Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

FSO-MANETs: Free-Space-Optical Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Dr. Murat Yuksel
Computer Science and Engineering
University of Nevada, Reno

1:00pm Monday 27 February 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

The recent proliferation of wireless technologies and choices available to user applications has triggered a tremendous wireless demand, and wireless nodes are expected to dominate the Internet soon. Reports show that usage of mobile Web and WiFi by smartphones is increasing sharply, with more than 80% of their data consumption landing on WiFi points, and this statistic does not even include a major smartphone brand, the iPhone. Accommodating this exploding wireless demand with cellular capacity does not seem possible in the long run. As the radio spectrum (RF) spectrum is getting scarcer and saturated by recent innovations in attaining high spectral efficiency gains such as hierarchical cooperative MIMO, we urgently need innovations that will enable leveraging of new wireless spectrums and substrates in order to respond to the exploding mobile wireless traffic demand. Further, the capacity gap between RF wireless and optical fiber backbone speeds will remain huge because of the limited availability of RF spectrum. Enabling optical spectrum in wireless communications is the needed revolution for ultra-high-speed mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) of the future.

In this talk, I will present our work on exploring the potential for free-space-optics (FSO), a.k.a. optical wireless, in the context of very-high-speed mobile ad-hoc and opportunistic networking. We introduce basic building blocks for MANETs using FSO and present initial prototypes for multi-hop FSO building blocks and protocols operating under mobility. 3-D spherical structures covered with inexpensive FSO transceivers (e.g., LED/VCSEL and photo-detector pair) solve issues relevant to mobility and line-of-sight (LOS) management via availability of several transceivers per node. Such structures facilitate electronic LOS tracking (i.e., “electronic steering”) methods instead of traditional mechanical steering techniques used in FSO communications. By abstracting FSO directionality and LOS characteristics, our work also explores issues relating to routing and localization, and develops layer 3 protocols. FSO has been used at high-altitude communications, and this research enables FSO communications at lower-altitudes and in ad-hoc settings with redundancy of cheap optoelectronic components. This research also contributes to the new application of using solid-state lighting technology due to potential integration of illumination and communication functions in the same devices. Please refer to our project website for further information.

Murat Yuksel is an Assistant Professor at the CSE Department of The University of Nevada – Reno (UNR), Reno, NV. He was with the ECSE Department of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, NY as a Postdoctoral Research Associate and a member of Adjunct Faculty until 2006. He received a B.S. degree from the Computer Engineering Department of Ege University, Izmir, Turkey in 1996. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Computer Science Department of RPI in 1999 and 2002 respectively. His research interests are in the area of computer communication networks with a focus on protocol design, network economics, wireless routing, free-space-optical mobile ad-hoc networks (FSO-MANETs), and peer-to-peer. He is a senior member of IEEE, life member of ACM, and a member of Sigma Xi and ASEE.

Host: Anupam Joshi

Engineering Week IEEE Student Branch Seminar
in conjunction with CSEE Graduate Seminar

Brain-Computer Interface Technologies
in the Coming Decades (with Demonstration)

Dr. Kaleb McDowell
Translational Neuroscience Branch Chief
Army Research Laboratory

11:30-12:30 Friday, 24 February 2012, ITE 227, UMBC

As the proliferation of technology dramatically infiltrates all aspects of modern life, in many ways the world is becoming so dynamic and complex that technological capabilities are overwhelming human capabilities to optimally interact with and leverage those technologies. Fortunately, these technological advancements have also driven an explosion of neuroscience research over the past several decades, presenting engineers with a remarkable opportunity to design and develop flexible and adaptive brain-based neurotechnologies that integrate with and capitalize on human capabilities and limitations to improve human-system interactions. Major forerunners of this conception are brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which to this point have been largely focused on improving the quality of life for particular clinical populations and include, for example, applications for advanced communications with paralyzed or "locked-in" patients as well as the direct control of prostheses and wheelchairs. Near-term applications are envisioned that are primarily task-oriented and are targeted to avoid the most difficult obstacles to development. In the farther term, a holistic approach to BCIs will enable a broad range of task-oriented and opportunistic applications by leveraging pervasive technologies and advanced analytical approaches to sense and merge critical brain, behavioral, task, and environmental information. Communications and other applications that are envisioned to be broadly impacted by BCIs are highlighted; however, these represent just a small sample of the potential of these technologies.

