One the hottest topics in computing today is data science — how we can exploit the massive amounts of data now available to discover knowledge and solve problems. Data science touches on many computing areas (e.g., databases, machine learning, high performance computing, visualization, cloud computing, text analysis and graph analytics) and has many applications.

If you are interested in this, you might consider joining the new Mid-Maryland Data Science Meetup.

"The Mid-Maryland Data Science group is intended to be a gathering of professionals, students, and enthusiasts in the area to discuss diverse topics related to data science. We aim to have frank discussions on all topics related to the field of data analytics. No subject is too big or too small, as we believe analytics can operate on any scale. We plan to mix education with practical examples, helping users make the most of their time."

An initial meeting will be held next Tuesday (January 29) from 6:00-8:00pm at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. You can find out more about the event and reserve a spot on the meetup site. You can expect the meetings to be held about once a month in the early evening at various sites, feature one or more speakers, and provide some refreshments (e.g., pizza, soda).

These meetup events are a great way to learn about emerging technologies as well as connect with people and organizations working with them. Attending such meetings can also lead to opportunities for internships and full time jobs.

The United States Intelligence Community (IC) invites you to attend the fourth annual IC Virtual Career Fair – a free online event – on Tuesday, 26 February 2013, from 2:00pm to 8:00pm (Eastern).

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn about IC careers and get tips on how to apply for positions. From the comfort of your computer or mobile device, you will be able to:

• Visit IC agencies’ virtual booths
• Chat with recruiters and subject matter experts in real-time
• Attend live presentations
• Explore currently available jobs
• Link to IC agency Web sites to apply to positions online
• Network with other job seekers
• Learn about internships and other student opportunities

Space is limited. To guarantee entrance, pre-registration is highly encouraged. For more information and to register, go to http://icvirtualfair.com/

U.S. citizenship is required. The United States Intelligence Community is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's DEVELOP program is looking for several interns to assist with Earth Science research projects during Summer 2013 for a 10 week paid internship, working 30-35 hours a week. The summer 2013 term will start on Monday, June 3, 2013 and end on Friday, August 9, 2013.

Students will work with NASA scientists and partner organizations to learn about the use of NASA remote sensing imagery for use in water resources, disaster management, and ecological forecasting applications to address environmental community concerns.

Requirements: U.S. Citizens. 3.0 GPA minimum. High School, Undergraduate, and Graduate Students with majors/skills in GIS, Remote Sensing, Cartography, Geography, Earth Science, Environmental Science, Computer Science, Web Programming, Web Development/Design, Database Management, Spatial Statistics, Hydrology, Ecology, Atmospheric Science, and/or Environmental Engineering are encouraged to apply. Knowledge of forest dynamics, fire ecology, satellite image processing, ENVI/IDL, Python, web development, GIS (ArcGIS, qGIS, SAGA) and database management (PostGIS/PostGresql, Geoserver, OpenLayers) are highly desirable.

The deadline to apply is Monday, February 4, 2013 (postmarked). Students need to visit the DEVELOP website, click on "Apply", download application, and choose Summer 2013 term at GSFC in Greenbelt, Maryland.

For more information contact Melissa Oguamanam: melissa (dot) i (dot) oguamanam (at) nasa (dot) gov

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's DEVELOP program is looking for several interns to assist with Earth Science research projects during Summer 2013 for a 10 week paid internship, working 30-35 hours a week. The summer 2013 term will start on Monday, June 3, 2013 and end on Friday, August 9, 2013.

Students will work with NASA scientists and partner organizations to learn about the use of NASA remote sensing imagery for use in water resources, disaster management, and ecological forecasting applications to address environmental community concerns.

Requirements: U.S. Citizens. 3.0 GPA minimum. High School, Undergraduate, and Graduate Students with majors/skills in GIS, Remote Sensing, Cartography, Geography, Earth Science, Environmental Science, Computer Science, Web Programming, Web Development/Design, Database Management, Spatial Statistics, Hydrology, Ecology, Atmospheric Science, and/or Environmental Engineering are encouraged to apply. Knowledge of forest dynamics, fire ecology, satellite image processing, ENVI/IDL, Python, web development, GIS (ArcGIS, qGIS, SAGA) and database management (PostGIS/PostGresql, Geoserver, OpenLayers) are highly desirable.

