The CSEE department will hold its annual research review this Friday from 9:30am to 4:00pm at the UMBC Technology Center at South Campus. Faculty, research staff and students from all of the department's programs present and discuss their latest research results. The Research Review is open to the public and is a good way for prospective collaborators and students to find out about the research our department is doing and meet and network with current faculty and students. There is ample free parking and refrehsments and lunch are provided. Directions: Take Gun Road off Rolling Road (Rt. 166) or take the UMBC “Satellite” Shuttle to South Campus.

A group of CSEE students from the Maple lab is developing Playing to Program (PtP) as an intelligent tutoring system to teach programming concepts. PtP uses the open source RUR-PLE visual programming environment for Python and automatically selects and loads problems from a catalogue which the student then attempts to solve. The student's work is analyzed for correctness and the results used to update a model of her understanding of programming concepts and ability to solve complex problems. That model is then used to select the next problem to present, resulting in an adaptive learning process.

The PtP project involves both undergraduate and graduate students and is led by Professor Marie desJardins. You can get more information on PtP and download the prototype code at the PtP Google code site. CSEE undergraduate students Amy Ciavolino, Eliana Feasley, and Robert Deloatch will present the work this Friday morning at the CSEE Research Review based on a recent paper accepted at the Second Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence. Graduate student David Walser also recently completed a MS thesis on Problem Selection of Program Tracing Tasks in an Intelligent Tutoring System and Visual Programming Environment which will be available later in May.

Twenty CSEE graduate students had oral or poster presentations at the 2011 GRC and CSEE alumnus Dr. Ralph Semmel gave a the keynote address. We have some photographs from the event.

Three of our graduates students were also honored by receiving awards for making outstanding presentations.

• Varish Mulwad received an award for an outstanding oral presentation on his dissertation research on "Generating Knowledge from Tables".

   

  Vast amounts of information are available in structured forms like spreadsheets, database relations, and tables found in documents and on the Web. We describe a framework for automatically understanding and interpreting information encoded in tables and generating knowledge from it. To accurately interpret a table, our framework maps every column header to class (or property wherever appropriate) from appropriate ontologies, link the data values to existing entities from a knowledge base (or map them as values of a property wherever appropriate) and identify and discover relations between various columns. Of the many domains where this work will be useful, we explore the application of this in two important domains — the medical research domain and the open government data. We also present preliminary results evaluating our framework against tables obtained from Google Squared, Wikipedia and a Google dataset.

• Kavita Krishnaswamy received an award for an outstanding oral presentation on her thesis research on "Path planning a roboticarm efficiently".

   

  Individuals with physical disabilities need assistance because of their lack of physical strength. In order to provide a solution, we propose to build an assistive robot to provide physical assistance services for individuals with disabilities in real-time through the Internet. For an assistive robotic arm with a collaborative mode of control, given the initial arm configuration we will attempt to increase the speed of response times for the user requesting physical assistance by calculating the paths of reach to the possible target goals before the time of command. The specific aims of our research project are to a) determine the trajectory path of a human arm to perform tasks; b) identify the paths of frequent use; and c) analyze ways to improve path planning performance. In the first stage, we will investigate the most frequently requested tasks of physical assistance in cases where a robotic arm will be preferred over a personal assistant. For example, if the target task is eating, we may calculate the percentage of volunteering participants picking up a fork, returning the fork, reaching for a cup, and returning the cup. In this study, we utilize the TUM kitchen data set from the Technische Universität München for motion tracking data analysis. With the collected information, we will compute the statistics of the motions to identify paths of frequent use and design the architecture with caching. We anticipate an increase in performance and time will be saved for the computation of path planning. We will begin implementing and testing the new strategies for the proposed architecture.

• Akshya Iyengar received an award for an outstanding poster presentation for her thesis research on "Estimating Temporal Boundaries of Events using Social Media Data".

   

  Social media websites like Twitter, Flickr and YouTube generate a high volume of user generated content as a major event occurs. Our goal is to automatically determine as accurately as possible when the event starts and when it ends by analyzing the volume and content of social media data. We describe a technique that estimates the temporal boundaries of anticipated events like wildfires and hurricanes and helps to monitor changes as events unfold. Estimating these temporal boundaries segments the event"related data into three major phases: the buildup to the event, the event itself, and the post"event effects and repercussions. The technique can also detect the presence and scope of significant sub"events occurring during the course of an event. For events that transpire over time and space, such as the dispersal of an oil spill, a hurricane or a spreading wildfire, we can analyze how event progressed, traveled geographically and major sub"events that occurred within the event. When applied to natural disasters and man-made disturbances, the derived data can help organizations involved in mediation efforts to track and analyze evolving events.

Bmore has a short video report on the UMBC GAIM programs that features CSEE Professor Marc Olano, VART Professor Neal McDonald and several GAIM students.

“The video game industry may not be Maryland’s equivalent of film in Los Angeles or country music in Nashville, but it is a force. Companies such as Zynga, Firaxis, Big Huge Games, and Day 1 Studios are all based here and are responsible for some of the industry’s most interesting titles. We’re also lucky to have a robust gaming program at UMBC, where students on the creative and technical ends of the game creation process learn side-by-side how to conceptualize and create the games of tomorrow.”

Just in time for the 2011 UMBC Digital Entertainment Conference.