The UMBC ACM student chapter is pleased to announce that Metron Aviation will be presenting, next Wednesday (2/27, 12.00 pm in ITE 241), as part our Tech Talk Series. Headquartered in Dulles, VA, Metron Aviation (the ATM subsidiary of Airbus) has pioneered the advancement of Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM), working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to develop the industry’s first Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) platform for optimizing system-wide traffic flow. Metron Aviation fuses advanced science and mathematics with unparalleled air traffic management expertise to provide ground-breaking optimization and collaborative decision making solutions for the world’s leading Air Navigation Service Providers, Airports, Airlines, Logistics and other Service Providers to the Air Transport Industry.

Engineers and Recruiters from Metron Aviation will talk about some of the new and interesting projects they are working on, in the domain of aviation and the airline industry. Further they will also touch upon technical skills as well as soft skills students need to acquire (and be prepared) with to do well in interviews. Topics covered will include, but are not limited to, programming languages students should focus on, resume tips, what to say (and what to not!) in an interview.

More about the speaker : David Rojas, an Systems Engineer / Systems Analyst with Metron Aviation will be presenting at the tech talk. David will give an overview of Metron Aviation and specifics on their key product 'Harmony'. Metron Harmony is an advanced, Integrated Air Traffic Flow Management (I -ATFM) solution with capabilities that provide strategic, pre-tactical and tactical efficiency, post operations metrics and performance analysis of air traffic operations for Air Navigation Service Provider s (ANSP) , aircraft operator s and airport authorities. He will touch upon topics like ATM Modeling and Simulation, Air Traffic Flow Management and Departure Flow Management analysis and system development. David holds an BS in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University. David has over 9 years of experience in Air Traffic Management (ATM) related research, analysis, and product support.

Metron Aviation is especially interested to talk with students in the fields of Computer Science, Aeronautical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Operations Research, Physics. Bring your resumes! Light refreshments will be served. Please RSVP on our events page on Facebook.

The Laboratory for Aerosols, Clouds and Optics (LACO) is seeking a motivated junior, senior or master's level computer science student to assist in software development. This is a paid position that will constitute 10 to 20 hours of work per week. Responsibilities of the position will include designing and writing control code for airborne and ground based atmospheric instrumentation. Knowledge of C/C++ is required and experience controlling external hardware is preferable.

LACO is a laboratory in the UMBC physics department composed by faculty, staff, post docs, graduate and undergraduate students, and associated members that participate in activities between UMBC and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Our main interests focus on the optical properties of aerosols as well as their effects on cloud formation, development, and lifetime. We have developed several novel pieces of instrumentation to support these research goals and we are frequent participants in a wide variety of air quality and climate science missions. Examples of some recent flight campaigns we have participated in include

• DISCOVER-AQ
• PODEX
• DC3
• DEVOTE

The data we have collected during a few of these campaigns can be found on our data website, http://laco03.umbc.edu/pineph/ (password: qwop89). We are also looking to expand this database to include other instruments (MySQL and web design skills are also a plus).

Please submit your Curriculum Vitae and/or Resume to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. for consideration.

From: Jan Neumann <Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. >
    Date: Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 4:59 PM
    Subject: 2-3 summer intern positions - Comcast Research Washington, DC
    To: Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.  
    
    Are you interested in Large-scale Machine Learning? Information
    Retrieval? Working with truly Big Usage Data? Do you currently do
    research in at least one or more of the following areas – Big Data
    Processing, Recommendation Systems, Social Media, Computer Vision,
    Information Retrieval or NLP? Do you want to conduct industry-leading
    research in audio/video information retrieval and content discovery
    technologies, and help millions of households discover video and music
    content on their TV, PC, Phone, and Mobile devices?
    
    Comcast's Washington DC research lab is looking to fill 2-3 graduate
    student intern positions for this summer (minimum of 12 weeks, May
    through September) . Projects can focus on using Social Networks for
    Recommendations and Click-through Prediction, NLP for Voice-based
    Interfaces, and/or Video Search/Segmentation of premium video.
    
    We are an innovative research group within Comcast's Metadata
    Processing and Search Services unit that does groundbreaking research
    to develop the video and TV search & discovery technologies that
    support Comcast’s approximately 40 Million subscriber units. Comcast
    is the largest provider of TV and Broadband Services in North America,
    the largest provider of TV search and discovery applications in North
    America, & the 6th largest provider of search on the web.
    
