Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

NSA will be at the Commons for this year's CryptoChallenge competition. Stop by and test your skills against their cryptographic brain teasers and maybe score some great giveaways. Join them for some friendly competition from 11:00am to 5:00pm on Friday 30 September at the Commons Outside Terrace or Main Street if it rains.

Bring your resume — NSA recruiters will be on hand to discuss career opportunities for the best codemakers and codebreakers in the business. You can hone your cryptographic skills before the event by downloading the free NSA CryptoChallenge from the Apple App Store for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

NSA CryptoChallenge is a game that tests your pattern recognition skills through a series of cryptographs. Your mission is to decipher encrypted quotes, factoids, historical events and more. It’s you against the clock to see how fast you can crack the code. Or, you can challenge a friend with the multiplayer interface. In that instance, it's a one-on-one race to see who can correctly solve the puzzle first.

NSA executes some of the nation’s most important and sensitive intelligence operations. To help us accomplish our mission, we’re looking for the best and the brightest problem solvers to join our team. If you can solve these puzzles, you just might have what it takes to help NSA keep America safe.

The Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference (MDC3) will provide an opportunity for students and professionals to network in a fun environment while participating in exciting games and learning about computer safety and cybersecurity skills. MDC3 teams of up to six players will compete in one of three categories: high school, college and university, and industry professionals. High school teams will focus on cyber defense techniques whereas college, university and professional teams will compete in a capture the flag match.

Students must be enrolled at a Maryland high school, college, or university. Professionals’ employers must have an office in Maryland and must be either a company or government agency. This summer’s final free Maryland Cyber Challenge orientation session will be held Thursday, August 25th at UMBC.

• Professional Session: 4:30 – 5:30pm
• High School & College Session: 6 – 7pm

Who should attend an orientation session?
Students, parents, teachers, administrators, cybersecurity professionals or anyone who wants to learn more about MDC3.

Why should I attend an orientation session?
To learn more about MDC3, including rules, format, scoring and CyberNEXSâ„¢, the system used during the competition.

Where are the orientation sessions?
The UMBC Technology Center, Main Seminar Room 1450 South Rolling Road Halethorpe, MD 21224

Demand Response; What is it and
What are the Business Opportunities?

Dr. Bjorn Frogner

4:00pm Wednesday, 17 August 2011
Maryland Clean Energy Technology Incubator
UMBC South Campus

Bjorn will discuss the aspect of the Smart Grid called Demand Response (DR). DR is where the action is in the Smart Grid. Implementation of DR is made possible by the merger of the following two forces.

• The State of Maryland has set the goal of reducing average electricity consumption by 15% and reducing the peak-to-average consumption by 15%. These two requirements will reduce the peak capacity needs by 30%. The goal is to reach these goals by 2015. This makes DR more valuable than all other renewable energy sources combined for the next five years.
• Smart Meters are already available in many businesses and they are soon going to be installed in 1.5 million homes in BGE and PEPCO customer residences. These meters will provide two-way communication and data readings from our homes as frequently as every 15 minutes. This provides tremendous opportunities for changes in the way we consume electricity.

These forces will rapidly transform the electric utility industry. DR will make the cost of electricity become a function of supply and demand which will make electricity be like other commodities where the market determines the price. If you are well-informed, you may save money. And, if you are real well-informed, you may be able to see some of the many new business opportunities that are being created by DR.

Bjorn Frogner has a PhD in Nuclear Engineering from University of California at Berkeley. He worked for about 35 years across a broad range of technologies, primarily related to energy and IT, while he lived in Silicon Valley in California. He moved to Annapolis, Maryland, in 2009 and he now works part-time as Entrepreneur-in- Residence at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His function there is to help startup companies in the clean energy field. He had many years of experience with the electric grid during the 70s and 80s. He has spent significant amount of time during the last 18 months making himself informed about the cyber security for the electric grid.

If your research involved language processing and/or machine learning you should consider submitting a poster abstract to the Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning.

This is a free, one-day event bringing together faculty, researchers and students from universities in the Mid-Atlantic area working in human language technology and/or machine learning. It is an opportunity for students to present preliminary or completed work and to network with other students, faculty and researchers working in related fields. The event will be held at JHU in Baltimore on Friday 23 September 2011.

