Embodied Interaction: Systems, Experiments, Models

Rob St. Amant
North Carolina State University

1:00pm Friday, 10 October 2015, ITE 325b

Over the past several years, engineering models for human-computer interaction — models that predict and explain performance in quantitative terms–have received increasing attention. In this talk, I’ll give an overview of experimentation and modeling work in my lab, in the areas of mobile interaction, augmented reality, and accessibility. Our research attempts to provide insight into emerging areas of HCI, where interaction goes beyond conventional desktop user interfaces to encompass the influences of physical body movement and cognitive strategies on performance.

Robert St. Amant is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at North Carolina State University; his degrees are from Johns Hopkins and the University of Massachusetts. He is on the editorial board of the Oxford Series on Cognitive Models and Architectures, and he is a former member of the steering committee for the ACM Intelligent User Interfaces conference. His current research is on human-computer interaction and cognitive modeling; past topics have included intelligent user interfaces, exploratory data analysis, and animal tool use. In 2012 his popular science book, Computing for Ordinary Mortals, was published by Oxford University Press.

Host: Tim Oates, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Last weekend, over 170 college and high school students converged upon UMBC for the second hackUMBC hackathon. This free event, spanning 24 continuous hours, brought students together to create, make, or otherwise “hack” together new technology projects, either individually or as a team. As with many hackathons, there was no limit to the type of technology students could work on — hackUMBC 2014 projects ranged from developing mobile apps and assistive/wearable technologies to applied virtual reality representations of cyberspace, a ‘smart’ autonomous tank, and reverse-engineering (and then porting to Linux) the Myo command protocol. The sky was the limit in terms of ideas and skill levels — indeed, many attendees were first-time “hackers” looking to learn programming or engineering concepts in an inclusive and fun environment.

Following opening ceremonies and brief remarks by the sponsors and UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski, participants took over the second floor ITE classrooms Saturday-into-Sunday before moving into the UC Ballroom to showcase their products before a panel of judges. Prizes were awarded for the most innovative, polished, complex, and useful ideas/technologies.

hackUMBC 2014 was well-supported by corporate sponsors, including Raytheon, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, MITRE, and ClearEdge Solutions, among others. Campus partners included the Alex Brown Center for Enterpreneurship and the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Additional support, participant encouragement, and round-the-clock motivational energy was provided by Mike Swift, chairman of Major League Hacking.

hackUMBC was organized and run by Michael Bishoff (Junior, CMPE), Randi Williams (Junior, CMPE), and Minhaz Mahmud (Senior, CMSC). CSEE’s Dr. Rick Forno serves as faculty advisor.

Special thanks to the UMBC volunteer judges Dr. Charles Nicholas, Shawn Lupoli, Geoff Weiss, and the many student volunteers who assisted in making the event a success.

Opening Ceremonies…

UMBC’s Sekar Kulandaivel (Junior, CMPE) talks about his summer internship at Northrop Grumman and what his team was able to “hack” together for the company…

UMBC President Hrabowski…

Hard at work through the day, night, and following morning…

Many attendees came prepared…

Showcase & Judging on Sunday …

For more information on hackUMBC visit the club’s website or contact the club at Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

(photos by MLH and/or Rick Forno)

Each year, the UMBC Alumni Association presents awards to honor alumni for their professional and personal achievements and service to the University. The 2014 awards will be presented on Thursday, October 9, 2014, at an awards ceremony in the Performing Arts and Humanities Building on the UMBC campus.

This year’s Alumna of the Year for Engineering and Information Technology is Claudia Pearce (’89 M.S. in Computer Science and ’94 Ph.D. in Computer Science) who is currently the Senior Computer Science Authority at the NSA. In her time at the NSA, Pearce has created development programs for computer science and information technology new-hires to NSA, a short-course series on high-end topics in CS and IT, a summer intern program and organized a distinguished lecture series. In addition, she has created a computer science grants program with the National Science Foundation, for computer science education and outreach. She has also served on the Advisory Board of the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology.

Prior to becoming the NSA’s Senior Computer Science Authority, Pearce served as the Chief of Knowledge Discovery Sciences, where she directed a research team that created Knowledge Discovery applications.

From 2000-2003, Pearce was part of the Senior Technical Development Program. While involved with this program, Pearce collaborated with organizations such as the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and Magnify Research, Inc., on topics such as “applications of data mining techniques to natural language processing.” As a Senior Computer Scientist from 1985-2000, Pearce conducted research in the area of databases and information retrieval systems.

