If you have good programming skills and are looking for an interesting alternative to the usual summer internship, you might check out the Google Summer of Code program. It pays student developers $5000 stipends to write code for various open source projects over the summer. Over the past eight years, it has brought together over 6,000 students with over 300 open source projects to create millions of lines of code.

Students who are accepted into the program will put the skills they have learned to good use by working remotely on an actual software project over the summer. Students are paired with mentors to help address technical questions and concerns throughout the course of the project. With the knowledge and hands-on experience students gain during the summer they strengthen their future employment opportunities in fields related to their academic pursuits.

Students should submit applications via the Google Summer of Code 2013 site by May 3. Google says that that the best applications they receive are from students who took the time to interact with one of the participating mentoring organizations and discuss their ideas before submitting an application. About 1,200 students are expected to be funded this year.

If you have good programming skills and are looking for an interesting alternative to the usual summer internship, you might check out the Google Summer of Code program. It pays student developers $5000 stipends to write code for various open source projects over the summer. Over the past eight years, it has brought together over 6,000 students with over 300 open source projects to create millions of lines of code.

Students who are accepted into the program will put the skills they have learned to good use by working remotely on an actual software project over the summer. Students are paired with mentors to help address technical questions and concerns throughout the course of the project. With the knowledge and hands-on experience students gain during the summer they strengthen their future employment opportunities in fields related to their academic pursuits.

Students should submit applications via the Google Summer of Code 2013 site by May 3. Google says that that the best applications they receive are from students who took the time to interact with one of the participating mentoring organizations and discuss their ideas before submitting an application. About 1,200 students are expected to be funded this year.

MS Thesis Defense

A Hybrid CPU/GPU Pipeline Workflow System

Tim Blattner

11:45am Thurday, 25 April 2013, ITE 325b, UMBC

Heterogeneous architectures can be problematic to program on, particularly when trying to schedule tasks on all available compute resources, overlapping PCI express transfers, and managing the limited memory available on the architectures. In this thesis we propose a workflow system that is capable of scheduling on all available compute resources, overlaps PCI express transfers, and manages the limited memory. A procedure for creating the workflow system is described and two case studies are analyzed.

• Image Stitching, which implements the workflow system and achieves two orders of magnitude speedup over an image stitching plugin found in the popular Fiji ImageJ application. Implementing the image stitching algorithm without the workflow system yielded only one order of magnitude speedup over the image stitching plugin.
• Out of Core LU Decomposition, which does not implement the workflow system. This case study demonstrates the impact of the PCI express on a problem with a large number of dependencies. A proposed workflow system for this algorithm is provided in Future Work.

Using the workflow system, programmers have a method for scheduling any algorithm on all available compute resources and is capable of hiding the I/O impact by overlapping computation with I/O.

Committee Members: Milton Halem, Yelena Yesha, Shujia Zhou, John Dorband, Walid Keyrouz

Baltimore Chapter of Electron Devices and Solid-State Circuits

Quantum Engineering of Semiconductor Atomic Structures for Biosensing

Dr. Manijeh Razeghi
Center for Quantum Devices
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Northwestern University

5:30pm Tuesday, 30 April 2013
206 Technology Research Center, UMBC

5:30pm social hour, talk begins at 6:15pm. Free but please RSVP to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. by Monday, April 29

Nature offers us different kinds of atoms, but it takes human intelligence to put them together in an elegant way in order to realize functional structures not found in nature. III-V semiconductors are made of atoms from column III (B, Al, Ga, In, Tl) and column V (N, As, P, Sb, Bi) of the periodic table, and constitute a particularly rich variety of compounds with many useful optical and electronic properties. Guided by highly accurate simulations of the electronic structure, modern semiconductor optoelectronic devices are literally made atom by atom using advanced growth technology such as Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) and Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD). Recent breakthroughs have brought quantum engineering to an unprecedented level, creating light detectors and emitters over an extremely wide spectral range from 0.2 µm to 300 µm. Nitrogen serves as the best column V element for the short wavelength side of the electromagnetic spectrum, where we have demonstrated III-nitride light emitting diodes and photo detectors in the deep ultraviolet to visible wavelengths. In the infrared, III-V compounds using phosphorus, arsenic, or antimony from column V with indium, gallium, aluminum, or thallium from column III can create lasers and detectors based on quantum-dot (QD) or type-II superlattice (T2SL). These are fast becoming the choice of technology in crucial applications such as environmental monitoring and space exploration. Last but not least, on the far-infrared end of the electromagnetic spectrum known as the terahertz (THz) region, III-V semiconductors offer a unique solution of generating THz waves in a compact device at room temperature. Continued effort is being devoted to all of the above areas with the intention of developing smart technologies which meet the current challenges in environment, health, security, and energy. This talk will highlight contributions to the world of III-V semiconductor nano-scale optoelectronic devices from deep UV to THz.

