Meet Kathy. She is a Psychology major who is graduating this Spring! Her research explored parental control in the Chinese immigrant and European American context. 

After discussing my interest in cross-cultural research, Dr. Cheah recruited me as a research assistant for her Culture, Child and Adolescent Development Lab.

How did you know this was the project you wanted to do?
While I was collecting data through conducting qualitative interviews with European American mothers for Dr. Cheah’s project, I began to develop my own research questions and decided to further examine parental control in both the Chinese immigrant context and European American context.

My career goal is to eventually conduct cross-cultural research examining the socialization and expression of emotions in families and to teach psychology in an academic setting.

Read her abstract here.

The 2014 UMBC team preparing for the match at the New York Athletic Club.

UMBC student Nicholas Pascarella created a short video on UMBC’s chess program and the current team, including its participation in the 2014 Final Four of College Chess match held at the New York Athletic Club in April.  This match has been held each year since 2001 and determines the U.S. college team chess champion.  In the 14 years that it has been held, UMBC has won six times and placed second six times.

Nicholas is a rising junior majoring in Media and Communication Studies.

UMBC graduate student Omar Shehab received a travel grant to attend two co-located events, the 14th Canadian Quantum Information Summer School and the 11th Canadian Quantum Information Student Conference. Both events are organized by the Fields Institute and will be held at the University of Guelph.

Omar is a fourth year PhD student in Computer Science working with by Professor Samuel Lomonaco. His Ph.D.research involves determining the quantum computational complexity of topological problems. He is also interested in quantum games, randomness and cryptography. This summer he will be working as a Visiting Research Assistant the USC Information Sciences Institute facility in Arlington, Virginia.

The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Academies has released of a report entitled At the Nexus of Cybersecurity and Public Policy: Some Basic Concepts and Issues in prepublication form. The final book version of the report will be available around end of May, and a PDF of that final version will also be available for free at this web site.

According to the study director and CSTB chief scientist Dr. Herb Lin, “This report is a first for CSTB in that it seeks to distill the cybersecurity wisdom and insight of this entire body of Academy work in a form that is easily accessible to nonspecialists. It provides the essential technical background for understanding cyber threats and the basic principles of cybersecurity, and is pretty much self-contained in this regard. At the same time, it underscores the point that improvements in cybersecurity depend at least as much on non-technical factors, based in fields such as economics and psychology, as on secure code or tamper-resistant hardware.”

National Research Council. At the Nexus of Cybersecurity and Public Policy: Some Basic Concepts and Issues. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2014.   ( Download )

We depend on information and information technology (IT) to make many of our day-to-day tasks easier and more convenient. Computers play key roles in transportation, health care, banking, and energy. Businesses use IT for payroll and accounting, inventory and sales, and research and development. Modern military forces use weapons that are increasingly coordinated through computer-based networks. Cybersecurity is vital to protecting all of these functions. Cyberspace is vulnerable to a broad spectrum of hackers, criminals, terrorists, and state actors. Working in cyberspace, these malevolent actors can steal money, intellectual property, or classified information; impersonate law-abiding parties for their own purposes; damage important data; or deny the availability of normally accessible services. Cybersecurity issues arise because of three factors taken together – the presence of malevolent actors in cyberspace, societal reliance on IT for many important functions, and the presence of vulnerabilities in IT systems. What steps can policy makers take to protect our government, businesses, and the public from those would take advantage of system vulnerabilities?

At the Nexus of Cybersecurity and Public Policy offers a wealth of information on practical measures, technical and nontechnical challenges, and potential policy responses. According to this report, cybersecurity is a never-ending battle; threats will evolve as adversaries adopt new tools and techniques to compromise security. Cybersecurity is therefore an ongoing process that needs to evolve as new threats are identified. At the Nexus of Cybersecurity and Public Policy is a call for action to make cybersecurity a public safety priority. For a number of years, the cybersecurity issue has received increasing public attention; however, most policy focus has been on the short-term costs of improving systems. In its explanation of the fundamentals of cybersecurity and the discussion of potential policy responses, this book will be a resource for policy makers, cybersecurity and IT professionals, and anyone who wants to understand threats to cyberspace.

Name: Kabish Shah

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company - UMBC PAHB Phase II

Major(s)/Minor(s): Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics

Expected Graduation Year: May 2014

Briefly describe your internship, co-op, research, or service- learning opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

 I learned the infrastructure of construction sites and the construction process which exposed me to the general requirements of the career in construction industry and helped me to ensure that it is something I am interested in continuing to pursue in the future. During my internship I oversaw (with supervision) the installations of the MEP contractors for compliance with the documents and the needs of the project. I was involved with the LEED and Commissioning work of the MEP equipment. I conducted quality control inspections for all trades (not just MEP) for compliance with the specifications of the project. Report and follow up on all. I also developed an understanding of business communications and working with people from all phases of construction, from laborers to presidents of companies. Some projects I worked on are LEED, Duct Tracking, Quality Control, Tracking Hot Water and Chilled Water Pipe testing, MEP, Internal Auditing, Cost Tracking and many more. I liked doing quality control because I believe as an engineer; it’s my duty to make sure that the job is done as it’s supposed to be done. And, there is no compromise in quality and integrity of the work.