Students are encouraged to submit one-page abstracts by Monday, August 15 describing ongoing, planned, or completed research projects, including previously published results and negative results. Submissions and presentations must be made by students or postdocs. See the call for papers for more information.

Accepted submissions will be presented as posters and each will also be given a one-minute presentation during a poster spotlight session. A small number of submissions will be selected to be presented as talks, on the basis of diversity and general interest. Student-led breakout sessions of one hour will also be held to discuss papers on topics of interest and stimulate interaction and discussion.

MS Thesis Defense

Clinical-Genomic Analysis for Disease Prediction

Darshana Dalvi

10:00am 6 July 2011, ITE 346

Recent advances in genomic research have generated vast amounts of information that can help identify individuals who differ in their susceptibility to a particular disease or response to a specific treatment. This information may offer solutions for the treatment of complex chronic diseases that are influenced by a wide array of factors. This vast amount of information brings critical challenges in applying advanced technology to synthesize clinical-genomic patient data. Synthesizing this information is necessary to derive the knowledge that would empower physicians to provide personalized care with the best possible therapeutic interventions.

We used statistical methods and data mining approaches to understand clinical-genomic risk factors that differentiate Type II Diabetes cases from healthy controls. We investigated whether inclusion of genomic risk factors in conjunction with clinical information improves classification accuracy. We also demonstrate how a biased and an unbiased method for selection of risk associated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) effect clustering along with clinical information. We determined the optimal method based on its clustering performance.

Committee members:

• Dr. Yelena Yesha (Chair)
• Dr. Michael Grasso
• Dr. Yaacov Yesha
• Dr. Milton Halem

Passive House; what is it and how does it work?

Brian Uher, ECORE Living

4:00pm Wednesday 20 July 2011
MD Clean Energy Technology Incubator, UMBC South Campus

Brian Uher will discuss the engineering and design principles behind Passive House – a rigorous building performance standard that ECORE Living is deploying in the Mid-Atlantic region.

The term passive house (Passivhaus in German) refers to the rigorous, voluntary, Passivhaus standard for energy efficiency in a building. It results in very low (<80%) energy requirements for space heating or cooling. Any building can be constructed to the standard. Passive design is not an attachment or supplement to architectural design, but a design process that is integrated with architectural design. Although it is mostly applied to new buildings, it has also been used for retrofits. As of August 2010, there were approximately 25,000 such certified structures of all types in Europe, while in the United States there were only 13. ECORE Living is in negotiations with several developers in the DC and Baltimore areas for initial implementation in this region.

Brian Uher is a co-founder of ECORE Living, LLC, a subsidiary of ECORE Ventures. He has developed methods for incorporating return-on-investment with standard energy modeling and auditing techniques to quantify and extend the value of intelligently applied sustainable building techniques, including market projections and capital project analyses. Brian has spoken widely to the real estate and development communities with a focus on a market-based approach to selling green and high performance building. He is currently working on several deep retrofit projects and is developing Passive House optimization strategies for East Coast row houses that will be deployed at scale in 2011 and 2012.

Brian is a LEED accredited professional, HERS/RESNET certified, BPI analyst and envelope professional and taught the Green Remodeling course for the Washington DC chapter of National Association of the Remodeling Industry. He is also a certified Passive House Consultant (residential and commercial standards), the most rigorous performance standard available today. He holds a masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and the Wharton School of Management, holds a master's of science degree in molecular biology from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Chicago.

Registration for the Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference (MDC3) is now open. MDC3 will provide an opportunity for students and professionals to network in a fun environment while participating in exciting games and learning about computer safety and cybersecurity skills.

MDC3 teams up to six players who will compete in one of three categories: high school, college and university, and industry professionals. High school teams will focus on cyber defense techniques whereas college, university and professional teams will compete in a capture the flag match.

