January 1997

• David Ebert David S. Ebert spoke on "Procedural Techniques for Realistic Computer Graphics" and signed the book Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach.(AP Professional) at Computer Literacy Bookstore in Virginia on January 11, 1997.

• David S. Ebert has been selected as Late Breaking Hot Topics Co-Chair for IEEE Visualization '97, October 1997.

• Aaron Roberts (NASA), David Ebert , M. Goldstein (NASA), Lloyd Treinish (IBM), and Dan Spicer (NASA) received a grant of $541,300 from the NASA AISRP program for a 3 year project entitled "Desktop Sterescopic Visualization and Analysis of Multi-Dimensional Data Sets."

• Tim Finin, James Mayfield and Russell Turner have received an award of $160K over 30 months as part of a DARPA-sponsored research project aimed at creating an environment for better software engineering. The project -- EVOLVER: A Capability Package Supporting Evolutionary Views of Lifecycle Versions Elements and Rationales -- is led by Lockheed Martin Tactical Defense Systems and also includes WPL Laboratories and Knowledge Evolution Inc. (KEI).

December 1996

November 1996

• Ethan Miller has been elected to the IEEE Mass Storage Systems TC Executive Committee.

• Dr. David Ebert and Dr. Charles Nicholas organized a workshop on New Paradigms in Information Visualization and Manipulation in Rockville on November 16. The workshop is being held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'99), November 12 - 16, 1996. It will provide a forum for presentation and discussion of new ideas and techniques for accessing, visualizing and manipulating information. UMBC CSEE Professor David Ebert will present

  • "Volume Visualization for Document Corpus Management", Dr. David Ebert.
  UMBC CSEE graduate student Amen Zwa will present

  • "Mutiresolution Document Analysis with Wavelets", Amen Zwa, David Ebert, Ethan Miller.

October 1996

• Ebert, D., Shaw, C., Zwa, A., and Starr, C. "Two-handed Interactive Stereoscopic Visualization," presented at IEEE Visualization '96 October 31, 1996.

• Ebert, D., Shaw, C., Zwa, A., Miller, E., and Roberts, D. A. Minimally-immersive Volumetric Information Visualization," presented at IEEE Information Visualization '96 October 28, 1996.

• Ph.D. student Mike Grasso has received a phase II small business innovation research grant award from the National Institutes of Health. The grant will provide $750K over the next two to three years to complete a speech-driven animal drug toxcology system. Data entry has become the bottleneck of many scientific applications designed to collect and manage information related to experimental studies. In animal drug toxicology studies, this is true because of the many hands-busy and eyes-busy constraints during animal handling, necropsy, and microscopic exams. The objective of this study is to design a voice-driven computer system to support the hands-free and eyes-free collection of data related to animal drug toxicology studies. This type of automation at the source of data collection could be used to greatly reduce the data validation costs associated with bringing new drugs to market.

• Tim Finin, Panelist, "Technologies and Tools", The First Annual Conference on Leveraging Cyberspace, October 8 and 9, 1996, XEROX Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Palo Alto, California.

September 1996

• Tim Finin, panelist "When an agent gets here, what can it do?", Dartmouth Workshop on Transportable Agents, September 27-28, 1996. Dartmouth College, Hanover NH.

• Ethan L. Miller, "Towards Scalable Benchmarks for Mass Storage Systems," Fifth NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies, College Park, MD, September 1996.

• Timothy J. Gibson and Ethan L. Miller "The Case for Personal Computers as Workstations," to appear in the Computer Measurement Group Conference, San Diego, CA, December, 1996.

• Ethan L. Miller and Randy H. Katz, "RAMA: An Easy-To-Use, High-Performance Parallel File System," to appear in Parallel Computing.

• Tulay Adali presented the paper ``Channel equalization using partial likelihood estimation and recurrent canonical piecewise-linear neural network,'' co-authored by Xiao Liu at the 1996 European Conf. on Signal Processing, Trieste, Italy, 10-13 September, 1996.

• Tulay Adali presented the paper ``Radiation dose optimization in computed radiography by shape analysis and wavelet analysis,'' co-authored by Jason Xuan, Yue Wang, and Eliot Siegel, at the 1996 European Conf. on Signal Processing, Trieste, Italy, 10-13 September, 1996.

