The UMBC Linux Users’ Group (LUG) will hold it's Spring Installfest on Friday February 18th from 10:30am to 5:00pm on the Commons Main Street. If you've ever wanted to try Linux but didn't know where to start, bring your computer and LUG members can help you install Linus and ensure that your hardware, including wireless, fingerprint reader, and webcam, is working.

At the Spring 2011 installfest, they will be installing Ubuntu version 10.10. If you would like assistance installing a different release or distribution, bring install media.

The installfest is open to anyone ans people with all skill levels, from complete novice to expert, are welcome. It's a great opportunity to meet people in the local Linux community.

Solitons, Self-Induced Transparency,
and Modelocking in Quantum Cascade Lasers

Professor Curtis Menyuk
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00-2:15pm Friday, 18 March 2011, ITE 227, UMBC

Standard semiconductor lasers operate in a limited wavelength range, below about 4 microns. Quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) that operate in the mid-IR and far-IR have important applications to medicine, environmental sensing, and national security. While short pulse lasers (~100 fs) are available for standard semiconductor lasers, that is not the case for QCLs. Standard passive modelocking is hard to do in QCLs because of their long coherence times and short gain recovery times. We propose a fundamentally different approach, based on the self-induced-transparency (SIT) effect, that turns these weaknesses into strengths. Solitons, modelocking, and SIT are all reviewed at the beginning of the talk.

Curtis R. Menyuk was born March 26, 1954. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from MIT in 1976 and the Ph.D. from UCLA in 1981. He has worked as a research associate at the University of Maryland, College Park and at Science Applications International Corporation in McLean, VA. In 1986 he became an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and he was the founding member of this department. In 1993, he was promoted to Professor. He was on partial leave from UMBC from Fall, 1996 until Fall, 2002. From 1996 – 2001, he worked part-time for the Department of Defense, co-directing the Optical Networking program at the DoD Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences in Adelphi, MD from 1999 – 2001. In 2001 – 2002, he was Chief Scientist at PhotonEx Corporation. For the last 20 years, his primary research area has been theoretical and computational studies of lasers, nonlinear optics, and fiber optic communications. He has authored or co-authored more than 220 archival journal publications as well as numerous other publications and presentations. He has also edited three books. The equations and algorithms that he and his research group at UMBC have developed to model optical fiber systems are used extensively in the telecommunications and photonics industry. He is a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the IEEE. He is a former UMBC Presidential Research Professor.

· directions · talks · events ·

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

A Cognitive Architecture for
Simulating Bodies and Minds

Professor Sergei Nirenburg
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00-2:15pm Friday, 18 February 2011, ITE 227, UMBC

This talk is an overview of a cognitive architecture that supports the creation and deployment of intelligent agents capable of simulating human-like abilities. The agents, have a simulated mind and may also be supplied with a simulated body. These agents are intended to operate as members of multi-agent teams featuring both artificial and human agents. The agent architecture and its underlying knowledge resources and processors are being developed in a sufficiently generic way to support a variety of applications. In this talk we briefly describe the architecture and two proof-of-concept application systems we have developed within it: the Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP) system for training medical personnel and the CLinician’s ADvisor (CLAD).We organize the discussion around four specific aspects of agent capabilities implemented in MVP and CLAD: physiological simulation, knowledge management and learning, decision-making and language processing.

This is joint work with Marjorie McShane and Stephen Beale, with contributions from Jesse English, Ben Johnson, Bryan Wilkinson and Roberta Catizone.

· directions · talks · events ·

The UMBC CSEE Department invites applications for a non-tenure track, full-time lecturer position to teach a variety of undergraduate computer science courses. Both a demonstrated ability to teach such courses and a strong interest in teaching undergraduates are essential. Applicants must have, or be about to receive, an M.S. or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science or a related discipline. Applications should be submitted by 15 March 2011 and the position will start on 23 August 2011.

The UMBC Center for Women and Information Technology (CWIT) will hold the second Bits & Bytes event on February 20-21, 2011 for academically talented young women who are juniors in high school and excel in math and science. This year's event is sponsored by Northrop Grumman and is intended to engage local high school girls in the college atmosphere and expose them to the possibilities open to them in Engineering or IT majors in college.

Along with in-depth exposure to life as a college student and UMBC as an institution, the students will participate in an Engineering or IT design competition and will interact with current college students involved in the CWIT Scholars Program, including staying overnight in a residence hall on campus and attending a college class with one of the CWIT students.

CSEE Professor Hillol Kargupta was named a IEEE Fellow for his contributions to distributed data mining. Dr. Kargupta's research focuses on distributed data mining that explores technology for data analysis in distributed environments where data cannot be centralized because of organizational, performance or privacy reasons.

He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996. He is also a co-founder of AGNIK LLC, a ubiquitous data analytics company. His research interests include mobile and distributed data mining, mining in sensor networks, peer-to-peer data mining, privacy-preserving data mining, vehicular sensor networks.

