Registration is open for the Big Ten+ Graduate School Expo September 23-24-2012.

Students will:

• Get an inside look at graduate school and the application process
• Receive advice about funding opportunities
• Network with representatives from more than 50 of the nation’s top graduate institutions
• Attend a premier graduate school fair

This two day mini-conference is especially designed for students interested in graduate education in:

• Science
• Technology
• Engineering
• Mathematics
• Other science-related disciplines.

The Big Ten+ Graduate School Expo awarded more than $30,000 in travel scholarships last year.  All students, including women and members of underrepresented groups, are encouraged to attend.

An initial 20 event calendar for the first-ever Baltimore Innovation Week has just been released. Organized by local tech news site Technically Baltimore, the annual event, held from September 20-30, is a celebration of technology and innovation in Baltimore. Its goal is to encourage local innovation through programming focused on technology, collaboration, and improving the city, says the website.

Highlights include:

Startup Weekend (Sep. 28), a worldwide three-day frenzy where aspiring entrepreneurs gather to  pitch business proposals, create business models, and gather feedback from local entrepreneurial leaders. The Baltimore chapter takes place at Betamore, an urban campus for technology and entrepreneurship that opens in September.

DiversiTech #7 (Sep. 26), a meetup geared towards the needs of the minority tech entrepreneur. "The Meetups allow for unmatched networking opportunities and access to resources relevant to building diversity in the regional tech entrepreneurship space," explains the website. 

Open Source Hack Night (Sep. 25), a chance to break into groups to work on the hack project of your choice. Hackers of all skill levels are welcome.

Check out the full calendar of events.

Anupam Joshi and Tim Finin have received a $200,000 research award from the NSF Division of Information and Intelligent Systems for a two-year project focused on extracting information from tables. The project, T2K: From Tables to Knowledge, will explore the feasibility of automatically extracting new knowledge directly from data found in spreadsheets, database relations, and document tables and representing it as highly interoperable linked open data (LOD) in the Semantic Web language RDF. The extraction is guided by probabilistic graphical models that use statistical information mined from current LOD knowledge resources. To demonstrate the potential payoff of the research, the system is used to extract knowledge from tables collected from medical journals and tables from web sites like data.gov.

While the W3C semantic web languages RDF and OWL are used to represent the knowledge, the results are applicable to other semantic data frameworks such as Microdata (Search Consortium), Freebase (Google), Probase (Microsoft) and the Open Graph (Facebook). The open sourced prototype software allows other researchers to experiment with automatically producing semantically enriched data from tables for their domains.

If successful, such software extraction systems are expected to become part of a new online knowledge ecology — both consuming existing LOD knowledge to understand the intended meaning implicit in a table and producing new facts and knowledge that will become part of Web. This represents a dramatic increase in the breadth and depth of public semantic data that can make “big data'' analytics more effective.

MS Thesis Defense

Calculating Representativeness of
Geographic Sites Across the World

Ashwinkumar Ganesan

11:00am Friday, 31 August 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

GLOBE is a global correlation engine, a project to study the effects of human activity on land change based on a set of parameters that include temperature, forest cover, human population, atmospheric parameters, and many other variables. The aim of this research is to understand how a land change study or set of studies of specific geographic areas generalizes to other areas of the world. The generic form of the question is – given a set of data points with a set of variables, how can we determine how much a selected subset of points represents the rest of the distribution. The research aims to answer a set of questions which include the definition of representativeness of a geographical site and how the representativeness can be computed. Land change researchers will dynamically select a subset of variables which they would like to study. Hence the method developed not only computes representativeness, but must do so in an efficient manner. For this purpose, we apply dimension reduction techniques to reduce the size of computation and analyze the effectiveness of using these techniques to calculate representativeness.

Committee: Drs. Tim Oates (chair), Tim Finin and Dr. Matt Schmill