Pearce received a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Florida in 1973, graduating with High Honors and a Phi Beta Kappa distinction. She received an M.S. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Florida in 1974. In 1989 she received an M.S. in Computer Science from UMBC.  She also received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMBC in 1994.

Pearce has described UMBC’s campus atmosphere as “very collegial.” She goes on to describe her decision to attend UMBC vs. College Park, explaining that, “[When] I came to UMBC…it seemed like a really friendly place. It was very small at the time, so it seemed like it was accessible…whereas College Park was this really big, almost overwhelming kind of environment. And I liked the small environment, the close-knit environment that you get at UMBC.”

Pearce is currently involved in research at UMBC. Earlier this year, she helped to organize a workshop sponsored by the NSF and the Department of Defense, titled “Beyond Watson: Predictive Analytics and Big Data.”

The research that inspired the Beyond Watson workshop ties into questions that are relevant to information retrieval systems. Questions such as “how do you find the right documents out of very large collections of text?” and “what are the kinds of languages, tools, techniques, infrastructure [needed]…to build our own Watson?” Pearce notes that she’s “always been interested in databases, and in particular text and natural language databases, and this notion of answering questions.” Furthermore, information retrieval systems was the topic of her Ph.D. dissertation.

Claudia lives with her husband Jonathan Cohen in Glenwood, MD. She is “an avid snow skier, quilt maker and trumpet player.”

On September 18, students from UMBC’s Graduate Cybersecurity Program joined others from Penn State, Penn State Harrisburg, and the Dickinson College of Law at the U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership and Development to participate in a scripted wargame considering the strategic aspects of cybersecurity during the 2014 Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence Symposium.

Students were provided the opportunity to be decision makers in one of six entitites ranging from DHS, DoD, and DoJ to state government and private sector organizations. The morning scenario required students to ascertain the roles and responsibilities of “their” agencies/organizations, their capabilities and liabilities, and decide who they should collaborate with to ensure that appropriate actions were taken and actionable information was conveyed appropriately. During the afternoon session, students considered whether acts of war were committed, decided what the appropriate steps were to counter those acts, and which agencies should be in the lead. The day concluded with a plenary session where each student group discussed their approach to the real-world scenario faced that day.

UMBC graduate cybersecurity students taking part in the event include Mark Lewis, Charles Swassing, Rina Chios, Chris Day, Sara Purdum, Michael Sterrett, Kristian Behel, and Joe Kirik (not pictured).

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UMBC’s involvement was coordinated by CYBR faculty member Bill Waddell, who is the Director, Mission Command and Cyberspace Division and General George S. Patton Chair of Operations Research and Analysis Center for Strategic Leadership and Development at the US Army War College.

The Baltimore Code Craftsmanship meetup group will hold its monthly meeting at 6:30pm on Thursday, September 18 at Betamore (1111 Light St.) in Baltimore (map). The meetup is for the students and software developers in the Baltimore area that care about the quality of their work and want to practice and improve their programming skills, share what they know and learn new things from others.

The meetup is a hands on coding user group with no presentations. Each meeting will be a dojo where we will go through a challenging software craftsmanship exercise that focuses on clean code, test-driven development, design patterns, and refactoring. We will pair up and practice on a kata in order to learn and apply the values, principles, and disciplines of software craftsmanship. It’s also a great way to meet others in Baltimore’s computing community to network and find out about internships and jobs.

The September meeting will go through the next Test-Driven Development (TDD) exercise focusing on solutions using pair programming, test-driven development, clean code and refactoring.

Come with your laptop equipped with your favorite programming and unit testing environment. Be prepared to pair up, code, learn, share and have fun!

Join the meetup and register to attend Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. .

UMBC Alumnus and Meyerhof Scholar Stephan Sherman (BS ’00, M8) spoke at Apple’s new product event  on Tuesday and described his company’s VainGlory game, which will run on the new iPhones using under iOS 8, taking advantage of Metal graphics API, larger screen and faster processors on the iPhone 6.

Stephan is Co-founder and CCO (Chief Creative Officer) of Super Evil Megacorp, a game development company headquartered in San Mateo, California.