The IEEE elevates a members to the grade of Fellow for "unusual distinction in the profession" and only for people "with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest". The number of new Fellows in any year is limited to at most one-tenth of one percent of the total membership.

UMBC will host the 2011 FIRST Lego League Maryland State Championship on Saturday February 26 in the UMBC Retriever Activities Center. The UMBC organizers, led by UMBC Mechanical Engineering Professor Anne Spence, need volunteers from the UMBC community to help on the tournament day as well as to help set up in on Friday. If you are interested in helping please register online.

FIRST Lego League (FLL) an international competition for elementary and middle school students that is run by the FIRST organization with support by Lego. FLL teams use Lego Mindstorms kits to build small autonomous robots built with a limited number of sensors and motors that complete to perform predefined challenge given tasks.

"Guided by adult mentors and their own imaginations, FLL students solve real-world engineering challenges, develop important life skills, and learn to make positive contributions to society. FLL provides students age 9-14 with an opportunity to challenge their math and science skills in an internationally recognized competitive environment. FLL combines a hands-on, interactive robotics program with a sports-like atmosphere. Teams of up to 10 players focus on team building, problem solving, creativity, and analytical thinking to develop a well thought out solution to a problem currently facing the world – the Challenge."

Volunteering to help in the Maryland FLL championship is a great way to help engage young people in science and technology and have some fun doing it.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

GPU Computing: Past, Present, and Future

Dr. David Luebke
Director of Research, NVIDIA Corporation

1:00-2:15pm Friday, 4 February 2011, ITE 227

Modern GPUs have outgrown their graphics heritage in many ways to emerge as the world's most successful parallel computing architecture. The GPUs that consumers buy to play video games provide a level of massively parallel computation in a single chip that was once the preserve of supercomputers. The raw computational horsepower of these chips has expanded their reach well beyond graphics. Today's GPUs not only render video game frames, they also accelerate astrophysics, video transcoding, image processing, protein folding, seismic exploration, computational finance, radioastronomy, heart surgery, self-driving cars – the list goes on and on.

When thinking about the future of GPUs it is important to reflect on the past. How did this peripheral grow into a processing powerhouse found everywhere from medical clinics to radiotelescopes to supercomputers? Why the graphics card and not the modem, or the mouse? Have GPUs really outgrown graphics and will they thus evolve into pure HPC processors? (hint: no)

This talk is intended as a sort of "state of the union" for GPU computing. I'll briefly cover the dual heritage of GPUs, both in terms of supercomputing and the evolution of fixed function graphics pipelines. I'll discuss "computational graphics", the evolution of graphics itself into a general-purpose computational problem, and how that impacts GPU design and GPU computing. Finally I'll describe the important problems and research topics facing GPU computing practitioners and researchers.

David Luebke helped found NVIDIA Research in 2006 after eight years on the faculty of the University of Virginia. Luebke received his Ph.D. under Fred Brooks at the University of North Carolina in 1998. His principal research interests are GPU computing and real-time computer graphics. Luebke's honors include the NVIDIA Distinguished Inventor award, the NSF CAREER and DOE Early Career PI awards, and the ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics "Test of Time Award". Dr. Luebke has co-authored a book, a SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater piece, a major museum exhibit visited by over 110,000 people, and dozens of papers, articles, chapters, and patents.

Huguens Jean, '03, '11, Ph.D., electrical engineering, and Clifford Muse '11, information systems, returned to Haiti in March 2010, after the devastating January earthquake, to fulfill their grandfather's last request of them. As he was dying of cancer, he asked that at his funeral they celebrate his life and "find the joy." "I had no idea what that meant until we encountered these people in Haiti," said Jean, "These images of life continuing on."

The brothers missed their grandfather's funeral when the earthquake made travel to Port-au-Prince impossible, but they resolved to find a way to honor his memory. The new documentary film Lift Up," co-directed by Jean and UMBC alumnus Philip Knowlton, records their journey back home.

The film will be screened at 8:00pm this on Thursday January 27 in the UMBC Commons Skylight room. Admission is free.

Work by Professor Hillol Kargupta and his students and colleagues was recognize as one of the top ten data mining case studies at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. The case study submission cited was described in

Hillol Kargupta, Kakali Sarkar, Michael Gilligan, Parag Namjoshi, Sai Subhash Paruchuru, Thiraphat Pongsudhiraks, and Robert Gilligan, "MineFleet, A Distributed Vehicle Performance Data Stream Mining System"

The MineFleet software was designed for commercial fleet owners and fleet management companies who want the power of advanced predictive vehicle data mining for dramatically reducing the operating costs. It uses powerful data stream mining algorithms for modeling, benchmarking, and monitoring of vehicle health, emissions, driver behavior, fuel-consumption, and fleet characteristics. Work on Minefleet was done at UMBC and Agnik, a a data analytics company for distributed, mobile, and embedded environments based in Columbia MD. You can read more about the Minefleet system here.