Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

ACM has recognized CSEE Professor Marie desJardins as a Distinguished Member for her contributions to the field of computing. ACM is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. Each year it recognizes a handful of its members for significant advances in computing technology that have dramatically influenced progress on a range of human endeavors. This year, Dr. desJardins was one of just 54 computer scientists, educators, and engineers from leading academic and corporate institutions worldwide who were recognized.

Dr. desJardins is well known for her artificial intelligence research, which focuses on planning, learning, and multiagent systems. She leads the large and active MAPLE research group and also works on developing new techniques to improve computer science education.

UMBC CHMPR Colloquium

Oil Spills and Search and Rescue:
Key Computational Challenges

Dr. C. J. Beegle-Krause
Environmental Research for Decision, Inc.

1:00pm 16 December 2011, ITE 227 325b

Leveraging the research community into societal issues can help save lives and reduce environmental impacts from both natural and anthropogenic disasters. For example, Search and Rescue, oil Spills, and marine debris drift are decision support areas commonly solved with Eulerian-Lagrangian models. These models typically use wind and current fields derived from external circulation models. These problems share many similarities:

• Use of a “leeway” or “windage” to simulate drift on the water surface or atmospheric transport,
• Increased leveraging of larger scale physical ocean and atmospheric circulation models, and
• Predicting geolocation information with sufficient accuracy for detection (e.g. finding the person) or response (booming off the beach),

However, there are some distinct differences and each field has some case types with complexities that remain unanswered by the research community. This presentation will cover some key examples, such as:

• Mystery spills (reverse drift) – Where did oil come from?
• Surface collection areas (sensitivity of drift to surface circulation convergence and divergences and shoreline contact);
• Accuracy required for locating a target – small islands may be missing in implementation of numerical model; and
• Extensive drift problems – an overdue vessel may have crossed the domains of several small and large-­Ã¢â‚¬Âscale models.

The 21st century vision of numerical modeling includes Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCS, and application of chaos theory), Social Media (thanks to UMBC), further integration of numerical and geospatial data streams, and more real-­Ã¢â‚¬Âtime information access through handheld computing.

Dr. C.J. Beegle-Krause is President of Environmental Research for Decision, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to three primary missions: transitioning peer reviewed research into Decision Support applications; Education; and Data Rescue. As founder of the nonprofit, she has a strong vision of the Next Generation Trajectory. Her background is in physical oceanography, specializing in modeling chemical transport. She is one of the original developers of the NOAA Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) GNOME trajectory model, and spent five years of her career at NOAA as one of the U.S. lead trajectory forecasters, on-call 24×7 for events around the world. She was called back to NOAA OR&R for the Deepwater Horizon (MC252) oil spill and continues to work on aspects of that incident and future model development.

Just over a month ago, DARPA announced The Shredder Challenge competition to develop a system to solve puzzles by reassembling images of shredded documents with a $50,000 prize for the winning entry. Yesterday the prize was won by All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S., a San Francisco-based team that was the first to correctly reconstructed each of the five challenge documents.

UMBC Assistant VP for
Research Don Engel

It's unfortunate that there was no prize for second place, because that honor was won by Schroddon, a two-person effort including UMBC Assistant Vice President for Research Don Engel. While most of the top teams had a handful of software engineers and used commercial crowdsourcing services, Schroddon was a part-time effort by Dr. Engel and his wife, Dr. Marianne Engel.

Both Don and Marianne have Ph.D.s in Physics, but Don also has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, did graduate work in computational linguistics, and develops software in his spare time for fun. Two of his active software development projects are ShowMe3D, an application for Mac and iOS that can be used to take and view 3D photos, and When2meet, a free web-based tool for finding the best time for a group to meet.

The Shredder Challenge was the latest competition run by DARPA as a low cost way to spur research on new problems. The press release describes it this way.

"The Shredder Challenge represents a preliminary investigation into the area of information security to identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used by war fighters operating in war zones to more quickly obtain valuable information from confiscated, shredded documents and gain a quantitative understanding of potential vulnerabilities inherent to the shredding of sensitive U.S. National security documents."

"Lots of experts were skeptical that a solution could be produced at all let alone within the short time frame,” said Dan Kaufman, director, DARPA Information Innovation Office. “The most effective approaches were not purely computational or crowd-sourced, but used a combination blended with some clever detective work. We are impressed by the ingenuity this type of competition elicits."

Over 9,000 teams registered for the Shredder Challenge and it is quite an achievement for the Engles to have placed second, especially against many much larger teams. If you are interested in seeing what the data is like, you can download it from the DARPA site.

These challenge competitions are becoming more common and are a great way for students to get involved in independent research and maybe win fame and fortune.

