The 11th Annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing has opened its Call for Participation. The annual conference, presented by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, is the world's largest gathering of women in computing. The 2011 CHC will take place from 9-12 November 9-12 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. This year's theme "What if?" recognizes that innovation in technology arises from the question What if a culture of technology that encourages participation and inquiry from a diverse workforce leads to greater levels of innovation.

The GHC is designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. Leading researchers present their current work, while special sessions focus on the role of women in today's technology fields, including computer science, information technology, research and engineering. The technical conference features well known keynote speakers and invited technical speakers, panels, workshops, new investigator technical papers, PhD forums, technical posters, birds of a feather sessions, the ACM Student Research Competition and an Awards Celebration.

Submissions on both technical and professional topics are encouraged. The GHC committee requests submissions reflecting the conference theme "What if?" in the areas of innovation within a company, from academia, or from individual contributors. Technical submissions that cross disciplines and other boundaries are encouraged. The submission deadline is March 15, 2011.

Next week IBM's Watson system will try to establish its claim to be the world's smartest computer in a Jeopardy! challenge against two of the best human players. The three matches will be broadcast on CBS on February 14, 15 and 16. Watson's competition will be the biggest all-time Jeopardy money winner Brad Rutter ($3.2M) and Ken Jennings, who holds the record holder for winning the most consecutive games (74). See the Jeopardy! for their perspective on this match.

Watson and the match was the subject of PBS NOVA episode #3808, Smartest Machine On Earth which was broadcast last night. If you missed it as I did :-( you can see it tonight (Thursday February 10) in the Baltimore-DC area at 11:00pm on WETA2.

Watson is a result of IBM's DeepQA Project whose goal is to develop "a computer system that can directly and precisely answer natural language questions over an open and broad range of knowledge". According to IBM:

"Watson is an application of advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering. At its core, Watson is built on IBM's DeepQA technology for hypothesis generation, massive evidence gathering, analysis, and scoring. Watson is a workload optimized system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and the IBM DeepQA software to answer Jeopardy! questions in under three seconds. Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. Each Power 750 server uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight core processor, with four threads per core. The POWER7 processor's massively parallel processing capability is an ideal match for Watson's IBM DeepQA software which is embarrassingly parallel (that is a workload that executes multiple threads in parallel).

Add your comments to say who you think will win the Jeopardy! IBM Challenge and if this is a good test of intelligence.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Team is looking for new members. Cyber security is all over the news, and UMBC is right in the middle of it. Join the UMBC team to learn more about this exciting and fast growing field, and to gain access to the best competitions, such as CCDC, the DC3 DFC, and the recently announced MDC3, as well as networking opportunities with all the key players, from government agencies to private industry.

When and where?

Join us for a presentation followed by a discussion next Monday, February 14th from noon to 1.00PM, in room ITE 235.

Who should attend?

We are inviting everyone who has an interest in cyber security, regardless of your major or current knowledge level. Most of our team members are undergraduate IS or CS majors, but we also have graduate CE and EE majors.

Why?

Because we want your help to grow within both UMBC and Maryland.

In Spring 2010 our team competed in the regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Championship (CCDC) for the east coast. In this competition, each team defended a mock corporate network against a horde of professional hackers in a fast-paced, real-time event over the course of two days. During Fall 2010 we participated in a scrimmage hosted at Towson University and became an official student organization recognized by SGA, consolidating both our technical and organizational skills. For 2011, we are upgrading our whole network/computing infrastructure and expanding to new competitions such as DC3 and MDC3.

In summary, the UMBC Cyber Defense Team is a great opportunity to gain real world security experience. We practice both penetration and defense of isolated networks similar to real business environments and plan on tackling more research-oriented problems as well. No experience is required, but you must be motivated to learn about computer networks and systems security.

If you have any questions, please email Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address and we’ll help you out.