The deadline to apply is Monday, February 4, 2013 (postmarked). Students need to visit the DEVELOP website, click on "Apply", download application, and choose Summer 2013 term at GSFC in Greenbelt, Maryland.

For more information contact Melissa Oguamanam: melissa (dot) i (dot) oguamanam (at) nasa (dot) gov

Applications are now being accepted for the Information Assurance Scholarship Program (IASP) and the Federal Cyber Service: Scholarship for Service (SFS). US citizens capable of receiving security clearances are eligible.  The deadline for both programs in February 8, 2013.

These scholarships require the recipient to work for the government following graduation. The awards include full tuition, stipend ($30k/year for PhD students, $25k/year for MS/MPS students, and $20k/year for BS students), and more.

(1) Information Assurance Scholarship Program (IASP)

The Information Assurance Scholarship Program is a yearly awarded Department of Defense sponsored scholarship/fellowship program to promote the education, recruitment, and retention of rising junior and senior undergraduate, MS, MPS, or PhD student status in CMSC, CYBR, or related field at UMBC (including IS, Math, EE, CE, physics, public policy).

(2) Federal Cyber Service: Scholarship for Service (SFS)

The Scholarship for Service is a yearly awarded National Science Foundation sponsored scholarship program to promote the education, recruitment, and retention of rising junior and senior undergraduates and graduate students in cybersecurity-related studies. See https://www.sfs.opm.gov/ for more SFS details. (We have 2 CYBR MPS, 1 BS in CS, and 1 PhD in CS, students presently in this program.)

Completed applications for both programs are due by 12:00 (noon) on February 8, 2013.  The same application form is used for each program.  This deadline is strict.

More information, points of contact, and application instructions for both programs can be found at http://www.cisa.umbc.edu/scholarships.php.

The UMBC Center for Information and Assurance (CISA) was created in 2001 as the central point of contact at UMBC for Information Assurance (IA) including  research, teaching, and best practices.  It is because of CISA that UMBC has been recognized as a national center of academic excellence in IA education and research (CAE/CAEr).

Ph.D. Defense

Multi-Source Option-Based Policy Transfer

James MacGlashan

10:00am Friday, 25 January 2013, ITE 325B

Reinforcement learning algorithms are very effective at learning policies (mappings from states to actions) for specific well defined tasks, thereby allowing an agent to learn how to behave without extensive deliberation.  However, if an agent must complete a novel variant of a task that is similar to, but not exactly the same as, a previous version for which it has already learned a policy, learning must begin anew and there is no benefit to having previously learned anything. To address this challenge, I introduce novel approaches for policy transfer. Policy transfer allows the agent to follow the policy of a previously solved, but different, task (called a source task) while it is learning a new task (called a target task). Specifically, I introduce option-based policy transfer (OPT). OPT enables policy transfer by encapsulating the policy for a source task in an option (Sutton, Precup, & Singh 1999), which allows the agent to treat the policy of a source task as if it were a primitive action. A significant advantage of this approach is that if there are multiple source tasks, an option can be created for each of them, thereby enabling the agent to transfer knowledge from multiple sources and to combine their knowledge in useful ways. Moreover, this approach allows the agent to learn in which states of the world each source task is most applicable. OPT's approach to constructing and learning with options that represent source tasks allows OPT to greatly outperform existing policy transfer approaches. Additionally, OPT can utilize source tasks that other forms of transfer learning for reinforcement learning cannot.

Challenges for policy transfer include identifying sets of source tasks that would be useful for a target task and providing mappings between the state and action spaces of source and target tasks. That is, it may not be useful to transfer from all previously solved source tasks. If a source task has a different state or action space than the target task, then a mapping between these spaces must be provided. To address these challenges, I introduce object-oriented OPT (OO-OPT), which leverages object-oriented MDP (OO-MDP) (Diuk, Cohen, & Littman 2008) state representations to automatically detect related tasks and redundant source tasks, and to provide multiple useful state and action space mappings between tasks. I also introduce methods to adapt value function approximation techniques (which are useful when the state space of a task is very large or continuous) to the unique state representation of OO-MDPs.

Committee: Dr. Marie desJardins (Chair), Dr. Tim Finin, Dr. Michael Littman, Dr. Tim Oates, Dr. Yun Peng

Photo: ua-net.eu

The ESNET Lab in UMBC's Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department is looking for qualified undergraduate or graduate students to join and work on an exciting underwater sensor networks project. For more information go to http://esnet.cs.umbc.edu/eduwan.html.

