opportunities that can emerge from academic research, and offers entrepreneurship training to student participants.

UMBC Information Systems

Sensor-based assessment of the quality
of human motion during therapeutic exercise

Dr. Portia Taylor
Social Security Administration

12-1pm Wednesday, 10 April 2013, ITE 459

Advances in technology and research have been employed in recent years to develop efficient mechanisms to deliver home-based exercise therapy to patients suffering from knee osteoarthritis, a degenerative disease associated with aging. Essential to the success of a therapeutic home-exercise program is the quality of the motion performed by the patient. The unsupervised nature of home-based exercise may lead to incorrect exercise performance by patients; however, current home-based exercise programs do not provide mechanisms for monitoring the quality of motion performed or for providing feedback to the patient. This lack of support has been found to be a factor in patient non-compliance to home exercise programs.

Our goal is to provide a motion sensor-based system that can evaluate the quality of exercise to support home rehabilitation. We introduce the Quality Assessment Framework (QAF) that uses low-cost motion sensors with data processing and machine learning techniques to assess the quality of human motion performed during therapeutic exercises. Data from fifteen persons with knee osteoarthritis was collected in a laboratory environment, and a classifier was trained using multi-label learning methods to detect descriptive characteristics of the patient's motion. These characteristics represent errors in the exercise performance as well as variables regularly monitored by the patient's therapist, such as speed.

Results from multi-label learning are presented and recommendations made on requirements for an in-home therapeutic exercise system. The QAF can be adapted to the home therapy needs of conditions other than knee OA. We present a preliminary design of the InForm Exercise System that utilizes the QAF and has the potential to present feedback to patients completing home exercise programs.

Portia Taylor received her BS degree in Computer Science from Grambling State University in 2007 and a Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2012. At CMU, she was part of the Quality of LifeTechnology Center, a NSF Engineering Research Center dedicated to the development of technologies for the elderly and disabled. Currently, Dr. Taylor works at the Social Security Administration as an IT Fellow. Her research interests include machine learning applications in biomedical engineering, intelligent systems for rehabilitation and physical therapy, and heath information technology.

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Machine learning techniques for predicting chronic diseases

Vladimir Korolev

1:00pm Friday, 5 April 2013, ITE 227, UMBC

In recent years we saw an explosion of cheap genetic tests, which lead to the emergence of personalized medicine. Personalized medicine is defined as practice of medicine that is tailored to specifics of individual patient. My work addresses the problem predicting an individual’s predisposition towards certain chronic diseases based on the their genetic makeup. The benefits of such work allow for more selective administration of invasive tests such as biopsies, which are known to cause health problems themselves.

Recently NIH has done a number of Gene Wide Association Studies q that resulted in massive datasets containing subjects’ generic makeup and labeled with clinical data including occurrence of chronic diseases. Unfortunately, given the relatively small number of patients in such studies and the vast number of genes possessed by human beings, these datasets cannot be analyzed with traditional statistical predictive models, which require a large number of samples (patients) with a very few features per sample.

My work attempts to solve this problem by employing state of the art machine learning techniques. In the past year I have built a software system that is capable of crunching of multi-terabyte scale datasets to refactor the NIH data into the form that is palatable by modern big data systems. I have run initial stages of feature selection. I will present the current state of the work and future plans. Another goal of this work is to ensure the repeatability of the experiments and flexibility to run with any similar dataset from current and future studies

Vlad Korolev is a PhD student in the UMBC Computer Science program. His research interests are in the are of personalized medicine, machine learning and large scale data processing. Vlad has considerable experience in the industry specializing in IT security, large scale data processing and the organization of software development processes.

Congratulations to the nine CSEE undergraduate students will have oral or poster presentations in UMBC's 17th Annual Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day on Wednesday, 24 April 2013

• Andrew Battisti, "Experiences in Group Game Development", Poster presentation, 12:30pm-3:00pm, UC Ballroom, Mentor: Dr. Marc Olano
   
• Michael Berlin, "Using Machine Learning to Classify Trouble Tickets", Poster presentation, 10:00am-12:30pm, UC Ballroom, Mentor: Dr. Tim Finin
   
• Kenneth Derda, "Puzzle Box: Video Game to Challenge Spatial Perception through Three-Dimensional Puzzles", Poster presentation, 12:30pm-3:00pm, UC Ballroom, Mentor: Dr. Marc Olano
   
• David Eisen, "Mid-Infrared Optical Stimulations for Non-Contact Neural Excitation", Oral Presentation, 11:00am, UC 310, Mentor: Dr. Fow-Sen Choa
   
• Julian Feild, "A High-Performance, Low-Power Many-Core Processor for DSP Applications", Poster presentation, 10:00am-12:30pm, UC Ballroom, Mentor: Dr. Tinoosh Mohsenin
   
• Thomas Hervey, "Lights, Camera, Motion, Action: The Dance Application of Microsoft's Kinect and Intelligent Stage Lighting", Artistic Performance, 11:15am, FA 317, Mentors: Dr. Marc Olano and Carol Hess
   
• Thomas Hervey, "Lights, Camera, Motion, Action: The Dance Application of Microsoft's Kinect and Intelligent Stage Lighting", Poster presentation, 12:30pm-3:00pm, UC Ballroom, Mentors: Dr. Marc Olano and Carol Hess
   
• David Mai, "Detached, Video Game", Poster presentation, 10:00am-12:30pm, UC Ballroom, Mentor: Dr. Marc Olano
   
• Jonathan Moriarty, "Derelict, An Experiment In Virtual Reality Game Development", Poster presentation, 10:00am-12:30pm, UC Ballroom, Mentor: Dr. Marc Olano
   
• Alexander Morrow, "Comparison of Dimension Reduction Techniques", Oral Presentation, 3:00pm, UC 310, Mentor: Dr. Marie desJardins