Hey there!
We're excited to announce that registration for Bitcamp 2018 is now officially open! We loved hosting you at our hackathon last year and hope you can make it back this year on April 6-8.

Check out www.bit.camp for more information about the event, and be sure to apply by February 28 for priority consideration!

If you have any questions or just want to chat, feel free to email us as hello@bit.camp. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook as well for more updates. We're so excited for our 5th year anniversary event this coming April!
See you by the campfire!

— The Bitcamp Team
Copyright © 2018 Bitcamp, All rights reserved.

Did you know?
Dr. Nicolas Papanicolaou innovated what we today call the Pap smear (named for him) at his medical practice in Greece, but it was tested and brought into common practice through testing done at Cornell in the 1930s. The Pap test is a method of cervical screening used to detect potentially pre-cancerous and cancerous processes caused by HPV, in the cervix.  The Pap test, when combined with a regular program of screening and appropriate follow-up, can reduce cervical cancer deaths by up to 80%.

Apply for a URA and get up to $1500 to support your research or creative work!
Deadline: Feb. 16
ur.umbc.edu/ura

CHMPR Distinguished Lecture Series

Nonnegative Binary Matrix Factorization
with a D-Wave Quantum Annealer

Dr. Daniel O’Malley
Los Alamos National Laboratory

1:30 15 February 2018, ITE325, UMBC

D-Wave quantum annealers represent a novel computational architecture and have attracted significant interest. Much of this interest has focused on the quantum behavior of D-Wave machines, and there have been few practical algorithms that use the D-Wave. Machine learning has been identified as an area where quantum annealing may be useful. Here, we show that the D-Wave 2X can be effectively used as part of an unsupervised machine learning method. This method takes a matrix as input and produces two low-rank matrices as output — one containing latent features in the data and another matrix describing how the features can be combined to approximately reproduce the input matrix. Despite the limited number of bits in the D-Wave hardware, this method is capable of handling a large input matrix. The D-Wave only limits the rank of the two output matrices. We apply this method to learn the features from a set of facial images and compare the performance of the D-Wave to two classical tools. This method is able to learn facial features and accurately reproduce the set of facial images. The performance of the D-Wave is mixed. It outperforms the two classical codes in a benchmark when only a short amount of computational time is allowed (200-20,000 microseconds), but these results suggest heuristics that would likely outperform the D-Wave in this benchmark.

Daniel O’Malley is a scientist in the Computational Earth Science group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Prior to that, he held postdoctoral positions at LANL and in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University. He studied at Purdue University, receiving a B.S. degree in computer science and mathematics (2004), an M.S. in mathematics (2006) and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics (2011). His research interests include computational science (with an emphasis on subsurface flow and transport), quantum computing, uncertainty quantification, and machine learning. He has won numerous awards including a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellowship from LANL (2014), the InterPore-Fraunhofer Award for Young Researchers from the International Society for Porous Media (2012), a Charles C. Chappelle Fellowship from Purdue University (2004), and the Meyer E. Jerison Memorial Award in Analysis from the Department of Mathematics at Purdue University (2004).

The post talk: Nonnegative Binary Matrix Factorization on a D-Wave Quantum Annealer, 1:30 2/15 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Ariel Poirier is a Geography and Environmental Studies major, graduating in December, 2018. She is the Treasurer for the GES Council of Majors, and a Newcombe Scholar for Returning Women through the Women’s Center.

Research Topic: Assessing functional traits (define how species interact in their environment and with each other- i.e. water requirements, height, seed dispersal) in plant species varying in low and high diversity communities. There are a total of 36 communities and also monocultures (controls) in both top soil (soil commonly used in gardens, rich and full of nutrients) and fill soil (used in vacant lots, not nutrient rich, contains glass, metal, brick etc).

How did you find the research opportunity? It was offered to me by my advisor, Dr. Christopher Swan, Geography and Environmental Systems, after I expressed having an interest in working with plants.

Do you get course credit for this work? I got research credit and was paid through the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies based out of New York. I have put a great deal of time into my research because I encountered a few setbacks along the way. It has continued through the school year, but I have followed through with my research regardless.

What was the hardest part about your research? Learning the hard way that nature has its own plan and might set things back despite best laid plans!

What was the most unexpected thing? My plants did not grow after the first seeding.

How does this research experience relate to your work in other classes? This REU position gave me a hands-on experience that I could not get in the classroom. Being able to have the chance to apply textbook education to real world experiments was rewarding and continued to build on the knowledge I already had.

What is your advice to other students about getting involved in research? Ask about research opportunities! And ask many professors what they have available.

Photo: I am pictured collecting aboveground biomass for the topsoil monocultures. This involves cutting the species from the soil line and then placing them in the drying oven. After the biomass is dry, it is weighed and recorded. This species is Gypsophila Elegans, commonly known as Baby’s Breath.

Become an undergraduate researcher and get up to $1500 to support your research or creative work! Go to: ur.umbc.edu.ura  Application deadline: Feb. 16.