The candidates applying should have experience in (or at least familiar with) some of the following areas:

1. FPGA development using Verilog/VHDL
2. Data Frame synchronization for wireless (or acoustic) communication
3. Doppler resistant compensation for FSK modulated data
4. Digital Signal Processing
   a) Adaptive data equalization (LMS/NLMS)
   b) Error Correction coding on FPGA, i.e. turbo codes, LPDC codes.

To apply please e-mail your resume and a cover letter detailing experience in the above mentioned areas to: Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Photo: ua-net.eu

The ESNET Lab in UMBC's Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department is looking for qualified undergraduate or graduate students to join and work on an exciting underwater sensor networks project. For more information go to http://esnet.cs.umbc.edu/eduwan.html.

The candidates applying should have experience in (or at least familiar with) some of the following areas:

1. FPGA development using Verilog/VHDL
2. Data Frame synchronization for wireless (or acoustic) communication
3. Doppler resistant compensation for FSK modulated data
4. Digital Signal Processing
   a) Adaptive data equalization (LMS/NLMS)
   b) Error Correction coding on FPGA, i.e. turbo codes, LPDC codes.

To apply please e-mail your resume and a cover letter detailing experience in the above mentioned areas to: Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

The Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) welcomes Cindy Greenwood as their new Assistant Director. Ms. Greenwood will spearhead the new Cyber Scholars Program which kicks off this fall.

Cindy Greenwood loved college so much that she never wanted to leave.

So she didn’t.  

When an Advertising and Public Relations internship during her senior year of college showed Ms. Greenwood that it wasn’t the career for her, she switched gears. She let her heart decide.

“I felt like I could make more of a difference by going into higher education,” she says.

Greenwood knows first-hand the difference that the college experience can make. Raised in Ishpeming, Michigan–a small town of no more than 7,000 people that is “half the size of UMBC,” she says—Ms. Greenwood thought it would always be her home. That is, until she left for Grand Valley State University.  

“A college campus is like no place else. You can do anything,” says Ms. Greenwood. “You can go from a cultural event where you’re trying food from Cambodia, to a dance party with glowsticks.” The atmosphere of possibility urged her to try new things, like studying abroad in Australia.

Afterwards, a master’s program in Higher Education Administration at the Leadership Center of Washington State University beckoned to her. After graduating, Ms. Greenwood spent eight years working for and with college students, first at Ferris State University in Michigan, and then at the University of South Florida.

In 2011, she joined UMBC as the Alumni Programming Coordinator in the Office of Institutional Advancement. Here, she started the Student Alumni Association to help connect current students with alumni. Hungry for more one-on-one time with undergraduates, Ms. Greenwood volunteered to be the advisor for the UMBC Vegetarian Student Group.

It’s the chance to work with students on a daily basis that drew her to the Assistant Director position in the Center for Women in Technology, she says. Ms. Greenwood will coordinate the new Cyber Scholars Program, which is run in partnership by CWIT and the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity. Her duties include overseeing the Cyber Scholars Living Learning Community, planning events, advising scholars, and teaching a seminar and bridge program for Cyber Scholars.

“The scholars programs are really interesting [at UMBC] because they really touch on every part of students’ lives,” says Greenwood.

An advocate of social justice and equality, Ms. Greenwood says she identifies with CWIT’s mission to bolster support for women in the male-centered fields of Engineering and Information Technology. She is a co-chair of UMBC’s Presidents Commission of Women. In the end it all comes back to her experience in college.

“I’ve had some good female mentors throughout my career,” says Ms. Greenwood, “and I definitely hope to be that to other females as well.”

*Ms. Greenwood joins CWIT as Assistant Director on January 28, 2013.

It’s not too late to apply for the 2013 CRA-W Graduate Cohort Workshop scheduled for April 5-6, 2013 in Boston, MA. This event brings together women graduate students in their first three years of graduate school for a series of presentations and panels with successful senior women researchers from academic, industrial, and government laboratories about how to succeed in graduate school and in a research career.

Applications will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. (ET) today, 15 January 2013 via an online form. Applicants must be female students in their first, second, or third year of graduate school in computer science and computer engineering or a closely related field at a U.S. or Canadian institution. Past workshops provided support for travel expenses, meals, and lodging for students chosen to participate in this program and we anticipate that similiar support will be available in 2013.