Grant English, VP Engineering, Advertising Technologies at AOL Networks (aka Advertising.com) in Baltimore will visit and give a talk from Noon to 1:00pm on Monday, 24 February 2014 in Lecture Hall 7 (ITE104) at UMBC. In his talk, he will describe AOL’s Adtech advertisement serving platform, its underlying system architecture, and what his development team does.

He will also dive deep into how new online and mobile technologies makes money, focusing it to computer science and engineering students. There will be a free lunch.

Please RSVP for the event here.

Grant English, VP Engineering, Advertising Technologies at AOL Networks (aka Advertising.com) in Baltimore will visit and give a talk from Noon to 1:00pm on Monday, 24 February 2014 in Lecture Hall 7 (ITE104) at UMBC. In his talk, he will describe AOL’s Adtech advertisement serving platform, its underlying system architecture, and what his development team does.

He will also dive deep into how new online and mobile technologies makes money, focusing it to computer science and engineering students. There will be a free lunch.

Please RSVP for the event here.

Linguistic and System Support for Structured Parallel Programming

Dr. I-Ting Angelina Lee
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

12:00-1:00 Thursday, 20 February 2014, ITE 325b, UMBC

Parallel programming is hard, due to issues such as scheduling and synchronization. Most parallel programs today deal with these issues using low-level system primitives such as pthreads, locks, and conditional variables. Although these low-level primitives are flexible, they, like goto statements, lack structure and make it difficult for the programmer to reason locally about the program state. Just as the use of goto has been mostly deprecated in favor of structured control constructs, we can simplify parallel programming by replacing these low-level primitives with linguistics that enable well-structured parallel programs.

To enable structured parallel programming is not merely a matter of linguistic design. The underlying system must also efficiently support the linguistics. In this talk, I will describe my work on pipeline parallelism, a parallel pattern commonly used in streaming applications, as an example of linguistics for structured parallel programming. I will also draw examples from my research to demonstrate how novel mechanisms in operating systems and hardware, not just the runtime, can help provide efficient support for the linguistics.

I-Ting Angelina Lee is a postdoctoral associate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, working with Prof. Charles E. Leiserson. Her areas of interest include designing linguistics for parallel programming, developing runtime system support for multithreaded software, and building novel mechanisms in operating systems and hardware to efficiently support parallel abstractions. Her work on “memory-mapped reducers” won best paper at SPAA 2012. Intel has released an experimental branch of Cilk Plus that incorporates support for parallel pipelining based on her work. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in 2012 under the supervision of Prof. Charles E. Leiserson. She received her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from UC San Diego in 2003.

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

Understanding Cybersecurity Market Dynamics

John Pescatore
SANS Institute

1:00-3:00 Tuesday, 4 March 2014
Suite 130, bwtech@UMBC, 5520 Research Park Drive, UMBC

There is no single cybersecurity market, and the factors that drive business decisions around security practices and purchases are complex and continually evolving. Based on more than 20 years of experience with cybersecurity technology and startups, this presentation will provide an understanding of the dynamics of the various markets that make up cybersecurity, as well as provide predictions of merging demand areas.

John Pescatore is SANS Director of Emerging Security Trends. He joined SANS in January 2013 after 14 years as Gartner’s lead security analyst. Before coming to Gartner he lead consulting groups at two early Internet security IPOs (Trusted Information Systems and Entrust) and spent 11 years in telecoms and computer security at GTE. He began his career at NSA and the US Secret Service. Follow him as @john_pescatore on Twitter or via his Security Trend Line blog on the SANS website.

Send your RSVP for this event to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. at BWTech.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

Multi-Modal Saliency Fusion for Illustrative Image Enhancement

Christopher J. Morris

10:30-12:30, Wednesday, 15 January 2013, ITE 365 & 352

Digitally manipulated or augmented images are increasingly prevalent. Multisensor systems produce augmented images that integrate data into a single context. Mixed-reality images are generated from insertion of computer generated objects into a natural scene. Digital processing for application-specific tasks (e.g., compression or network transmission) can create images distorted with processing artifacts. Digital image augmentation can lead to the inclusion of artifacts that influence the perception of the image.

Visual cues (e.g., depth or size cues) may no longer be perceptually consistent in an augmented image. A feature deemed important in its local context may no longer be in the broader integrated context. Inserted synthetic objects may not possess the appropriate visual cues for proper perception of the overall scene. Finer cues that distinguish critical features may be lost in compressed images. Enhancing augmented images to add or restore visual cues can improve the image’s perceptibility.

This dissertation presents a framework for illustrating images to enhance critical features. The enhancements improve the perception and comprehension of the augmented image. The framework uses a linear combination of image (2D), surface topology (3D), and task based saliency measures to identify the critical features in the image. The use of multi-modal saliency allows the visualization designer to adjust the definition of critical features based on the attributes of the scene and the task at hand. Upon identification, the features are enhanced using a non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) deferred illustration technique. The enhancements, inspired by an analysis of artists’ techniques, bolster the features’ perceptual cues.

To measure the amount of similar salient features between the enhanced image and the original image, the framework describes the Saliency Similarity Metric (SSM). The SSM is feedback with which to make informed decisions to tune the visualization. The benefits of illustrative enhancement are analyzed using objective and subjective evaluations. Using conventional metrics, illustrative enhancements improve the perceptual image quality of images distorted by noise or compression artifacts. User survey results reveal that enhancements must be carefully applied for perceptual improvement. The framework can be effectively utilized in mobile rendering, augmented reality, and sensor fusion applications.

Committee: Drs. Penny Rheingans (chair), Dan Bailey, Jian Chen, Thomas Jackman (Desert Research Institute), Anupam Joshi and Marc Olano

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Quantum Computing Seminar

Shor’s Algorithm Part 2

Samuel Lomonaco, CSEE, UMBC

2:30-3:00 Tuesday, 3 December 2013, ITE 325b

As requested in the last seminar, we will devote this seminar to stepping through the complete Shor algorithm (from beginning to end) to factor the “enormous” integer 21. This talk will based on the example found at the beginning of the following paper.

Quantum hidden subgroup algorithms: A mathematical perspective, AMS CONM, vol. 305, (2002), 139 – 202.

Samuel J. Lomonaco is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He is internationally known for his many contributions in mathematics and in computer science. His research interests span a wide range of subjects from knot theory, algebraic and differential topology to algebraic coding theory, quantum computation, and symbolic computation. In quantum cryptography, he has shown how quantum information theory can be used to gain a better understanding of eavesdropping with quantum entanglement. In quantum computation, he has shown how Lie groups can be used to solve problems arising in the study of quantum entanglement. In 2000 Professor Lomonoco organized the first American Mathematical Society short course on quantum computation.

Organizer: Prof. Samuel Lomonaco, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Quantum Computing Seminar

Shor’s Algorithm Part 2

Samuel Lomonaco, CSEE, UMBC

2:30-3:00 Tuesday, 3 December 2013, ITE 325b

As requested in the last seminar, we will devote this seminar to stepping through the complete Shor algorithm (from beginning to end) to factor the “enormous” integer 21. This talk will based on the example found at the beginning of the following paper.

Quantum hidden subgroup algorithms: A mathematical perspective, AMS CONM, vol. 305, (2002), 139 – 202.

Samuel J. Lomonaco is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He is internationally known for his many contributions in mathematics and in computer science. His research interests span a wide range of subjects from knot theory, algebraic and differential topology to algebraic coding theory, quantum computation, and symbolic computation. In quantum cryptography, he has shown how quantum information theory can be used to gain a better understanding of eavesdropping with quantum entanglement. In quantum computation, he has shown how Lie groups can be used to solve problems arising in the study of quantum entanglement. In 2000 Professor Lomonoco organized the first American Mathematical Society short course on quantum computation.

Organizer: Prof. Samuel Lomonaco, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Quantum Computing Seminar

Shor’s Algorithm Part 2

Samuel Lomonaco, CSEE, UMBC

2:30-3:00 Tuesday, 3 December 2013, ITE 325b

As requested in the last seminar, we will devote this seminar to stepping through the complete Shor algorithm (from beginning to end) to factor the “enormous” integer 21. This talk will based on the example found at the beginning of the following paper.

Quantum hidden subgroup algorithms: A mathematical perspective, AMS CONM, vol. 305, (2002), 139 – 202.

Samuel J. Lomonaco is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He is internationally known for his many contributions in mathematics and in computer science. His research interests span a wide range of subjects from knot theory, algebraic and differential topology to algebraic coding theory, quantum computation, and symbolic computation. In quantum cryptography, he has shown how quantum information theory can be used to gain a better understanding of eavesdropping with quantum entanglement. In quantum computation, he has shown how Lie groups can be used to solve problems arising in the study of quantum entanglement. In 2000 Professor Lomonoco organized the first American Mathematical Society short course on quantum computation.

Organizer: Prof. Samuel Lomonaco, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Center for Information Security and Assurance
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Finding privacy leaks and stolen data with
bulk data analysis and optimistic decoding

Dr. Simson Garfinkel
Naval Postgraduate School

12:00-1:00 Friday, 6 December 2013, ITE 229

Modern digital forensics tools are largely based on the recovery and analysis of files. This talk explores how identity information such as email addresses, credit card numbers, and other of information can be more efficiently found using bulk data analysis, and how results are significantly improved through the use of optimistic decompression. Together, these techniques can find important information on computer media that are ignored by the majority of today’s digital forensics tools.

This talk presents the results of a study of roughly 5000 hard drives purchased on the secondary market and shows how different kinds of data formats can be traced to different kinds of privacy leaks and coding errors. It shows how the results were generated using bulk_extractor, an easy-to-use open source digital forensics tool. Finally, it shows how bulk_extractor was extended to detect data obscured with a simple steganographic technique (XOR 255), and how a subsequence re-analysis of the research corpus found significant use of the technique in commercial software, malware, and by at least one computer criminal.

Dr. Simson L. Garfinkel is an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. Based in Arlington VA, Garfinkel’s research interests include digital forensics, usable security, data fusion, information policy and terrorism. He holds six US patents for his computer-related research and has published dozens of research articles on security and digital forensics.

Garfinkel is the author or co-author of fourteen books on computing. He is perhaps best known for his book Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. Garfinkel’s most successful book, Practical UNIX and Internet Security (co-authored with Gene Spafford), has sold more than 250,000 copies and been translated into more than a dozen languages since the first edition was published in 1991.

Garfinkel received three Bachelor of Science degrees from MIT in 1987, a Master’s of Science in Journalism from Columbia University in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2005.

Host: Dr. Alan T. Sherman, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

The Problem with Print: publishing born digital scholarship

Professor Helen J. Burgess
Department of English, UMBC

4:00pm Monday, 25 November 2013

Gallery, A. O. Kuhn Library

Dr. Burgess will discuss some of the difficulties for academics seeking to work and publish outside traditional “print-bound” models of humanities scholarship – including issues of professional evaluation and distribution – and show some examples of “born digital” works that would benefit from a new model of publishing. A reception, sponsored by the Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, will follow the program.

Helen J. Burgess is an Assistant Professor of English in the Communication and Technology track. Dr Burgess received her BA(Hons) and MA(Dist.) in English Language and Literature from Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, and her PhD in English from West Virginia University. She is active in the new media research community as editor of the online journal Hyperrhiz: new Media Cultures, and technical editor of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. Dr Burgess is coauthor of Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Enounters with Mars and Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information, both titles published in the Mariner10 interactive DVD-Rom series at the University of Pennsylvania Press. She has interests in multimedia and web development, open source and open content production, electronic literature, and science fiction.