Photo Courtesy University of Michigan, EECS Department

Johnson's company, MEMStim, is dedicated to developing customizable micro-fabricated stimulators. According to an article from Xconomy Detroit, this technology, which Johnson has been working on for several years, is “a platform for creating electrode leads…that can be easily integrated into devices that shoot electric pulses into a patient’s nervous system.” The platform would allow for the creation of multiple leads at a time, contrary to the current process that is expensive and slow, the article adds. This means more effective and more affordable care for those who could benefit from the technology—like patients with Parkinson’s disease.

A Meyerhoff scholar, Ms. Johnson graduated from UMBC in 2005 with a B.S. in Computer Engineering and a B.A. in Mathematics. After receiving her undergraduate degrees, Ms. Johnson attended the University of Michigan to pursue her Masters and subsequently a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. Ms. Johnson speaks fondly about her experience at UMBC and with the Meyerhoff Scholars program here.

Google is sponsoring another AI Challenge Competition run by an independent group of volunteers that grew out of the Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo. The competition opens today and invites submissions of programs designed to control ants a simulated colony in competition with other colonies.

Ants is a multi-player strategy game set on a plot of dirt with water for obstacles and food that randomly drops. Each player has one or more hills where ants will spawn. The objective is for players to seek and destroy the most enemy ant hills while defending their own hills. Players must also gather food to spawn more ants, however, if all of a player's hills are destroyed they can't spawn any more ants.

The objective is to create a computer program (a bot) that plays the game of Ants as intelligently as possible. It is recommended that you use one of the starter packages as a starting point. If you are looking to get up and running as quickly as possible, check out the Five Minute Quickstart Guide. For more details about Ants beyond this introductory document, see the Game Specification.

The site has documentation, a tutorial and starter packages for windows and Linux in a variety of programming languages. Each package contains a simple working entry to use as a starting point, tools that allow you to run your bot and watch it play graphically, sample opponents that you can test your bot against, and maps you can use for testing. Once you've developed your bot, you can enter it at the website and watch your ant colony fight for domination against colonies created by other people from around the world.

The behavior of ants is a classic example of how the local interactions among individuals in a collection can give rise to interesting emergent behavior. This concept is important in the study of complex systems and was the subject of a recent special topics course taught by Professor Marie desJardins, Computation, Complexity, and Emergence.

Google is sponsoring another AI Challenge Competition run by an independent group of volunteers that grew out of the Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo. The competition opens today and invites submissions of programs designed to control ants a simulated colony in competition with other colonies.

Ants is a multi-player strategy game set on a plot of dirt with water for obstacles and food that randomly drops. Each player has one or more hills where ants will spawn. The objective is for players to seek and destroy the most enemy ant hills while defending their own hills. Players must also gather food to spawn more ants, however, if all of a player's hills are destroyed they can't spawn any more ants.

The objective is to create a computer program (a bot) that plays the game of Ants as intelligently as possible. It is recommended that you use one of the starter packages as a starting point. If you are looking to get up and running as quickly as possible, check out the Five Minute Quickstart Guide. For more details about Ants beyond this introductory document, see the Game Specification.

The site has documentation, a tutorial and starter packages for windows and Linux in a variety of programming languages. Each package contains a simple working entry to use as a starting point, tools that allow you to run your bot and watch it play graphically, sample opponents that you can test your bot against, and maps you can use for testing. Once you've developed your bot, you can enter it at the website and watch your ant colony fight for domination against colonies created by other people from around the world.

The behavior of ants is a classic example of how the local interactions among individuals in a collection can give rise to interesting emergent behavior. This concept is important in the study of complex systems and was the subject of a recent special topics course taught by Professor Marie desJardins, Computation, Complexity, and Emergence.

Adapt3D: A Framework for Supporting CFD and MHD Modeling

Professor John E. Dorband
Research Associate Professor and MCC Chief Scientist
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00pm Friday 21 October 2011, ITE227

Adapt3D is a software framework that supports 3-D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) modeling on an unstructured mesh. It facilitates adaptive refinement and execution in a parallel computing environment, either on shared memory or distributed memory computer architectures. The framework was designed primarily to support parallel computing of simulations on a continuum expressed by an adaptively refined unstructured mesh. It was designed to cleanly differentiate the code that manages an unstructured mesh on a parallel computer and the code that performs the numerics on the components of the mesh. The intent is to ease the burden of the engineer or scientist when it come to understanding parallel computing or adaptive refinement, allowing him to spend his time understanding the computational science rather than the computer science.

Dr. John Dorband received a BA in Math and Physics from Northwest Nazarene University in 1972 and a PhD in Computer Science from The Pennsylvania State University in 1985. He work for NASA for 21 years doing research in parallel and high performance hardware architectures and software. He has developed parallel compilers, algorithms and applications. He was a member of the group that developed the concept of developing high performance computing architectures from commodity components (the Beowulf project).

Host: Yelena Yesha

Educational opportunities limit the life choices of the 15 million children growing up in poverty today, impacting their earning potential, voter participation, civic engagement and community involvement. This is not for lack of potential, but for lack of opportunity. 

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Student leaders from around the country are electing to do something very powerful – to make an impact for 2 years immediately after graduation. Find out why 47,000 people applied to Teach For America last year.

Log on to our website at www.teachforamerica.org to learn more about our mission and who we look for.

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Join us to learn how you can make an immediate difference in the lives of students.

Wednesday, October 19^th

5:00pm-6:00pm

The Commons, Room 331

Sign up to learn more here.

Next Application Deadline: October 26^th, 2011

NSA Women in Intelligence: Making a Difference

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

3-8pm

NSA Headquarters, Ft. Meade, MD

• Dinner with NSA recruiters and employees
• Technical demonstrations
  
• Leadership panel discussions
• Keynote address
• Round-table group discussions
• Networking