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MS Defense: Text and Ontology Driven Clinical Decision Support System
posted Saturday, April 20th, 2013

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

Summer Trusted Infrastructure Workshop for graduate students
posted Thursday, April 4th, 2013

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The Fourth Trusted Infrastructure Workshop (TIW 2013) will be held at Penn State University in University Park, PA from Sunday afternoon, June 2 to Thursday, June 6.

TIW 2013 is a free premier educational meeting for graduate students with a focus on computer systems security research and research that builds on trusted computing foundations. TIW 2013 will consist of lectures and hands-on labs, enabling the students to learn concepts and apply them in practice. Speakers include world-class experts in their respective fields from industry, government, and academia. See the preliminary program for more information.

The workshop is designed for graduate students with a research interest in computer security. Although the workshop is free for students, students must apply to be selected for TIW 2013. Applications received by April 25 will also receive full consideration for travel support. Applications will continue to be received until May 20 based on space and funds. The workshop may have space for a small number of other attendees, but a fee will be required for other attendees.

First Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering goes to Internet pioneers
posted Monday, March 18th, 2013

Queen-Elizabeth-Prize-for-Engineering-2

The first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering was awarded to five people who made major contributions to the development of the internet and the WWW: Louis Pouzin, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreesen each played a significant part in the development of the technology.

The UK government initiated the QE Prize as a companion to the Nobel prizes to raise the profile of engineering and recognize outstanding advances that have changed the world and benefited humanity.

"Louis Pouzin, Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf made seminal contributions to the protocols (or standards) that together make up the fundamental architecture of the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee created the worldwide web (WWW) which vastly extended the use of the Internet beyond email and file transfer. Marc Andreessen wrote the Mosaic browser that was widely distributed and which made the WWW accessible to everyone. His work triggered a huge number of applications unimagined by the early network pioneers."

Digital Societies and Social Technologies Summer Institute, UMCP
posted Monday, March 18th, 2013

CASCI: Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information

Doctoral students, postdocs and established researchers working in the intersection of technology and social systems might consider applying to the 2013 Digital Societies and Social Technologies Summer Institute, 7/28 to 8/1 at the University of Maryland College Park.

"MOOCs, Education and learning; personal health and well-being; open innovation, eScience, and citizen science; co-production, open source, and new forms of work; cultural heritage and information access; energy management and climate change; civic hacking, engagement and government; disaster response; cybersecurity and privacy – these are just a few problem domains where effective design and robust understanding of complex sociotechnical systems is critical. To meet these challenges a trans-disciplinary community of scholars has come together from fields as wide ranging as CSCW, HCI, social computing, organization studies, information visualization, social informatics, sociology, information systems, medical informatics, computer science, ICT for development, education, learning science, journalism, and political science."

Lodging, meals, and other onsite costs will be covered for all Summer Institute participants. Applications are due by April 5.

JOBS: Summer research internships in AI and ML at Bryn Mawr College
posted Saturday, February 9th, 2013

UMBC alumnus Professor Eric Eaton (BS '03, PhD '09) has positions for undergraduate and graduate summer research internships in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Bryn Mawr College in suburban Philadelphia. Apply by March 1, 2013 for full consideration.

Spend ten weeks of your summer working on exciting projects in artificial intelligence and machine learning at Bryn Mawr College! We have openings for several undergraduate or graduate research assistants to work on two grant-sponsored research projects this summer. Student participants will join a research team with other students, Prof. Eric Eaton, and one postdoctoral researcher to carry out a detailed program of research toward scholarly publications. Students will present the results of their research during the final week of the program at Bryn Mawr College, and (if appropriate) at their home institutions and/or other academic venues, such as research conferences.

All students who are beginning their junior or senior undergraduate year in Fall 2013 or who will graduate during the Spring 2013 semester, and all graduate students are eligible to apply. To be considered, you should have a background in either computer science, mathematics, physics, or statistics and have strong grades in your major. Although it is not required, it would be beneficial if you have taken and done well in at least one course related to artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, statistics, or topology.

On-campus housing and meals are available for student participants, along with a variety of professional development workshops and summer activities. Application instructions and further details are available online.

JOBS: Summer internships at White House OSTP
posted Monday, February 4th, 2013

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is an office in the Executive Office of the President (EOP), established by United States Congress on May 11, 1976, with a broad mandate to advise the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is currently accepting applications for its Summer 2013 Student Volunteer Program. Serving as an OSTP Student Volunteer provides a unique opportunity to work closely with senior White House officials and science and technology policy analysts in OSTP's topic-based divisions (Division internship), or on OSTP's legal team (Legal internship).

The application deadline is 11:59pm Friday, February 22nd. Students who are U.S. citizens and who will be actively enrolled as a graduate or undergraduate student during the Fall 2013 semester are welcome to apply.

The mission of the Office of Science and Technology Policy is threefold: first, to provide the President and his senior staff with accurate, relevant, and timely scientific and technical advice on all matters of consequence; second, to ensure that the policies of the Executive Branch are informed by sound science; and third, to ensure that the scientific and technical work of the Executive Branch is properly coordinated so as to provide the greatest benefit to society.

DoD plans five-fold increase in cybersecurity command
posted Monday, January 28th, 2013

US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) is an armed forces sub-unified command subordinate to US Strategic Command. The command is located in Fort Meade, Maryland and led by General Keith B. Alexander. USCYBERCOM centralizes command of cyberspace operations, organizes existing cyber resources and synchronizes defense of U.S. military networks.

Both the Washington Post and New York Times report that the Pentagon has approved a five-fold expansion of the US DoD Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) over the next several years to enhance its ability to defend critical computer systems and conduct offensive computer operations against foreign adversaries.