Kaleb McDowell (M'08-SM'11) was born in Frederick, MD, USA on July 10, 1970. He has a B.S in operations research and industrial engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA in 1992, an M.S. in kinesiology from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA in 2000, and a Ph.D. in neuroscience and cognitive science from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA in 2003.

He is currently the Chief of the Translational Neuroscience Branch and Chair of the Neuroscience Strategic Research Area at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, USA. Since joining ARL as a Research Psychologist in 2003, he has contributed to over 30 reviewed publications, and has led several major research and development programs focused on neuroscience, indirect vision systems and vehicle mobility. His current research interest focuses on translating basic neuroscience into applications for use by healthy populations in everyday, real-world environments.

Dr. McDowell received Department of Army Research and Development Achievement awards for technical excellence in 2007 and 2009 and the ARL Award for Leadership in 2011.

Host: IEEE UG and Grad Student Branches (cookies drinks available 11:15am)

Exploring the Web, Beyond Document Search

Professor Yi Chen
Computer Science, Arizona State University

1:00pm Friday 24 February 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

Today we rely on Web Search Engines, like Google or Bing, to find relevant documents among trillions or quadrillions of documents on the Web. The Web also contains a vast amount of structured data in a variety of domains, such as travel, products, bibliographies, finance, and social networks. Current Web search engines and web database query interfaces are insufficient to satisfy the diverse search needs of web users. The information discovery processes are further complicated by the prevalence of uncertain data. At the same time, it is infeasible to request a web user to design clean databases and write precise SQL queries. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges, opportunities, and then some of the solutions that we have developed for empowering web users for effective information search on structured data. Furthermore, I will discuss how to enable successful social search so that complex computation tasks can be accomplished by leveraging social computing.

Yi Chen is an Associate Professor in Computer Science and an affiliate faculty in Biomedical Informatics at Arizona State University (ASU). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.S. from Central South University in 2005 and 1999, respectively. Her research interests include keyword search on structured data, learning uncertain data, workflow management and social computing, with applications in Web, social computing and healthcare. She is a general chair for SIGMOD'2012, a PC chair for KEYS’2009 and DBRank’2012. Yi Chen is a recipient of Outstanding Researcher Award in ASU CSE (2011), a Google Research Award (2011), IBM Faculty Award (2010) and an NSF CAREER Award (2009).

Host: Anupam Joshi

EE Graduate Seminar

Physical Layer Wireless Network Modeling and Simulation
and my Technical Publishing Experience

Jon R. Ward
EE PhD Student, UMBC and
the Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory

11:30 – 12:45, Friday, 17 February 2012, ITE 237

Jon Ward, and coauthors Jack Burbank and Bill Kasch, recently wrote a book for IEEE Press/Wiley entitled "An Introduction to Network Modeling and Simulation for the Practicing Engineer." In this talk, Jon will provide a biographical summary of his UMBC research, the path that led to the book, and the technical publishing process. The talk will then transition to a technical discussion that highlights physical layer wireless network modeling and simulation from Chapter 3 of the book.