Write or Radiate

Professor Christopher Rose
Rutgers University

1:00pm Friday December 9, 2011, ITE 227

Communication theory researchers do the relatively routine but deeply important work that maintains and expands our increasingly connected society. It is therefore easy to forget that communications research, by its very nature, is more than about telephones and the Internet, but is about interactions of any and every kind. That is, communication theory is an inherently profound subject and as communications researchers, we should be sensitive to the deeper questions our discipline often raises. In illustration, we describe how some routine wireless research had something surprising to say about how we might efficiently communicate across a wide range of distances and in so doing knocked on the door of one of the "big questions" — are we alone in the universe?

Christopher Rose was a semi-lifer at MIT from 1975 to 1985. He was paroled by his new wife and new baby in 1985 when he graduated with a Ph.D. in EECS. Almost immediately afterward he began what is now a 26-year-and-counting postdoc in communication theory starting at Bell Laboratories Research where he rubbed shoulders with a wide range of uniformly delightful technical angels and curmudgeons. He's currently an ECE professor at Rutgers, WINLAB and an IEEE Fellow cited for "contributions to wireless systems theory."

Chris has always been confused about his technical identity and has thus roamed over research terrain that has included introducing surprisingly good random switch architectures as an antidote to the "topology of the week" rage back in the late '80s, better-than-fiber superconducting coax with levitated center conductors during the heady days of High-Tc superconductors, and a variety of wireless problems, culminating in his proudest moment — an interview on NPR where a caller asked him about crop circles and ET communication. That interview (and the Nature paper which spawned it) has done wonders for his reputation as an expert witness.

He is currently thinking hard about (but not making loads of progress on) fundamental problems in bio-molecular communication. He is also thinking about communications as a lens on everything — with some already surprising initial results.

MS Thesis Defense

Analyzing the Growth of Hoeffding Trees

Mayank Sawhney
12:00-1:30pm Thursday 1 December 2011, ITE 346

Mining high speed data streams has become a necessity because of the enormous growth in the volume of electronic data. In the past decade, researchers have suggested various models for learning in both stationary and concept drifting data streams. Hoeffding Trees (Domingos & Hulten 2000) are one such model for mining stationary data streams. Several modifications of the nave Hoeffding Tree algorithm have been proposed to study data streams.

Our work analyzes the behavior of Hoeffding Trees when they are trained on infinite and experiments, we show that the Hoeffding bound suffers from an inherent shortcoming. Even after reaching a stage where accuracy asymptotes, Hoeffding Trees continue to grow. We examine this behavior in data streams with both nominal and numeric attributes. We also study enhancements made to the naive Hoeffding Tree algorithm and also evaluate different discretization methods.

In our work, we analyze how the Hoeffding bound relates to the information gain when splits are made and also when we send a random distribution as a data stream. We conclude that this behavior is a result of decisions made for the early growth of Hoeffding Trees and the induced randomness in an online setting. We also argue that the presence of this behavior will impact the use of Hoeffding algorithms in real world online applications.

Committee Members

• Dr. Tim Oates (Chair)
• Dr. Tim Finin
• Dr. Kostas Kalpakis

Silence of the labs: Why are we still commuting
the way we did 40 years ago?

Professor Ouri Wolfson
University of Illinois at Chicago

1:00pm Friday 2 December 2011, ITE 227

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have been in research and development since the 70's but their impact so far has been relatively small. In this talk I will argue that this is about to change, and that these systems will soon revolutionize the way we commute. I will describe research issues and Information Technology approaches related to ITS. I will focus on urban transportation, and discuss novel applications enabled by mobile wireless technologies. Such applications have the potential to improve safety, mobility, environmental impact, and energy efficiency of urban transportation. The applications are based on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, and they epitomize ITS efforts currently undertaken throughout the world, particularly the IntelliDrive initiative of the US Department of Transportation. I will also relate these efforts to our NSF-sponsored IGERT PhD program in Computational Transportation Science.

Ouri Wolfson is the Richard and Loan Hill Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is the sole founder of Mobitrac, a venture-funded high-tech startup that was acquired by Fluensee Co. in 2006.

Ouri Wolfson authored over 180 publications, and holds seven patents. He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a University of Illinois Scholar for 2009, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He co-authored three award winning papers, served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Association of Computing Machinery during 2001-2003, and participated in numerous conferences as a keynote speaker, general chairman, program committee chairman or member, tutorial presenter, session chairman, and panelist. Most recently he was the keynote speaker at the Mobilware 2010 Conference, and the general chair of the 17th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS 2009) . His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NATO, US Army, NASA, the New York State Science and Technology Foundation, Hughes Research Laboratories, Informix Co., Accenture Co., and Hitachi Co.

Wolfson’s main research interests are in database systems, distributed systems, and mobile/pervasive computing. Before joining the University of Illinois he has been on the computer science faculty at the Technion, Columbia University, and a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs.

Host: Yelena Yesha

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) offers paid Summer internships through their SURF program with opportunities at NIST facilities in Gaithersburg and Boulder.  Many of the participating research projects are looking for students majoring in Computer Science or Computer Engineering.

