Professor Ryan Bergeron has been a lecturer of Computer Science at UMBC since Spring 2008. Currently the Technical Director for UMBC's Women's Volleyball team, Bergeron's research interests lie at the intersection of athletics and technology. Questions like “How do I make coaches understand what their players are doing better” and “How can we make athletes even better at what they do” are at the heart of his search.

To read more about professor Ryan Bergeron, see his faculty profile.

Professor Ryan Bergeron has been a lecturer of Computer Science at UMBC since Spring 2008. Currently the Technical Director for UMBC's Women's Volleyball team, Bergeron's research interests lie at the intersection of athletics and technology. Questions like “How do I make coaches understand what their players are doing better” and “How can we make athletes even better at what they do” are at the heart of his search.

To read more about professor Ryan Bergeron, see his faculty profile.

Some of this text was adapted from a press release and a post from the Scantegrity blog

UMBC Professor Alan Sherman, UMBC alumnus Rick Carback (Ph.D. 2010) and many former and current UMBC students helped to develop Scantegrity, an an open source election verification technology for optical scan voting systems. In 2009, their Scantegrity II voting system was used in the election of the mayor and city council members of Takoma Park, Maryland. This was an historic first time any end-to-end voter verifiable voting system with ballot privacy has been used in a binding governmental election.

This week, absentee voters in Takoma Park, Maryland will have the option to cast their votes for mayor and city council using a new Internet voting system called Remotegrity which uses the same approach of generating privacy preserving confirmation numbers that allow each voter to verify her vote is counted and anyone to verify that all the votes were counted correctly. Dr. Carback has played a significant role in helping Takoma Park adopt and use Scantegrity and Remotegrity in the municipal elections.

Internet voting has been used to elect government officials before (for example, in Switzerland, Estonia, and Norway), but what is new here is that voters mail in paper ballots and use the Internet to independently verify that their votes have been received by the city and recorded correctly. Anyone can check online that the recorded votes were tallied correctly.

Dr. Filip Zagorski, computer scientist at The George Washington University, explains ÒThrough the hybrid use of paper ballots and Internet verification, Remotegrity combines the best of both worlds to provide a very high degree of security even against malware and insider attack.Ó Portions of the underlying research in cryptography and secure server design were supported by the National Science Foundation and the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

Voters who have requested to vote by mail receive a ballot which they mark and mail in, but they can also verify their vote on-line in the Remotegrity system, without revealing how they voted. In future elections, the same online procedure may cast votes and physical mailing of paper ballots may be optional or omitted.

The city will also use the Scantegrity voting system for voters who cast their ballot in person, as it did in 2009. The integrated Scantegrity and Remotegrity systems offer full end-to-end voter-verifiability, in which voters casting ballots from home or in person can verify that their votes were correctly cast, collected, and counted.

Additionally, this year, the city will provide an audio interface for marking ballots. The interface, named Audiotegrity, developed by researchers at The George Washington University, will enable voters with difficulty marking paper ballots to mark ballots independently using an electronic interface. Mr. Noel Runyan, a usability and accessibility expert, provided pro bono design advice to the Audiotegrity team.

With a grant from the federal Election Assistance Commission, and support from the non-profit Voting Systems Institute, researchers from UMBC will survey voters and election officials as well as conduct focus groups around their experiences using these new voting systems.

For more information, see the recent paper by UMBC Ph.D. alumnus Rick Carback et al., Scantegrity II Municipal Election at Takoma Park: The First E2E Binding Governmental Election with Ballot Privacy, or contact Professor Alan Sherman.

Some of this text was adapted from a press release and a post from the Scantegrity blog

UMBC Professor Alan Sherman, UMBC alumnus Rick Carback (Ph.D. 2010) and many former and current UMBC students helped to develop Scantegrity, an an open source election verification technology for optical scan voting systems. In 2009, their Scantegrity II voting system was used in the election of the mayor and city council members of Takoma Park, Maryland. This was an historic first time any end-to-end voter verifiable voting system with ballot privacy has been used in a binding governmental election.

This week, absentee voters in Takoma Park, Maryland will have the option to cast their votes for mayor and city council using a new Internet voting system called Remotegrity which uses the same approach of generating privacy preserving confirmation numbers that allow each voter to verify her vote is counted and anyone to verify that all the votes were counted correctly. Dr. Carback has played a significant role in helping Takoma Park adopt and use Scantegrity and Remotegrity in the municipal elections.

Internet voting has been used to elect government officials before (for example, in Switzerland, Estonia, and Norway), but what is new here is that voters mail in paper ballots and use the Internet to independently verify that their votes have been received by the city and recorded correctly. Anyone can check online that the recorded votes were tallied correctly.

Dr. Filip Zagorski, computer scientist at The George Washington University, explains ÒThrough the hybrid use of paper ballots and Internet verification, Remotegrity combines the best of both worlds to provide a very high degree of security even against malware and insider attack.Ó Portions of the underlying research in cryptography and secure server design were supported by the National Science Foundation and the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

Voters who have requested to vote by mail receive a ballot which they mark and mail in, but they can also verify their vote on-line in the Remotegrity system, without revealing how they voted. In future elections, the same online procedure may cast votes and physical mailing of paper ballots may be optional or omitted.

The city will also use the Scantegrity voting system for voters who cast their ballot in person, as it did in 2009. The integrated Scantegrity and Remotegrity systems offer full end-to-end voter-verifiability, in which voters casting ballots from home or in person can verify that their votes were correctly cast, collected, and counted.

Additionally, this year, the city will provide an audio interface for marking ballots. The interface, named Audiotegrity, developed by researchers at The George Washington University, will enable voters with difficulty marking paper ballots to mark ballots independently using an electronic interface. Mr. Noel Runyan, a usability and accessibility expert, provided pro bono design advice to the Audiotegrity team.