While at UMBC, Stephen put together an independent study program combining Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Digital Animation. After graduating in 2000, he went on to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received a MS degree in computer science in 2002. He worked at a number of computer game companies as a programmer, lead programmer and senior engineer and co-founded Super Evil Megacorp in 2010.

CSEE’s Dr. Rick Forno, Cybersecurity GPD and Assistant Director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity, has received an $84K grant from the National Security Agency (NSA) to fund the prizes for student winners at the 2014 Maryland Cyber Challenge finals that will take place at the CyberMaryland 2014 conference in Baltimore on 29 and 30 October.

The Maryland Cyber Challenge aims to build excitement around pursuing education and careers in the cybersecurity field by bringing together teams of students and cyber practitioners to compete in a series of ever-more-complex cybersecurity challenges. To date, approximately 700 competitors across 115 teams have participated in the past three annual competitions. With the generous support of NSA, UMBC has provided more than $252,000 in monetary prizes to highly skilled and talented computer science students during the competition.

First place team members each will receive $5K and runners-up receive $2K each to contribute toward their higher education and training in the cybersecurity and computer science fields. Identical prizes are awarded both in the high school and college divisions.

The 2014 Challenge begins with the first scored qualification round taking place over 13-15 September.

Dr. Forno and UMBC are co-founders of the Maryland Cyber Challenge, which is a partnership with Leidos and the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED).

UMBC Quantum Computation Seminar

How to program the D-Wave Quantum Annealing Computer?

Omar Shehab

2:30-4:00 pm, Tuesday, 9 September 2014, ITE 325B

In this tutorial session, we will give a gentle introduction to the programming model of the D-Wave Quantum Annealing Computer. The implementations of a number of programs will be demonstrated. Mapping of generic problems, minor embedding of problem Ising graphs, classical computational complexity of problem mapping and different system parameters will be discussed in details. We will also discuss how to enhance the success probability of finding a solution.

Omar Shehab is a PhD student of the department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering working under the direction of Professor Samuel Lomonaco. Omar’s research areas of interest are quantum Hamiltonian complexity and quantum cryptography.

Name: Olivia Wolfe
Educational Background: Bachelor’s and Master’s degree (Counseling and Personnel Services) from University of Maryland, College Park
Hometown: Albuquerque, New Mexico
Current role: As Coordinator of Academic Affairs, Olivia oversees academic services staff of the department, oversees course scheduling for the department, coordinates adjunct instructor and TA/RA hiring, addresses undergraduate and graduate student concerns, assists with special events in the college, coordinates administration of the Promotion and Tenure process, coordinates prospective faculty interviews, and room scheduling.

Olivia is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She joined UMBC’s CSEE Department in January of 2014. Prior to her arrival at UMBC, Olivia worked as the Undergraduate Student Services Coordinator in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. When not working, Olivia volunteers with a fire department, a missing persons search and rescue group, and a large breed dog rescue. She also enjoys photography, reading, and spending time outdoors.

Name: Yemisi Aina
Educational Background: Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from UMBC.
Current role: As a program management specialist for the undergraduate division of CSEE, Yemisi serves as the primary scheduling coordinator for the department. She also acts as a content editor for the department website, and provides administrative support to faculty, staff and students.

Yemisi joined UMBC’s CSEE Department in February of 2014. Prior to her arrival at UMBC, Yemisi worked for the Howard County Library. When not working, she enjoys reading, watching movies, and going to concerts. She is also interested in photography and web development.

The new Eclipse research custer includes three collaborating labs at UMBC that focus on low-level hardware design to data analytics. Current projects include wearable computing, hardware security, and human assisted computer vision.

Professor Nilanjan Banerjee’s Mobile, Pervasive, and Sensor System Lab performs research in cyber-physical systems spanning mobile systems, renewable-energy driven systems, and low power wearable sensors. It uses cross-disciplinary techniques including hardware design, software systems design, and analytics to build more usable and robust systems.

Professor Ryan Robucci’s Covail Lab develops on cooperative technolgy that explores ultra-low-power hybrid analog-digital computational systems, sensors, and hardware security. Studies of biological systems are leveraged for inspiring signal and image processing algoritghms and sensor system design for embedded aplications including robust wearable, mobile, biomedical systems.

Professor Chintan Patel’s VLSI Lab focuses on electronic design automation (EDA) for reliable digital systems and low-power VLSI design. Research on hardware security, power supply noise analysis and estimation, delay testing enables the development of secure and robust systems.