A group of nearly 40 participants assembled yesterday afternoon at the UMBC 2012 Global Game Jam site. The Global Game Jam is an annual event where small teams design and create computer games over the course of one weekend. The teams will upload their final games to a central site by 3:00pm EST Sunday. Here’s a video stream live from the GAIM lab in 005 ECS.
If you are on campus tomorrow around 3:00pm, stop by the GAIM lab and see the final UMBC games demonstrated.
UMBC is a host for the 2012 Global Game Jam which takes place this coming weekend, January 27-29. This is a 48 hour event, where teams from around the world work to develop a complete game over one weekend. The first year had 54 sites in 23 countries. The second year had 124 sites in 34 countries. Last year was up to 169 sites. The UMBC site is open to participants at all skill levels and affiliations. Thanks to generous sponsorship by Next Century, there's no registration fee and food will be provided all weekend. However, you DO need to sign up in advance, just log into globalgamejam.org and select UMBC as your site.
The jam will start at 3:00pm on Friday, January 27th in the UMBC GAIM lab, room 005 in the ECS building with presentations by Microsoft about developing for the Windows Phone. There will be some spiffy giveaways at the end of the weekend for teams that choose make a Windows Phone game. The main event starts at 5:00pm with video keynote talks by Will Wright, Baiyon, Gonzalo Frasca, Brenda Garno Brathwaite and John Romero. After these presentations, the theme for this year’s games will be announced, and participants will brainstorm game ideas and form into teams. For the rest of the weekend, each team will work to build a brand new computer game around the theme. At 3:00pm on Sunday, the final games must be uploaded and from 3-5, the group will review what was accomplished over the weekend.
For more information on the jam and how to participate, see the UMBC GAIM site.
Photo Courtesy Microsoft.com
Check out the CNET.com article where our very own Dr. Rick Forno, UMBC's Graduate Program Director of Cybersecurity, discusses how Microsoft security has progressed over the years.
Dr. Finin has been a faculty member of UMBC’s Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department for over twenty years. A member of UMBC’s Ebiquity research group, Dr. Finin’s research is in Artificial Intelligence.
Congratulations to Dr. Tim Finin, who was just named this year’s Presidential Research Professor. The appointment, which lasts from the beginning of July 2012 through June 2015, is awarded to faculty members whose outstanding scholarship and excellent teaching have stood out at UMBC.
“I’m very honored to be selected,” says Dr. Finin of the award. He credits his research success to the collaborative research environment at UMBC and the talented students and professors that he has worked with over the years. “I feel like I’ve been lucky to be here at UMBC because having a good set of colleagues and students to work with is the reason for [this] success.”
Through his research in Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Finin is constantly searching for answers to the question: “How can we make [software] systems more intelligent?” He has applied his research to the increasingly popular areas of Mobile Computing, Social Computing and Security. Recently, Dr. Finin has been working on a project that looks at the potential of smartphones to understand a user’s context. The project– a collaborative effort with fellow CSEE professor, Dr. Joshi–is being sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). More information about Dr. Finin’s research can be found in his research profile.
Finin’s appointment as Presidential Research Professor, comes with a $2,500 allowance, and a $2,500 per semester gift to the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department, to be used towards enhancing teaching and research. A formal award ceremony will take place this Spring to celebrate Dr. Finin and the other recipients of 2012 Presidential Faculty and Staff Awards.
Attention rising Junior and Senior Undergraduate and Graduate students interested in Information Assurance: Thursday, January 12 is the deadline to apply for a scholarship through the Information Assurance Scholarship Program (IASP).
The scholarship is great for students who are interested in pursuing careers in Information Assurance for the Federal Government. Each recipient will receive full tuition, room and board, books,and stipend. In return, the recipient must work for DoD (for pay) for one year for year of scholarship. Each recipient will also engage in a summer internship at DoD (for pay).
Interested applicants should contact Dr. Alan Sherman () to be guided through the application process. For more information about the program, and for an application form, visit UMBC's Center for Information Security and Assurance website.
In an exciting close finish, UMBC placed 2nd with 5 points at the 2011 Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship, held Dec 27-30 in Dallas-Fort Worth, TX. Also advancing to the President's Cup (Final Four of College Chess) are Univ. of Texas at Dallas [UTD] (1st place with 6 points), Texas Tech (3rd place with 4.5 points), and New York Univ. (4th place with 4.5 points). Top-rated Univ. of Texas Brownsville [UTB] finished 5th with 4 points, failing to make the cut for the Final Four. UMBC's only loss was to UTD, in Round 5. In Round 6, UTD defeated UTB, clinching clear first place in this six-round team Swiss championship open to any university team from North, South, or Central America.
UMBC's International Grandmaster Giorgi Margvelashvili won top player on Board 2, and UMBC's Adithya Balasubramanian won the prize for top alternate. Also playing for UMBC were GM Leonid Kritz (captain), IM Sasha Kaplan, WGM Sabina Foisor, and alternate Benjamin Krause. Supporting the UMBC team in Texas was Associate Director GM Sam Palatnik.
Twenty-eight teams entered this annual championship, known as the "World Series of College Chess." Princeton placed 16, Yale 24. Each team comprised four players and up to two alternates. UMBC has won or tied for first place a record nine times at the Pan-Am.
For complete results, see http://swchess.com/sce/
For some of the games, see www.monroi.com
An article in last week's Wall Street Journal, Interns Are Latest Target In Battle for Tech Talent, focused on the increased interest in hiring summer interns in the Bay area.
