Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

“I think it’s more than a jargon,” says Karuna Joshi of Cloud Computing, a topic she will discuss this Friday during a Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department Colloquium, “It’s an actual paradigm shift.” Ms. Joshi, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at UMBC, has been pursing research on Cloud Computing for the past three years and was recently awarded a prestigious IBM Ph.D. Fellowship (2011-2012) to help fund her efforts. Ms.Joshi explains that with the widespread implementation of Cloud Computing, Computing has the potential to become a utility—such as power or water—that would be widely available over a wireless network.

Though the cloud has the potential to save money and increase efficiency within organizations that choose to implement the new technology, there are still serious concerns about security, she says. What’s revolutionary about the cloud, for example, is that is removes the need to contain software and information on a particular device. Instead, information and services are wirelessly available to a network of users. The risk is that without proper security enforcement, sensitive information could potentially be accessed by hackers.

Nevertheless, Cloud Computing is steadily gaining credence among popular companies, says Joshi. Amazon, Microsoft and Google, for example, have all developed clouds. “I believe it will be strongly adopted by the industry,” says Ms. Joshi, “It’s the fastest growing field in the computing area.”  Even federal agencies have been mandated to move to a cloud system under the Federal Cloud Computing Initiative, as a way to reduce cost by consolidating necessary information and services into a central, easy to manage location.

Ms. Joshi explains that the novelty of the field makes her work exciting. The research allows her to explore issues that have not been addressed, such as the future of negotiation for acquiring services in the cloud. Through her research, Ms. Joshi has developed an ontology for the life cycle of the cloud that is composed of five phases: requirements, discovery, negotiation, composition and consumption. In addition, she is collaborating with the National Institute of Standards and Technology ( NIST) on a web-based prototype system.

Ms. Joshi envisions a future where powerful portable computing devices, like iPads, tablets and smartphones, will replace traditional computers. This future is only possible, explains Joshi,  if the widespread implementation of Cloud Computing and the transformation of computing into a service becomes a reality.

Ms. Karuna Joshi will speak about her research this Friday, October 7^th at 1 p.m. in ITE 227.

Read anything interesting lately? Why not nominate it for next year’s new student book experience.

UMBC’s summer reading connects new freshmen and transfer students with other students, faculty, and staff at the start of the academic year, providing an intellectually stimulating interaction that welcomes new students into the UMBC community.

You can now use a convenient Facebook app to nominate books. It uses Google’s book search service to find books based on key words from its title or author’s name and automatically enter their information. The app can then help you post your book nomination to your Facebook page and/or recommend the app to some of your Facebook friends.

A group of UMBC faculty members was recently awarded a 4-year, National Science Foundation (NSF) grant totaling $1.8 million to pursue work with “Global Collaboration Engine” (GLOBE), a “globally relevant search engine.” “Our objective is to change the way land change scientists do business,” explains Dr. Erle Ellis, associate professor of Geography and Environmental Systems, and the Principal Investigator for the grant.

Ellis explains that GLOBE will allow land change researchers to quickly and easily harvest expertise from a range sources. “People working locally will use that connection to think globally about their work in a more quantitative way.”

Along with Dr. Ellis and Dr. Wayne Lutters, associate professor of Information Systems, the research team includes Computer Science and Electrical Engineering professors Dr. Tim Oates, Dr. Tim Finin and Dr. Penny Rheingnas, all Co-Principal Investigators for the grant who are responsible for the computing elements of the project.

“It’s sort of like Facebook,” says Dr. Oates of GLOBE, which, in addition to consolidating papers and case studies, includes a social networking component to allow researchers to communicate and collaborate with one another.     

The GLOBE project began as an idea broached at a small conference dedicated to linking global and local land change. In the summer of 2009, Ellis looked to UMBC’s Computer Science faculty to find collaborators with expertise in computing. “From my point of view, I was really impressed with the depth and breadth of the computing expertise at UMBC,” says Ellis.

