The UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department seeks to fill two tenure-track faculty positions for its Computer Science program and is especially interested in candidates whose research areas include security and data analytics and related fields. Apply by January 15, 2015 for full consideration.

UMBC has a large and vibrant computing community with nearly 100 faculty and more than 3100 students enrolled in computing programs that include computer science, cybersecurity, computer engineering, electrical engineering, information systems, human-centered computing, intermedia and digital arts, and bioinformatics.

Our location in the Baltimore-DC corridor puts us in the center of one of the largest concentrations of federal agencies and research and development centers and many industrial research labs, including the new Cybersecurity Federally Funded R&D Center. We benefit from an excellent computing infrastructure that includes several high-performance computing clusters and participation in the National LambdaRail network.

The CSEE Department also has three new positions for full-time lecturers. The College of Engineering and Information Technology has a position for a full-time lecturer or Professor of the Practice to focus on the needs of incoming computing majors through teaching, advising, and helping develop programs in computing. This person will work closely with faculty in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department and Information Systems Department. UMBC’s Information Systems department is accepting applications for three tenure track faculty positions in data science, software engineering and human-centered computing.

Dissertation Defense

TABEL — A Domain Independent and Extensible
Framework for Inferring the Semantics of Tables

Varish Vyankatesh Mulwad

8:00am Thursday, 8 January 2015, ITE325b

Tables are an integral part of documents, reports and Web pages in many scientific and technical domains, compactly encoding important information that can be difficult to express in text. Table-like structures outside documents, such as spreadsheets, CSV files, log files and databases, are widely used to represent and share information. However, tables remain beyond the scope of regular text processing systems which often treat them like free text.

This dissertation presents TABEL — a domain independent and extensible framework to infer the semantics of tables and represent them as RDF Linked Data. TABEL captures the intended meaning of a table by mapping header cells to classes, data cell values to existing entities and pair of columns to relations from an given ontology and knowledge base. The core of the framework consists of a module that represents a table as a graphical model to jointly infer the semantics of headers, data cells and relation between headers. We also introduce a novel Semantic Message Passing scheme, which incorporates semantics into message passing, to perform joint inference over the probabilistic graphical model. We also develop and explore a “human-in-the-loop” paradigm, presenting plausible models of user interaction with our framework and its impact on the quality of inferred semantics.

We present techniques that are both extensible and domain agnostic. Our framework supports the addition of preprocessing modules without affecting existing ones, making TABEL extensible. It also allows background knowledge bases to be adapted and changed based on the domains of the tables, thus making it domain independent. We demonstrate the extensibility and domain independence of our techniques by developing an application of TABEL in the healthcare domain. We develop a proof of concept for an application to generate meta-analysis reports automatically, which is built on top of the semantics inferred from tables found in medical literature.

A thorough evaluation with experiments over dataset of tables from the Web and medical research reports presents promising results.

Committee: Drs. Tim Finin (chair), Tim Oates, Anupam Joshi, Yun Peng, Indrajit Bhattacharya (IBM Research) and L. V. Subramaniam (IBM Research)

UMBC GM Niclas “The Dark Knight” Huschenbeth plays GM Nadezhda Kosintseva from UT Dallas in the fifth round of the Pan-Am chess tournament.

Congratulations to the UMBC chess team for placing third in the 2014 Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship and qualifying to advance to the President’s Cup on April 5-6 at the New York Athletic Club.  This tournament, known as the Final Four of College Chess, will determine the 2015 U.S. college team chess champion.

The UMBC team in this year’s Pan-Am consists of GM Niclas Huschenbeth, IM Levan Bregadze, IM Tanguy Ringoir, GM Akshayraj Kore and WGM Nazi Paikidze (alternate).

The final standings were: Webster University A (5.5 points), the University of Texas at Dallas A (5 points), the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (5 points) and Texas Tech University A (4.5 points). UTD placed ahead of UMBC by virtue of winning their match.

You can view the final results on the tournament website and review selected games on Monroi.

Photo by Marlayna Demond. Sitting (left to right): Joel DeWyer, Business Manager; Dr. Alan T. Sherman, Director and GM Sam Palatnik, Coach. Standing (left to right): GM Akshayraj “The Indian Knight” Kore; IM Levan “The Georgian Gangster” Bregadze; GM Niclas “The Dark Knight” Huschenbeth, Captain; IM and WGM Nazi “The Black Widow” Paikidze and IM Tanguy “The Belgium Butcher” Ringoir.

