UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Cloud Computing

Henry J. Sienkiewicz

Chief Information Officer
Defense Information Systems Agency

11:30-12:30 Friday, 16 September 2011
Room 231, ITE Building

Mr. Henry Sienkiewicz will discuss the opportunities and challenges for using cloud computing in government agencies.

Henry J. Sienkiewicz is the Chief Information Officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency. As the DISA CIO he is responsible for developing, maintaining, and facilitating the implementation of the Agency's information technology (IT) architecture, enabling DISA to accomplish its critical combat support missions. As CIO, he ensures that agency IT and information assurance programs and policies are fully coordinated, integrated, and effectively implemented and are aligned with the Agency's strategy. Mr. Sienkiewicz joined DISA in 2008 as the Technical Program Director for DISA Computing Services before moving to the CIO position. He is a founding member of George Washington University's technology transfer council, retired from the US Army Reserves, and has been involved in many academic and entrepreneurial pursuits throughout his extensive IT career.

Hosts: Professor Yelena Yesha and Joel Morris

– directions — upcoming talks –

CSEE Graduate Seminar

Nonlinear Optical Signal Processing in
Optical Fibers and Waveguides

Dr. Gary M. Carter
Professor of Electrical Engineering
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1-2pm Friday, 16 September, 2011, ITE 227

postponed until later in the Fall

Advances in optical fiber and semiconductor technology have progressed to the degree that nonlinear optical signal processing can be demonstrated at extraordinarily high data rates. This talk will review some of the work of Dr. Carter's research group in photonic crystal fibers, silicon nano wires, and AlGaAs optical waveguides.

Hosts: Profs. Joel M. Morris and Yelena Yesha

Upcoming CSEE talks

EE Graduate Seminar

Analysis of Brain Network Connectivity
in fMRI Data using Spatial Dependence

Sai Ma
EE PhD Candidate, CSEE Dept, UMBC

11:30-12:45 Friday 9 September 2011, ITE 231

Due to low invasiveness and high spatial resolution, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has become popular in neuroimaging field to determine where activity occurs in brain as a result of performing cognitive tasks or merely being at rest.  One of the most active areas in current fMRI research involves exploring functional connectivity, i.e., statistical interactions, among distributed neural units. Understanding connectivity elucidates how functional systems process information in brain. More interestingly, disorganized connectivity has shown to be related to various kinds of mental disorder.

Data-driven methods, especially independent component analysis (ICA), have been successfully applied to fMRI data analysis and provided an opportunity to study brain functional connectivity on a network, hence multivariate scale. However, independence is a strong assumption which is not necessarily nor typically satisfied in real applications. For this reason, dependent component analysis (DCA) has emerged to generalize ICA by grouping components into independent subsets while within subset dependence is allowed.

Based on ICA and motivated by DCA, we aim to develop effective and efficient analysis schemes to extract, characterize, and quantify network connectivity pattern in fMRI data. We define functional network connectivity as spatial dependence among ICA-derived components, instead of second-order temporal correlation between time courses, to capture high-order statistics. According to this definition, we present our work on the study of network connectivity by several data-driven methods, including ICA, DCA, hierarchical clustering, hypothesis testing, and graph theoretical analysis.

seminar Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

Microsoft will be on campus to meet with undergraduate and graduate students interested in internship and full-time positions in the Seattle area. Interested students should come to the the Skylight Room in the Commons between 6:30 and 7:30pm on Tuesday September 6.

There are opportunities for Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Information Systems majors and more. Food will be available and also chances to win cool prizes.

If you plan to attend, please RSVP via the Events tab in your UMBCworks account (access myUMBC under the Jobs and Internships topic in myUMBC).

The CSEE department will hold an orientation session for new graduate students in its Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering programs at 9:00am Thursday August 25 in Lecture Hall 8 (ITE 102). Here is the schedule.

