Dr. Anthony Johnson, a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and Physics, was elected to serve on the American Physical Society’s (APS) Executive Board. With over 50,000 members, APS is one of the world’s leading organizations of physicists. It is dedicated to advancing research in the field through journals, scientific meetings, education, outreach, advocacy and international activities.

This one year term will be Dr. Johnson’s second appointment on APS’s Executive Board. He previously served nearly twenty-years ago while working for AT&T Bell Laboratories.

Dr. Johnson is the director of UMBC’s Center for Advanced Studies in Photonics Research (CASPR). His research is in the area of ultrafast optics and optoelectronics- the ultrafast photophysics and nonlinear optical properties of bulk, nanoclustered, and quantum well semiconductor structures, untrashort pulse propagation in fibers and high-speed lightwave systems.

Earlier this month SPIE (The International Society for Optics & Photonics) interviewed Dr. Johnson and his colleague Dr. Elaine Lalanne about their research in the UMBC/ CASPR Ultrafast Optics & Optoelectroncis Lab during the SPIE 2012 Defense, Security + Sensing Conference. You can watch the video below:

Originally from Glen Burnie, Julia is a Computer Science major. For Halloween she made her own set of cobalt armor inspired by the video game Terraria.

About Julia

When did you become interested in Computer Science? After my freshman year at UMBC. I was a CMPE major for my first year, but I decided that I enjoyed CMSC more.

What area of Computer Science interests you the most? I just really love writing code.

What are your plans after graduation? I plan to get a job in the industry, possibly a defense contractor position. 

What is your dream job? Any job that lets me be creative with my coding and gives me interesting problems to solve.

About being a CS major

Who is your favorite professor or course? Dr. Park is an amazing professor. He's really great about making his subject matter interesting, no matter what class he's teaching.

Are you part of any on-campus clubs, organizations, teams, or labs?  I'm an active member of Humans versus Zombies club.

What is the best part about being a CWIT Scholar/ Affiliate? The support network. I don't know how I would've gotten as far as I have without their help.

What advice would you give to other females entering the field? Adversity toward women in computer science has really died down, and there are a lot of support groups out there for women in technology now. That doesn't mean you'll never encounter adversity, but it does mean that you can do something about it, and there are lots of people–like those at CWIT–who will be glad to help you.

What advice would you give to incoming students? Get plenty of sleep!

About life at UMBC

What is the best part about campus life at UMBC? Everything is within a few minutes walking distance. That means you don't have to get up really early to get to class, you can go get food between classes without being late, and you can grab a bunch of people and go to late night at the dining hall.

What is your favorite spot on campus? The commuter lounge in the Commons is almost always full of cool people. It's a great place to hang out between classes.

Where can you get the best coffee/lunch/ food or beverage of choice? The sandwich shop in the Administration building probably has the best lunch-type food. The Skylight lounge is another often-overlooked place with really good food, too.

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Advanced Computer Systems (ACS)
Machine Learning program

Mark McLean
Senior Researcher, Advanced Computer Systems group

1:00pm Friday, 30 November 2012, ITE 227, UMBC

My talk will discuss the ACS Machine learning program. The ACS ML program's focus is on three main areas; algorithm development, applied research and integration into efficient hardware. Our algorithm development work has created the Concurrent Learning Algorithm and Importance Map technologies. These technologies were developed in-house and have some unique capabilities which make it ideal for our purposes. I'll give some demos of these technologies learning on datasets from the UCI repository. For our current research effort, I will discuss our ideas of using neural networks to process complex digital algorithms, which is not a traditional focus for neural networks. Here, I will discuss our efforts to make a neural network learn the Advanced Encryption Standard encryption functionality and why this could impact the way we design digital systems in the future. For our hardware focus, I'll talk about our efforts to develop a Memristor-based neuromorphic processor and why we hope to succeed where others have failed.

Mark McLean has been a senior researcher in the Advanced Computer Systems group Since 2009. His main area of research is on neural network algorithms, application and neuromorphic processor development. Mr. McLean has done post-graduate work at UMD, Holds a MS degree in Computer Engineering from Loyola College and a BS degree in Computer Science. Previously, he held the position of technical director for the microelectronics and reverse engineering group in the DOD. He has work in industry as lead designer for re-configurable computing at Annapolis Micro-Systems and is a retired officer from the USAF.

– more information and directions –

Information Systems Department Seminar

Subjectivity and Social Role Recognition in Meetings

Theresa A. Wilson
Human Language Technology Center of Excellence
Johns Hopkins University

12 noon-1pm, Tue. 20 Nov. 2012, ITE459

Opinions, sentiments and other types of subjective content are an important part of any meeting. Meeting participants express pros and cons about ideas, they support or oppose decisions, and they make suggestions that may or may not be adopted. In this talk, I will present an annotation scheme for labeling subjective content in meetings, as well as experiments for recognizing subjective utterances and their polarity. Our experiments show that even very shallow linguistic features, such as n-grams of characters, can be effective for this task, and that the combination of classifiers using word, character, and phoneme n-grams yields the best result for subjective utterance recognition. Finally, I will discuss the application of subjectivity recognition to social role recognition in meetings.

Theresa Wilson is a research scientist working on opinion and sentiment analysis at the Johns Hopkins Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (HLTCOE). Before coming to Johns Hopkins, she completed her post-doctoral research as part of the AMIDA Project (www.amiproject.org) at the University of Edinburgh Human Communication Research Centre. She received her Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008.