Sixty-six years ago today (on 1947-09-09) operators of the Mark II Aiken Relay Computer being tested at Harvard found a dead moth trapped between points of Relay #70 in Panel F. Dr. Grace Hopper made an entry in the Mark II log book and identified it as the "first actual case of bug being found". (source)

The log book is now at the National Museum of American History.

Sixty-six years ago today (on 1947-09-09) operators of the Mark II Aiken Relay Computer being tested at Harvard found a dead moth trapped between points of Relay #70 in Panel F. Dr. Grace Hopper made an entry in the Mark II log book and identified it as the "first actual case of bug being found". (source)

The log book is now at the National Museum of American History.

Sixty-six years ago today (on 1947-09-09) operators of the Mark II Aiken Relay Computer being tested at Harvard found a dead moth trapped between points of Relay #70 in Panel F. Dr. Grace Hopper made an entry in the Mark II log book and identified it as the "first actual case of bug being found". (source)

The log book is now at the National Museum of American History.

CSEE Professor Tim Finin was one of eight researchers elected this year as a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). His election citation reads

The new fellows were inducted at the annual AAAI fellows dinner at the 2103 AAAI conference in Seattle Washington in July.

Finin's research interests have ranged widely over a the field of Artificial Intelligence during his professional career and have included computer vision, natural language processing, knowledge representation and reasoning, expert systems and multiagent systems. His current research is focused on extracting useful information from text and semistructured data and using Semantic Web technologies to enable people and computers to effectively model, share and integrate both knowledge and data. He is working with UMBC faculty and students on applying these ideas to help solve problems in security, privacy, mobile computing and social computing environments.

AAAI was founded in 1979 as an international scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines. It's fellow program started in 1990 to recognize individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions, usually over at least a ten-year period, to the field of artificial intelligence.

UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance

Computer-Assisted Reasoning In Digital Forensics

Dr. Eoghan Casey

Noon-1:00 Friday, 20 September 2013

Cyber Defense Lab, room 228 ITE, UMBC

The primary challenge in digital forensics today is uncovering not the right answer, but the right question. As in any scientific discipline, the formation of viable hypotheses that ultimately uncover meaning in available evidence is a central problem in digital forensics. Such hypothesis formation, based on intuition and experience, involves an underlying mental process that can be substantially aided by computers. This seminar delves into the cognitive science of investigative reasoning, and how research in artificial intelligence can help humans find the right questions in large quantities of data. The implications of this work for digital identity and privacy, as well as its potential uses in other areas, such as medical diagnosis and virtual learning environments, are also discussed.

Eoghan Casey is an internationally recognized expert in digital forensics and data breach investigations. For over a decade, he has dedicated himself to advancing the field of digital forensics. He wrote the foundational book Digital Evidence and Computer Crime, now in its third edition, and he created advanced smartphone forensics courses taught worldwide. He has also co-authored several advanced technical books including Malware Forensics, and is Editor-in-Chief of Digital Investigation: The International Journal of Digital Forensics and Incident Response. Dr. Casey received his Ph.D. from University College Dublin, and has taught digital forensics at the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute.

Dr. Casey has worked as R&D Team Lead at the Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3) helping enhance their operational capabilities and develop new techniques and tools. He has also helped organizations handle security breaches and analyzes digital evidence in a wide range of investigations, including network intrusions with international scope. He has testified in civil and criminal cases, and has submitted expert reports and prepared trial exhibits for computer forensic and cyber-crime cases.

Host: Dr. Alan T. Sherman, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

The UMBC ACM student chapter is glad to announce the first meetup of Baltimore Software Craftsmanship User Group. This meetup is for the students and software developers in the Baltimore, MD area that care about the quality of their work and want to practice and improve their programming skills, share what they know and learn new things from others.

Please RSVP for the event by completing the form. More details can be read on the form or below.

Note: Registration for this initial meetup is limited to only twelve people from the UMBC community. If you are UMBC Student or Faculty please don't RSVP on the meetup site. Use the above form only.

Event Details

This is a HANDS-ON coding user group with no presentations. Each meeting will be a dojo where we will go through a challenging software craftsmanship exercise that focuses on clean code, test-driven development, design patterns, and refactoring. We will pair up and practice on a kata in order to learn and apply the values, principles, and disciplines of software craftsmanship. Come with your LAPTOP equipped with your favorite programming and automated unit testing environment. If you don't have a laptop COME ANYWAY, we will need only one laptop for every two people. Be prepared to pair up, learn, share and have fun!

The event is open to all UMBC students, however programming ability is REQUIRED. Interested Faculty members can join in too! This can also be a good opportunity to network with professionals from various companies and get yourself noticed for any job opportunities that exist.

Questions or Suggestions? Send email to Primal Pappachan (primal1 at umbc.edu) or Vladimir Korolev (vkorol1 at umbc.edu).

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. UMBC has an active ACM student chapter that is open to all UMBC undergraduate and graduate students of any major.

This year the chapter is planning to organize various events where faculty members, ACM distinguished speakers, and local tech companies will talk about various interesting topics. The first event of the year is the Welcome Back Picnic which be held from 11:30am to 1:30pm on September 18th in the Engineering Atrium. Other activities like Hi-Tea competitions, Code Craftsmanship, Reading groups and Peer mentorship are also in the works. Suggestions on speakers or other events are welcome and can be sent to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

While you do not need to join ACM to be a part of the local chapter, the annual membership dues for students is only $19, heavily discounted from the non-student rate. See the ACM site for more information on student membership and its benefits.