Jon R. Ward, PE graduated from NCSU in 2005 with an MSEE. He currently works at The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) on projects focusing on wireless network design and interference testing of standards-based wireless technologies such as IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15.4, and IEEE 802.16. He has experience in wireless network modeling and simulation (M&S) and in test and evaluation (T&E) of commercial wireless equipment. He is currently a student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), pursuing a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

A Scalable, Fault Tolerant Programming Model for
Developing Data Intensive Parallel Applications

Tyler A. Simon
Faculty Research Scientist
UMBC Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research

1:00pm Friday 17 February 2012, ITE 325b

Future exascale computing systems will have to execute a single program on the order of 10^8-10^9 individual, low powered processing elements. These processors need to be fed data efficiently and reliably through the duration of a parallel computation. The current methods for explicit message passing between processors provide little in terms of fault tolerance support and the overheads of system level and application checkpoint/restart incur unreasonable overheads for exascale class computing systems.

We propose the development of novel autonomic execution model and an Adaptive Runtime Resource for Intensive Applications (RRIA), which improves application reliability, scalability and performance while freeing the programmer from explicit message passing. Experiments were conducted to evaluate ARRIA's capabilities on data intensive applications, those where the majority of execution time is spent reading and writing either to local or remote memory locations. In our approach, we focus on managing data movement both on a compute node and across a cluster of nodes for the application during runtime. We use a hybrid "threaded data parallel" model in which message passing is hidden entirely from the programmer and parallel tasks are bundled and farmed to a dynamic resource pool for execution.

Tyler Simon is a Faculty Research Assistant and PhD student working for the Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He is also a computational scientist at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard Space Flight Center. Tyler is interested in the theoretical and practical aspects of concurrency and parallel computation in general. His research is focused on what can be done with the effective application of distributed, parallel algorithms in high performance computing environments, particularly in parallel numerical methods and data movement.

Host: Yelena Yesha

A Self-Powered In-Vitro Biosensing Microsystem

Dr. Gymama Slaughter

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

11:30am-12:45pm Friday, 10 February 2012, ITE 237

Recent studies on biofuel cells have shown that energy can be harvested from biological compounds. Because of the recent biofuel cell discoveries, it possible to use inertial power scavenging design by converting interstitial glucose into energy through the coupling of enzymes and three-dimensional nanowire arrays. This talk will discuss our own contribution to identifying a pathway to embed sensing by eliminating the need for a potentiostat circuit and an external power source.

The self-powered biosensing microsystem consist of massively dense 3D nanowire cell structures fused with an energy harvesting circuit that maximizes power and energy densities while maintaining short ion transport distances, thus leading to dramatic improvement in both speed and energy efficiency of biofuel cells. Not only is such a paradigm extremely fast because of absence of a potentiostat circuit, but it is also extremely energy-efficient since the device operates at low voltage and current levels. As a result, the biosensing microsystem generates a drive signal in real-time and periodically powers an electrical device by generating and accumulating electrical power as a result of the catalysis of glucose.

Gymama Slaughter received her B.S. in Chemistry in 2001, M.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2003, and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the Virginia Commonwealth University in 2005. She then joined Virginia State University as an Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering and Director of the Center for Biosystems and Engineering University. Finally, she joined the UMBC as Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering in August 2010.

Dr. Slaughter is currently the Director of the Bioelectronics Laboratory Group and oversees research and research outreach programs in the BEL Group. She develops and applies sensor-processor platforms, focusing on innovative contributions to identifying a pathway to embed sensing and processing functions in the same device to eliminate bottlenecks arising from communication between the sensor, transducer, and processor, thus, resulting in ultra-fast and ultra-low power devices.

Her research has been supported by the NSF for her diabetes research that focuses on the design and development of glucose biosensor, especially in relationship to monitoring blood glucose in diabetics. Her research interests include biosensors, microsensors, microfabrication technology, and BioMEMS and design.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

Innovating for Society: Realizing the
Promise and Potential of Computing

Dr. Farnam Jahanian

Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
National Science Foundation

10:30am Thursday, 9 February 2012, ITE 456, UMBC

The computing discipline is at the center of an ongoing societal transformation. The explosive growth of scientific and social data, wireless connectivity at broadband speeds for billions of mobile endpoints, and seamless access to computational resources in the “cloud” are transforming the way we work, learn, play, and communicate. Advances in computation and data-enabled techniques will continue to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and engineering innovation, with the impact becoming more pervasive throughout society for decades to come.  Dr. Jahanian will focus his talk on some of the technological and societal trends that are shaping our future and providing new opportunities for foundational research and education. He will describe how these advances influence the portfolio of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at NSF and, therefore, also serve as key drivers of economic competitiveness and are crucial to achieving national priorities.

