MOTD
Schwartz, 1992 O'Reilly & Associates, pg 426]
MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR
IN THE FOREGROUND
UMBC Remote Data Center established
The CSEE department is setting up a regional center for geographic and remote sensing data, in collaboration with the UMBC geography department, NASA/GSFC Code 935, and CESDIS. Facilities include a NASA-supplied tracking antenna to receive data directly from the NOAA-N family of weather satellites, and hardware and software for a prototype data-system developed at Code 935. Although we are still getting things set up, images from the most recent NOAA-12 and NOAA-14 passes can be seen at http://www.cs.umbc.edu/avhrr.
This regional data center (RDC) will produce a range of products of local and regional interest, including images and information about the atmosphere and earth's surface, and will help monitor regional change; and it should significantly aid several current research efforts at UMBC. Members of the CSEE department involved in this project include Howard Motteler, Aya Soffer, Susan Hoban, Yelena Yesha, Odysseas Pentakalos, Kostas Kalpakis, Russell Turner, and Dave Ebert.
FACULTY NEWS
Promotions
Dr. James Mayfield was promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure. Dr. Mayfield has been a member of the UMBC faculty since XYZZY.
Bindings
Dr. Kostas Kalpakis...
Three CSEE faculty will be on leave during the coming semester. ...mayfield, nicholas, sidhu...
For Professor Alan T. Sherman, a new educational adventure began on June 12, 1996, when his first child, William Shimakawa Sherman, was born weighing 6 lbs. 5.5 oz. See photo on cs.umbc.edu/~sherman/.
Professor Ethen Miller gets married...?
Gobbetti to Sardina
Menyuk chosen Presidential Research Professor
Menyuk elected Fellow of Optical Society of America
ALUMNI NEWS
UNDERGRAD NEWS
Rite Aid to endow scholarships for UMBC Computer Science Students
Five Computer Science students, along with CSEE Professors Joel Morris and Tim Finin, attended the reception to demonstrate some of the work they and fellow UMBC students and faculty are doing. The students were Priya Ramakrishnan (Sophomore), Eric Schmitt (Senior), Charles Shelton (Sophomore), Justin Sun (Senior) and Amen Zwa (Graduate).
The students gave the legislators and Rite Aid executives demonstrations of information retrieval on the World-wide Web, showed information systems they developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and demonstrated a variety of graphical visualization techniques on an SGI workstation. The legislators found particularly intriguing a system developed by CSEE Professor David Ebert which used special "3D goggles" to present realistic three-dimensional visualizations of scientific data.
NEW UPE members
Co-op activites
...more is needed...
GRAD NEWS
Grants
RESEARCH NOTES
Grants
Tim Finin, James Mayfield and Russell Turner received research support from ARPA worth over $180K over the next three years as part of a team which will develop new approachs for the evolutionary design of complex software. The project, entitled A Capability Package Supporting Evolutionary Views of Lifecycle Versions, Elements and Rationales is a team effort which includes Lockheed-Martin, WPL Laboratories and Knowledge Evolution Inc.
Tim Finin, Yun Peng and James Mayfield received a research contract which will supply over $875K over three years to participate in the Consortium for Integrated Intelligent Manufacturing Planning and Execution. This Consortium, which includes partners from both Industry and Academia, represents a $23M project funded by the NIST Advanced Technology Program. The focus of the research program is to develop the basic algorithms and technologies for linking agile planning systems with the wealth of real-time factory-floor information provided by manufacturing execution systems (MES). UMBC's contribution will be to lead the application of intelligent software agent technology to MES systems.
Publications
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
Chelliah Thirunavukkarasu, Tim Finin and James Mayfield, Secret Agents -- A Security Architecture for the KQML agent communication language, proceedings of the ACM CIKM Intelligent Information Agents Workshop, Baltimore, December 1995.
Tim Finin, Chelliah Thirunavukkarasu, Anupama Potluri, Donald McKay, and Robin McEntire, On Agent Domains, Agent Names and Proxy Agents, proceedings of the ACM CIKM Intelligent Information Agents Workshop, Baltimore, December 1995.
James Mayfield, Tim Finin, Rajkumar Narayanaswamy, Chetan Shah William MacCartney & Keith Goolsbey, The Cycic Friends Network: Getting Cyc agents to reason together. Proceedings of the CIKM '95 Workshop on Intelligent Information Agents. (PostScript version, 150Kb), Presentation Slides (PostScript version, 350Kb).
James Mayfield, Yannis Labrou, and Tim Finin, Evaluation of KQML as an Agent Communication Language, in Intelligent Agents Volume II -- Proceedings of the 1995 Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages. M. Wooldridge, J. P. Muller and M. Tambe (eds). Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Springer-Verlag, 1996.
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.
Tim Finin, Yannis Labrou, and James Mayfield, KQML as an agent communication language invited chapter in Jeff Bradshaw (Ed.), ``Software Agents'', MIT Press, Cambridge, (1996).
Activities
Alan T. Sherman organized a Cryptography Workshop ``Applying crypography to electronic commerce'' at the 1996 ACM Computer Science Conference (February 17, 1996, Philadelphia).
David S. Ebert has been selected as Late Breaking Hot Topics Chair for IEEE Visualization '96, October 1996.
David S. Ebert has been selected as Sketches Chair for ACM SIGGRAPH 97, 3-8 August 1997,Los Angeles, California.
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.
Invited talks
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.
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.
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".
David S. Ebert, Volumetric Procedural Modeling and Realistic Visualization, ONR Workshop on Volume Visualization, Phoenix, AZ, February 14-16, 1996.
Tim Finin, KQML and the Knowledge Sharing Approach to Building Intelligent Information Agents, Naval Research Laboratory, Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, February, 1996.
Tim Finin, Agent Communication Languages, Tools with Artificial Intelligence Conference, November, 1995.
Tim Finin, KQML and the Knowledge Sharing Approach to Building Intelligent Information Agents, Computer Science Department, University of North Carolina Charlotte, October, 1995.
EDUCATION NOTES
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.