Then, a year ago, the research group received initial funding from Geoff Summers, Vice President for Research at UMBC, through the Research Seed Funding Initiative (RSFI). “The seed funding was very important,” says Ellis. The funding enabled the group to develop a prototype before submitting a second proposal to NSF after the first was rejected.   

In addition to GLOBE’s anticipated impact on land change science, the project will also make contributions to the field of Computer Science by way of machine learning algorithms. “What we want to do is to be able to watch people use the system and figure out what their workflow is and then be able to use that information to help novices make better use of the system,” says Dr. Oates, who has previously done research involving workflow analysis through a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project and is excited about applying those ideas to the GLOBE project.

GLOBE is also being applied to the field of Information Systems with the help of Dr. Lutters who is assessing the usefulness of the system by comparing how researchers study land change now to how it will be done when GLOBE is in place.  

Ellis anticipates that GLOBE will take at least two years to complete, with a working version expected within a year. Though it is designed to support the land change science community, GLOBE will be available for free online and has the potential to become an essential tool for researchers in other disciplines (archaeology, for example) and students.

Alexander Morrow is a Sophomore majoring in Computer Science. His research explores predictive model uncertainty. To learn more about Alexander's research, read his research profile.

UMBC has been named an NVIDIA CUDA Teaching Center following the submission of a proposal by Dr. Marc Olano, professor, and Dr. Shujia Zhou, research associate professor of the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department. The NVIDIA CUDA Teaching Center Program will provide UMBC with enough high-end GPUs to upgrade the UMBC GAIM (Games, Animation and Interactive Media) Lab, as well as a Tesla GPU-based computing processor.

Dr. Olano was familiar with NVIDIA’s grant programs through previous equipment grants, and last February, he spoke with David Luebke, Director of Research at NVIDIA, about the CUDA Teaching Center Program. His decision to submit a proposal weighed heavily upon the increasing interest in GPU computing around the UMBC community.

“It’s an important skill for game programming,” says Dr. Olano, who is the director of the Computer Science program’s Game Development Track. He adds that UMBC’s Multicore Computational Center (MC2) and High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) are also moving toward nodes with GPU computing capability and could benefit from the upgrade.  

UMBC is now one of thirty-six NVIDIA CUDA Teaching Center within the U.S., joining schools such as Florida A&M University, Hood College, Purdue University and UCLA. Apart from the generous equipment donation, UMBC’s distinction as a NVIDIA CUDA Teaching Center provides the university with recognition on NVIDIA’s website, access to teaching materials, and the opportunity to receive discounts on some NVIDIA equipment purchases.

Dr. Olano predicts that the newly-enhanced GAIM lab will be usable by the beginning of the Spring semester. The new equipment will enhance game development and parallel programming classes in upcoming semesters, such as CMSC 483: Parallel and Distributed Processing, which will be taught by Dr. Shujia Zhou in the upgraded lab this Spring. 

How to Raise Capital in Maryland

Art Jacoby
Managing Partner, Maryland Cyber Investment Partners

4:00pm Tuesday 27 September 2011

Courtyard Meeting Room
Maryland Clean Energy TechnologyIncubator (CETI)
UMBC Sounth Campus

Capital is the fuel your business needs to drive growth but raising it will be one of the most daunting challenges you will face as a CEO with a promising venture. Since not all capital is created equal so it’s essential to learn what types of capital you need, the right sources to get it from and how to work out a reasonable agreement so that you can succeed. Learn the best practices and whatnot to say so that the check will be “on the table".

• The right type of Capital
• The right source of Capital
• Creating the Capital Raise Plan
• Reasonable Expectations
• Selling it!
• Deal Killers
• … and much more!

