UMBC will host a free two-day workshop April 11-12 for faculty, researchers, and students from all disciplines who are interested in learning how to incorporate high performance computing, advanced data analysis, modeling and simulation and data visualization into their teaching and research.

The workshop will be given by representatives from XSEDE, an NSF-sponsored distributed resource for high performance computing and data storage that is available for UMBC faculty and students to use for their research. The workshop will be held in room 120 of the Meyerhoff Building on the UMBC campus, starting at Noon on Thursday April 11 and ending at 4:00pm on Friday, April 12.

Workshop participants get information on gaining access to XSEDE resources and hands on training one a topics including computational thinking, parallel computing, scientific visualization, research data management, using Unix and adding computational science to curricula. The XSEDE resources are a natural "next step" for applications that have outgrown the cluster computing facilities available at UMBC, such as HPCF and MC2.

While the workshop is free, you must pre-register online — start by creating an account via the SIGN IN link. Registration closes on March 25 and space is limited, so if you are interested, register as soon as possible.

For more information about the workshop and XSEDE, see the workshop flier or contact Andrew Raim (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ), Linda Akli (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) or Prof. Ian Thorpe (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ).

Teaching & Research with Mathematica 9 and Wolfram|Alpha Pro

2:30-3:45 Tuesday, 9 April 2013, 401 Math/Psyc Building, UMBC

This talk by staff from Wolfram will illustrate capabilities in Mathematica 9 that are directly applicable for use in teaching and research on campus. Topics include the folowing

• Free-form linguistic input & predictive interface features
• 2D and 3D visualization
• Dynamic interactivity & On-demand scientific data
• Example-driven course materials
• Symbolic interface construction
• Statistics & Data anaylsis
• Digital Image Processing, Parallelization, and Control Systems functionality

The new Wolfram|Alpha Pro website will be featured, demonstrating the following capabilities.

• built-in CDF interactivity
• automatic creation of interactive models
• ability to upload data (spreadsheets, data, text) for instant and
• thorough analysis
• step-by-step solution guide to many problems
• specialized keyboard for mathematical and scientific symbols
• export results to over 60 formats

Current Mathematica users will benefit from seeing improvements and new features of Mathematica 9 as well as Wolfram|Alpha Pro but prior knowledge of Mathematica is not required.

UMBC's Training Centers is offering a new Certificate in Cyber Operations that is designed to help move participants from a basic competence with computers and technology up to the level of a competent, entry-level professional as a Cyber Analyst or Operator.

Homer Minnick, the Training Centers' director for Cybersecurity training, will host a free webinar on the certificate program from 12:00-1:00pm on Wednesday March 27, 2013. It will include the following topics.

• What is the Cybersecurity Academy?
• Is the Certificate in Cyber Operations right for me?
• How does the Certificate in Cyber Operations contrast with other certifications from UMBC Training Centers?”
• What are the education and experience eligibility requirements?
• Which industry certifications are included in this program?
• What is the value this certification brings to my organization?
• How do you apply for the program?
• What is the next step? Where do I get more information?

  If you are interested in participating, please register online for the free webinar.

Privacy and Security in Online Social Media (PSOSM)

Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK")
Assistant Professor
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, India

10:30-12:00 Monday, March 11, 2013, ITE 325b, UMBC

With increase in usage of the Internet, there has been an exponential increase in the use of online social media on the Internet. Websites like Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Orkut, Twitter and Flickr have changed the way Internet is being used. There is a dire need to investigate, study and characterize privacy and security on online social media from various perspectives (computational, cultural, psychological). Real world scalable systems need to be built to detect and defend security and privacy issues on online social media. This talk will give you a preview of what we do at PreCog in the area of PSOSM. I will describe briefly some of the cool ongoing projects that we have: ChaMAILeon, PhishAri, Twit-Digest, U2P2, and OCEAN. Much of our research work is made available for public use through tools or online services. Our work derives techniques from Data Mining, Text Mining, Statistics, Network Science, Public Policy, Complex networks, Human Computer Interaction, and Psychology.

In this talk, I will focus on the following: (1) Twit-Digest is a tool to extract intelligence from Twitter which can be useful to security analysts. Pro-cursor to this work is published at PSOSM 2012, this work also obtained second best award at IBM ICARE 2012. (2) OCEAN: Open source Collation of eGovernment data and Networks. Here, we show how publicly available information on Government services can be used to profile citizens in India. This work obtained the Best Poster Award at Security and Privacy Symposium at IIT Kanpur, 2013. (3) Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness V 2.0 U2P2, this is one of the largest ever done privacy study in India. This has been in media recently; if you are interested search for #privacyindia12 on Twitter. This work obtained the third Best Poster Award at Security and Privacy Symposium at IIT Kanpur, 2013.

Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK") Assistant Professor, is currently the Hemant Bharat Ram Faculty Research Fellow at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi, India. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His research interests include developing technological and inter-disciplinary solutions to detect and prevent computer crime, in particular, these days be has been dabbling with complex networked systems (e.g. social web systems like Twitter, Facebook, and telephone logs). He is also very passionate about issues related to human computer interaction. As Principal Investigator, PK is currently managing research projects value of about 2 Crores INR. PK is a Co-Principal Investigator in a project that is approved at the Europe Union FP7 which is about 5.3 million Euros. PK has received research funds Government of India, National Science Foundation, industry bodies in India, and International Development Research Centre. He is serving as a PC member in WWW 2013, AsiaCCS 2013 and he is also serving as a reviewer for International Journal of Information Security and ACM's Transactions on Internet Technology. PK’s Ph.D. thesis work on anti-phishing research at Carnegie Mellon University has contributed in creating a successful start-up company, Wombat Security Technologies. PK founded and manages PreCog, a research group at IIIT-Delhi. PK can be reached at Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Dynamically Reconfigurable Layered Filesystem (DLFS)

Dr. John Dorband

Research Associate Professor
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00pm Friday, 8 March 2013, ITE 227, UMBC

The standard filesystem paradigm is based on a hierarchy of directories and files. The Dynamically reconfigurable Layered Filesystem (DLFS) adds a new dimension to filesystem organization that of filesystem layers and the ability to make custom configuration of them. The DLFS filesystem consists of many layers where each layer is mounted transparently on the root, ‘/’, directory. It is dynamic in the sense that every user can have a customizable list of layers that are included in a personalized view of the filesystem. We present in here the concept of a dynamically reconfigurable layered filesystem. We also present how it can be used, such as how it facilitates security and system management.

Dr. John E. Dorband received his PhD in Computer Science from Penn State University in 1985. He worked for NASA GFSC from 1985 until 2007. He currently is a Research Associate Professor at UMBC. Dr. Dorband was one of the builders of the first Beowulf system, constructed at GSFC in the fall of 1994. In the 80’s, he pioneered work in the generalized use of extremely parallel SIMD fixed-routing grid architectures through the use of sorting to implement generalized routing methods. This facilitated such application areas as image processing, graphics rendering, symbolic processing, database operations, and other irregular applications on parallel architectures that lacked generalized routine hardware. Dr. Dorband has been an innovator in the area of parallel programming language paradigms as a means of simplifying the implementation of applications on parallel computers. His professional specialties include designing and prototyping high-performance computer architectures; designing and implementing languages for simplified implementation of applications on parallel computers; designing and implementing algorithms for parallel computers; applying highly parallel architectures to image processing, signal processing, and data processing; and applying highly parallel architectures to computational science.

Reinventing the Classroom:
creating a new course and a space to teach it

Professor Harry Lewis

Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science
Harvard University

12:00-2:00 ITE 456, UMBC

slides (ppt); talk (video); discussion (video)

TALK AND LUNCH: 12:00-1:00. Lunch courtesy of Dr. Warren DeVries, Dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology. RSVP on my.umbc.edu by Monday, February 25 to reserve a spot. Email requests from outside UMBC to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

DISCUSSION: 1:00-2:00. The community is invited to stay after the talk for an open discussion and conversation with Professor Lewis and your UMBC colleagues about designing new classroom spaces for active learning and the flipped classroom approach.

For decades my lectures kept getting better, my enrollments kept going up, and the number of warm bodies in the lecture hall kept going down. So I decided to try something entirely different, a "flipped classroom." Students watched lectures over the Internet at night in their rooms, and spent class time solving problems under supervision in small groups. The subject matter was discrete mathematics, which is well suited to this pedagogical style, but the class was so successful that it is being adapted for use in other Harvard courses. I will report on some of the conceptual and practical problems I encountered, including the creation of a new teaching space, which had to be cheap to construct and adaptable in use since the experiment might have failed.

Harry Lewis is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, where he has taught since 1974. He is uncertain whether he should be proud of his role in launching the careers of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom dropped out of Harvard shortly after taking his course. From 1995-2003 Lewis served as Dean of Harvard College. In this capacity he oversaw the undergraduate experience, including residential life, career services, public service, academic and personal advising, athletic policy, and intercultural and race relations. He is a long time member of the College’s Admissions Committee.

For more information, see his article Reinventing the Classroom in the Fall 2013 issue of Harvard Magazine.

UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal

Paper form digitization for information systems strengthening and socio-economic development in developing countries

Huguens Jean

3:00pm Tuesday, 5 March 2013, ITE346, UMBC

In developing countries, people are now more likely to have access to a mobile phone than clean water, making cellular based technology the only viable medium for collecting, aggregating, and communicating local data so that it can be turned into useful information. While mobile phones have found broad application in reporting health, financial, and environmental data, many data collection methods still suffer from delays, inefficiency and difficulties maintaining quality. In environments with insufficient IT support and infrastructure, and among populations with limited education and experience with technology, paper forms rather than electronic methods remain the predominant means for data collection. To meet the digitization needs of paper driven data collection practices, this thesis proposes the development and study of a software platform that automatically converts unknown paper forms into digital structured data and uses human intelligence when necessary to improve its performance.

We begin by identifying a high-level system architecture for dealing with infrastructure constraints and human resources limitations. We then break the architecture into its integral pieces and organize them into three distinct functional and interacting stages: data collection, data conversion, and crowdsourcing. In the collection phase, we focus on visually detecting structurally identical form instances and transmitting the images of their raw input data to a remote server. During this phase, we present a novel framework for identifying specific form types by generating a multipart template for unknown forms and decomposing the form identification problem into three distinct tasks: similar image retrieval, learning, and duplicate matching. The conversion phase uses a mixture of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and human annotations techniques to convert images into digital information and group structurally identical forms in their respective database table. In crowdsourcing, we investigates how to use low-end smartphones for collecting training information to improve OCR related tasks and verify the accuracy of converted input values. We pay special emphasis on identifying natural interaction forms that lower the technical and knowledge threshold for local residents. Furthermore, because crowdsourcing can also provide money to the mobile workers of its micro-tasking platform, we concurrently explore how systems that facilitate collaboration between humans and machines for improving the quality of intelligent information systems can be used a vehicle for delivering socioeconomic opportunities to developing countries.

Committee: Dr. Timothy Oates (Chair), Dr. Janet Rutledge, Dr. Fow-Sen Choa, Dr. Jesus Caban

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Integration of HBase and Lucene for real-time big data analysis

Yin Huang
CSEE Department, UMBC

1:00 pm Friday, 22 February 22 2013, ITE 227, UMBC

The increasing size of data sets have posed several challenges on real-time big data analysis, Business Intelligence for example, in terms of system scalability and data availability. Business Intelligence focuses on mining the big data, providing multidimensional visualization and thus supporting business decision making, ideally in a real-time fashion. Traditional relational database management systems fail to provide a flexible and stable solution. Several NoSQL database systems have been proposed to tackle these challenges, such as Cassandra and HBase. HBase, however, does not support full-text searching; current implementation of HBase only offers the row-key based indexing. In this talk, we introduce building Lucene index on top of HBase to support multidimensional queries for data mart under MapReduce framework, serving as the corner stone for future data analysis and business report.