July 1996

• David S. Ebert has been selected as Sketches Chair for ACM SIGGRAPH 97, 3-8 August 1997,Los Angeles, California.

• David S. Ebert, Chris D. Shaw, Amen Zwa , and Cindy Starr, "Two-handed Interactive Stereoscopic Visualization," to appear in Proceedings IEEE Visualization '96, October 1996.

• David S. Ebert will teach (and chair) SIGGRAPH 96 Course 10: Procedural Modeling and Animation Techniques, Monday August 5, 1996, New Orleans, LA with John Hart, Ken Musgrave, Ken Perlin, Karl Sims, and Brian Wyvill.

June 1996

• Ethan Miller presented the talk "RAMA: An Easy-to-Use Scalable High Performance Parallel File System" at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM.

• David S. Ebert, Chris D. Shaw, Amen Zwa, Ethan L. Miller, and D. Aaron Roberts, "Minimally-immersive Interactive Volumetric Information Visualization," to appear in Proceedings IEEE Information Visualization '96, October 1996.

• David S. Ebert has been selected as Late Breaking Hot Topics Chair for IEEE Visualization '96, October 1996.

• Tulay Adali presented the tutorial on statistics and neural networks at the National Polytechical Institute of France in Toulouse, June 20, 1996.

• Tulay Adali presented two papers, one on equalization by canonical piecewise linear networks and one on partial likelihood, both co-authored by Xiao Liu at the Bayona Workshop in Bayona-Vigo, Spain, June 24-26, 1996.

May 1996

• David S. Ebert presented the talk "Volumetric Procedural Modeling and Realistic Visualization" at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH.

• David S. Ebert presented the talk "Volumetric Procedural Modeling and Realistic Visualization" at Clemson University, Clemson, S.C.

• At the IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust., Speech, Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Atlanta, Georgia, 6-10 May 1996, Tulay Adali presented the paper ``Partial likelihood estimation for real-time signal processing,'' co-authored by Xiao Liu and M. K. Sonmez, Yue Wang presented the paper, ``Efficient learning of finite normal mixtures for image quantification,'' co-authored by Tulay Adali, and Jason Xuan presented the paper ``Information geometry of maximum partial likelihood estimation for estimation for channel equalization,'' co-authored by Tulay Adali and Xiao Liu. The papers appeared in the conference proceedings.

• Jason Xuan presented the invited paper, ``Task-specific segmentation for remote sensing images,'' co-authored by Tulay Adali at the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium in Lincoln, Nebraska, May 1996, and co-chaired the image segmentation session.

April 1996

• On April 19, Alan T. Sherman will present the guest lecture at the induction ceremony of the Sigma Xi honary society at Villanova University in Pennslyvania. The subject of his talk will be Electronic Money.

March 1996

• David S. Ebert presented "Realistic Interactive Information Visualization," at the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis (AIPA96) Symposium Proceedings, March 26-28, 1996.

• On March 21,Enrico Gobbetti was invited at Microsoft Research in Seattle to give a talk on "Building Integrated Environments for the Visual Construction of 3D Animation".

• Russell Turner, Enrico Gobbetti, Ian Soboroff Head-Tracked Stereo Viewing with Two-Handed 3D Interaction for Animated Character Construction. To appear in Proc. EUROGRAPHICS, Futuroscope, France, August 1996.

• Enrico Gobbetti, Andrea O. Leone Virtual Sardinia: a Large-Scale Hypermedia Regional Information System. To appear in Proc. Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, Paris, France, May 1996.

• On March 8, Alan T. Sherman hosted a visit by Professor Mark Glickman (inventor of the Glicko chess rating system), who gave a seminar talk on chess rating systems.

February 1996

• David S. Ebert presented "Volumetric Procedural Modeling and Realistic Visualization," at the ONR Workshop on Volume Visualization, Phoenix, AZ, February 14-16, 1996.

• Enrico Gobbetti, Russell Turner Exploring Annotated 3D Environments on the World-Wide Web. To appear in Mayfield J, Nicholas C (Eds) Advances in Hypertext, Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series.

• Rite Aid to endow scholarships for UMBC Computer Science Students

• Donald McKay, Jon Pastor, Rbon McEntire and Tim Finin, An architecture for information agents, in "Advanced Planning Technology", (ed. Tate,A.), The AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA., USA, May 1996, ISBN 0-929280-98-0.

• Alan T. Sherman organized a Cryptography Workshop ``Applying crypography to electronic commerce'' at the 1996 ACM Computer Science Conference (February 17, 1996, Philadelphia).

January 1996

• Enrico Gobbetti and Charles Nicholas developed a new special topics course 691j: Object-Oriented Technology, which in spring 1996 is focusing on the construction of correct, reusable, and efficient software through a systematic application of design by contract.

• Alan T. Sherman developed a new special topics course 691g: Internet Security, which in spring 1996 is focusing on applying cryptography in electronic commerce.

• As an experiment in distance education, Alan T. Sherman continues to orchestrate the Master Preparation chess course, which is made avilable to people throughout the world via the internet. Lectures by Grandmaster Ilya G. Smirin are broadcast over the MBone multicast digital video system, course materials are made available through the WWW, discussions and announcements take place via email, and weekly internet office hours are held every Friday afternoon on the Internet Chess Club using a graphical chess interface.

December 1995

• Enrico Gobbetti, Andrea O. Leone, Alberto Marini. Virtual Sardinia: a Hypermedia Fly-through with Real Data. In Binaghi E, Brivio PA, Rampini A (Eds) Proceedings of the International Workshop on Soft Computing in Remote Sensing Data Analysis, Milan, Italy. World Scientific, Singapore: 253-260.

• Jean-Francis Balaguer, Enrico Gobbetti I3D: A High Speed 3D Web Browser. Proceedings First Annual Symposium on the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML'95), San Diego, CA, USA.

• The UMBC Chess Team placed fourth at the 1995 Pan-American Intercollegiate Championship , held December 26-29, in New York City. The team finished ahead of Havard, Chicago, Upenn, and many other strong schools. Alan T. Sherman is Faculty Advisor of the UMBC Chess Club. Story.

• Yun Peng has presented a paper entitled "Relaxing Backpropagation Networks as Associative Memories" at IEEE International Conference on Neural Networks, Perth, Australia, Nov. 27 - Dec. 1, 1995. The paper is co-authored by Yun Peng, Zonglin Zhou, and Erik McLenney.

• Tim Finin and James Mayfield have organized a two day workshop on Intelligent Information Agents held at the Omni Inner Harbor Hotel, in Baltimore, Maryland in Decmber 1 and 2. UMBC authors were well represented by four papers:

  • An Approach to Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Using Statistical Properties of Text to Guide Agent Search. Grace Crowder & Charles Nicholas
  • The Cycic Friends Network: Getting Cyc agents to reason together. James Mayfield, Tim Finin, Rajkumar Narayanaswamy & Chetan Shah and William MacCartney & Keith Goolsbey(Cycorp., Austin, TX.).
  • Secret Agents -- a Security Architecture for KQML. Chelliah Thirunavukkarasu, Tim Finin & James Mayfield .
  • On Agent Domains, Agent Names and Proxy Agents. Tim Finin, Chelliah Thirunavukkarasu & Anupama Potluri and Don McKay & Robin McEntire (Loral).

• Dr. Russell Turner and Dr. Charles Nicholas have organized a workshop on New Paradigms in Information Visualization and Manipulation in Baltimore on December 2. The workshop is being held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'95), November 28 - December 2, 1995. It will provide a forum for presentation and discussion of new ideas and techniques for accessing, visualizing and manipulating information. UMBC CSEE Professor David Ebert will present

  • "Realistic Interactive Visualization and Perceptual Cues for Information Visualization", Dr. David Ebert.

November 1995

• A recent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education, ON THE INTERNET - College Chess Club Offers Lessons With New Technologies, describes how UMBC is using Internet technology to offer a special course on master preparation in chess from Grandmaster Ilya Smirin, a UMBC sophomore majoring in computer science.

• Personal Web Search Application Developed , Newsbytes News Network story, November 13, 1995, By Martyn Williams.

• A number of UMBC CSEE faculty members have played a leading role in organizing the 1995 ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'95), lead by Dr. Charles Nicholas who is serving as the general chair of the conference. CIKM provides an international forum for presentation and discussion of research on information and knowledge management, as well as recent advances on data and knowledge bases. The 1995 conference will be held at the Omni Inner Harbor Hotel, in Baltimore, Maryland from November 29 through December 2.

• UMBC checkmates MIT.

• Professor James Mayfield and undergraduate CSEE major Justin Sun presented their paper Searching the World-Wide Web Using Signature Files at the AAAI '95 Fall Symposium Artificial Intelligence Applications in Knowledge Navigation and Retrieval held in Cambridge, November 10-12, 1995.

• PhD student R. Scott Cost served as a session respondant at the AAAI '95 Fall Symposium on Rational Agents held in Cambridge, November 10-12, 1995.

• Yannis K. Labrou, a PhD student in CSEE, was invited to give a one hour talk at the Intelligent Agents Workshop held as part of CASCON'95 on November 8th in Toronto, Canada. CASCON'95 is the fifth annual conference sponsored by the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies. It provides a forum in which government, academia and industry can discuss the technical challenges that face the software industry and be exposed to important new ideas and technologies in a workshop setting. Labrou will talk about his dissertation research done in the CSEE Laboratory for Advanced Information Technology.

• Tim Finin is giving an invited talk on November 7th at the Tools with Artificial Intelligence Conference entitled "Agent Communication Languages".

October 1995

• Tim Finin is serving on the program committee of the "Third International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages" (ATAL-96), to be held in Budapest during August, 1996.

• The 6th Maryland Workshop on Very High Speed Networks will be held Oct. 30-31 on the UMBC campus.

• On Saturday, October 21 (11:30am -4:00pm) UMBC Image-Processing Day will feature a lecture, luncheon, and laboratory open houses. This special one-day event is being held with the cooperation of the MIT Club of Washington.

• Tim Finin is giving an invited talks at the University of North Carolina Charlotte on October 31 and on October 16 at the Naval Research Laboratory as part of a seminar series run by the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence. Finin will talk on KQML and the Knowledge Sharing Approach to Building Intelligent Information Agents.

September 1995

• The UMBC Laboratory for Advanced Information Technology (LAIT) has been established as an interdisciplinary research group focused on advanced database and knowledge-based systems, intelligent agents, text and natural language processing, intelligent interfaces, information retrieval and hypertext systems, machine learning, and artificial life. Application areas include electronic commerce, healthcare information systems and electronic publishing. It includes faculty and students from the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering as well as the Information Systems Department and Department of Geography.

• Ray Cromwell a UMBC undergraduate majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics has discovered a serious new flaw in a number of world-wide web browsers, including the popular Netscape and Mosaic programs. This has raised new concerns for the privacy and safety of information on the global computer network. Cromwell discovered that the popular Netscape Navigator program and several other web browsers contains a "buffer overflow" bug which allows arbitrary commands to be executed on the client computer (the one running Navigator) given knowledge of the client's machine language. MORE.

• Dr. Teresa Przytycka (przytyck@cs.umbc.edu) has joined the CSEE Department as a visiting scholar for the 1995-96 academic year. Dr. Przytycka is currently on the faculty of Odense University, Denmark. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia in 1990 where she did fundamental work on algorithms for parallel computation. Her current research interests include computational biology, graph theory and the design and analysis of parallel, distributed, and sequential algorithms.

• National Research Council Ranks Research Programs -- UMBC Computer Science Program Noted for dramatic improvement. MORE.

• Tim Finin is serving on the advisory board of PAAM96 - The First International Conference and Exhibition on The Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology. Monday 22nd April - Tuesday 23rd April 1996, London, UK.

August 1995

• Professor Ethan L. Miller is serving on the program committee of the 1996 Workshop on I/O in Parallel and Distributed Systems, part of the Federated Computing Research Conference to be held in May, 1996.

• Professor David S. Ebert is serving on the courses committee for the ACM SIGGRAPH '96 conference to be held August 4-9, 1996 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, New Orleans, Louisiana.

