Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

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.

The Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST) will sponsor 20 undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds and cultures, to participate in the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience located at TRUST partner campuses: UC Berkeley, Cornell University, Stanford University, Vanderbilt University. These students will work with graduate student and faculty mentors throughout the summer performing research and supporting activities in the area of information technology and TRUST related topics. The program will run from June 3 to July 27, 2012 and provide room and board, a travel allowance and a $4,000 stipend. Apply by February 17. See the flyer for more information and the Trust REU site for details and to apply.

DARPA has announce another research-relevant competition: the $50,000 Shredder Challenge which invites teams to try to reconstruct virtual shredded documents.

"Today’s troops often confiscate the remnants of destroyed documents in war zones, but reconstructing them is a daunting task. DARPA’s Shredder Challenge calls upon computer scientists, puzzle enthusiasts and anyone else who likes solving complex problems to compete for up to $50,000 by piecing together a series of shredded documents.

The goal is to identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used by our warfighters operating in war zones, but might also create vulnerabilities to sensitive information that is protected through our own shredding practices throughout the U.S. national security community. …

The Shredder Challenge is comprised of five separate puzzles in which the number of documents, the document subject matter and the method of shredding will be varied to present challenges of increasing difficulty. To complete each problem, participants must provide the answer to a puzzle embedded in the content of the reconstructed document."

You can download the puzzles, register a team and submit solutions online as well as view the current top teams. The prizewinner and prize awarded will depend on the number and difficulty of the problems solved. DARPA will a winner in the week of December 5, 2011 once final results are calculated.

Google is sponsoring another AI Challenge Competition run by an independent group of volunteers that grew out of the Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo. The competition opens today and invites submissions of programs designed to control ants a simulated colony in competition with other colonies.

Ants is a multi-player strategy game set on a plot of dirt with water for obstacles and food that randomly drops. Each player has one or more hills where ants will spawn. The objective is for players to seek and destroy the most enemy ant hills while defending their own hills. Players must also gather food to spawn more ants, however, if all of a player's hills are destroyed they can't spawn any more ants.

The objective is to create a computer program (a bot) that plays the game of Ants as intelligently as possible. It is recommended that you use one of the starter packages as a starting point. If you are looking to get up and running as quickly as possible, check out the Five Minute Quickstart Guide. For more details about Ants beyond this introductory document, see the Game Specification.

The site has documentation, a tutorial and starter packages for windows and Linux in a variety of programming languages. Each package contains a simple working entry to use as a starting point, tools that allow you to run your bot and watch it play graphically, sample opponents that you can test your bot against, and maps you can use for testing. Once you've developed your bot, you can enter it at the website and watch your ant colony fight for domination against colonies created by other people from around the world.

The behavior of ants is a classic example of how the local interactions among individuals in a collection can give rise to interesting emergent behavior. This concept is important in the study of complex systems and was the subject of a recent special topics course taught by Professor Marie desJardins, Computation, Complexity, and Emergence.

This year, October 7 has been designated as Ada Lovelace Day, a day to honor Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. She is widely regarded as the first computer programmer for her work with Charles Babbage who developed an early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.

ReadWriteWeb commemorated the day with a story on the Women Who Made Google Plus and profiled twenty-two of the  Googlers:

"Launched on June 28th and just opened to the public at large late last month, Google Plus is a feature-rich social network with variable privacy and sharing settings at the core of its experience. Who were the women involved in building such a big, important technology? We asked, on Google Plus, and were told about twenty two of them profiled below. They are an incredibly accomplished group of people and a great source of inspiration for young women interested in science and technology – or for anyone else who could use some powerful role models. You should share this list of women with the girls in your life, though, that's what Ada Lovelace Day is all about."

You can visit their public G+ profiles and see more about who they are and what they do. The article points out that the 22 profiled are just some of the women who helped to build and launch this new and successful application.  

Many former UMBC students work at Google or have done internships there.  If you are interested in either, you can explore the opportunities at Google's pages for internships and jobs.

If you are interested in machne learning you might check out the  American Meteorological Society  Wind Power Prediction Contest.  It is sponsored by the AMS Committee on AI Applications to Environmental Science, Energy, and Probability and Statistics.  The goal is to compare various statistical learning techniques to predict wind power production. This contest considers a wind farm consisting of 53 turbines located in northern Colorado. The objective is to forecast the wind power for the wind farm (sum of the power from the 53 turbines). The inputs are forecast variables from several Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models, both from the National Center for Environmental Prediction and NCAR's high resolution WRF forecast. Training data are currently available on the download site, and the test data will be available in November.

The contest consists of two parts: (1) a day-ahead forecasting contest and (2) a short-term (one-, two-, and three-hour) contest. Participants are welcome to enter either or both parts of the contests. The AMS welcome entries from professionals to students, but registration is required by November 15. Entrants names will be kept blind – they must register an abstract to present a poster at AMS, then winners will be notified of an invitation to present a talk at the January AMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta. The AMS expects to solicit prize money, which will be announced on the website at a later time.

Do you know the right programming languages? Depending on your objective, the most important one to know might be Java, Python, PhP, C, or even Haskell.

IEEE Spectrum has a short article on The Top 10 Programming Languages that is based on data from David Welton's Programming Languages Popularity site which "attempts to collect a variety of data about the relative popularity of programming languages"

Got Linux? If you've ever wanted to try Linux but didn't know where to start, bring your computer to the Linux Installfest this Friday.

The UMBC Linux Users Group will hold a Linux Install Fest from 10:30am to 4:30pm on Friday 7 October on Main Street in the Commons. Experts from the Linux Users Group will help you install a free copy of Linux on your computer as a multi-boot operating system on your computer. They can help you to ensure that your hardware, including wireless, fingerprint reader, and webcam, is working. At the Fall 2011 installfest, they will be installing Ubuntu version 11.04. If you would like assistance installing a different release or distribution, bring install media.

If you are bringing a laptop, bring the AC adapter or charger. If you are bringing a desktop, then bring power cables, a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, too. If you will be dual-booting with Windows, please defragment your C: drive before attending the installfest. This increases the maximum size of your Linux partition. Finally, back up your data. The LUG will make all attempts to keep your data intact, but there's always the slim chance that something will go wrong.  See the LUG site for more information.

The UMBC ACM Student Chapter is co-hosting Interdisciplinary Engineering Panel Night at 7:00pm on Thursday 6 October 201 in the Commons Skylight Lounge. This free event is open to both undergraduate and graduate students in all engineering disciplines. Students have a chance to hear the perspective of professionals from industry, socializing and expanding their network. The event is co-sponsored with mechanical engineering (ASME), chemical engineering (AIChE), Device and the National Society of Black Engineers. Hors d’oeuvres will be served. Business casual dress suggested.

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.