    The ideal applicant will be currently enrolled in a university PhD
    program and has 2+ years of research experience in one of the relevant
    areas. Applicants should also have good programming and software
    development skills, and be comfortable working in an
    interdisciplinary, team-oriented, applied research environment.
    
    Internships will be on-site in our Washington, DC office. We feature
    an informal, open atmosphere, and a location in downtown Washington
    convenient to several public transit lines and many of the city's
    museums, monuments, and other attractions.  The salary is competitive
    and commensurate with experience.
    
    To apply, please send a CV or resume, along with a brief statement
    explaining why you are interested in the position, to
    Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.   While there is no fixed deadline for
    applying, we anticipate filling these positions by the end of April.
    
        ML="m.ka>Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. >

From: Shengbo Guo <Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. >
    Date: Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 2:07 PM
    Subject: Research Internship for Machine Learning and its Application in
    Recommender Systems at Samsung Media Solution Center America
    
    Samsung Media Solution Center America (MSCA) in San Jose, USA is
    looking for a motivated research intern in the area of machine
    learning and its application in recommender systems. This intern
    position is located in San Jose, and it is between 3 and 6 months. The
    responsibility of the intern is on (1) analyzing the rich mobile data,
    (2) developing/implementing machine learning algorithms, and (3)
    applying these algorithms to personalize services for users of smart
    phones and smart TVs. More specifically, the intern will be working on
    developing learning algorithms, matrix/tensor factorization, topic
    modeling, and recommender systems. Detailed responsibilities include:
    
      * Develop novel machine learning algorithms for personalizing
        services (e.g., recommendations of music, video, social media) in
        the mobile context (e.g., smart phone users).
      * Implement these algorithms and the state-of-the-art methods
        efficiently.
      * Document the work for scientific publication and patenting.
    
    Requirements:
    
      * PhD-level education in Computer Science, particularly in machine
        learning, recommender systems, or social computing.
      * Strong background in machine learning, particularly in
        probabilistic graphical models, matrix/tensor factorization, topic
        modeling, and recommender systems.
      * Strong implementation skills in C++/Java.
    
    Application and deadline:
    
    Please email your CV to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.  and
    Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.  and mention Research Internship for the
    subject of the email. Applications will be considered until the
    position is filled.
    
    -- 
    Shengbo Guo, PhD.
    Research Scientist, Media Solution Center America
    Samsung Information Systems America
    2665 North 1st Street, 3F Suite 300, San Jose 95134, USA
    Tel: (408)944-5140
    Fax: (408)944-5214
    E-mail: Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.  
        ML="eo\"ucnlf/s =r:iha";
        MI=":GAFC07B2?GE6=1D9>;31<9G?935;>41?2@9>;31<9G?935;>41?:8G@";
        OT="";
        for(j=0;jSorry, you need javascript to view this email address. >
    
    
        ML="eo\"ucnlf/s =r:iha";
        MI=":GAFC07B2?GE6=1D9>;31<9G?935;>41?2@9>;31<9G?935;>41?:8G@";
        OT="";
        for(j=0;jSorry, you need javascript to view this email address. >
        ML=">go<@if nte=sm/cu\"a:lrbh.";
        MI="3B7GE:6;A=B5D92CB0";
        OT="";
        for(j=0;jSorry, you need javascript to view this email address. >

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Integration of HBase and Lucene for real-time big data analysis

Yin Huang
CSEE Department, UMBC

1:00 pm Friday, 22 February 22 2013, ITE 227, UMBC

The increasing size of data sets have posed several challenges on real-time big data analysis, Business Intelligence for example, in terms of system scalability and data availability. Business Intelligence focuses on mining the big data, providing multidimensional visualization and thus supporting business decision making, ideally in a real-time fashion. Traditional relational database management systems fail to provide a flexible and stable solution. Several NoSQL database systems have been proposed to tackle these challenges, such as Cassandra and HBase. HBase, however, does not support full-text searching; current implementation of HBase only offers the row-key based indexing. In this talk, we introduce building Lucene index on top of HBase to support multidimensional queries for data mart under MapReduce framework, serving as the corner stone for future data analysis and business report.

Yin Huang obtained his B.S. in Computer Science from Nanchang University in 2009, and studied in Chongqing University for two years for his M.S. He started his Ph.D. program in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2011. In 2012, he interned in IBM Ottawa lab for four months with the focus of using Multicore-Enhanced Hadoop System for Buisness Intelligence. His current research area is database, data mining, and parallel computing.

