The Second Baltimore Hackathon will be held this weekend, starting at 6:00pm Friday June 8 and ending at 6:00pm Sunday. At a hackathon people get together to build a hardware or software project from idea to prototype, in this case in one weekend. You can do it individually or as a team. You can come as part of a team or find one when you get there. It’s a great way to meet people and have fun.

The hackathon will take place at Advertising.com‘s offices in Tide Point (1020 Hull Street, 1st Floor Ivory Building, Baltimore, MD 21230).

You can register online (tickets are limited) for just $10, which includes a t-shirt and food for the weekend. Significant prizes will be awarded in six different categories: technical complexity, smart design, civic service, aesthetics, crowd favorite, and hacker/DIY.

See the Baltimore Hackathon site for more information.

Should an introductory Computer Science course fall within the cadre of General Education Requirements (GEP)—like Math, Science, and English—that are required of all undergrads?

According to a USA Today College article, the answer is yes.

In the article, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering professors Marie desJardins and Penny Rheingans talk about the importance of having, at least, a basic knowledge of how computers work, especially in a world that is quickly evolving in the hands of technology: 

“Inevitably, by the time today’s college students are middle-aged, technology will be unimaginably faster, more powerful and more integrated into our daily lives,” said desJardins, “and the people who understand how it works are the ones who will be helping society to take advantage of it and use it to improve people’s lives.”

For non-technical students who recoil at the thought of taking a computer course, Dr. Rheingans is an example of what can happen when you take a chance. Originally planning to major in the social sciences, says the article, a computer science course during Dr. Rheingans' first semester changed her entire career projection:

“I found computing to be both incredibly frustrating and incredibly addicting,” Rheingans said in an email. “I love the challenge of building something to solve a problem and the satisfaction of figuring out why my creation isn’t working and fixing it.”

Check out the entire article, “The Power of Computing,” to hear more of what professors desJardins and Rheingans have to say about the increasing importance of computer science comprehension. 

Blockly is new web-based, graphical programming language developed by Google. It's graphical in the style of Scratch in that you create a program not as a linguistic object, but by selecting and composing icons that represent control flow constructs, operations, functions, variables and values. It's Web based in that both the program development and program interpreter components are written in javascript run in your browser runs in your browser. There is also the capability of compiling your Blockly program into Javascript, Dart or Python. You can inspect or checkout the Blockly source code from the Blockly source repository or try the Maze demo. In that demo, you construct a Blockly program to solve a simple maze, moving the agent to the designated target.

This is work in progress and there's lots more to make it a good language for instruction or to adapt it for actual use in a special environment. But it is fun to play with and is a good way to engage young people with learning how to program computers. It could also be adapted to provide an interface to allow non-programmars to write simple procedures to control devices or define workflows. You can read more about it in an article on Wired

Our department is a member of the Computing Research Association, which started in 1972 as a organization of US PhD granting CS departments and has grown to more than 220 North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and academia engaging in basic computing research; and affiliated professional societies. The CRA has become an important advocate in the US for research and education for all of the computing disciplines.

One of its useful services is publishing the free Computing Research News (CRN) five times a year. It has short articles on trends, programs, issues, events, and opportunities as well as advertisements for academic and R&D oriented positions. Reading it is a good way to stay informed about computing research and higher education and to find R&D-oriented jobs.

The CRA has announced that the CRN will no longer be published in hard copy and invites people to sign up to receive announcements of the availability of electronic versions. We encourage anyone interested in computing R&D or higher education to subscribe.

A small study by the Brookings Institution looked at the percentage of people age 25 and over in the 100 largest U.S. metro areas who held at least a bachelor’s degree in 2010, versus in 1970. It reveals a trend for college graduates to concentrate in a set of metropolitan areas that include the greater DC and Baltimore regions. Of the 100 largest metropolitan areas, the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria area had the highest percentage (46.8%) and the Baltimore-Towson area had the 14th highest (35.1%). Baltimore had one of the largest increases in the percentage between 1970 and 2010.

"Metro areas that enjoyed the most substantial jumps in their college degree attainment ranks included many, like Dayton, that lost a tremendous share of their manufacturing between 1970 and 2010. But because regions like Worcester, Baltimore, Charlotte, and Pittsburgh shed much of that base earlier than other manufacturing centers, they have had more time to build services-oriented economies in sectors like health, professional services, higher education, and finance, and to grow, attract, and retain highly educated populations to fill those jobs."