Please stop by for these events for which we will send out detail as they get confirmed. Sign up for the UMBC ACM mailing list to become a part of the local chapter and receive updates and news of its activities and events. You can also follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook to keep track of chapter’s events.

Professor Marie desJardins has created a new my.umbc.edu group for Computer Science Education for UMBC students, faculty, and staff who are interested in any or all aspects of computer science education and computing education generally, including information systems, computer engineering, cybersecurity, bioinformatics, etc.

She especially encourage students who are planning to or considering a career in teaching at the K-12 level to join — but anyone who is interested in educational issues in computing (e.g., teaching pedagogies, curriculum, access to CS classes in K-12 schools, teacher certification and training, and gender/minority underrepresentation in CS classes) is welcome.

In addition to sharing ideas, events, and information about computing education, the group will be used to plan events, which could include social gatherings, seminars on topics of interest (e.g., teacher certification, pedagogical innovations, MOOCs, etc.), round table discussions, and visits by invited speakers. The group will hold some initial breakfast or lunchtime meetings to meet one another and talk about what people would like to get out of such a group.

Members of the UMBC community can join the group by visiting http://my.umbc.edu/groups/cs-ed/.

Research Assistantship Available

Smart Plug-based Appliance Energy Profiling and

Prediction Portal for Green Buildings

New emerging “smart plugs” embed a micro-controller and low-power communication device that allows you to monitor the power consumption of individual devices (e.g., microwave, coffee machine, laptop) plugged into power sockets, and communicate such power consumption information over a wireless network to a central monitoring station. Such devices could lead to substantial savings of energy and money by enabling Internet-based monitoring and real-time control of the behavior of individual appliances. This project will use real-life microcontroller kits (ACME Plugs from Moteware) and real-life building measurement data to explore whether such measurement-based monitoring can be used to:

• Develop Smart Circuit Breaker — i.e., to lessen the burden of the user of plugging each and every appliance/device in the building with a smart plug; we will investigate connecting multiple devices together with an individual smart plug/smart circuit breaker and design a smart circuit breaker using energy metering chip (ADE7753), AC/DC power supply, Microcontroller with radio (TI MSP430F16 and CC2420 radio supported by TinyOS) and solid state AC relay (Sharp S216SE1) etc.
• Profile individual devices — i.e., use NILM (non-intrusive load monitoring) data analytics algorithm on the time-series of power consumption traces to infer the type of plugged-in device (e.g., distinguish between a laptop & a coffeemaker), thereby building a dynamic catalog of the types & number of devices connected by a consumer.
• Predict the power consumption of individual rooms — i.e., using the past history of the power consumption of individual devices to create predictive inferences of the usage patterns for individual devices (e.g., learn that the individual switches on a dehumidifier for ~3 hrs every Thursday).

Expertise: Technical knowledge of standard time-series & statistical mining techniques (e.g., regression, support vector machines) is needed. Significant programming knowledge of Java & ability to create simple Web Applications is a must. Knowledge of TinyOS, Embedded System and Networking protocols is a plus, although not essential. The project will utilize real ACME plugs, which are programmed using TinyOS & which communicate using a ZigBee radio.

Please contact Dr. Nirmalya Roy at Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. for research assistantship for this project.

Research Assistantship Available

Smart Plug-based Appliance Energy Profiling and

Prediction Portal for Green Buildings

New emerging “smart plugs” embed a micro-controller and low-power communication device that allows you to monitor the power consumption of individual devices (e.g., microwave, coffee machine, laptop) plugged into power sockets, and communicate such power consumption information over a wireless network to a central monitoring station. Such devices could lead to substantial savings of energy and money by enabling Internet-based monitoring and real-time control of the behavior of individual appliances. This project will use real-life microcontroller kits (ACME Plugs from Moteware) and real-life building measurement data to explore whether such measurement-based monitoring can be used to:

• Develop Smart Circuit Breaker — i.e., to lessen the burden of the user of plugging each and every appliance/device in the building with a smart plug; we will investigate connecting multiple devices together with an individual smart plug/smart circuit breaker and design a smart circuit breaker using energy metering chip (ADE7753), AC/DC power supply, Microcontroller with radio (TI MSP430F16 and CC2420 radio supported by TinyOS) and solid state AC relay (Sharp S216SE1) etc.
• Profile individual devices — i.e., use NILM (non-intrusive load monitoring) data analytics algorithm on the time-series of power consumption traces to infer the type of plugged-in device (e.g., distinguish between a laptop & a coffeemaker), thereby building a dynamic catalog of the types & number of devices connected by a consumer.
• Predict the power consumption of individual rooms — i.e., using the past history of the power consumption of individual devices to create predictive inferences of the usage patterns for individual devices (e.g., learn that the individual switches on a dehumidifier for ~3 hrs every Thursday).

Expertise: Technical knowledge of standard time-series & statistical mining techniques (e.g., regression, support vector machines) is needed. Significant programming knowledge of Java & ability to create simple Web Applications is a must. Knowledge of TinyOS, Embedded System and Networking protocols is a plus, although not essential. The project will utilize real ACME plugs, which are programmed using TinyOS & which communicate using a ZigBee radio.

Please contact Dr. Nirmalya Roy at Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. for research assistantship for this project.