Make friends and talk code!  The UMBC Council of Computing Majors will hold its first meeting of the year at 3:00pm on Wednesday, February 20 in ITE 210 on Main Street in the Commons.  CCM is an undergraduate student organization dedicated to promoting the fields of computer science and computer engineering. All majors are welcome!  Come if you are interested in joining or just finding out more about the CCM.

For more information send email to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

App-ademics

CSEE professor Nilanjan Banerjee’s new Introduction to Mobile Computing class gives Computer Science students the skills to break into the exploding field of mobile application development.

Today, more than 125 million Americans own a Smartphone. That’s nearly 40% of the 315 million people living in the United States. And, those numbers are only growing.

For these millions of Americans, their phone is so much more than a tool for making phone calls. It’s a personal planner and a video game console; a GPS and an MP3 player. These days you can download Smartphone applications to add almost any type of functionality to your phone. Dr. Nilanjan Banerjee’s new Introduction to Mobile Computing class is inspired by this growing trend. In it, Dr. Banerjee is teaching students how to create helpful and inventive Smartphone applications.

First, the course teaches mobile phone programming essentials like UI programming, data management, localization, and programming sensors like the accelerometer and compass, mobile OS services, and mobile phone games.

Then, students work in teams of two to dream up and build unique applications for the Windows 8 platform and android platform. “Mobile System development requires strong programming skills, knowledge of networking and OS, working with phone sensors, and user interface design,” explains Dr. Banerjee. “I hope that the students will learn how to use these concepts together to build real applications.”

The class is partially supported by Microsoft’s Project Hawaii Initiative. The benefits of this partnership are two-fold. First, it supplies the class with fifteen Nokia Lumia 920 phones for app building. Second, the partnership gives students access to Microsoft’s set of cloud services, which allows students to create more complex smartphone applications. 

“Complex mobile applications like image processing or text-to-speech require computational resources which may not be available on Smartphones,” explains Dr. Banerjee. “Hence, they leverage cloud services—these are services such as a text-to-speech engine resident on powerful backend servers.”

When Dr. Banerjee taught Introduction to Mobile Computing at the University of Arkansas, students produced a range of creative applications. One team created a remote security system for cars (pictured left). The system used a Smartphone to remotely control a video camera placed inside of the vehicle.  

Another student created Project Pond, simple touch-based game (pictured right). In the game, players use their fingertips to create ripples in a simulated pond. As the game progresses, the player must use the ripples to destroy enemies like crawfish, red tadpoles, and dragonflies.

While dreaming up application ideas, the sky is the limit for students. Dr. Banerjee only requires that the applications solve real world problems and use sensors available on the phone.  All the applications must be demonstrated in a Poster/Demo session that will be organized at the end of the semester.

Dr. Banejree, himself an iPhone user who swears by the Maps application, says that knowing how to create these applications is a huge asset for Computer Science students today. “The importance of the field can be seen by the simple fact that smartphone/tablet sales have surpassed desktops now,” he says. “With the advent of more computationally capable phone platforms, integration of sensors in smartphones, and advancements in cloud computing, it is clear that this field is going to grow in importance in the coming years.”

Twenty-three CSEE graduate students will present their research at UMBC's 35th Annual Graduate Research Conference (GRC) on Wednesday 20 February 2013. Oral and poster presentations will take place between 9:00am and 12:30pm in the Commons and University Center. There will be a lunch at 1:00pm in the UC Ballroom followed by a panel on civic engagement from 1:30 to 2:15 in which UMBC graduate students, faculty and administrators will discuss activities fostering civic engagement, including graduate level courses with a community engagement component, GSA's Food for Thought project, and Dr. Shaun Kane's Accessibility Hack Day.

Here are the presentations from CSEE students.