• 09:00-09:30am Registration
• 09:30-09:45am Welcome, CSEE Department Chair Dr. Gary Carter
• 09:45-10:15am Success Strategies, Dr. Tim Finin
• 10:15-10:45am CSEE Computer Accounts, CSEE System Administrator Geoffrey Weiss
• 10:45-11:30am Program specific presentations and discussions
  • Computer Science Program, CS Graduate Program Director Dr. Anupam Joshi (remain in Lecture Hall 8)
  • Electrical Engineering Program, EE Graduate Program Director Dr. Gary Carter (report to ITE 325B conference room)
  • Computer Engineering Program, Dr. Chintan Patel (report to ITE 346 conference room)
• 11:30-12:30pm Pizza lunch (ITE Building, 3rd Floor, outside 325 suite)
• 12:30-1:30pm TA and RA Orientation, Dr. Anupam Joshi, (ITE 325B conference room)

Microsoft has two generous graduate fellowship programs that are open to full-time students in all three of the core CSEE graduate programs: Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering. These will provide support starting with the 2012-13 academic year and have application deadlines of October 6, 2011. The nominations come from the University, must be endorsed by the Department chair and at most three students per department can be nominated to each program. The programs are:

• The Graduate Women’s Scholarship Program, which is open to women starting their graduate studies in 2011-12.
• The Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship Program which is open to students starting the second or third year of their PhD program in 2011-12.

If you are interested in being considered, please read the descriptions of the programs, confirm your eligibility, discuss the opportunity with your advisor and inform your graduate director (Prof. Joshi for CS, Prof. Carter for CE and EE) of your interest by September 7. The graduate directors will select nominees by September 12 and inform the students, who will prepare their material by September 30.

Demand Response; What is it and
What are the Business Opportunities?

Dr. Bjorn Frogner

4:00pm Wednesday, 17 August 2011
Maryland Clean Energy Technology Incubator
UMBC South Campus

Bjorn will discuss the aspect of the Smart Grid called Demand Response (DR). DR is where the action is in the Smart Grid. Implementation of DR is made possible by the merger of the following two forces.

• The State of Maryland has set the goal of reducing average electricity consumption by 15% and reducing the peak-to-average consumption by 15%. These two requirements will reduce the peak capacity needs by 30%. The goal is to reach these goals by 2015. This makes DR more valuable than all other renewable energy sources combined for the next five years.
• Smart Meters are already available in many businesses and they are soon going to be installed in 1.5 million homes in BGE and PEPCO customer residences. These meters will provide two-way communication and data readings from our homes as frequently as every 15 minutes. This provides tremendous opportunities for changes in the way we consume electricity.

These forces will rapidly transform the electric utility industry. DR will make the cost of electricity become a function of supply and demand which will make electricity be like other commodities where the market determines the price. If you are well-informed, you may save money. And, if you are real well-informed, you may be able to see some of the many new business opportunities that are being created by DR.

Bjorn Frogner has a PhD in Nuclear Engineering from University of California at Berkeley. He worked for about 35 years across a broad range of technologies, primarily related to energy and IT, while he lived in Silicon Valley in California. He moved to Annapolis, Maryland, in 2009 and he now works part-time as Entrepreneur-in- Residence at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His function there is to help startup companies in the clean energy field. He had many years of experience with the electric grid during the 70s and 80s. He has spent significant amount of time during the last 18 months making himself informed about the cyber security for the electric grid.

This week’s story on This American Life, When Patents Attack, is a good introduction to how the patent system is being used and abused, especially in the software industry. I listened to it today and got new insights into a complex problem. It will be aired on WYPR (88.1) at 4:00pm Sunday and available for for online listening or downloading after 7:00pm on Sunday. The text of the show is available now on NPR’s Planet Money blog. Here’s how it starts…

Nathan Myhrvold is a genius and a polymath. He made hundreds of millions of dollars as Microsoft’s chief technology officer, he’s discovered dinosaur fossils, and he recently co-authored a six-volume cookbook that “reveals science-inspired techniques for preparing food.”

Myhrvold has more than 100 patents to his name, and he’s cast himself as a man determined to give his fellow inventors their due. In 2000, he founded a company called Intellectual Ventures, which he calls “a company that invests in invention.”

But Myhrvold’s company has a different image among many Silicon Valley insiders.