• Professor David S. Ebert is serving as Demonstrations Co-Chair for the IEEE Visualization '95 conference conference to be held October 29 - November 3, 1995 at the Atlanta Airport Hilton and Towers, Atlanta, Georgia.

• Professor David S. Ebert chaired a course on "Procedural Modeling, Texturing, and Animation Techniques," at the ACM SIGGRAPH '95 conference on August 11, 1995 in Los Angeles, CA.

• On August 26, Professor Alan T. Sherman chaired a technical session on cryptanalysis at the Crypto 95 conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

• Professor Alan T. Sherman and Bradley C. Kuszmaul (MIT) had their paper ``*Socrates 2.0 beats Grandmaster Sagalchik'' accepted for publication by the International Computer Chess Association Journal .

• Professor Marvin B. Cooper Chess Collection to the UMBC Albin O. Kuhn Library. This private collection, which comprises over one hundred chess books and over two hundred magazine issues, will be a useful resource for the UMBC Chess Club and for all chess players of Maryland. Cooper Collection Book List.

• James Mayfield, Yannis Labrou and Tim Finin. Evaluation of KQML as an Agent Communication Language, IJCAI-95 Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, Montreal, Quebec, 19-20 August 1995.

• Deepinder Sidhu is organizing the 6th Maryland Workshop on Very High Speed Networks, Aug 21-22, BaltiMORE. .

• Professor Alan T. Sherman (with the help of Professors Tim Finin, David Ebert, and Russell Turner) is organizing an Image-Processing Day at UMBC for Saturday, October 21, 1995. This special one-day event, which is being held with the cooperation of the MIT Club of Washington, will feature a lecture, luncheon, and laboratory open houses.

July 1995

• Tim Finin gave an invited talk on Intelligent Information Agents at a Navy sponsored symposium on Technologies Applicable to Human-Machine Interface Needs for the 21st Century.

• James Mayfield, Marty Hall and Tim Finin have a paper accepted to appear in IEEE Expert entitled "Using Automatic Memoization as a Software Engineering Tool in Real-World AI Systems".

• Tim Finin was selected to be an Associate Chair of the 1996 AAAI Symposium Series.

June 1995

• Tim Finin, Yannis Labrou, and James Mayfield, KQML as an agent communication language, invited chapter in Jeff Bradshaw (Ed.), ``Software Agents'', MIT Press, Cambridge, to appear, (1995).

May 1995

• Professor Richard Chang's paper "On Computing Boolean Connectives of Characteristic Functions" co-authored with James A. Kadin has appeared in Mathematical Systems Theory, 28(3):173-198, May/June 1995.

• Two Computer Science majors, Mark Cather and Ray Slee, were awarded research fellowships from the Provost's office to support them in working on projects during the summer of 1995. MORE .

April 1995

• David Ebert and the IRC helped the NASA Space Data and Computing Division produce a publicity video for use by the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program, a worldwide network of students, teachers, and scientists working together to study and understand the global environment. MORE

• Russell Turner was awarded a three year grant of $135K from the National Science Foundation CAREER program for a project entitled "An Object-Oriented 3D Interaction Toolkit for Virtual Environment Research".

March 1995

• Live web event: Man vs. Machine Chess Match -- Friday March 24 from 10:00am to 4:00pm EST. MORE.

• Professor James Sasaki was awarded a three year grant of $80K from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled "An Imperative Mixed-Constructive Type Theory for Program Verification". MORE.

• Professor Howard Motteler received a one year grant of $20K from NASA for a project entitled "Information Content in Atmospheric Retrievals and Radiative Transfer Calculations".

• Professor Alan T. Sherman is building a connection with IBM's Distributed Computing Security Research Group at the T. J. Watson Research Center in White Plains, New York. Sherman has arranged for UMBC undergraduate Ray Cromwell to work at IBM over the summer on a project applying cryptography to electronic banking.

• On March 7, 1995, Dr. Matt Franklin (ATT Bell Labs) presented a research seminar on how to apply cryptography in electronic commerce. Franklin described his new method for carrying out a sealed-bid auction electronically. Professor Alan T. Sherman hosted the event. Abstract

• Professors Richard Chang, Ethan Miller, Alan Sherman, Yelena Yesha, and Yaacov Yesha were appointed to the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). MORE.

