If you’d like to be part of Maryland’s biggest Cybersecurity battle this October, then don’t forget to register before September 19, 2012.

In its second year, The Maryland Cyber Challenge & Competition (MDC3) will pit teams of high schoolers, college students, and industry professionals against one another in a series of “hackathons” that test their problem solving mettle.

Last year 150 finalists competed for the MDC3 title and more than $100,000 in prizes. In the end, three teams prevailed, one at each level: Team ICF (Industry level), Towson University (College level), and the Sherwood Cyber Warriors from Sherwood High School.

To be held at the Baltimore Convention Center on October 16 and 17,  MDC3 features a series workshops, panels and talks by industry professionals, including a keynote speech from UMBC president Dr. Freeman Hrabowski  called “Creating the Cyber Generation.”

You can learn more about the competition at a special Information session this Friday, September 7, 2012 at the UMBC Training Centers in Columbia, MD. The session will go over rules, format, and scoring of the competition, as well as the CyberNEXS competition platform.

To learn more and to register for the Maryland Cyber Challenge & Competition, visit the CyberMaryland 2012 website.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) invites all students, and the faculty and staff in the College of Engineering and Information Technology to their annual beginning of the year Ice Cream Social. It takes place tomorrow Wednesday, September 5 from 11:30-1:30 p.m. in the atrium of the Engineering/Computer Science (ECS) Building.

Stop to meet other women and men majoring in Engineering, Computer Science, and Information Technology. Plus, who can say no to free ice cream?

**Involvement Fest has been postponed until Monday, September 10th, due to the rain**

"Pirates" is the theme of this year's Involvement Fest, which takes place Monday, September 10th from 12-3 p.m. on the Quad.

For Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering majors ready to dive into UMBC's vast sea of extracurricular activities, there will be plenty to choose from among the more than 250 clubs and organizations. Those targeted toward tech-minded individuals include:

• Amateur Radio Club
• Chess Club
• CWIT Student Council
• Cyber Defense Team
• DEVICE
• Engineers Without Borders
• Entrepreneurial Society
• Game Developer's Club
• Linux User's Group
• National Society of Black Engineers
• Society of Women Engineers

and, more….

Photo: The Retriever Weekly

This August, UMBC welcomed its inagural batch of Transfer Scholars in Information Technology and Engineering (T-SITE) Scholars (pictured above).

The brainchild of a team of seven women sprinkled throughout IT and Engineering departments in the College of Engineering and Information Technology at UMBC, the T-SITE scholarship program offers support–financial and otherwise–to help transfer students succeed in careers in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, and Information Systems.

The scholars took part in the Center for Women in Technology's (CWIT) New Scholars Retreat, held August 10-12. The Olympics-themed retreat included a trust-building activity at College Park's ropes course, a traditional business dinner with faculty members, industry representatives, and CWIT alumni, and a discussion of women in STEM fields.

You can read more about CWIT's New Scholars Retreat in a Retriever Weekly article: " CWIT summer retreat welcomes the T-SITE scholars."

Photo: Gracehopper.org

Facebook has announced that it will award scholarships to 25 women who wish to attend the upcoming Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference that will take place at the Baltimore Convention center October 3-6. This year's theme is "Are We There Yet?"

Applicants must be women studying Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field. Both full-time students and full-time working professionals within the same fields are eligible.

Scholarship recipients will receive free registration to the conference, free travel and lodgings, and a $200 food stipend. The lucky winners will also be treated to an all-expenses-paid visit to Facebook's New York City office from September 30 through October 2 that includes tech talks, mentoring sessions, and optional sightseeing. During the conference, the 25 recipients will be invited to a private reception with Jocelyn Goldfein, the director of engineering at Facebook.

If interested, you can apply for the scholarship through the Facebook Grace Hopper Scholarship application page by next Wednesday, September 5, 2012. Winners will be notified by September 14, 2012.

An initial 20 event calendar for the first-ever Baltimore Innovation Week has just been released. Organized by local tech news site Technically Baltimore, the annual event, held from September 20-30, is a celebration of technology and innovation in Baltimore. Its goal is to encourage local innovation through programming focused on technology, collaboration, and improving the city, says the website.