Dr. Manijeh Razeghi received the Doctorat d'État es Sciences Physiques from the Université de Paris in 1980. After heading the Exploratory Materials Lab at Thomson-CSF (France), she joined Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, in the fall of 1991 as the Director of the Center for Quantum Devices, where she created undergraduate and graduate programs in solid-state engineering. Dr. Razeghi pioneered the development and implementation of major modern epitaxial techniques such as MOCVD, VPE, gas MBE, and MOMBE for the growth of entire compositional ranges of III-V compound semiconductors. She is on the editorial board of journals such as the Journal of Nanotechnology and the Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, and is an Associate Editor of the Opto-Electronics Review. Dr. Razeghi is on the International Advisory Board for the Polish Committee of Science, and is an Adjunct Professor at the College of Optical Sciences of the University of Arizona in Tucson. She ha s authored or co-authored more than 1000 papers, over 30 book chapters, and fifteen books, including the textbooks Technology of Quantum Devices and Fundamentals of Solid State Engineering, 3rd Edition. Two of her books, MOCVD Challenge Vol. 1 (1989) and MOCVD Challenge Vol. 2 (1995), discuss some of her pioneering work in InP-GaInAsP and GaAs-GaInAsP based systems. [The MOCVD Challenge, 2nd Edition (2010) represents the combined updated version of Volumes 1 and 2]. Dr. Razeghi holds 50 U.S. patents and has given more than 1000 invited and plenary talks. Her current research interest is in nanoscale optoelectronic quantum devices. Dr. Razeghi is a Fellow of MRS, IOP, IEEE, APS, SPIE, OSA, and the International Engineering Consortium (IEC), a Fellow and Life Member of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), and a member of the Electrochemical Society, ACS, AAAS, and the French Academy of Sciences and Technology. She received the IBM Europe Science and Technology Prize in 1987, the Achievement Award from the SWE in 1995, the R.F. Bunshah! Award in 2004, and multiple best paper awards.

Betamore is an urban campus for technology and entrepreneurship that is home to dozens of startups and entrepreneurs and located at 1111 Light St. in Baltimore's Federal Hill neighborhood. They are holding a "startup crawl" on Thusday, 2 May 2013 from 6:00pm to 9:00pm where students and recent graduates can meet with people from the Baltimore technology and startup community.

"Are you a current student or recent graduate looking to enter the startup market through an internship or job? Are you a startup looking for the next best thing? Join us here at Betamore for our first Startup Crawl, an event that puts talented college and graduate students in the same room with the startup / tech community to learn the industry, create beneficial connections and discover what the Baltimore Tech community has to offer.

Shake a few hands, have a couple beers, and experience how fun working for a startup can be. This event is exclusive to students and recent grads (must be less than one year out of school)."

If you are interested, see their Facebook Startup Crawl event page and register for this free event.

MS Defense

Modeling Individual Nodes In Dynamic Link Prediction

Maksym Morawski

2:00pm Thursday, 25 April 2013, ITE325b, UMBC

The question of how to predict which links will form in a graph, given the graph’s history, is an open research problem in computer science. There are many different approaches to the link prediction problem, one of which involves building a set of features for pairs of nodes and using supervised learning to build a model that predicts when these pairs of nodes will link. Typically, this model is learned over the entire graph. In this thesis, I investigate building this model over each individual node in an attempt to learn the particular ways in which that node behaves before making predictions about it. In addition, research into link prediction to date lacks intelligent ways of utilizing the graph over large timespans. To address this, I introduce a variety of ways to include temporality into the link prediction process by introducing new ways of using existing features.

Committee: Dr. Marie desJardins (Chair), Dr. Tim Oates, Dr. Tim Finin

UMBC's cyber defense team, the Cyber Dawgs, will host an interdisciplinary talk and screening of the film Game of Pawns at 7:00pm on Tuesday, April 30, 2013 in room 102 of the ITE building (LH8). The film is a true story of an American student who was recruited by the Chinese government to infiltrate a U.S. intelligence agency.

The event is sponsored and run by InfraGuard, an organization that acts as a partnership mediator between the FBI and US businesses. The talk will be nontechnical and will present an overview of the dangers that might arise when dealing with foreign businesses or representatives. It should be of interest to students considering studying abroad, pursuing international relations or business, or anticipating working for a government agency.