Art Jacoby is a Managing Partner of Maryland Cyber Investment Partners which provides business guidance, business connections and growth capital to Cyber Security companies. Art is a well-known Maryland business advisor and investor who has mentored and motivated many small IT business entrepreneurs across the region. He serves on the Board of the Technology Council of Maryland and is active in the Chesapeake Regional Technology Council. Art has advised Maryland DBED on cyber security investment and strategic issues and also is on the Board of Maryland’s IT Political Action Committee. His early career at Dayton Hudson, Carlson Companies and Tonka Toys engaged in Corporate M&A, financial and strategic planning gave him a deep understanding of how great businesses operate. He has spent most of his career helping small IT entrepreneurs develop and execute practical, affordable strategies and tactics to achieve sustainable competitive advantage and earnings growth. Art and MCIP are here to serve Maryland’s IT entrepreneurs.

Sponsors: Whiteford Taylor Preston and Baltimore County

Please RSVP to Dr. Bjorn Frogner,

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.

Joshua Sunday is a Senior majoring in Computer Engineering. He has been doing research in Dr. Slaughter's Bioelectronics Laboratory since last Spring. To learn more about Joshua's research pursuits, read his research profile.

EE Graduate Seminar

Intelligent Agents in the OntoAgent Cognitive Architecture

Professor Sergei Nirenburg
Director, Institute for Language and Information Technologies
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

11:30am-12:45pm Friday 30 September 2011, ITE 231

OntoAgent is a constantly evolving cognitive architecture that facilitates development of and experimentation with artificial intelligent agents (ontoagents). Distinguishing characteristics of Ontoagents include the following.

• They model human information processing capabilities by simulating conscious perception and action, which involves reasoning and decision-making;
• They are intended to operate in a hybrid network of human and artificial agents; and
• They incorporate: (a) an ontological world model and a memory (fact repository) of instances of ontological objects, events and properties; (b) OntoSem, a natural language processing module that supports two-way translation between texts (including dialog turns) and their semantic and discourse/pragmatic meanings; (c) a goal- and plan-oriented reasoning module; (d) a decision theory for choosing goals, plans and individual actions that relies on knowledge (beliefs) about self, other agents, the ontological world model, the current world state and memory of past world states and past actions; (e) a capability for verbal, mental and simulated physical action; (f) (optionally) a physiological model, making them what we call double agents with simulated bodies as well as simulated minds and providing an additional channel of perception; and (g) (optionally) personality traits, preferences and psychological states that influence their overtly perceived or subconscious preferences in decision-making.

OntoAgent has so far provided the basis for two proof-of-concept systems:

• Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP) modeling a patient and a tutor to help training in medical diagnostics and treatment; and
• CLinicians ADdvisor (CLAD) assisting clinicians by reducing their cognitive load.

This talk will give a brief introduction to OntoAgent functionalities implemented in MVP and CLAD.

Professor Nirenburg has worked in the areas of cognitive systems, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing (NLP) for over 30 years. His professional interests include developing computational models of human cognitive capabilities and implementing them in hybrid-engine models of societies of human and computer agents; computational studies of meaning in natural languages; and representation and management of knowledge about the world and about language. He is Member of the Intl Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL) and Honorary Editor of Machine Translation (served as Editor-in-Chief in 1987-96). He has been Program Committee Chair for: Machine Translation Summit III (Washington, DC, 1991), the Conference on Applied NLP sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics (Seattle, WA, 2000), and COLING 2004 in Geneva, Switzerland. He served as a director of two NATO-sponsored Advanced Studies Institutes on Language Engineering for Lesser-Studied Languages (Ankara, Turkey, 2000 and Batumi, Georgia, 2007).

Host: Professor Joel Morris

The Computing Community Consortium has a new web site for undergraduates in computing fields hoping to learn more about doing research, summer research opportunities, and the process for applying to graduate school. The website contains:

• A section on what graduate school in computer science is all about, including frequently asked questions with answers by current graduate students and faculty
• Information, advice, and insights on how to apply to graduate school in computer science including a FAQ by students who have just been through the process as well as faculty
• A set of pages with information on undergraduate research and summer research positions nationwide.

It's a good resource if you want to get involved in research and/or considering going on to graduate school. If you are interested in grad school and graduating this Spring, now is the time to start thinking about it. A way to start is by talking with your adviser.