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?

I enjoyed being able to shadow engineers and use my skills in the real world. I learned a great deal from the engineers and I can see myself performing the same types of tasks in the coming future.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

My internship experience with Whiting-Turner is very valuable to me. I have learned a lot through this experience, from how to be professional to making friends with someone completely different than me. Some of the most valuable things I have learned are how to communicate professionally, work well with sub-contractors, manage time, and have fun.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

Get started as soon as possible. The earlier you put your feet in the door, the better off you will be. Internship experience is something that cannot be compared with anything else.

How do you see your experience as meaningful? This might involve skills you’ve gained, information you’ve learned, mentors you’ve connected with, or projects you’ve completed.

My experience is meaningful because I feel like I am giving something back to UMBC, which I am very proud of. I am surprised with the help I am getting from engineers from my group. My supervisor is always there to answer my questions related to construction and the company. Also, I am proud to use my engineering skills to complete the projects.

Please provide a short quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process.

 I believe in giving back and being a part of UMBC PAHB Phase II project is all I could ask for.

 Congratulations on graduating next week, Kabish!

 Ph.D.Dissertation Defense
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Schema Free Querying of Semantic Data

Lushan Han

10:00am Friday, 23 May 2014, ITE 325b

Developing interfaces to enable casual, non-expert users to query complex structured data has been the subject of much research over the past forty years. We refer to them as as schema-free query interfaces, since they allow users to freely query data without understanding its schema, knowing how to refer to objects, or mastering the appropriate formal query language. Schema-free query interfaces address fundamental problems in natural language processing, databases and AI to connect users’ conceptual models and machine representations.

However, schema-free query interface systems are faced with three hard problems. First, we still lack a practical interface. Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) are easy for users but hard for machines. Current NLP techniques are still unreliable in extracting the relational structure from natural language questions. Keyword query interfaces, on the other hand, have limited expressiveness and inherit ambiguity from the natural language terms used as keywords. Second, people express or model the same meaning in many different ways, which can result in the vocabulary and structure mismatches between users’ queries and the machines’ representation. We still rely on ad hoc and labor-intensive approaches to deal with this ‘semantic heterogeneity problem’. Third, the Web has seen increasing amounts of open domain semantic data with heterogeneous or unknown schemas, which challenges traditional NLI systems that require a well-defined schema. Some modern systems gave up the approach of translating the user query into a formal query at the schema level and chose to directly search into the entity network (ABox) for the matchings of the user query. This approach, however, is computationally expensive and has an ad hoc nature.

In this thesis, we develop a novel approach to address the three hard problems. We introduce a new schema-free query interface, SFQ interface, in which users explicitly specify the relational structure of the query as a graphical “skeleton” and annotate it with freely chosen words, phrases and entity names. This circumvents the unreliable step of extracting complete relations from natural language queries.

We describe a framework for interpreting these SFQ queries over open domain semantic data that automatically translates them to formal queries. First, we learn a schema statistically from the entity network and represent as a graph, which we call the schema network. Our mapping algorithms run on the schema network rather than the entity network, enhancing scalability. We define the probability of “observing” a path on the schema network. Following it, we create two statistical association models that will be used to carry out disambiguation. Novel mapping algorithms are developed that exploit semantic similarity measures and association measures to address the structure and vocabulary mismatch problems. Our approach is fully computational and requires no special lexicons, mapping rules, domain-specific syntactic or semantic grammars, thesauri or hard-coded semantics.

We evaluate our approach on two large datasets, DBLP+ and DBpedia. We developed DBLP+ by augmenting the DBLP dataset with additional data from CiteSeerX and ArnetMiner. We created 220 SFQ queries on the DBLP+ dataset. For DBpedia, we had three human subjects (who were unfamiliar with DBpedia) translate 33 natural language questions from the 2011 QALD workshop into SFQ queries. We carried out cross-validation on the 220 DBLP+ queries and cross-domain validation on the 99 DBpedia queries in which the parameters tuned for the DBLP+ queries are applied to the DBpedia queries. The evaluation results on the two datasets show that our system has very good efficacy and efficiency.

Committee: Drs. Li Ding (Memect), Tim Finin (chair), Anupam Joshi, Paul McNamee (JHU), Yelena Yesha