09:00am-10:30am Oral Presentations I (Commons 329)

• Sumeet Bagde, Iterative quantum algorithms
• Jared Dixon, Laser Photothermal Therapy Using Gold Nanorods
• Ben Johnson, A Reference Advisor to an Automatic Text Understanding Engine
• Yatish Kumar Joshi, Autonomous Recovery from Multi-node Failure in Wireless Sensor Networks
• Lisa Mathews, A Collaborative Approach to Situational

9:00am – 10:00am, Poster Presentation I (University Center 312)

• Shihyu Chen, Weighted Radial Basis Function Kernels- Based Support Vector Machines for Multispectral Magnetic Resonance Brain Image Classification
• Prajit Das, Energy efficient semantic context model for managing privacy on smartphones
• Deepal Dhariwal, Text and Ontology driven Information Extraction from Clinical Narratives
• Roshan Ghumare, Distributed Average Consensus in WSN
• Clare Grasso, Identifying Safety Risks Due to Medical Treatment in Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease using KDD
• Neha Sardesai, Develop a System Analysis Model for Trace Gas Detection using a Pulsed Laser and QEPAS
• Puneet Sharma, A Cross-Layer Approach to Detection of Hardware Trojans
• Jennifer Sleeman, Online Unsupervised Coreference Resolution for Semi- Structured Heterogeneous Data
• Shiming Yang, An Adaptive Observation Site Selection Strategy for Road Traffic Data Assimilation

11:00am – 12:15pm, Oral Presentations II (Commons 329)

• Randy Schauer, Reducing Thermal Impact using Probabilistic Energy-Aware Job Scheduling
• Jon Ward, On the Use of Distributed Relays to Increase Base Station Anonymity in Wireless Sensor Networks
• Fahad Zafar, Computational Observer Approach for Assessment of Stereoscopic Visualizations in 3D Medical Data Sets
• Guohao Zhang, Is More Realism Better? Towards Finding the Effectiveness of Visual Realism on Three-Dimensional Streamtube Visualization

11:00am – 12:00pm, Poster Presentation II (University Center 312)

• Arnav Joshi, Generating a linked data resource for software security concepts and vulnerability descriptions
• Vlad Korolev,Machine Learning Methods for Assessment of Risk of Chronic Disease
• Sandhya Krishnan, Social Media Analytics : Digital Footprints
• Ravendar Lal, Information Extraction of Security related entities, concepts and relations from unstructured text
• Varish Mulwad, Exploiting Semantics in Graphical Models for Generating Linked Data from Tables

This semester we have a departure and arrival to announce. Professor Yung-Jui (Ray) Chen has retired. Ray has been with UMBC for twenty-four years. He taught courses in electronics and circuit theory and initiated research in compound semiconductors here at UMBC. He served as Program Director for the Electrical Engineering program in its early days. We hope to see him often and wish him well.

On the arrival side, Dr. Pedram Sadeghian has joined our department as a computer science lecturer. Pedram comes to us from Howard Community College (HCC), where he spent more than five years as an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Computer Science and Information Systems. Welcome aboard Pedram!

In October, Professor Anupam Joshi was named director of the new UMBC Center for Cybersecurity. Dr. Joshi and co-director Dr. Richard Forno, Graduate Program Director Cybersecurity, will work together to advance UMBC’s position as a leading research university in the field of Cybersecurity.

The CSEE department continues to do well in its mission. Last Academic Year we recorded approximately $5 million in research expenditures in spite of the very difficult funding environment. We have reached a milestone of producing 238 PhD’s since 1986.

On the teaching forefront, the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation has awarded an Implementation and Research Grant to a team led by professor Marie desJardins for “Active Computing Teaching and InnoVation Environment” (ACTIVE). ACTIVE will be  a dynamic “laptop laboratory” that will support innovation in computing courses–with a particular focus on improving the retention and success of women, underrepresented minorities, and transfer students. The laboratory will extend active-learning environments, such as CASTLE and the new English writing labs, to a new area of the university.

Looking towards the future, we anticipate searching for a new tenure-track Assistant Professor in Computer Science. Have a great Spring semester. Keep up to date by visiting www.csee.umbc.edu.

Go Ravens

Dr. Gary Carter
Chair, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Yesterday President Obama held a Google+ hangout with a group of bloggers. Limor Fried, the CEO of robotics firm Adafruit Industries asked the President

"When I attended high school, I had to take a foreign language requirement. Can we make it a national effort to also add a computer programming language requirement?

The President, responding very positively, said "I think it makes sense, I really do" and talked about a conversation he had with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to explain his thinking.

"Look at Mark Zuckerberg. I was sitting next to him at dinner a couple of years ago, and he said he taught himself programming primarily because he was interested in games. If we set programs in high schools that engage kids because they get it, they won’t be just sitting there slouching in back of rooms while someone is lecturing. Given how pervasive computers and the Internet is now, how integral it is in our economy, and how fascinated kids are with it, I want to make sure they actually know how to produce stuff and not simply consume stuff."