Yin Huang obtained his B.S. in Computer Science from Nanchang University in 2009, and studied in Chongqing University for two years for his M.S. He started his Ph.D. program in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2011. In 2012, he interned in IBM Ottawa lab for four months with the focus of using Multicore-Enhanced Hadoop System for Buisness Intelligence. His current research area is database, data mining, and parallel computing.

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Analytics for Cancer Survival Time

Dr. Shujia Zhou and Ran Qi
CSEE Department, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00 pm Friday, 15 February 2013, ITE 227, UMBC

With advent of new medical technologies, more and more prognostic factors are discovered and used in predicting cancer survival time. Consequently, the number of cancer patient types increase significantly. However, there are limited therapies available for cancer patients. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop accurate algorithms in grouping cancer patients so that a doctor can choose the optimal therapy for a cancer patient. In this talk we will introduce current grouping algorithms, discuss new approaches in improving their efficiencies, and present a prototype of prognostic system for cancer patients.

Dr. Shujia Zhou is a research associate professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at UMBC. He received a Ph.D. from Washington University at St. Louis in 1993. He held a Director’s-funded Postdoctoral Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and became a LANL technical staff member in 1996. At LANL, his researches in large-scale molecular dynamics simulations were published in the Journal of Science and reported in the journals of both Science and Nature. In 2000, he joined Northrop Grumman Corporation and worked on NASA Computation Technology Projects. He is a pioneer in accelerating climate and weather applications with multi-core processors such as,IBM’s Cell B.E. processor. His current research interests are big data analytics, in particular in finance and health.

Ran Qi received her M.S. degree in Computer Science from the Lamar University in 2009 and started her Ph.D program in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2010. In 2011, she worked on train monitoring system development at Norfolk Southern for 4 months as a co-op intern. In January 2012, she worked on personalized medicine in IBM Toronto Lab for 3 weeks. Her current Ph.D research focus is data mining in health analytics and personal medicine including cancer survival analysis and developing a cancer prognostic system.

Reinventing the Classroom

Professor Harry Lewis

Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science
Harvard University

12:00-2:00 ITE 456, UMBC

TALK AND LUNCH: 12:00-1:00. Lunch courtesy of Dr. Warren DeVries, Dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology. RSVP on my.umbc.edu by Monday, February 25 to reserve a spot. Email requests from outside UMBC to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

DISCUSSION: 1:00-2:00. The community is invited to stay after the talk for an open discussion and conversation with Professor Lewis and your UMBC colleagues about designing new classroom spaces for active learning and the flipped classroom approach.

For decades my lectures kept getting better, my enrollments kept going up, and the number of warm bodies in the lecture hall kept going down. So I decided to try something entirely different, a "flipped classroom." Students watched lectures over the Internet at night in their rooms, and spent class time solving problems under supervision in small groups. The subject matter was discrete mathematics, which is well suited to this pedagogical style, but the class was so successful that it is being adapted for use in other Harvard courses. I will report on some of the conceptual and practical problems I encountered, including the creation of a new teaching space, which had to be cheap to construct and adaptable in use since the experiment might have failed.

Harry Lewis is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, where he has taught since 1974. He is uncertain whether he should be proud of his role in launching the careers of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom dropped out of Harvard shortly after taking his course. From 1995-2003 Lewis served as Dean of Harvard College. In this capacity he oversaw the undergraduate experience, including residential life, career services, public service, academic and personal advising, athletic policy, and intercultural and race relations. He is a long time member of the College’s Admissions Committee.

For more information, see his article Reinventing the Classroom in the Fall 2013 issue of Harvard Magazine.