Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University Of Maryland, Baltimore County

M.S. Thesis Defense

Assessing Confidence in Relation Extraction Systems

Lianjie Sun

2:00ppm Thursday, 27 July 2015, ITE 325b, UMBC

In information extraction, a central and challenging task is extraction of relations. Systems that extract relations from text tend to be very productive, so it is important to quantify confidence or certainty in what is extracted. In this thesis we introduce a framework to assess confidence in relation extraction systems. We trained our system using a logistic regression model based on manually tagged sentences from the New York Times Annotated Corpora. Empirical results based on ROC curves show that our system performs better at computing confidence than previous systems such as Reverb. We conclude with a detailed analysis of the features used in our system and explain how these features might be tailored for use in other relation extraction systems.

Committee: Drs. Tim Oates (chair), Charles Nicholas and Matt Schmill

Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal

Real-time Spectral Rendering of Atmospheric Optical Phenomena

Ari Blenkhorn

2:00pm Wednesday, 10 June 2015, ITE 352

Glories, rainbows, and coronas are colorful atmospheric effects which occur when sunlight interacts with cloud droplets. Adding these effects to digital cloud environments will provide increased realism and a greater sense of immersion. Furthermore, these phenomena are the subject of active scientific research.  In both communities, high-resolution real-time rendering is desirable.

The color distribution of these phenomena is typically calculated using the Mie scattering theory, Debye series, or Airy theory. The calculations give the intensity of a single wavelength of light at a single scattering angle. They must be repeated for all desired wavelengths at all desired pixels of the final image.

I propose accelerating the calculations by using general-purpose GPU computing to transform a single-threaded, CPU-based Mie scattering application into a collection of highly-parallel GPU calculations.  I also propose to reduce the number of wavelengths required by using importance sampling, a monte-carlo selection method which concentrates the computing resources on the wavelengths belonging to the most important regions of the visible spectrum.

Planned work includes development of both numerical and perceptually-based image quality metrics, of interest to optical physicists and interactive application developers, respectively. These metrics will guide development of the GPU kernel parallel structure and the selection of a suitable estimator for importance sampling.

Committee: Drs. Marc Olano, Penny Rheingans, Curtis Menyuk, Matthias Gobbert (Mathematics), Raymond Lee (USNA)

Transforming big data into smart data:
deriving value via harnessing volume, variety
and velocity using semantics and semantic web

Professor Amit Sheth
Wright State University

11:00am Tuesday, 26 May 2015, ITE 325, UMBC

Big Data has captured a lot of interest in industry, with the emphasis on the challenges of the four Vs of Big Data: Volume, Variety, Velocity, and Veracity, and their applications to drive value for businesses. In this talk, I will describe Smart Data that is realized by extracting value from Big Data, to benefit not just large companies but each individual. If my child is an asthma patient, for all the data relevant to my child with the four V-challenges, what I care about is simply, "How is her current health, and what are the risk of having an asthma attack in her current situation (now and today), especially if that risk has changed?" As I will show, Smart Data that gives such personalized and actionable information will need to utilize multimodal data and their metadata, use domain specific knowledge, employ semantics and intelligent processing, and go beyond traditional reliance on Machine Learning and NLP. I will motivate the need for a synergistic combination of techniques similar to the close interworking of the top brain and the bottom brain in the cognitive models. I will present a couple of Smart Data applications in development at Kno.e.sis from the domains of personalized health, health informatics, social data for social good, energy, disaster response, and smart city.

Amit Sheth is an Educator, Researcher and Entrepreneur. He is the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, an IEEE Fellow, and the executive director of Kno.e.sis – the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing a Wright State University. In World Wide Web (WWW), it is placed among the top ten universities in the world based on 10-year impact. Prof. Sheth is a well cited computer scientists (h-index = 87, >30,000 citations), and appears among top 1-3 authors in World Wide Web (Microsoft Academic Search). He has founded two companies, and several commercial products and deployed systems have resulted from his research. His students are exceptionally successful; ten out of 18 past PhD students have 1,000+ citations each.