The UMBC chess team won its match (4-0) against Lindenwood University in the first round of the 2014 Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship being held this week in South Padre Island, Texas. Five more rounds will be played over the next three days to determine winner and the top four USA schools, which will compete in the President’s Cup championship April 5-6 at the New York Athletic Club to determine the U.S. college team chess champion.

UMBC’s chess team has won or tied for first place a record ten times at the Pan-Am and a record six times at the President’s Cup. The UMBC team in this year’s Pan-Am consists of GM Niclas Huschenbeth, IM Levan Bregadze, IM Tanguy Ringoir, GM Akshayraj Kore and WGM Nazi Paikidze (alternate).

CSEE professor Alan Sherman, director of UMBC’s chess program, reports that the field is especially strong this year with 22 International Grandmasters (GM) or International Woman Grandmaster (WGM) and notes that “At least one strong school will not make the Final Four”.

You can view the latest results on the tournament website and watch selected games live on Monroi.

MS Thesis Defense

distratto: Real-time Impaired Driving Detection Using Multiple Textile and Inertial Sensors

Tsu An Chen

1:00-3:00pm Tuesday, 23 December 2014, ITE 341

Statistical data shows that driving-related accidents and human casualties caused by vehicles are on the rise in the US and globally. Most of these accidents are cause by impaired or distracted driving. Existing systems that detect impaired driving use cameras that perform eye and head tracking and do not capture full-body movements that are indicative of dangerous driving. To address this problem, in this thesis we present a system, distratto, that uses capacitive textile sensors embedded into car seats, headrests, and arm rests to capture whole body motion, and inertial and GPS sensors for determining vehicle speed and turns. Using a combination of these sensors and a tiered signal processing algorithm, we infer attributes that are indicative of impaired driving. We have developed a fully functional prototype of distratto that we evaluate in a real vehicle setting. We show that our system can detect impaired driving instances and driver movements with high accuracy.

Committee: Drs. Nilanjan Banerjee (chair), Ryan Robucci, Chintan Patel

The Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2014 bill was passed by Congress this month and signed by the President at the end of last week. The bill provides for “an ongoing, voluntary public-private partnership to improve cybersecurity, and to strengthen cybersecurity research and development, workforce development and education, and public awareness and preparedness, and for other purposes.”

The bill formalizes the role of the National Institute for Standards and Technology in continuing to develop the voluntary Cybersecurity Framework. It includes provisions to promote cybersecurity research, private/public sector collaboration on cybersecurity, education and awareness and technical standards, which includes a federal cloud computing strategy. It also directs NSF to continue the Federal Cyber Scholarship-for-Service program under which recipients agree to work in the cybersecurity mission of a federal, state, local, or tribal agency for a period equal to the length of their scholarship.

CSEE’s Marie desJardins is currently collaborating with Maryland educators and researchers for the NSF-funded CS10K Teacher Training Project. The project seeks to change how computer science is taught by high school teachers. Researchers work together with high school teachers to craft new curricula for high school computer science programs. This project is unique in that actual high school teachers are creating the new curricula, rather than professional curriculum writers. The CS10K Maryland Project team includes faculty from UMCP, as well as high school teachers from Charles County and Baltimore County.

The CS10K team has facilitated the creation of “a complete curriculum package for a new College Board Advanced Placement (AP) course called CS Principles.” Originally, the goal of the CS10K team was to train 10,000 teachers to teach computer science in 10,000 schools nationwide. The project has been revised to reflect its new goal of training teachers in all U.S. schools.

In academia there is a growing concern that females–as well as minorities and those with disabilities–are being repeatedly discouraged from pursuing programming in high school. Professor desJardins is trying to change this by directing the CS Matters in MD Project. (CS Matters in MD is part of the larger, NSF-supported initiative known as CS 10K.)

“I believe that CS should be included throughout the K-12 curriculum as a set of basic skills and knowledge for today’s world,” desJardins said. “All citizens of the 21st century, especially the next generation of knowledge workers, will benefit greatly from learning about computational thinking and the problem-solving skills that are a core part of computer science.”

In addition, desJardins explains that, “We need to expand the pool of available workers to fill the many computing-related jobs that our economy demands, and in order to be sure that the technology we develop is robust and useful, we need to increase the diversity of the computer scientists who take those jobs.  To meet these goals, we must broaden our notion of what it means to teach computer science (beyond just teaching coding skills), and we must reach a broader audience at an earlier age.  Our ‘CS Matters in Maryland’ project is particularly focused on creating appealing and engaging curriculum materials for the newly announced AP CS Principles course, and on training teachers to deliver this material effectively to a diverse population of learners.”