The eleven week program starts in the last week of May and provides a generous stipend and housing (if needed). It is open to United States citizens or permanent U.S. residents who attend U.S. colleges or universities. It is competitive, but in the past, about one in three applicants was accepted. Applications are due by February 1 and must be submitted by UMBC. If you are interested, read more about the application process and come to the NIST SURF Information Session from 3:00 to 4:00 on Friday, December 2 in Sondheim 108.

Dr. Joshi has been a faculty member of UMBC’s Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department since 1998. His research focuses on wireless and mobile computing, trust, security, privacy issues in distributed systems, and analytics of social media. He is a core member of UMBC's Ebiquity research group.

Congratulations to Dr. Anupam Joshi, who was recently appointed as the Oros Family Professor of Technology. This five year endowed professorship will provide Dr. Joshi with nearly $33,000 to spend on enhancing education in the fields of Information Technology at UMBC.

The Oros Family Professorship in Technology–established by David Oros, a UMBC alumnus who graduated with a Math degree in 1985– was established to support the work of Computer Science faculty whose research is geared toward mobile computing and wireless technology. Dr. Zary Segall, a former professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at UMBC previously served as the Oros Family Professor in Technology.

Apart from being a prestigious distinction, the award allows support by way of a generous donation. Broadly defined, the money will be used to support students with assistantships and fellowships, develop international collaborations, and buy equipment to keep labs up to date. But, the funds are also meant to enhance and extend Dr. Joshi’s own research at the intersection of healthcare IT and mobility.

“The funds enable me to merge these two existing and very strong research threads to pursue a new “Blue Sky” opportunity,” says Dr. Joshi.

For example, Dr. Joshi is interested in creating a mobile device that can be used to diagnose illness— something similar to the “Tricorder” used in Star Trek. What Joshi envisions is a small, wireless tool (think smartphone) that could do things like take sensor readings and measure vitals. Essentially, it could diagnose a patient who is thousands of miles away from a hospital. Joshi explains that the implications of a device like this are especially encouraging for people in remote areas and poorer populations, where access to modern healthcare is limited if not non-existent.  

Though Dr. Joshi acknowledges the incredible potential of the encroaching age of ubiquitous computing, he is nevertheless wary of the consequences. As a result, he hopes the award will help him look more closely at the implications of mobile and social computing on our privacy. This Spring, Dr. Joshi will teach a course on the topic: Security and Privacy in a Mobile Social World, which will look at cases like that of 13-year old Megan Meier, who committed suicide after being cyberbullied by a friend’s mother who was posing as a 16-year old boy on Myspace.

Masters Thesis Defense

Approximation of Nonintegral Frequency Moments

Brian Pilz

10:00am 30 November 2011, ITE325b

Let a data stream have length m over an alphabet of n letters, with letter i occurring m_i times for i = 1,…,n. For any k, define the frequency moments F_k as F_k = sum_{i=1}^n m_i^k. Alon, Matias, and Szegedy showed how to estimate F_k for integers k>0 with a one-pass algorithm using O(n^{1-1/k}log n) space for given length m, accuracy, and confidence. Here we extend those results to non-integral k obtaining bounds on the variance giving accuracy and confidence estimates, and giving quantitative results on the algorithm’s space requirements with particular interest to when k is near 1. We also give some performance statistics of the algorithm for these cases and consider an application to entropy estimation. This algorithm is known as a sketching algorithm. Sketching algorithms are probabilistic algorithms generally requiring sublinear space vs. a "classical" O(n) (linear) space requirement, and may have applications for anomaly detection of systems or networks.

Committee:

• Drs. Samuel Lomonaco
• Brooke Stephens
• Kostas Kalpakis (chair)
• Larry Wagoner

EE Graduate Seminar

Time-Varying Amplitude Compression Processing to
Preserve and Enhance Spectral Contrast in Speech Signals

Dr. Janet C. Rutledge
Dean, UMBC Graduate School
Vice-Provost for Graduate Education
Affiliate Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering

11:30-12:45 Friday, 18 November 2011, ITE 231

Multichannel amplitude compression processing is used to reduce the level variations of speech to fit the reduced dynamic ranges of listeners with sensorineural hearing loss. This processing, however, can result in smearing of temporal information, artifacts due to spectral discontinuities at fixed channel edges, and spectral flattening due to reduced peak-to-valley ratios. Presented here is an implementation of a time-varying compression processing algorithm based on a sinusoidal speech model. The algorithm operates on a time-varying, stimulus-dependent basis to adjust to the speech variations and the listeners hearing profile. The algorithm provides fast-acting compression with minimal artifact, has time-varying frequency channels, is computationally inexpensive and preserves the important spectral peaks in speech.

This method has been extended to provide real-time enhancement of spectral peaks and valleys. This work is also related to processing audio signals that will be transmitted over amplitude-limited noisy channels or for listeners in a noisy environment.

Dr. Janet Rutledge is Dean of the Graduate School and Affiliate Associate Professor in the CSEE Department at UMBC. She received the BS in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the MS and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech. Prior to coming to UMBC in 2001, she was a faculty member at Northwestern University, and program director at the National Science Foundation.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris