This year, October 7 has been designated as Ada Lovelace Day, a day to honor Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. She is widely regarded as the first computer programmer for her work with Charles Babbage who developed an early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.

ReadWriteWeb commemorated the day with a story on the Women Who Made Google Plus and profiled twenty-two of the  Googlers:

"Launched on June 28th and just opened to the public at large late last month, Google Plus is a feature-rich social network with variable privacy and sharing settings at the core of its experience. Who were the women involved in building such a big, important technology? We asked, on Google Plus, and were told about twenty two of them profiled below. They are an incredibly accomplished group of people and a great source of inspiration for young women interested in science and technology – or for anyone else who could use some powerful role models. You should share this list of women with the girls in your life, though, that's what Ada Lovelace Day is all about."

You can visit their public G+ profiles and see more about who they are and what they do. The article points out that the 22 profiled are just some of the women who helped to build and launch this new and successful application.  

Many former UMBC students work at Google or have done internships there.  If you are interested in either, you can explore the opportunities at Google's pages for internships and jobs.

If you are interested in machne learning you might check out the  American Meteorological Society  Wind Power Prediction Contest.  It is sponsored by the AMS Committee on AI Applications to Environmental Science, Energy, and Probability and Statistics.  The goal is to compare various statistical learning techniques to predict wind power production. This contest considers a wind farm consisting of 53 turbines located in northern Colorado. The objective is to forecast the wind power for the wind farm (sum of the power from the 53 turbines). The inputs are forecast variables from several Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models, both from the National Center for Environmental Prediction and NCAR's high resolution WRF forecast. Training data are currently available on the download site, and the test data will be available in November.

The contest consists of two parts: (1) a day-ahead forecasting contest and (2) a short-term (one-, two-, and three-hour) contest. Participants are welcome to enter either or both parts of the contests. The AMS welcome entries from professionals to students, but registration is required by November 15. Entrants names will be kept blind – they must register an abstract to present a poster at AMS, then winners will be notified of an invitation to present a talk at the January AMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta. The AMS expects to solicit prize money, which will be announced on the website at a later time.

Cybersecurity Guest Lecture

An Evening With General Michael Hayden, USAF (Ret.)

6:00-8:00pm Thursday, 27 Oct. 2011
Room 102, Information Technology and Engineering

UMBC is proud to announce this opportunity for students and faculty to meet with General Hayden to hear his perspectives and discuss current issues regarding cybersecurity. The evening is sponsored by Next Century Corporation.

Former NSA and CIA director General Michael Hayden will discuss the evolution of technology from World War II to the present and outline the challenges this evolution presents to national security organizations. He will address the timely issues of cybersecurity and cyberwarfare, stress the role of education in preparing the intelligence community workforce to deal with cyber concerns, and share anecdotal stories of his time as Director of both the CIA and NSA in meeting these challenges facing the nation. General Hayden is happy to answer questions and make this an engaging, informative, and interactive evening.

Refreshments will be furnished by Next Century Corporation.

RSVP REQUIRED: Space is limited, with preference given to graduate CYBR, CSEE, and IS students and faculty. Please RSVP to Allison Jones (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) by October 25th if you plan to attend.

General Michael Hayden, USAF (Ret.), served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency and was the nation’s first Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence. He retired from the CIA in February 2009, and is now a Principal in the Chertoff Group, a security consultancy co-founded by former Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. General Hayden also serves as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at George Mason University School of Public Policy and in an advisory capacity to several organizations focused on national security.

General Hayden retired from a distinguished thirty-nine year career in the United States Air Force on July 1, 2008. In addition to his senior intelligence community assignments, he served as Commander of the Air Intelligence Agency, Director of the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center, and Chief of the Central Security Service.

General Hayden graduated from Duquesne University with a Bachelor’s degree in history in 1967 and a Master’s degree in modern American history in 1969.