Apply to the University of Michigan's Summer Research Opportunity Program (SROP) for summer 2013. SROP is a great way for you to take part in faculty-led research projects while exploring doctoral studies at U-M. Students who are admitted into the program will work for eight weeks (May 28th - July 27th) on research projects under the guidance of in a wide range of academic disciplines. In addition, students will be introduced to life in Ann Arbor and U-M's community of scholars. 

The online application for SROP at the University of Michigan will be available on December 1st. The application deadline is February 10th, 2013, but we encourage you to complete your application as early as possible. If admitted into the program you will receive:

•A stipend of $4,000 for the summer

•Round-trip transportation to and from the University of Michigan

•Campus residential housing and meals

•Participation in a GRE prep course

•Weekly seminars to help you understand the graduate school application process

•Participation in a Research Symposium held at U-M

“Minimizing Intrusiveness in Home Energy Measurement”, a paper written by CSEE Assisant Professor Nilanjan Banerjee, Computer Science graduate student David Lachut, and their colleagues at the University of San Francisco, was nominated for the best paper award at ACM's BuildSys workshop.

The paper outlines the design of a system that will analyze and manage energy use in homes. “The overarching goal of our work is to automate the process of adapting energy demand to meet supply, which requires a comprehensive understanding of home energy use,” explains the abstract. Banerjee and his collaborators have collected data on energy-consumption from six both on and off-grid homes. “Our techniques reduce the energy footprint of the system as well as the amount of physical infrastructure required, making adoption of the system more attractive, particularly to those who live in homes powered by renewable energy sources.”

You can learn more about Dr. Banerjee’s work with renewable-energy driven devices and green homes at the website for his Mobile, Pervasive, and Sensor Systems Laboratory.

Ph.D. Thesis Defense Announcement

Semantically Rich, Policy Based Framework to Automate Lifecycle of Cloud Based Services

Karuna P. Joshi

10:00am 19 November 2012, ITE 325B

Managing virtualized services efficiently over the cloud is an open challenge.  Traditional models of software development are very time consuming and labor intensive for the cloud computing domain, where software (and other) services are acquired on demand. Virtualized services are often composed of pre-existing components that are assembled on an as-needed basis. We have developed a new framework to automate the acquisition, composition and consumption/monitoring of virtualized services delivered on the cloud.  We have divided the service lifecycle into five phases of requirements, discovery, negotiation, composition, and consumption and have developed ontologies to represent the concepts and relationships for each phase. These are represented in Semantic Web languages. We have developed a protocol to automate the negotiation process when acquiring virtualized services. This protocol allows complex relaxation of constraints being negotiated based on user defined policies. We have also developed detailed ontologies to define service level agreements for cloud services. To illustrate and validate how this framework can automate the acquisition of cloud services, we have built two applications from real world scenarios. The Smart cloud services application enables users to determine and procure the cloud storage application that matches most of their constraints and policies. We have also built a VCL broker application that allows users to automatically reserve the VCL Image that will best meet their requirements. We have developed a framework to measure and semi-automatically track quality of a virtualized service delivery system. The framework provides a mechanism to relate hard metrics typically measured at the backstage of the delivery process to quality related hard and soft metrics tracked at the front stage where the consumer interacts with the service. While this framework is general enough to be applied to any type of IT service, in this dissertation we have primarily concentratated on the Helpdesk service and include the performance rules we have created by mining Helpdesk data.

Thesis Committee:

• Dr. Yelena Yesha (chair)
• Dr. Tim Finin (co-chair)
• Dr. Milton Halem
• Dr. Yaacov Yesha
• Dr. Aryya Gangopadhyay

CSEE Colloquium

Active PURLs: An architecture for enterprise information interoperability

Dr. David Wood
Three Round Stones

11:00am Friday, 9 November 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

The World Wide Web differed from other early hypertext systems in the removal of "back links" (the ability of a hyperlinked object to link back to a referring resource). The removal of back links allowed the scalability inherent in the Web's design, but sacrificed the knowledge necessary to update links when content moved. Persistent URLs (PURLs) have been used on the Web since 1995 to provide an inexpensive and partial solution to link updates via HTTP redirection: PURLs do not change their URL, but they may change the target they redirect to. Various iterations of the PURL concept have allowed Web addresses to be updated, clients notified of permanent changes of address and the provision of directions to metadata about a requested resource.

"Active" PURLs are a relatively new (2007) iteration of the PURL concept that allow PURLs to actively participate in the creation of data returned. The Callimachus Project, an Open Source Linked Data management system, now implements Active PURLs as a means to automate the collection, transformation and provision of information from distributed sources. Active PURLs are implemented in Callimachus by means of a PURL service, a new PURL type and an XML pipeline (XProc) implementation.

This talk will introduce Active PURLs and describe how they may be used to address long standing problems in enterprise architecture, especially those of distributed information interoperability, by facilitating a strong separation of concerns between data producers, publishers, administrators, librarians and consumers.

Dr. David Wood has contributed to the evolution of the World Wide Web since 1999, especially in the formation of standards and technologies for the Semantic Web. He has architected key aspects of the Web to include the Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL) service and several Semantic Web databases and frameworks. David is co-chair of the W3C RDF Working Group, co-chaired the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group and is a member of the Semantic Web Coordination Group. David has represented international organizations in the evolution of Internet standards at the International Standards Organization (ISO), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium. David is a founding and contributing member of many Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects, including the Mulgara Semantic Store, Persistent URL (PURLs), Freemix and the Callimachus Project. He is the author of Programming Internet Email (O'Reilly, 1999), editor of Linking Enterprise Data (Springer, 2010) and Linking Government Data (Springer, 2011) and lead author of Linked Data (Manning, anticipated 2013).

Host: Tim FInin, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

— more information and directions: http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks —

UC Berkeley Amgen Scholars Program An Undergraduate Summer Research Program
in Science and Biotechnology

The Amgen Scholars Program is a national program to increase research opportunities for students committed to pursuing careers in the sciences. This program provides outstanding science undergraduates with research experience and increases participants’ competitiveness as candidates for admission to prestigious graduate and professional institutions. Additionally, this program encourages participants to pursue a Ph.D. or the joint M.D./Ph.D. degree and research careers in the sciences and biotechnology. Applicants from diverse populations and backgrounds are encouraged to apply.

2013 Program Dates: May 27 - August 2, 2013

On-Campus Interviews offer students a chance to conveniently interview for professional positions on campus.  Employers travel to our campus for the specific purpose of interviewing preselected students for currently open positions.  This is a great opportunity to interview with employers specifically interested in UMBC students and offers the advantage of a smaller applicant pool.  Interviews take place during the fall and spring. The logistics (viewing positions, applying, signing up for interview time slots, etc.) are all handled via UMBCworks.

Don't miss out on employers coming to UMBC to recruit YOU this fall! The following is a list of employers coming to conduct on-campus interviews with application deadlines in the next month.

**Sherwin-Williams

Interviewing on 12/7/12 (Deadline to apply via UMBCworks:  11/23/12)
Position:  Management/Leadership Training Program
Majors:  All Majors

A full list of On-Campus Interviews scheduled this fall is available on our website calendar and on UMBCworks, please check regularly for any updates or changes that may occur.

The following part-time positions have been posted within the past week to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings!

9254715 - Internet Brands/SatisFacts - Operations Assistant
9254652 - YMCA of Central Maryland - Before & After School Enrichment Group Leader
9254717 - IT Help Desk - Baltimore Aircoil