More information about CS Matters in Maryland and the CS10K Project can be found here.

UMBC’s Imaging Research Center is looking for student programmers to assist in ongoing projects. Current projects range from websites to mobile apps. Such projects include web based panorama viewer, working with Unity to develop mobile apps, developing a web based story sharing social network, developing a image archive/gallery, and more. Projects are assigned as seen fit. Work will begin in January 2015.

Do you enjoy programming challenges? Do you enjoy learning new skills? Are you passionate about writing software that could potentially be used by thousands of users daily? If so, this is a great opportunity for you.

Duties:

• Maintain existing projects from websites to mobile apps
• Develop web based solutions
• Develop mobile based solutions
• Assist in ongoing projects
• Other duties as assigned

Requirements:

• Ability to program in C, C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, Python
• Knowledge of web technologies: HTML, CSS, Javascript, Php, MySQL
• Quick learner
• Able to work well in groups
• Excellent troubleshooting skills
• Excellent communication skills
• Available to work up to 20 hours a week during the semester and up to 40
  hours a week during the summer
• Active UMBC student.

Desires:

• Major in Computer Science or other related field
• Experience with the HTML5 <canvas> tag and/or WebGL is a plus
• Experience developing iOS/Android apps is a plus
• Experience with Unity and/or Unreal is a plus
• Experience with UNIX/Linux is a plus
• Experience with git, svn, or other revision control systems is a plus

Submit resumes by email to Mark Jarzynski, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. Please provide an example of a programming project that you were passionate about.

Mark Jarzynski, Technical Director / Programmer, Imaging Research Center, UMBC, ITE 101G, 410-455-1498

Filmmaker Matthew Coakley of Blue Mantle Media created this amazing drone-assisted video of Baltimore.

Coakley comments on the video:

“It features Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the Raven’s M&T Bank Stadium, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, National Aquarium, the Baltimore Convention Center, Federal Hill, Fells Points, The Pride of Baltimore memorial, The Pride of Baltimore II, Patterson Park, Penn Station, Power Plant, and more.
..
To film this I used a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter, with a GoPro Hero4 mounted on a Zenmuse H3-3D gimbal. I hope to eventually upgrade to a higher-end system, but you work with what you’ve got…and it’s still incredible the types of shots achievable with such a small piece of equipment!”

CSEE’s Marie desJardins recently collaborated with a group of Howard County parents and teachers to create HowGirlsCode, an educational program that “educates and inspires young girls to pursue computer related activities, courses, and careers.”

The program–originally called Computer Mania Club–is based out of Fulton Elementary School. Over the course of ten weeks, students meet for weekly two-hour sessions, working on projects such as Lego Mindstorm robots and 3D printing. Students also work with programming tools such as MIT’s Scratch program. The curriculum for the program is largely based off of materials from the Code.org website.

UMBC alumna Katie Egan and her husband Kent Malwitz have been instrumental in getting the club off the ground. Malwitz, who is the President and Chief Learning Officer for UMBC Training Centers, originally recruited Marie desJardins to participate in a brainstorming session for the club back in 2013. Professor desJardins now serves as a member of the Advisory Board for HowGirlsCode.

Bethany Meyer, Senior Web Developer at MGH, Inc., was a recent guest speaker for HowGirlsCode. During her presentation, Meyer explained how she got into coding, citing as an example a website that she created when she was 13 years old. Meyer went on to present more recent projects, such as OldBay75.com and OCOcean.com. “I think a lot of people have negative stereotypes in mind when they think of programmers,” Meyer says. “My goal was to break down some of those stereotypes by showing…[students] that the work can be really exciting and that it involves creativity and interacting with others. I hope that I inspired some of them to teach themselves to make websites. ”

A recent Baltimore Sun article notes that there has been a marked increase in student signups for HowGirlsCode since last year. More courses will be offered in the spring, due to increasing demand. At some point, the coding club could possibly expand to other schools. Currently, Egan is trying to turn HowGirlsCode into a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, charitable organization. This would allow the club to have better access to resources such as facilities, grants and funding. Ideally, she hopes to turn the club into a nonprofit by September 2015.

The Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab has a similar program, called Girls Who Code. The Hopkins APL program, which is intended for middle and high school students, is based on a national nonprofit of the same name.