Students must be enrolled at a Maryland high school, college, or university. Professionals’ employers must have an office in Maryland and must be either a company or government agency. Teams can register during a day of an orientation session or online if they are unable to attend in person. The next orientation session will held between 4:30pm and 7:00pm on Tuesday, 21 June 2011 at the UMBC Technology Center, 1450 South Rolling Road. People interested in the professional league should come between 4:30-5:30pm and students should come between 6:00pm and 7:00pm.

The sessions will give contestants and coaches insight about the event as well as tips and tricks to prepare for the competition. After registering and orientation, competitors will be able to attend practice challenges during the summer to prepare for the qualifying rounds in September and finals on October 21-22 at the Baltimore Convention Center. Scholarships and prizes will be available for winning participants.

Gamescape is a visual arts exhibition showcasing video games and video game inspired artwork that will be held in Baltimore July 14-17 in conjunction with at Artscape. Developers and artists will demo and display games and game inspired art that they have created.

The UMBC Game Developer's Club will present four of its projects from the 2010-2011 academic year: Light, a 2-D puzzle platformer involving the manipulation of light; City of Gears, a 2-D steam punk hack and slash; Titan, a 3-D shooter where you use physics based weaponry to defeat your foes, and Slug 3D, a 3-D platformer where you must evade enemies using your unique abilities.

The Gamescape exhibition will include classic arcade machines, video game demos from local companies, panels on game development, and art related to video games. It will open on July 14, 2011 and run through the duration of Artscape: Friday, July 15 through 17, 2011. Gamescape will be located in the Pinkard Gallery located in the Bunting Center at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Gamescape and Artscape are programs of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts on behalf of the Baltimore Festival of the Arts, Inc. Artscape is America’s largest free public arts festival featuring more than 150 artists, fashion designers, and craftspeople.

Ph.D. Preliminary Examination

Generating Linked Data by inferring the semantics of tables

Varish Mulwad

9:30am Wednesday 25 May, 2011, ITE 325b

A vast amount of information is encoded in tables on the web, spreadsheets and databases. Considerable work has been focused on exploiting unstructured free text; however techniques that are effective for documents and free text do not work well with tables. In this research we present techniques to generate high quality linked data from tables by jointly inferring the semantics of column headers, table cell values (e.g., strings and numbers), relations between columns, augmented with background knowledge from open data sources such as the Linked Open Data cloud. We represent a table's meaning by mapping columns to classes from an appropriate ontology, linking cell values to literal constants or entities in the linked data cloud (existing or new) and discovering or and identifying relations between columns. The interpreted meaning is represented as linked RDF assertions. An initial evaluation of our preliminary baseline system demonstrate the feasibility of tackling the problem. Based on this work and its evaluation, we are further developing our framework grounded in the theory of graphical models and probabilistic reasoning.

Committee members:

• Dr. Tim Finin (chair)
• Dr. Anupam Joshi
• Dr. Tim Oates
• Dr. Yun Peng
• Dr. L V Subramaniam (IBM Research India)
• Dr. Indrajit Bhattacharya (Indian Institute of Science)

MS Thesis Defense

Community Detection in Twitter

Mohit Kewalramani

1:00pm Monday, 16 May 2011, ITE 346

Twitter has evolved into a source of social, political and real time information in addition to being a means of mass-communication and marketing. Monitoring and analyzing information on Twitter can lead to invaluable insights, which might otherwise be hard to get using conventional media resources. An important task in analyzing highly networked information sources like twitter is to identify communities that are formed. A community on twitter can be defined as a set of users that are more similar to other members than to non-members.

We present a technique to devise a similarity metric between any two users on twitter based on the similarity of their content, links and metadata. The link structure on Twitter can be characterized using the twitter notion of followers, being followed and the @Mentions, @Reply and @RT tags in tweets. Content similarity is characterized by the words in the tweets combined with the hash-tags they are annotated with. Meta-data similarity includes similarity based on other sources of user information such as location, age and gender. We then use this similarity metric to cluster users into communities using spectral and bottom-up agglomerative hierarchical clustering. We evaluate the performance of clustering using different similarity measures on different types of datasets. We also present a heuristic to find communities in twitter that take advantage of the network characteristics of twitter.

Committee:

• Dr. Tim Finin (chair)
• Dr. Anupam Joshi
• Dr. Tim Oates