Highlights include:

Startup Weekend (Sep. 28), a worldwide three-day frenzy where aspiring entrepreneurs gather to  pitch business proposals, create business models, and gather feedback from local entrepreneurial leaders. The Baltimore chapter takes place at Betamore, an urban campus for technology and entrepreneurship that opens in September.

DiversiTech #7 (Sep. 26), a meetup geared towards the needs of the minority tech entrepreneur. "The Meetups allow for unmatched networking opportunities and access to resources relevant to building diversity in the regional tech entrepreneurship space," explains the website. 

Open Source Hack Night (Sep. 25), a chance to break into groups to work on the hack project of your choice. Hackers of all skill levels are welcome.

Check out the full calendar of events.

Anupam Joshi and Tim Finin have received a $200,000 research award from the NSF Division of Information and Intelligent Systems for a two-year project focused on extracting information from tables. The project, T2K: From Tables to Knowledge, will explore the feasibility of automatically extracting new knowledge directly from data found in spreadsheets, database relations, and document tables and representing it as highly interoperable linked open data (LOD) in the Semantic Web language RDF. The extraction is guided by probabilistic graphical models that use statistical information mined from current LOD knowledge resources. To demonstrate the potential payoff of the research, the system is used to extract knowledge from tables collected from medical journals and tables from web sites like data.gov.

While the W3C semantic web languages RDF and OWL are used to represent the knowledge, the results are applicable to other semantic data frameworks such as Microdata (Search Consortium), Freebase (Google), Probase (Microsoft) and the Open Graph (Facebook). The open sourced prototype software allows other researchers to experiment with automatically producing semantically enriched data from tables for their domains.

If successful, such software extraction systems are expected to become part of a new online knowledge ecology — both consuming existing LOD knowledge to understand the intended meaning implicit in a table and producing new facts and knowledge that will become part of Web. This represents a dramatic increase in the breadth and depth of public semantic data that can make “big data'' analytics more effective.

MS Thesis Defense

Calculating Representativeness of
Geographic Sites Across the World

Ashwinkumar Ganesan

11:00am Friday, 31 August 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

GLOBE is a global correlation engine, a project to study the effects of human activity on land change based on a set of parameters that include temperature, forest cover, human population, atmospheric parameters, and many other variables. The aim of this research is to understand how a land change study or set of studies of specific geographic areas generalizes to other areas of the world. The generic form of the question is – given a set of data points with a set of variables, how can we determine how much a selected subset of points represents the rest of the distribution. The research aims to answer a set of questions which include the definition of representativeness of a geographical site and how the representativeness can be computed. Land change researchers will dynamically select a subset of variables which they would like to study. Hence the method developed not only computes representativeness, but must do so in an efficient manner. For this purpose, we apply dimension reduction techniques to reduce the size of computation and analyze the effectiveness of using these techniques to calculate representativeness.

Committee: Drs. Tim Oates (chair), Tim Finin and Dr. Matt Schmill

This Friday, August 31, new and returning students are invited to the Office of Undergraduate Education's Open House.

Held from Noon to 2 p.m. in the Academic IV Building (Room 114), the event is a chance to talk about First Year Seminars, The New Student Book Experience, Undergraduate Research, and an Introduction to an Honors University.

MS Thesis Defense

Predicting the Activities of Mobile Phone Users
with Hidden Markov Models

Amey Sane

9:00am Tuesday, 28 August 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

Mobile phones are ubiquitous and increasingly capable, with sophisticated sensors, network access, significant storage and processing power and access to a wide range of application data. They can improve the range and quality of their services by acquiring and using models of their context, including the activities in which their users are engaged. This thesis explores the use of supervised machine learning techniques for predicting a smartphone user's activities from available sensor data. We have specifically concentrated on applying classifiers and ensembles using hidden markov models for activity recognition. Our classifiers predict a user's current activity from among a set of conceptual activity classes such as sleeping, traveling, playing, working, and chatting/watching TV. We have experimented with and evaluated the effectiveness of different approaches on data collected on Android smartphones by university faculty and students.

Committee: Drs. Tim Finin (chair), Anupam Joshi and Yelena Yesha