Ryan K. Cox
Fred Worden, Associate Professor, Department of Visual Art

AC IV Wing A 110  |  1:30 PM

Backspace/Erase: DELETE is an experiment in creating a video adaptation of an original comic book story. Delete was completed using a computer drawing tablet and three computer software programs: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects and Adobe Flash. The flexibility and efficiency of using computer software allowed for a more manageable and less time-consuming workflow than with traditional cel animation. This was especially important as, unlike with a Hollywood production, I was the sole animator available to put in the time necessary to achieve the sophisticated graphic and dynamic style I hoped to achieve. I had to find a balance between the visual subtleties of the hand drawn animation technique and the time saving properties of computer frame interpolation animation. One of the creative challenges of Backspace/Erase: DELETE was deciding how to incorporate and adapt the strongest features of the print media, multi-panel comic book version of the story into a smoothly flowing time-based animated film. This required both careful pre-production planning, including using story boards to plan a scene’s composition, as well as some trial and error modifications of those plans as I undertook the actual animating.

CWIT is looking for one or two undergraduate students to work on a grant funded project called Computing Education for the 21st Century-Maryland. We would like someone to begin immediately and continue through the summer and beyond if interested. The position will assist with implementing a survey of high school computer science teachers in May and June and working on data analysis. The RA will also assist with planning two events for high school computer science teachers, faculty, and administrators.

We are looking for applicants who can work independently and as part of a team; good problem solvers; willing to learn about survey research. Website design skills and online survey experience a plus!

Contactand send your resume to Dr. Susan Martin, susan@umbc.edu,  by Wednesday April 18th if you are interested.

EE Graduate Seminar

On Far-End Crosstalk Mitigation in VDSL Systems

Dr. Amitkumar Mahadevan
Ikanos Communications Inc., Red Bank, NJ

11:30am-12:45pm, Friday 13 April 2012, ITE 237, UMBC

Very-high-speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) is a last mile communications access solution that exploits the existing copper infrastructure to deliver high-speed internet access to homes and businesses. Far-end crosstalk (FEXT), i.e., interference seen at a VDSL receiver due to leakage from extraneous transmitters located at the other end (far end) of the line, is by far the most dominant impairment in VDSL. Left untreated, FEXT results in a considerable reduction in the service rates than can be delivered to users, or equivalently, a considerable reduction in the range over which a given service rate can be guaranteed. In this presentation, we will discuss the characteristics of FEXT in DSL systems and techniques employed in the industry to mitigate the impact of FEXT. Substantial attention will be devoted to 'vectoring': a per-frequency active FEXT mitigation scheme involving signal cooperation across different users at the central-office end of the system.

By design, vectoring necessitates the use of a pre-coder for downstream FEXT mitigation and a post-canceller for upstream FEXT mitigation. Low-complexity adaptive schemes for estimating the off-diagonal downstream FEXT pre-coder and the upstream FEXT canceller based on independent minimization of the per-frequency user error variances will be presented. These schemes do not involve any matrix inversion and are shown to achieve almost FEXT-free performance. We will also discuss key features of the recently published G.vector (G.993.5) ITU standard that allows for rapid and non-disruptive estimation of new elements of the pre-coder and canceller matrices when users join the vectored system.

Short Bio: Amitkumar Mahadevan was born in Mumbai, India. He received the B.E. degree in electrical engineering in 1998 from Sardar Patel College of Engineering, Mumbai University, India, and the MSEE degree in 2002 and the Ph.D. (EE) degree in 2005 from UMBC. In 2005, he joined Conexant Systems Inc., Red Bank, NJ, (now Ikanos Communications, Inc.) as a firmware engineer and has worked on advanced technology development for various flavors of DSL communication systems. More recently, he has been working on algorithm development and implementation for active crosstalk cancellation or 'vectoring' in VDSL systems. His research interests include discrete multi-tone and orthogonal frequency-division-multiplexing based communication systems, error correction codes, importance sampling techniques, and quantum information theory.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

More infoformation

Volunteer to help staff the UMBC booth with interactive ITE activities at the U.S. Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, DC on Sunday, April 29th! This is the first year UMBC will have our own booth there, so COEIT student organizations will be working together to staff the booth on Sunday, April 29th from 10am-4pm. Volunteers will do hands-on-activities with hundreds of children who are at the festival! http://www.usasciencefestival.org/

Round trip van transportation will be provided from UMBC and lunch will be provided. You have the option of volunteering the entire time, or working at the booth for half the time and spending the other half perusing the hundreds of booths at the fair. Many large and small ITE companies, schools, and organizations will be present, so it would be a great networking opportunity. Invite your ITE friends & CWIT Affiliates as well!

More details are forthcoming. If you are interested in volunteering, email me, Susan Martin  susan@umbc.edu,  so that I can add you to the list of volunteers for Sunday from 10 am-4 pm, and get more details out to you after the planning meeting next week.

• Bright Spot, Inc. -- High School Mathematics Tutoring -- i.d 9245891
• United States Coast Guard -- Human Resources (Student Trainee) -- i.d. 9250696
• Careers in ARS -- U.S. Department of Agriculture - Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Multiple Posting (April 5) -- i.d. 9250704
• Citelighter -- Knowledge Expert -- i.d. 9250801

Martin Onuegbu
Frederic Worden, Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts

AC IV A 110  |  2:00 - 2:10 p.m.

Life Is Like Basketball is a narrative film depicting a young man’s struggles in his life and makes use of the game of basketball as a metaphorical representation of those struggles. This short movie presents a dazzling array of action shots and makes use of special effects to tell an epic story of a boy named Ron battling a variety of foes. These battles unfold both on a basketball court as well as in an imaginary trial room in his mind. As the story progresses, the protagonist overcomes his foes through his determination as well as his fantastic basketball skills. This film is intended to be both entertaining, as well as an in-depth character study of a man striving to overcome the obstacles in his life. Both the visual imagery and the original musical soundtrack are designed to communicate and articulate the character’s struggles. The hope is that the film will both entertain as well as make viewers think about the sources of inspiration that can be called upon to rise above some of life’s more challenging obstacles.

Morgan A. Madeira

Anupam Joshi, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

UC Ballroom  |  10:00-12:30 PM

Social media has increasingly become an outlet for expression for a large part of our society. Literature suggests that analyzing data from these sites can lead to improvements in areas such as health-care and search-ad targeting. Users of these sites often associate with many other users described as “friends,” even if they do not have a strong connection, or what would be described as friendship in daily life. It is valuable to determine the strength of relationships between users and to identify communities within social networks. These communities represent people with similar characteristics, which are used by applications to solve many real-world problems. For instance, it is useful to identify groups that listen to the same type of music, are similarly affected by a natural disaster, or share health risks for a particular disease. We have created a system to collect and analyze the data about user characteristics, while being respectful of privacy concerns. The system is composed of a front end Facebook application and a back end machine-learning based tool. The front end component gathers data about a user and their friends. The back end uses the collected data and machine-learning techniques to determine relationships between users.

This work was funded through an Undergraduate Research Award from the UMBC Office of Undergraduate Education.