Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

The Sixth UMBC Digital Entertainment Conference (DEC) will be held this Saturday, April 28 from 10:00am to 4:00pm in LH1 in the Biological Sciences building.

Every year since 2007 the students ofn the UMBC Game Developer's Club has organized the conference and invited speakers from the videogames industry to come in and discuss important topics in the games industry. DEC 2012 is sponsored by Zynga, the studio that developed Farmville and many other Facebook games.  One of the strenghts of the UMBC program in Graphics, Animation and Interactive Media (GAIM) is its strong ties to game development studios in the Maryland, DC and Northern Virginia area.

The 2012 DEC is open to anyone, and features an all-star lineup of speakers from Firaxis Games, Zynga East, Pure Bang, and Mythic Entertainment. Whether you are a high school student, go to UMBC or another university, or are already working in a different industry, you are sure find interesting information about how the games industry works, how some current developers got started, and what they do. If you are a game developer, you are sure to find high school students, UMBC students and students from other universities who are interested in jobs in the games industry.

Here is the schedule.

10:00am – Barry Caudill, Director of Gameplay Development at Firaxis
11:00am – Tim Train, Studio Manager at Zynga East
12:00pm – Lunch Break
1:00pm – Eric Jordan, Programmer at Firaxis
2:00pm – Ben Walsh, CEO of Pure Bang Games
3:00pm – Brian Johnson, Director of Online Operations at Mythic Entertainment

photo courtesy www.umbc.edu/gsa

More than two-dozen Computer Science and Electrical Engineering graduate students are slated to present at the Graduate Student Association's annual Graduate Research Conference (GRC). The GRC will be held this Friday, April 27 and features a keynote presentation from Dr. Michael I. Nishimura, a UMBC alumnus who now works at Loyola University Chicago as a professor in the Department of Surgery, the Associate Director of the Oncology institute, the Associate Director of the Cancer Center Translations Research, and as Program Director of Immunologic Therapeutics.

This year, the CSEE presence at the GRC is even stronger than it was last year, when three CSEE students were awarded for outstanding presentations. The honorees were Varish Mulwad who received an award for an outstanding oral presentation on his dissertation research entitled "Generating Knowledge from Tables," Kavita Krishnaswamy who received an award for an outstanding oral presentation on her thesis research entitled "Path planning a roboticarm efficiently," and Akshya Iyengar who received an award for an outstanding poster presentation for her thesis research entitled "Estimating Temporal Boundaries of Events using Social Media Data".

Take a look at the list below, which includes the 27 CSEE graduate students who will present at the GRC this year.

Check out some photos from last year's conference.

Click here for a printable list of CSEE presenters.

Oral Presentations
Location: Sondheim 203

“Noise Reduction in AIRS Infared Earth Observing Radiance Grids using the Obscov Algorithm”
David Chapman, Milton Halem, Phuong Nguyen, and Jeff Avery
Time: 9:00 a.m.

“Heart Disease Prediction Model: A Data Mining Approach”
Soma Das
Time: 9:15 a.m.

“Measuring the Pulse Duration of Ultrafast Lasers”
Jared Dixon
Time: 9:30 a.m.

“Using Deceptive Packets to Increase Base-Station Anonymity in Wireless Sensor Network”
Yousef Ebrahimi and Mohamed Younis
Time: 9:45 a.m.

“SmartRate: A Rating Interpretation Mechanism for Agents in Smart Grid Markets”
Yasaman Haghpanah
Time: 10:00 a.m.

“Visualizing Changes to Directory Structure to Support Digital Forensics”
Timothy Leschke
Time: 10:15 a.m.

“Extracting Semantic Linked Data from Tables”
Varish Mulwad
Time: 10:30 a.m.

“Automatic Identification of Prescription Drugs Using Shape, Imprint, and Color”
Adrian Rosebrock
Time: 11:00 a.m.

“An Optical Sensor for a Ceramic Water Filtration System for the Detection of E.Coli Using a Microfluidic Chip”
Serina Woods
Time: 11:15 a.m.

Poster Presentations
Location: Albin O. Kuhn Library: 7^th Floor

“Witness-based Saboteur Detection in Multi-agent Systems”
Petr Babkin
Time: 11:00 a.m.