The expansion is in response to concerns about threats of potential attacks by "malicious actors" on US computer infrastructure, networks, computer systems. The Post article says that

"The gravity of that threat … has been highlighted by a string of sabotage attacks, including one in which a virus was used to wipe data a from more than 30,000 computers at a Saudi Arabian state oil company last summer."

The Cyber Command will have three different forces: national mission forces to protect computer systems that support the nation’s critical infrastructures, such as the electrical power grid, combat mission forces to plan and execute attacks on adversaries and cyber protection forces to secure DoD networks and computer systems.

The current Cyber command comprises about 900 personnel and is expected to grow to include 4,900 troops and civilians.

Apply today for CRA-W Graduate Cohort Workshop
posted Tuesday, January 15th, 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.

JOB: Intern positions at Qualcomm Research, San Diego
posted Friday, December 7th, 2012

Qualcomm's Research & Development team in San Diego has a number of cutting edge projects lined up for next summer and will hire 20+ interns on their team during Summer 2013. The opportunities below are just a section. See the complete list here.

Intern Context Analysis and Reasoning (Qualcomm Research San Diego)

QUALCOMM Research is looking for highly motivated and self-driven systems engineering interns to work on challenging problems related to context awareness on mobile platforms.

Job Function

Mobile phones have transformed from being a communication device to smart and powerful personal computing platforms. Over recent years, with a wide variety of sensors available on smart phones, there has been an exploding interest in context aware applications that use sensor information to infer user situation and interest. These applications utilize different types of hard sensor data (such as GPS, WiFi, accelerometer, gyro, Bluetooth, pressure sensor, etc.) and soft sensor data (such as user calendar, user profile, data from social networks such as Facebook posts and Twitter feeds) to infer user situations and provide a useful service.

QUALCOMM Research is looking for highly motivated and self-driven systems engineering interns to work on challenging problems related to context awareness on mobile platforms.

Responsibilities

Positions are available in the following areas: Situation Inference on Mobile Devices

The goal of this intern project is to research algorithms for inferring user situations from smartphone sensor data. This involves developing machine learning and probabilistic graphical models to fuse low-level inferences from multiple sensor streams. The intern will work on developing techniques and on-device algorithms.

Always-On Context Awareness

Since context is fundamentally 24/7, one of the key challenges is to enable situation inference that is always-on, or “in the background,” and to do this within the power requirements for background tasks. The goal of this intern task is to analyze context aware algorithms and smartly optimize them for execution on QUALCOMM smartphone platforms.

Privacy

The goal of this internship task is to develop a framework for privacy in smartphones that provides a good tradeoff between the amount of private data collected and utility of the application. The intern will look into different aspects of privacy in smart phone and examine approaches to: (1) include privacy aspects into sensor data collection and inferences made from different types of data, (2) incorporate privacy in data models and ontologies, and (3) automatically learn user preferences and user privacy settings for different context aware applications.

Skills/Experience

Seeking candidates with strong background in one or more of the following areas:

  • Machine learning, statistics, and signal processing
  • Hands on experience with probabilistic inference techniques, Bayesian networks, graphical models, Hidden Markov models
  • Working knowledge on semantics, reasoning, ontology definitions
  • Experience working with rule based systems
  • Privacy aspects of data acquisition
  • Sensor data analysis and modeling
  • System design and analytical reasoning
  • Strong coding skills on C++, Java, and Android is a plus.
JOB: CyberSecurity internships and part-time positions
posted Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

CyberPoint is seeking Paid Summer Intern Scientists and a Jr. IT Specilist. US Citizenship required. APPLY VIA UMBCworks.

CyberPoint delivers innovative, leading-edge cyber security products, solutions and services to customers worldwide. We discover the threats and vulnerabilities that expose data, systems, and infrastructure to compromise, and we design defenses that provide critical protection. Our approach is tailored to our customers’ need to reduce risks and ensure ongoing protection in a world of continuously emerging cyber threats. At CyberPoint, we seek out hard problems, develop new products and solutions, and drive innovation in cyber security. Employing world-class engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, and other industry experts, CyberPoint supports a broad array of commercial and government customers.

Paid Summer Intern Scientist Needed (UMBCworks position 9255053)

Join CyberPoint Labs as a summer intern scientist and conduct research in program analysis, machine learning, and high performance computing. Skills that will be needed include Python, C/C++, Intel x86 and ARM assembly language, and/or functional programming (Haskell, OCaml, Erlang). Some candidate projects include:

  • Using Dynamic Bayesian Networks to develop risk models for IT infrastructure.
  • Developing CUDA integration into Unified Parallel C or other PGAS systems.
  • Developing machine learning based network models of insider threat activity.
  • Developing malware analysis scripts using Intel PIN tool, DynamoRIO, and IDA Pro/Immunity scripts.

They will consider all years, rising junior, senior and graduate level students. US Citiznship and 3.00 GPA or above GPA required.

Jr IT Specialist— Temp to Hire position (UMBCworks position 9255090)

CyberPoint International is adding to its Corporate IT Team. The Jr IT Helpdesk will work as a member of the IT Service Desk team providing daily system support including hardware, operating systems and applications, installation and modifications. Troubleshoot system and user problems. Manage user accounts. Perform system maintenance on software; evaluate, test and integrate upgrades to hardware; upgrade operating systems and applications. Investigate problems, research and develop effective and logical solutions considering operational policies and information assurance requirements.

They are looking for an enthusiastic team player with outstanding customer service skills and a strong drive to learn and develop your technical skills. CyberPoint is open to hiring a current student and we can work around your school schedule. The ultimate goal is to have this position convert to a Full time role with an outstanding benefits package. Hourly pay is $16-18/hr + based on experience. Candidate must be a US Citizen