• Professors Richard Chang and Alan T. Sherman received a $5,328 grant from the National Security Agency, under the Mathematical Sciences Program, for the 12th Maryland Theoretical Computer Science Day, to be held March 24, 1995, at UMBC. This one-day conference will feature distinguished talks on quantum computing, integer factoring, approximation algorithms, and massively parallel search. As a special side event, International Grandmaster Gennady Sagalchik will play one slow chess game against a 512 processor CM-5 Supercomputer running the MIT *Socrates chess program.

• Professor Alan T. Sherman is serving on the Program Committee for the Crypto 95 conference, to be held in August 1995 at the University of California Santa Barbara.

• Dr. Zonglin Zhou joins the CS Department as a visiting scholar. MORE..

• Russell Turner received a one-year DRIF award for a project to develop "A Virtual Human Sculpture System".

February 1995

• David Ebert was awarded a grant from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for $34,273 for a project entitled "Interactive Stereo Volume Visualization for Space Physics Data" .

• UMBC team selected to compete in IEEE National Programming Contest

• Undergraduate Dedrick Henry was selected as a Ronald E. McNair Scholar for 1995, under the mentorship of James Mayfield. Previous winners of this scholarship from the Computer Science Department are Justin Sun and Pris Walther.

• Richard Chang. "On Finding the Number of Graph Automorphisms" has been accepted for presentation at the 10th Structure in Complexity Theory Conference, June 1995. William I. Gasarch (University of Maryland College Park) and Jacobo Toran (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya) are co-authors.

• James Mayfield, Marty Hall and Tim Finin. Dr. Yun Peng has received an Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) award of $4625 for 1995 from the Information, Robotics and Intelligent Systems Division of NSF. This award will be used to support undergraduates to work with Dr. Peng on his project "Neural Network Method for Causal Networks".

• Dr. Alan Sherman will serve as the Director of the Computer Science Graduate Program effective February 6, 1995. Dr. Charles Nicholas has decided to step down as Graduate Director in order to concentrate on his research program and to manage the large number of grants that he has recently received.

• Dr. Alan Sherman was promoted to the rank of shodan (first-degree black belt) in the Japanese martial art of Tomiki Aikido, as certified by the Japan Aikido Association. Sherman has assisted instructors in the UMBC winter-session course PHED-129/WMST-099: Women's Self-Defense.

• Yelena Yesha received a grant of over $500K over four years to support her work with the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences (CESDIS).

January 1995

• Sam Lomonaco gave a one hour invited talk at the American Mathematical Society (AMS) Short Course on Knots and Physics at the annual meeting of the AMS held in San Francisco, California in January, 1995. The title of his talk was The Modern Legacies of Thomson's Atomic Vortex Theory in Classical Electrodynamics and a paper on this will appear as a chapter in an AMS book entitled: Knots and Physics in the AMS Series on Applied Mathematics

• Sam Lomonaco has been awarded an Army Reseach Lab (ARL) grant of $15,000 for work research in cryptography.

• Russell Turner LEMAN: A System for Constructing and Animating Layered Elastic Characters to appear in the proceedings of Computer Graphics International '95, June 1995.

• Ethan Miller and Randy Katz, " RAMA: Easy Access to a High-Bandwidth Massively Parallel File System," USENIX - Winter 1995, New Orleans, LA (January 1995).

• Alan T. Sherman received a $20,000 grant from the Abell Foundation to promote chess in Baltimore City Schools; the money will be used to pay for the tuition of Grandmaster Ilya Smirin, who will join UMBC as an undergraduate computer science major in fall 1995. Recently, Sherman placed first in the faculty category in the Open individual tournament at the 1994 Pan-American Intercollegiate Chess Championships, held December 27-30, in Providence, Rhode Island. The top UMBC chess team, which Sherman advises, tied for fifth place with Harvard, Chicago, and Toronto in the team competition. PICTURE

• Yelena Yesha is co-program chair of "ADL'95 -- A Forum on Research and Technology Advances in Digital Libraries" to be held Monday-Friday, May 15-19, 1995, McClean, VA. Tim Finin is also a member of the program committee.