Host: Yelena Yesha, yeyesha2umbc.edu

UMBC Cyber Defense Lab

Verifying Security Properties of
Cryptographic Protocols with CPSA

Edward V. Zieglar Jr.
Analysis and Design Methods
DoD Trusted Systems Research Group

12-1pm, Friday, 15 May 2015, ITE 227

The design of cryptographic protocols with well understood properties is a difficult problem. Many simple cryptographic protocols that have been designed over the years by experienced designers have been found to have subtle flaws or incorrect assumptions that have led to attacks against them. Much effort has gone into the development of theories, techniques and tools to formally analysis the security properties of cryptographic protocols in an attempt to identify and eliminate such security flaws. This talk will address basic paradigms used in the analysis and verification of the security properties of cryptographic protocols, discuss efforts to develop tools to assist designers in developing protocols with verifiable security properties and demonstrate one such tool, the Cryptographic Protocol Shapes Analyzer (CPSA), available at https://hackage.haskell.org/package/cpsa.

Mobile Computing and Smart Home
Automation Systems Demonstrations

UMBC Students in CMSC 628 and 691

12:00-1:30pm Tuesday, 12 May 2015
Third floor main corridor, ITE Building

The students in UMBC's graduate Introduction to Mobile Computing class and Systems for Smart Home Automation course will showcase their cutting-edge projects and application that use mobile phones, tablets, cloudservices and smarthome sensors.

Come and enjoy the demonstrations that range from cool smartphone games to smartphone-based educational tools to location‐based mobile phone services to voice and mind controlled home appliances.

For more information, contact Prof. Nilanjan Banerjee at Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

CSEE Ph.D. student Kavita Krishnaswamy will give a talk entitled Robotics for Independence sponsored by Refresh Baltimore on May 20 at 7:00pm. The talk will be given at Betamore, 1111 Light Street in Baltimore. Refreshments at 6:30, RSVP online.

Robotics for Independence

Kavita Krishnaswamy

7:00pm Wednesday, 20 May 2015
Betamore, 1111 Light St., Baltimore

The future is here! In this talk, Kavita will discuss the development of robotic systems and how they provide assistance and increase independence for people with disabilities. Kavita will introduce several prototype robotic systems that support transferring, repositioning, and personal care, and focus on accessible user interfaces for control that are feasible for persons with severe disabilities.

Kavita Krishnaswamy is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County working with Dr. Tim Oates. As a professional researcher with a physical disability, Kavita is motivated by a powerful, innate force: autonomy is the soul of independent daily living that is achieved with the advancement of technology. She is both a Ford Foundation Predoctoral and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Kavita has worked at the National Science Foundation's Engineering Research Center – Quality of Life Technology Center (QoLT) in Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh and IBM Business consulting services.

Refresh Baltimore describes itself as "a community made up of sharp design and development professionals, creative minds and Baltimore technologists looking to learn from one another and apply critical thinking to the industry."

Spring 2015 IS Distinguished Lecture 
Department of Information Systems

Opinion Mining, Machine Learning and Big Data

Dr. Philip Bourne
Associate Director for Data Science
The National Institutes of Health

10:00am Tuesday, 5 May 2015, ITE 456, UMBC

Philip E. Bourne is the Associate Director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health. Formally he was Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Industry Alliances, a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank and an Adjunct Professor at the Sanford Burnham Institute.

Bourne's professional interests focus on service and research. He serves the national biomedical community through contributing ways to maximize the value (and hence accessibility) of scientific data. His research focuses on relevant biological and educational outcomes derived from computation and scholarly communication. This implies algorithms, text mining, machine learning, metalanguages, biological databases, and visualization applied to problems in systems pharmacology, evolution, cell signaling, apoptosis, immunology and scientific dissemination. He has published over 300 papers and five books, one of which sold over 150,000 copies.

Bourne is a Past President of the International Society for Computational Biology, an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Society for Computational Biology and the American Medical Informatics Association.  His awards include: the Jim Gray eScience Award (2010), the Benjamin Franklin Award (2009), the Flinders University Convocation Medal for Outstanding Achievement (2004), the Sun Microsystems Convergence Award (2002) and the CONNECT Award for new inventions (1996 and 1997).