With a grant from the federal Election Assistance Commission, and support from the non-profit Voting Systems Institute, researchers from UMBC will survey voters and election officials as well as conduct focus groups around their experiences using these new voting systems.

For more information, see the recent paper by UMBC Ph.D. alumnus Rick Carback et al., Scantegrity II Municipal Election at Takoma Park: The First E2E Binding Governmental Election with Ballot Privacy, or contact Professor Alan Sherman.

Human-Centered Computing Speaker Series
UMBC Information Systems Department

'Natural' Search User Interfaces

Professor Marti Hearst
School of Information
University of California, Berkeley

12:00-1:00pm Friday 18 November 2011, ITE 459

What does the future hold for search user interfaces? Following on a recently completed book on this topic, this talk identifies some important trends in the use of information technology and suggest how these may affect search in future. This includes is a notable trend towards more “natural'' user interfaces, a trend towards social rather than solo usage of information technology, and a trend in technology advancing the integration of massive quantities of user behavior and large-scale knowledge bases. These trends are, or will be, interweaving in various ways, which will have some interesting ramifications for search interfaces, and should suggest promising directions for research.

Dr. Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She received BA, MS, and PhD degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997. A primary focus of Dr. Hearst's research is user interfaces for search.

She just completed the first book on the topic of Search User Interfaces and she has invented or participated in several well-known search interface projects including the Flamenco project that investigated and the promoted the use of faceted metadata for collection navigation. Professor Hearst's other research areas include computational linguistics, information visualization, and analysis of social media.

Prof. Hearst has received an NSF CAREER award, an IBM Faculty Award, a Google Research Award, an Okawa Foundation Fellowship, two Excellence in Teaching Awards, and has been principle investigator for more than $3M in research grants.

See M. Hearst, 'Natural' Search User Interfaces, CACM, v54n11, pp. 60-97, 2011.

Host: Professor Anita Komlodi/p>

Human-Centered Computing Speaker Series
UMBC Information Systems Department

'Natural' Search User Interfaces

Professor Marti Hearst
School of Information
University of California, Berkeley

12:00-1:00pm Friday 18 November 2011, ITE 459

What does the future hold for search user interfaces? Following on a recently completed book on this topic, this talk identifies some important trends in the use of information technology and suggest how these may affect search in future. This includes is a notable trend towards more “natural'' user interfaces, a trend towards social rather than solo usage of information technology, and a trend in technology advancing the integration of massive quantities of user behavior and large-scale knowledge bases. These trends are, or will be, interweaving in various ways, which will have some interesting ramifications for search interfaces, and should suggest promising directions for research.

Dr. Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She received BA, MS, and PhD degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997. A primary focus of Dr. Hearst's research is user interfaces for search.

She just completed the first book on the topic of Search User Interfaces and she has invented or participated in several well-known search interface projects including the Flamenco project that investigated and the promoted the use of faceted metadata for collection navigation. Professor Hearst's other research areas include computational linguistics, information visualization, and analysis of social media.

Prof. Hearst has received an NSF CAREER award, an IBM Faculty Award, a Google Research Award, an Okawa Foundation Fellowship, two Excellence in Teaching Awards, and has been principle investigator for more than $3M in research grants.

See M. Hearst, 'Natural' Search User Interfaces, CACM, v54n11, pp. 60-97, 2011.

Host: Professor Anita Komlodi/p>

The Department wishes to extend its congratulations to the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering graduate students that were recently admitted to candidacy for the doctoral degree. The following students were recognized at the Doctoral Candidates Recognition Reception that was held last Tuesday, November 1st in the UC Ballroom:

Computer Science

David Chapman
Mentor: Dr. Milton Halem
"Multidimensional Map Reduce for Remote Sensing Applicators

Niyati Chhaya
Mentor: Dr. Tim Oates
"Joint Inference for Extracting Text Descriptors from Triage Images of Mass Disaster Victims"

Yasaman Haghpanah
Mentor: Dr. Marie desJardins
"A Trust Model for Decision Making in Supply Chain Management"

Lushan Han
Mentor: Dr. Tim Finin
"GoRelations: An Intuitive Query System for Linked Data"

Karuna Joshi
Mentor: Dr. Yelena Yesha, Dr. Tim Finin
"Framework for an Integrated Lifecycle of Virtualized Services"

Varish Mulwad
Mentor: Dr. Tim Finin
"Generating Linked Data by Inferring the Semantics of Tables"

Randy Schauer
Mentor: Dr. Anupam Joshi
"A Framework for the Intelligent Management of Distributed Rack-Based Blade Operations"

Fatih Senel
Mentor: Dr. Mohamed Younis
"Relay Node Placement for Federating Segmented Wireless Sensor Network"

Shiming Yang
Mentor: Dr. Konstantin Kalpakis
"Improving the Traffic Flow Forecasts for Road Networks with Data Assimilation"

Xianshu Zhu
Mentor: Dr. Tim Oates
"Finding Story Chain in Newswire Articles"

Electrical Engineering

Matthew Anderson
Mentor: Dr. Tulay Adali
"Joint Blind Source Separation with Multivariate Gaussian Model: Algorithms, Performance Analysis and Applications"

Damon Bradley
Mentor: Dr. Joel Morris
"On the Analysis, Modeling, and Mitigation of Radio Frequency Interference for Spaceborne Microwave Radiometers"

Sai Ma
Mentor: Dr. Tulay Adali
"Analysis of Brain Network Connectivity in MRI Data Using Spatial Information"

Ganesh Saiprasad
Dr. Chein-I Chang
"Adrenal Gland Abnormality Detection Using Random Classification Forest"