“Entity Linking and Disambiguation for Smartphone Platforms”
Anurag Korde
Time: 11:00 a.m.

“Third-order Quadratically Converging, Quasi-Newton Optimization”
Rory Mulvaney
Time: 11:00 a.m.

“Supervised Learning Techniques for Predicting Risk of Breast Cancer using Genetic Information”
Aniket Bochare
Time: 11:12 a.m.

“Prostate Cancer Prognosis using Genomic Data”
Rohit Kugaonkar
Time: 11:12 a.m.

“Using Supervised Techniques for Classification of Conventional Data Items”
Nikhil Puranik
Time: 11:12 a.m.

“Surface Emitting Quantum Cascade Laser Array”
Xing Chen, Liwei Cheng, Dingkai Guo, and Fow-Sen Choa
Time: 11:24 a.m.

“Learning Sensitive to Multiple Sources of Costs”
Zachary Kurtz
Time: 11:24 a.m.

“Exploring Hidden Markov Model for Semantic Activity Prediction”
Amey Sane
Time: 11: 24 a.m.

“Calculating Representatives of Geographic Sites across the World”
Ashwinkumar Ganesan
Time: 11:36 a.m.

“Older Adults Interactions with a Touch Table Top Display Space”
Galina Madjaroff
Time: 11:36 a.m.

“Rendering of Smoke and Fire in a 3D Volume with Multiple Scattering”
Taekyu Shin
Time: 11:36 a.m.

“Chronic Disease Prediction: An Experimental Analysis Using the K-nearest Neighbor Algorithm”
Matthew Gately
Time: 11:48 a.m.

“Situation Aware Intrusion Detection Model”
Sumit S. More
Time: 11:48 a.m.

“Unsupervised Coreference Resolution for FOAF Instances”
Jennifer Sleeman
Time: 11:48 a.m.

“Towards an Intuitive Query System for DBpedia”
Lushan Han
Time: 12:00 p.m.

“Link Prediction Using Frequent Subgraphs”
Maksym Morawski
Time: 12:00 p.m.

“Modeling Motheye Antireflective Structures for Increased Coupling through As2S3 Optical Fibers”
Robert J. Weiblen
Time: 12:00 p.m.

Analyzing Social Media Data
Morgan Madeira
Junior, Computer Science

Social media has increasingly become an outlet for expression for a large part of our society. Literature suggests that analyzing data from these sites can lead to improvements in areas such as health-care and search-ad targeting. Users of these sites often associate with many other users described as “friends,” even if they do not have a strong connection, or what would be described as friendship in daily life. It is valuable to determine the strength of relationships between users and to identify communities within social networks. These communities represent people with similar characteristics, which are used by applications to solve many real-world problems. For instance, it is useful to identify groups that are interested in a specific movie genre. Information about these groups can be used to target movie advertisements towards the people most interested in that genre. These types of problems have similar characteristics to identifying close friends. We have created a system to collect and analyze the data about user characteristics, while being respectful of privacy concerns. The system is composed of a front end Facebook application and a back end machine-learning based tool. The front end component gathers data about a user and their friends. The back end uses the collected data and machine-learning techniques to determine relationships between users.

To learn more about the project, check out an interview with Morgan.

Catch Morgan's poster presentation at URCAD this Wednesday, April 25 in the University Center Ballroom from 10:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Multiclass Datasets, Their Predictions, and Their Visualization
Wallace Brown and Alexander Morrow with Kevin Winner
Senior, Computer Science
Sophomore, Computer Science

Many datasets contain a wealth of information. For example, a person may be described by their race, age, gender, income, marital status, nationality, level of education, etc. By analyzing this data, we can form educated and accurate predictions about individuals. We can, for instance, determine that a person with a particular race, age, nationality, and income is likely to be a college undergraduate. Our goal is to develop ways to visualize these predictions and the uncertainty associated with the predictions. Displaying data in a scatterplot is a standard means of describing two-dimensional information. However, displaying high-dimensional data (i.e., data that includes many attributes, such as age, race, and income) is significantly more challenging.  We present a means of visualizing high-dimensional data sets and the predictive models derived from the data, using existing dimension reduction techniques and novel glyph-based displays.