CSEE Colloquium

Queuing and Long Lines: How to run efficient elections

Dr. William A. Edelstein
Visiting Distinguished Professor of Radiology
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

1:00pm Friday, 3 May 2013, ITE227, UMBC

Computerized touchscreen "Direct Recording Electronic" (DRE) voting systems have been used by over 1/3 of American voters in recent elections, including in Maryland. In many places, insufficient DRE numbers, in combination with lengthy ballots and high voter traffic, have caused long lines and disenfranchised voters who left without voting. We have applied computer queuing simulation to the voting process and conclude that far more DREs, at great expense, would be needed to keep waiting times low. Alternatively, paper ballot-optical scan systems can be easily and economically scaled to prevent long lines and meet unexpected contingencies. We have developed a heuristic "Queue Stop Rule" that can be applied to prevent long lines at voting stations. We have also carried out queuing simulations of other parts of the voting process, for example, voter check-in and ballot scanning. Our results can be used to help plan cost-effective election systems that will produce expeditious elections.

William Edelstein, physicist, received BS and PhD degrees in that subject from University of Illinois and Harvard, respectively. His career has principally focused on the development of MRI, starting in Scotland in 1977 and continuing from 1980 at the GE research lab in Schenectady, NY. He has been Visiting Distinguished Professor of Radiology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine since 2007. His MRI work has been recognized with many honors, including the 2005 Industrial Applications of Physics Prize from the American Institute of Physics. His interest in election systems began several years ago in NY State during the debate to replace lever voting machines.

MS Thesis Defense

Text and Ontology Driven
Clinical Decision Support System

Deepal Dhariwal

9:00am Tuesday 23 April 2013, ITE325b, UMBC

This thesis discusses our ongoing research in the domain of text and ontology driven clinical decision support system. The proposed framework uses text analytics to extract clinical entities from electronic health records and semantic web analytics to generate a domain specific knowledge base (KB) of patients’ clinical facts. Clinical Rules expressed in the Semantic Web Language OWL are used to reason over the KB to infer additional facts about the patient. The KB is then queried to provide clinically relevant information to the physicians. In the first phase, standard text pre processing techniques such as section tagging, dependency parsing, gazetteer lists are used filter clinical terms from the raw data.

In the second phase, a domain specific medical ontology is used to establish relation between the extracted clinical terms. The output of this phase is a Resource Description Framework KB that stores all possible medical facts about the patient. In the final phase, an OWL reasoner and clinical rules are used to infer additional facts about patient and generate a richer KB. This KB can then be queried for a variety of clinical tasks. To demonstrate a proof of concept of this framework, we have used discharge summaries from the cardiovascular domain and determined the TIMI Risk Score and San Francisco Syncope Score for a patient. The goal of this research is to combine factual knowledge about patients, procedural knowledge (clinical rules), and structured knowledge (medical ontologies) to develop a clinical decision support system.

Committee: Dr. Anupam Joshi (chair), Dr. Michael Grasso, Dr. Tim Finin, Dr. Yelena Yesha

MS Thesis Defense

Text and Ontology Driven
Clinical Decision Support System

Deepal Dhariwal

9:00am Tuesday 23 April 2013, ITE325b, UMBC

This thesis discusses our ongoing research in the domain of text and ontology driven clinical decision support system. The proposed framework uses text analytics to extract clinical entities from electronic health records and semantic web analytics to generate a domain specific knowledge base (KB) of patients’ clinical facts. Clinical Rules expressed in the Semantic Web Language OWL are used to reason over the KB to infer additional facts about the patient. The KB is then queried to provide clinically relevant information to the physicians. In the first phase, standard text pre processing techniques such as section tagging, dependency parsing, gazetteer lists are used filter clinical terms from the raw data.

In the second phase, a domain specific medical ontology is used to establish relation between the extracted clinical terms. The output of this phase is a Resource Description Framework KB that stores all possible medical facts about the patient. In the final phase, an OWL reasoner and clinical rules are used to infer additional facts about patient and generate a richer KB. This KB can then be queried for a variety of clinical tasks. To demonstrate a proof of concept of this framework, we have used discharge summaries from the cardiovascular domain and determined the TIMI Risk Score and San Francisco Syncope Score for a patient. The goal of this research is to combine factual knowledge about patients, procedural knowledge (clinical rules), and structured knowledge (medical ontologies) to develop a clinical decision support system.

Committee: Dr. Anupam Joshi (chair), Dr. Michael Grasso, Dr. Tim Finin, Dr. Yelena Yesha