A story in the New York Times, A Gap in College Graduates Leaves Some Cities Behind, discusses the results of the analysis and what they might mean.

Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, is seen using SQL in the Hollywood remake. See The Girl With The ANSI Tattoo for an analysis of which DBMS this is and a critique of the queries (Everybody’s a critic!).

NIST will hold a Big Data Workshop 13-14 June 2012 in Gaithersburg to explore key national priority topics in support of the White House Big Data Initiative. The workshop is being held in collaboration with the NSF sponsored Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research, a collaboration between UMBC, Georgia Tech and UCSD.

This first workshop will discuss examples from science, health, disaster management, security, and finance as well as topics in emerging technology areas, including analytics and architectures. Two issues of special interest are identifying the core technologies needed to collect, store, preserve, manage, analyze, and share big data that could be standardized and developing measurements to ensure the accuracy and robustness of big data methods.

The workshop format will be a mixture of sessions, panels, and posters. Session speakers and panel members are by invitation only but all interested parties are encouraged to submit extended abstracts and/or posters.

The workshop is being held at NIST’s Gaithersburg facility and is free, although online pre-registration is required. A preliminary agenda is available which is subject to change as the workshop date approaches.

Photo Courtesy Penny Riordan

That's Todd Marks up there, standing over a banner for Mindgrub Technologies. In 2002, Marks founded the Catonsville-based start-up that specializes in mobile and web development. In fact, you're probably a fan of their work if you've downloaded UMBC's free iPhone application.

According to a Patch.com article, Mindgrub has already outgrown its office space on Frederick Road, which houses the company's 36 full-time employees. The company, which started in Marks' basement, is growing faster than anticipated. Its growth is likely tied to a string of recent successes. Like, at this year's Biz Buzz Awards–sponsored by the Baltimore Business Journal–Mind grub took home first place in the App Creator Category. And, at this year's ADDY Awards, they earned a Gold Addy for their iPhone game TAG: The Mobile Assassination Game.

To learn more about Mindgrub's rapid success, check out the full article: "In Just a Year, Tech Startup Outgrows Frederick Road Space."

Oh, and by the way, they're hiring.

Photo Courtesy Penny Riordan

That's Todd Marks up there, standing over a banner for Mindgrub Technologies. In 2002, Marks founded the Catonsville-based start-up that specializes in mobile and web development. In fact, you're probably a fan of their work if you've downloaded UMBC's free iPhone application.

According to a Patch.com article, Mindgrub has already outgrown its office space on Frederick Road, which houses the company's 36 full-time employees. The company, which started in Marks' basement, is growing faster than anticipated. Its growth is likely tied to a string of recent successes. Like, at this year's Biz Buzz Awards–sponsored by the Baltimore Business Journal–Mind grub took home first place in the App Creator Category. And, at this year's ADDY Awards, they earned a Gold Addy for their iPhone game TAG: The Mobile Assassination Game.

To learn more about Mindgrub's rapid success, check out the full article: "In Just a Year, Tech Startup Outgrows Frederick Road Space."

Oh, and by the way, they're hiring.

Congratulations to Computer Science Ph.D. student Yasaman Haghpanah, who will be receiving one of three prestigious Dissertation Fellowships from UMBC’s Graduate School to help complete her Ph.D. dissertation this summer.

Originally from Iran, Yasaman began her Ph.D. studies at UMBC in Spring 2009. Her dissertation, entitled “A novel trust and reputation mechanism through behavioral modeling of reviewers,” focuses on trust and reputation modeling for online markets.

“My research interests lie in the broad area of trust and reputation modeling and their effect on various domains such as online markets, supply chain management, auctions, social networks, smart grids, and e-commerce applications,” explains Yasaman. She credits the success of online auction site eBay to its reputation system: “Feedback Forum.” “I have extensively modeled trust and reputation through behavioral modeling of the reviewers using formal probabilistic modeling. My model is general and can be applied to several domains.”

Planning to defend her dissertation in August 2012, Yasaman credits the fellowship with helping her to wrap up her research over the summer. Once she graduates, she will be looking for postdoc positions or work in a research lab. She aspires to one day become a professor.