December 1994

• Dr. Yelena Yesha has been appointed as the Director of the The Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences (CESDIS). CESDIS was developed jointly by NASA, Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and the University of Maryland in 1988 to focus on the design of advanced computing techniques and data systems to support NASA space and Earth science research programs. The CESDIS mission is to increase the connection between computer science and engineering research programs at colleges and universities and NASA groups working with computer applications in Earth and space sciences. CESDIS also focuses attention on the computer science issues involved in accessing, processing, and analyzing data from space observing systems; and collaborates with NASA space and Earth scientists in research related to NASA's needs.

• James Mayfield, Yannis Labrou and Tim Finin, Desiderata for Agent Communication Languages , accepted for presentation at the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium on Information Gathering in Distributed Environments, March 1995.

• Charles Nicholas and Richard Wiklund were awarded a MIPS grant in the amount of $50k for their project entitled "Fourth Mesa Internet Publishing Engine".

• Tim Finin organized and James Mayfield served on the program committee of the Intelligent Information Agents Workshop held in conjunction with CIKM'94 on Friday, December 2, 1994 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA.

• Charles Nicholas and James Mayfield served on the Organizing Committee of the Intelligent Hypertext Workshop held in conjunction with CIKM'94 on Friday, December 2, 1994 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA.

• Alan T. Sherman has become one of the Editors for the journal Cryptologia, which publishes articles on all aspects of Cryptology---especially ciphers and their analyses.

• David M. Lazoff and Alan T. Sherman had a paper accepted for publication in SIAM Review . The paper gives an exact formula for the expected wire length between two randomly chosen terminals on a VLSI chip, a problem whose exact solution had eluded many mathematicians.

November 1994

• Tim Finin, Richard Fritzson, Don McKay and Robin McEntire, "The KQML Information and Knowledge Exchange Protocol", Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM-94), Gaithersburg, MD, November 1994.

• Yannis Labrou and Tim Finin, "A semantics approach for KQML -- a general purpose communication language for software agents". Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM-94), Gaithersburg, MD, November 1994.

• On November 4, Thomas R. Cain delivered a joint paper with Alan T. Sherman at the 2nd Annual ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, held in Fairfax Virgina. The title of the talk was ``How to Break Gifford's Cipher.'' Earlier this year, Sherman presented the research at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill.

• Several members of the Department helped to organize the Third International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'94) held November 29 - Dec 2, 1994 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA. Yelena Yesha served as co-general chair, and Tim Finin, Charles Nicholas and James Mayfield were on the program committee.

• Deepinder Sidhu, computer science, has received an IBM Department Grant of $10,000 to support research in the Maryland Center for Telecommunications Research.

October 1994

• A grant from NASA/USRA for Research on Unitree Mass Storage System was awarded to support the PhD. dissertation research of Odysseas Pentakalos. Tim Finin is the Principal investigator. The award will total $60K over two years.

• David Ebert presented and co-authored the paper "Volume Rendering Methods for Computational Fluid Dynamics Visualization" at the IEEE Visualization'94 conference in Washington, D.C. October 17-21, 1994. Co-authors were Roni Yagel, James Scott, and Yair Kurzion.

September 1994

• David Ebert was awarded a grant from NSF entitled RIA: Realistic Interactive Visualization for Computational Fluid Dynamics, Grant number CCR-9409243, Amount: $61,168, Duration: September 1, 1994 - August 31, 1997.

• David Ebert edited and co-authored the book Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach, published by AP Professional in September, 1994. The other book authors are F. Kenton Musgrave, Darwyn Peachey, Ken Perlin, and Steven Worley. The book explains techniques for creating realistic computer generated images and animations.

• Tim Finin was elected to the advisory board of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for a three year term.

• Tim Finin, Don McKay, Rich Fritzson, and Robin McEntire, "KQML: An Information and Knowledge Exchange Protocol", in Kazuhiro Fuchi and Toshio Yokoi (Ed.), Knowledge Building and Knowledge Sharing, Ohmsha and IOS Press, 1994.