"Bay Area tech companies, already in a fierce fight for full-time hires, are now also battling to woo summer interns. Technology giants like Google Inc. have been expanding their summer-intern programs, while smaller tech companies are ramping up theirs in response—sometimes even luring candidates away from college."
The motivation for companies is simple. Their growth depends on a steady stream of new hires with good skills and work habits. Hiring prospects as summer interns is a "try before you buy" strategy, giving the company lots of information to decide whether to extend an offer for a full-time position after graduation.
Meanwhile, Facebook Inc. plans to hire 625 interns for next summer, up from 550 this year. Google hired 1,000 engineering interns this past summer, up 20% from the previous year. Yolanda Mangolini, Google's director of talent and outreach programs, says the company is still figuring out its target for 2012, based on its overall staffing plan. Google generally extends offers to the majority of its intern class, Ms. Mangolini says. "It is one of the primary ways we find full-time hires."
While the WSJ story focused on Bay area companies, the situation is similar throughout the country and applies not only to companies, but also government agencies. It you are pursuing a computing-related program, now is the time to aggressively explore internship opportunities for the summer.
Graduate students and undergraduates who are currently juniors or seniors planning on going into graduate school will get the most interest, but there will be opportunities for current sophomores and even freshmen as well. If you want start working on lining up a great summer internship, your first stop should be the Career Services Center.
We congratulate the 114 students who graduated from our programs in December 2011. Three students received Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, 58 received M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, and 53 got B.S. degrees in Computer Engineering and Computer Science. We wish all of our new alumni happiness and success as they moved on to new challenges in 2012. Please stay in touch by keeping your contact information current on the UMBC Alumni Association site.
If you’re at loose ends for the semester break and want to sharpen your programming slils, you might try competing in the ACM Queue Magazine online programming competition. You will program a player that will compete with others in the game of Coercion. The competition opens January 15 and closes at midnight GMT on February 12.
“The game of Coercion takes place on a square field that is divided into regions, which vary by height and slope of the field. Each player controls three movable playing pieces called pushers, using them to push little doughnut-shaped markers around. Players use the markers to claim new territory on the playing field. The player with the most territory at the end of the match wins. The game rules will describe how to control your team, score points, and win. A double elimination tournament follows the coding phase, to determine the top four places.”
You can create your entry in in C++, C#, Java, Python or JavaScript. Preliminary matches will take place during the one-month coding phase will that will let you know how well your player is doing. A final double-elimination competition among all the submitted players will decide whose player is best.
Queue is the ACM’s magazine for practicing software engineers. Written by engineers for engineers, it focuses on the technical problems and challenges that loom ahead, helping readers to sharpen their own thinking and pursue innovative solutions.
Tyler Campbell, Nick Ducq, Ryan King, Andrew Nguyen and Tim Spillman walked out of the Baltimore Convention Center elated. Their team, the Sherwood Cyber Warriors, had just won the high school division of the inaugural Maryland Cyber Challenge. Their success netted them each a $5,000 scholarship from the National Security Agency.
The entire experience was rewarding for both the students and their parents, says Steve Weiss, one of the team’s advisers. “Winning first place was the icing on the cake.”
In a conference with over 800 attendees, the excitement over the cyber competition was palpable. With scoreboards changing in real time, onlookers crowded around to see who was in the lead.
Following the competition, held October 21 and 22, eight teams from each division — professional, college and high school — walked away with scholarships and cash prizes. The scholarships for students, put up by the National Security Agency (NSA), totaled more than $84,000.
Members of first place high school and college teams took home $5,000 scholarships each. Members of second place high school and college teams took home $2,000 scholarships. Each member of the first place professional teams won $2,000 and each second place member won $1,000.
First place winners in the college and high school categories were from, respectively, the University of Maryland, College Park and Sherwood High School. Second place winners were Towson University and Poolesville High School. In the professional category Team ICF came in first, with Team Pr3tty coming in second.
The Sherwood Cyber Warriors, four seniors and a junior, are mostly undecided in their future careers, although one does plan to work cybersecurity. Jim Kirk, the team’s senior advisor, says that regardless of the their ultimate career choices, the students learned valuable skills from the competition — such as how to communicate effectively and work as a team.
The Cyber Warriors began practicing for the competition in May, often meeting twice a week. The team developed strategies to pick the low hanging fruit — what hackers go for first. That, says Kirk, includes developing strong passwords and removing unnecessary software from servers.
The challenge for the high school teams, says Rick Forno, Director of UMBC's Graduate Cybersecurity Program and an organizer of the Cyber Challenge, was purely defensive. “They were being attacked and their job was to keep services open.”
The challenge was run using CyberNEXS, a software system developed by SAIC for cybersecurity training and exercises.The system is self-contained and runs both Windows and UNIX systems.
But, more than just the chance to compete, the event gave college and high school students a taste of what cybersecurity work is like. And that, involves more than technical skills say professionals in the field.
“The cyber challenge is especially interesting to me, since all the students participating are passionate about cyber security and the teams will only excel if every member is doing their job,” says Neil Furukawa, vice president of CyberPoint International. “We’re looking for people who can lead, but who can also roll up their sleeves and get the work done.”
Phyllis Villani, Director of Talent acquisition at Northrop Grumman says that to get a job, “networking is key.” Besides honing “soft skills” like communication, Furukawa says, people should never stop their education because cybersecurity is a rapidly evolving field.
Fittingly, education is what the Maryland Cyber Challenge is all about.
Originally posted by Nicole Ruediger at November 18, 2011 1:02 PM