The School of Engineering is offering a summer research program with a stipend valued at $4500, as well as providing housing, food, and up to $400 in travel expenses.

During the nine-week period, students will investigate topics in the interdisciplinary field of Surface and Thin Film Science and Engineering. Participants will contribute to the forefront ofresearch on the synthesis, structure and properties of thin films and materials surfaces. Work side-by-side with faculty mentors, doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows in our labs to conduct original research, gain valuable new experience, and make new friends and contacts. The program provides professional development, career exposure, industry visits, advanced analytical skills, and a variety of recreational activities.

Are you looking for a way to get involved in the community with other UMBC students?  

The MS SWIM program is a great place to get involved! 

The MS SWIM program uses aquatherapy and other exercises to assists adults with Multiple Sclerosis at the Catonsville YMCA.  

We are currently looking for volunteers from 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm on Fridays. Transportation is provided.  You will also receive a service-learning notation on your transcript!  

If you would like more information, email wlucas@umbc.edu or call The Shriver Center at 410-455-2493 and tell them that you're interested!

ACM Tech Talk

Studying Internet Latency via TCP Queries to DNS

Dr. Yannis Labrou
Principal Data Architect, Verisign

1:30-2:30pm Friday, 27 February 2015, ITE 456, UMBC

Every day Verisign processes upwards of 100 billion authoritative DNS requests for .COM and .NET from all corners of the earth. The vast majority of these requests are via the UDP protocol. Because UDP is connectionless, it is impossible to passively estimate the latency of the UDP-based requests. A very small percentage of these requests though, are over TCP, thus providing the means to estimate the latency of specific requests and paths for a subset of the hosts that interact with Verisign’s network infrastructure.

In this work, we combine this relatively small number of datapoints from TCP (on the order of a few hundred million per day) with the much larger dataset of all DNS requests. Our focus is the process of data analysis of real world, imperfect data at very large scale with the goals of understanding network latency at an unprecedented magnitude, identifying large volume, high latency clients and improving their latency. We discuss the techniques we used for data selection and analysis and we present the results of a variety of analyses, such as deriving regional and country patterns, estimations for query latency for different countries and network locations, and techniques for identifying high latency clients.

It is important to note that latency results we will report are based on passive measurements from, essentially, the entire Internet. For this experiment we do not have control over the client side — where they are, which software, their configuration, their network congestion. This is significantly different from latency studied in any active measurement infrastructure such as Planet Lab, RIPE Atlas, Thousand Eyes, Catchpoint, etc.

Dr. Yannis Labrou is Principal Data Architect at Verisign Labs where he leads efforts to create value from the wealth of data that Verisign’s operations generate every day. He brings to Verisign 20 years of experience in conceiving, creating and bringing to fruition innovations; combining thinking big with laboring through the pains of materializing ideas. He has done so in an academic environment, at a startup company, while conducting government and DoD/DARPA sponsored research and for a global Fortune 200 company.

Before joining Verisign, Dr. Labrou was a Senior Researcher at Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Director of Technology and member of the executive staff of PowerMarket, an enterprise application software start-up company and a Research Assistant Professor at UMBC. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMBC, where his research focused on software agents, and a Diploma in Physics from the University of Athens, Greece. He has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications, with almost 4000 citations and he has been awarded 14 patents from the USPTO. His current research focus is data through the entire lifecycle from generation to monetization.

– more information and directions: http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks –

A post written by Women’s Center staff member, Bria

My click moment was progressive. It proceeded slowly, with caution, and then consumed me.

For as long as it has been relevant, I’ve believed in autonomy. I didn’t have the word for it in 7th grade, but I knew that I was never obligated to dance with a boy at a mixer* or hug a stranger just because they insisted I should. I don’t remember the day I realized I was black, but I do remember the day I learned of “Affirmative Action.” Eleven years old is a little soon to tell someone they only got into that middle school because they are black. I knew of overt racism, but the door to covert racism swung open with the hiss of that tongue.

I don’t remember the day I realized I was a feminist, but I do remember the day my “friends” tried to make me feel like a slut** because I told them I lost my virginity to my then boyfriend. I was unaware at the time that they had become sexually active years before and were taking the opportunity to project some regretful feelings in the form of hate. I don’t remember the first time I spoke out in support of reproductive justice, but I do remember the devastation I felt after the only comprehensive reproductive health class at my high school was dropped due to its “insignificance” in relation to English and science.

And then there was the first time I consciously acknowledged my liberality.

The moment when you cross the line from spectator to activist is a scary one. You know there’s no going back, no renouncing your titles. It’s permanent. To go from the quiet girl who solely acknowledged injustices and microaggressions to the one who actively spoke out against stigma, prejudices, and misogyny… that was my click moment. It was a sneaky, powerful, positive, scary moment. Think of it like approaching the peak of a roller-coaster, but the thrill of anticipation never ends.

*mixer: a middle school dance

**slut: a person who should is shamed for their sexual activities