The influential blog Techdirt regularly refers to Intellectual Ventures as a patent troll. IPWatchdog, an intellectual property site, called IV “patent troll public enemy #1.” These blogs write about how Intellectual Ventures has amassed one of the largest patent portfolios in existence and is going around to technology companies demanding money to license these patents.

Patents are a big deal in the software industry right now. Lawsuits are proliferating. Big technology companies are spending billions of dollars to buy up huge patent portfolios in order to defend themselves. Computer programmers say patents are hindering innovation.

But people at companies that have been approached by Intellectual Ventures don’t want to talk publicly.

“There is a lot of fear about Intellectual Ventures,” says Chris Sacca, a venture capitalist who was an early investor in Twitter, among other companies. “You don’t want to make yourself a target.”

Sacca wouldn’t say if Intellectual Ventures had been in contact with any of the companies he’s invested in.

“I tried to put you in touch with other people in this community to talk to you about this and they almost uniformly said they couldn’t talk to you,” Sacca told us. “They were afraid to.” IV has the power to “literally obliterate startups,” Sacca says.

It’s well worth reading or listening to to understand how the current patent system in the US is effecting not only business, but also the disciplines that produce new ideas and inventions in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

This week’s story on This American Life, When Patents Attack, is a good introduction to how the patent system is being used and abused, especially in the software industry. I listened to it today and got new insights into a complex problem. It will be aired on WYPR (88.1) at 4:00pm Sunday and available for for online listening or downloading after 7:00pm on Sunday. The text of the show is available now on NPR’s Planet Money blog. Here’s how it starts…

Nathan Myhrvold is a genius and a polymath. He made hundreds of millions of dollars as Microsoft’s chief technology officer, he’s discovered dinosaur fossils, and he recently co-authored a six-volume cookbook that “reveals science-inspired techniques for preparing food.”

Myhrvold has more than 100 patents to his name, and he’s cast himself as a man determined to give his fellow inventors their due. In 2000, he founded a company called Intellectual Ventures, which he calls “a company that invests in invention.”

But Myhrvold’s company has a different image among many Silicon Valley insiders.

The influential blog Techdirt regularly refers to Intellectual Ventures as a patent troll. IPWatchdog, an intellectual property site, called IV “patent troll public enemy #1.” These blogs write about how Intellectual Ventures has amassed one of the largest patent portfolios in existence and is going around to technology companies demanding money to license these patents.

Patents are a big deal in the software industry right now. Lawsuits are proliferating. Big technology companies are spending billions of dollars to buy up huge patent portfolios in order to defend themselves. Computer programmers say patents are hindering innovation.

But people at companies that have been approached by Intellectual Ventures don’t want to talk publicly.

“There is a lot of fear about Intellectual Ventures,” says Chris Sacca, a venture capitalist who was an early investor in Twitter, among other companies. “You don’t want to make yourself a target.”

Sacca wouldn’t say if Intellectual Ventures had been in contact with any of the companies he’s invested in.

“I tried to put you in touch with other people in this community to talk to you about this and they almost uniformly said they couldn’t talk to you,” Sacca told us. “They were afraid to.” IV has the power to “literally obliterate startups,” Sacca says.

It’s well worth reading or listening to to understand how the current patent system in the US is effecting not only business, but also the disciplines that produce new ideas and inventions in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

While you can find a treehouse to rent using Airbnb, they also have a mockup of one for their employees to chill in.

Last week’s Wall Street Journal had a story, The Perk Bubble Is Growing as Tech Booms Again, on how technology companies compete for employees by offering more and more extravagant perks.

“Here in the capital of the latest tech boom, engineers and product developers work late into the night creating the next big thing. But they take office culture just as seriously, fueling behavior that is reaching a level of froth not seen in a decade.

Some Web start-ups are partying like it’s 1999. Airbnb’s housewarming later this month is to include a visit by rapper and occasional tech investor M.C. Hammer. The party room at reviews site Yelp Inc. has three beer kegs with built-in iPads to offer information about what’s on tap. Last month, start-ups Peanut Labs Inc. and AdParlor Inc. sponsored the sold-out “Pirates of Silicon Valley Cruise,” a $600-per-person seafaring party.