To learn more about the project, check out an interview with Wallace and Alexander.

Catch Wallace and Alexander's presentation at URCAD this Wednesday, April 25 in the University Center 312 from 1:15 to 1:30 p.m.

Photo Courtesy g4tv.com

Computer Science alumnus Joshua Barczak (B.S. ’03, M.S. ’06) will be a featured speaker at this year’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD).

Now a Senior Graphics Engineer at the Maryland-based game development studio Firaxis Games, Joshua studied computer graphics at UMBC and carried out research under professors Dr. Marie desJardins and Dr. Marc Olano before graduating with his Master's degree in Computer Science in 2006.

At Firaxis, Joshua’s first game credit was for Sid Meier’s Civilization V video game. For the game, Joshua worked on implementing the rendering framework which drives the diplomacy screens. He also put together a procedural ice-floe generator. “If you’re playing the game and happen to go close enough to the poles, you’ll notice that each and every ice chunk is unique,” writes Joshua on his website.

Joshua will speak on Wednesday, April 25 at 12:00 p.m. in the University Center 312. After Joshua's talk, come chat with him about what it's like to work in the video game industry in the Information Technology/ Engineering (ITE) Building 325B from 3:00-3:50 p.m.

For more information about Joshua’s game development experience, check out his bio on UMBC’s Office of Undergraduate Education website.

Joshua Barczak (CMSC, B.S. '03, M.S. '06)
Senior Graphics Engineer, Firaxis Games
 

Each year, UMBC's Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD) gives hardworking undergraduate researchers from all disciplines an outlet for presenting the findings of their unique research projects. On April 25th, 2012, a handful of students from the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department (CSEE) will be part of that motley crew. Click on the photos below to learn about the research projects of a few CSEE students which you wont want to miss. You can also check out this complete list of CSEE students presenting research at URCAD this year.

Multiclass Datasets, Their Predictions, and Their Visualization

Wallace Brown and Alexander Morrow
Faculty Mentors: Dr. Marie desJardins + Dr. Penny Rheingans

Analyzing Social Media Data

Morgan Madeira
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Anupam Joshi

The Greater Baltimore Technology Council is hosting a very interesting event on Friday, April 20th called BmoreFail — a conference celebrating failure. Entrepreneurs, investors, developers, students, designers, and others from across the innovation and creative communities will come together to learn from their failure and that of others. BmoreFail is modeled after San Francisco's famous FailCon conference.

The first 20 UMBC students who register using the promotion code XYZZYXYZZY will get the registration waived. (We've redacted the promo code in this post — CSEE students should check their email.) If you're not one of the first 20, you'll have to pay an unlucky $13 to get in.

The event will be held from aa:00am to 5:00pm in Baltimore's Du Burns Arena, located in the Canton neighborhood at 1301 South Ellwood Avenue.

BmoreFail will bring together more than 300 entrepreneurs, investors, developers, students, designers, and others from across the innovation and creative communities to share their failures and learn from the failures of others. It promises to be an exciting event that will help build momentum in Baltimore's entrepreneurial, innovation community.

Register and get more information at the BmoreFail web site.

The CSEE Department will hold its annual CSEE Research Review day from 9:00am to 4:00pm on Friday, May 4, 2012. Faculty, research staff and students from the Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering programs will present and discuss their latest research results via short oral presentations and a poster session.

The event is open to the public and is a good way for prospective collaborators and students to find out about the research our department is doing and meet and network with current faculty and students. See pictures from CRR-06, CRR-08, CRR-09, CRR-10 and CRR-11 to get an idea of what goes on at this event.

The 2012 CSEE Research Review (CRR-12) will take place in the large conference room of the UMBC Technology Center's business Incubator and Accelerator building on South Campus. There is ample free parking and refreshments and a free buffet lunch will be provided.

CSEE faculty, staff and students are encouraged to submit papers and posters for possible presentation by the April 12 deadline. See the CRR-12 Call for Submissions for details on how to submit research work. Awards with cash prizes will be given for the best research paper submitted by a undergraduate, M.S. and Ph.D. student and for the best three posters.

For more information, contact the CRR-11 General Chair, Professor Alan Sherman, .