Smart Distribution Systems

Dr. Karen Butler-Purry
Texas A&M University

11:00-12:00 Wednesday, 22 April 2015, ITE 325b

Smart Grid refers to the computerizing of the grid via the addition of monitoring, analysis, control, and communication capabilities to improve its reliability, efficiency, and security. Smart meter devices, that include sensors to gather data and two-way digital communication between the smart meters in the field and the utility's grid operations center, are associated with the grid. The smart grid can take advantage of new technologies, such as plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, various forms of renewable and conventional distributed generation, lighting management systems, automation technology that lets the utility adjust and control each individual device or millions of devices from a central location, and many more. This presentation will discuss some of the current research projects being investigated by Butler-Purry's group on smart distributions systems, in grid or island operation. One project investigates the impact of cyber attacks on the operation of smart distribution systems. The second project developed two new approaches to enhance the protection of smart distribution systems. One approach uses smart meters during distribution planning to improve selectivity of protection, and the other approach uses smart meters during operation to improve the sensitivity of protection.

Karen L. Butler-Purry, PhD, PE, is Associate Provost for Graduate and Professional Studies and Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University where she has served on the faculty since 1994. She received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1985 from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She was awarded a M.S. degree in 1987 from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1994 from Howard University in Washington, D.C. Her research interests are in the areas of protection and control of distribution systems and isolated power systems such as all electric power systems for ships, mobile grids, and microgrids; cybersecurity protection; and intelligent systems for equipment deterioration and fault diagnosis.

Host: Prof. Gymama Slaughter, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Karen Butler-Purry flyer

Two UMBC alumni who now work at Google will present a Google information session and two technical talks this coming Wednesday afternoon in the Library Gallery. It's a chance for both undergraduate and graduate students to learn about internship and full-time opportunities at Google. The Googlers are:

• Blazej Bulka is a currently a Senior Software Engineer at Google NYC. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMBC in 2009.
• Robert Banz is a Site Reliability Manager at Google. He received a BS in Computer Science from UMBC in 1995 and worked for UMBC's Department of Information Technology for many years before joining Google.

There will be an opportunity to network and ask questions between talks and an informal happy hour after the talks starting at 5:00pm at Flat Tuesdays in the Commons. Faculty, staff and frinds are welcome to attend the talks and happy hour.

• Noon-1:00pm Google Culture and Careers, Presented by Blazej Bulka and Robert Banz

  Google culture and mission presented by two UMBC graduates who work at Google. Brief history of Google, products and projects, and first-hand relation of how it is to work for Google. The second half of the talk will describe various career opportunities (both for full-time positions and internship), including information about the interview process.

• 2:00-3:00pm Engineering Reliability at Google, Presented by Robert Banz

  Keeping Google services up and running efficiently, reliably, and at scale.

• 4:00-5:00pm Research and Work at Google: Graduate Student Opportunities, Presented by Blazej Bulka

  How to do research and utilize skills learned in graduate school at Google.

• 5:00- Happy Hour at Flat Tuesdays, The Commons

Let Google know you are interested in opportunities and plan to attend some of the sessions by filling out this form.

Two UMBC alumni who now work at Google will present a Google information session and two technical talks this coming Wednesday afternoon in the Library Gallery. It's a chance for both undergraduate and graduate students to learn about internship and full-time opportunities at Google. The Googlers are:

• Blazej Bulka is a currently a Senior Software Engineer at Google NYC. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMBC in 2009.
• Robert Banz is a Site Reliability Manager at Google. He received a BS in Computer Science from UMBC in 1995 and worked for UMBC's Department of Information Technology for many years before joining Google.

There will be an opportunity to network and ask questions between talks and an informal happy hour after the talks starting at 5:00pm at Flat Tuesdays in the Commons. Faculty, staff and frinds are welcome to attend the talks and happy hour.

• Noon-1:00pm Google Culture and Careers, Presented by Blazej Bulka and Robert Banz

  Google culture and mission presented by two UMBC graduates who work at Google. Brief history of Google, products and projects, and first-hand relation of how it is to work for Google. The second half of the talk will describe various career opportunities (both for full-time positions and internship), including information about the interview process.

• 2:00-3:00pm Engineering Reliability at Google, Presented by Robert Banz

  Keeping Google services up and running efficiently, reliably, and at scale.

• 4:00-5:00pm Research and Work at Google: Graduate Student Opportunities, Presented by Blazej Bulka

  How to do research and utilize skills learned in graduate school at Google.

• 5:00- Happy Hour at Flat Tuesdays, The Commons

Let Google know you are interested in opportunities and plan to attend some of the sessions by filling out this form.