Farnam Jahanian serves as the National Science Foundation Assistant Director for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. He guides CISE, with a budget of over $635 million, in its mission to uphold the nation’s leadership in computer and information science and engineering through support of fundamental and transformative advances that are a key driver of economic competitiveness and that are crucial to achieving national priorities. Dr. Jahanian is also co-chair of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council Committee on Technology, providing overall coordination for the activities of 15 government agencies.

Dr. Jahanian is on leave from the University of Michigan, where he holds the Edward S. Davidson Collegiate Professorship and served as Chair for Computer Science and Engineering from 2007 – 2011 and as Director of the Software Systems Laboratory from 1997 – 2000. His research on Internet infrastructure security formed the basis for the Internet security company Arbor Networks, which he co-founded in 2001. He served as Chairman of Arbor Networks until its acquisition by Tektronix Communication in 2010. Dr. Jahanian holds a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Host: Prof. Anupam Joshi

CSEE Colloquium

An Integrated Machine Learning Framework for Analyzing Protein-Ligand Interaction Data

Dr. Huzefa Rangwala
Assistant Professor, Computer Science & Engineering
George Mason University

1:00 p.m., Friday, February 10, 2012, ITE 325B, UMBC

Proteins have a vast influence on the molecular machinery of life. Stunningly complex networks of proteins perform innumerable functions in every living cell.  Small organic molecules (a.k.a. ligands) can bind to different proteins and modulate (inhibit/activate) their functions. Understanding these interactions provides insight into the underlying biological processes and is useful for designing therapeutic drugs.

In this talk I will describe our work related to the analysis of information associated with proteins and their interacting molecule partners (protein-ligand activity matrix). The underlying hypothesis of our approach is that by extracting information from protein-ligand activity matrix, we are drawing bridges between the structure of chemical compounds (chemical space) and the structure of the proteins and their functions (biological space).  I will present an approach used for mining relational data, especially when the data is sparse and high dimensional. I will also present methods that are based on the principles of multi-task learning and semi-supervised learning.

Huzefa Rangwala is an Assistant Professor at the department of Computer Science & Engineering, George Mason University. He holds affiliate positions with the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Bioinformatics & Computational Biology. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in the year 2008. His core research interests include bioinformatics, machine learning, and high performance computing. Specifically, he is working on developing new data mining algorithms and applying them to the fields of genomics, structural bioinformatics, drug discovery and social media analysis.

Host: Dr. Marie desJardins

UMBC Cyber Defense Lab Research Meeting

Using data visualization techniques to support digital forensics

Tim Leschke

11:00am-12:15pm, Friday, Feb 3, 2012
ITE Room 228

Digital forensic examiners explore large datasets in search of evidence of a crime. In order to keep pace with the growing amount of data that is subject to a forensic examination, digital forensic examiners need to be more selective about the data they examine. One way to be selective about data is to focus attention at data that has changed-over-time. We present Change-Link, a data exploration tool which allows the user to see directories that have changed within an operating system. Our novel contributions are 1) the development of a segmented-box-and-whisker icon for representing change to individual directories, and 2) the first data visualization tool developed specifically for the domain of digital forensic data. We show that by using Change-Link to view change to a directory-tree structure, digital forensic examiners can enhance their ability to perform forensic examinations.

Tim Leschke is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science program at UMBC.

Host: Professor Alan Sherman

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.