This semester, the students in Susan Mitchell’s Software Design and Development course were hand-picked. After applying and being interviewed, ten students were chosen based on their “go-getter” attitude.

Why the selectivity? Susan ’s CMSC 345 course this semester is a trial course that’s being taught in collaboration with Next Century Corporation, a Maryland-based technology company. Though Mitchell has been teaching CMSC 345 for ten years, this is a first.

Designed around the completion of one software-design project, the course provides students with a “customer” (normally a faculty member) who gives them specific guidelines for the “product” they need to complete. In years prior, students were given the task of developing a program that plans a student’s UMBC course career. Mitchell explains that the product for this semester will be especially real-world focused.

In fact, essentially everything about the course is meant to simulate working in the software industry. A writing intensive course, students are asked to write formal documents, and at the end of the semester, they must give a formal presentation.
Mitchell explains that the course isn’t so much about coding as it is about understanding the “software development lifecycle.” It’s the process that’s important, she explains, from conception to carry through. Understanding what the customer wants and then turning out a product that fits those guidelines is the goal.

Chris Stepnitz, a software engineer at Next Century, is the “customer” of this semester’s pilot course. Stepnitz, who graduated from UMBC in 2006 with a degree in Computer Science, took the very same course with Mitchell years ago. “We wrote an accounting system,” remembers Stepnitz, who admits she was considering changing majors before taking the course. She credits it with opening her eyes to the reality of a career in software development and the rewarding experience of programming with a team.

So, when Stepnitz heard that Next Century, who has been reaching out to the community through local colleges, was about to reach out to her alma matter, she jumped at the chance to participate. “I’m very excited,” says Stepnitz. “For the students, I really want to make sure that they both enjoy [the class] and get the taste of what it’s like to really be in the development world.”

The arrangement is meant to be mutually beneficial. Students in the course learn how to succeed in an industry setting, while Next Century builds bonds with universities that may provide them with future staff members (In fact, roughly 20% of their staff are UMBC alumni). If all goes well, Mitchell hopes to collaborate again and maybe even branch out to other local businesses.

The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation is seeking approximately three full-time, paid, summer 2012 interns.  Candidates should be enrolled in or completing a graduate level program and have an overall GPA of at least a 3.0.

Intern (2)

Program/Grants Support

The internship will provide students with relevant and constructive work experience in a philanthropic setting.  Interns will be given the opportunity to explore the field of philanthropy within a dynamic and active setting.  In doing so, the intern will be expected to analyze and synthesize information and create reports for review and decision making at the Foundation. The internship will expose the student to all five areas of grantmaking, including our Maryland Small Grants program. The individual should have excellent writing and verbal skills and a strong interest in best practice research and program evaluation.

Interns must be able to commute to our Owings Mills office where parking is available and provided.  A minimum of 37 hours per week is expected for summer interns.   This is a paid position with availability in to begin May or June.  There will be a possibility of extending the internship beyond the summer based on needs and professional fit with the Foundation. Interested applicants should apply by sending a cover letter and resume to gradinternship@hjweinberg.org to be considered for an interview in April 2012. Please put “Internship Opportunity” in the subject line of the email.

Intern (1)

Communications/Public Relations/Marketing

 The internship will provide students with relevant, constructive work experience involving public and media relations, marketing, web management and social media in a philanthropic setting.  The Foundation is seeking one intern whose academic concentration, ideally, includes marketing, public relations, media or a related field who will assist with Weinberg Foundation communications both externally and internally. The candidate should have a strong interest in communications and public relations as well as exceptional writing skills. Web management (WordPress) and social media experience are highly desirable.

Interns must be able to commute to our Owings Mills office where parking is available and provided.  A minimum of 37 hours per week is expected for summer interns.   This is a paid position with availability in to begin May or June.  There will be a possibility of extending the internship beyond the summer based on needs and professional fit with the Foundation. Interested applicants should apply by sending a cover letter and resume to gradinternship@hjweinberg.org to be considered for an interview in April 2012. Please put “Internship Opportunity” in the subject line of the email.

Correlation Aware Optimizations for Analytic Databases

Hideaki Kimura, Brown University

1:00pm Friday 9 March 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

Recent years have seen that the analysis of large data-sets is crucially important in a wide range of business, governmental, and scientific applications. For example, research projects in astronomy need to analyze petabytes of image data taken from telescopes. Providing a fast and scalable analytical data management system for such users has become increasingly important.

The major bottlenecks for analytics on such big data are disk- and network-I/O. Because the data is too large to fit in RAM, each query causes substantial disk I/O. Traditional database systems provide indexes to speed up disk reads, but many analytic queries do not benefit from indexes because data is scattered over a large number of disk blocks and disk seeks are prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, such huge data sets need to be partitioned and distributed over hundreds or many thousands of nodes. When a query requires more than one data at once, such as a query involving a JOIN operation, the data management system must transmit a large amount of data over the network. For example, the Shuffle phase in Map-Reduce systems copies file blocks over the network and causes a significant bottleneck in many cases.

Our approach to tackling these challenges in big data analytics is to exploit correlations. I will describe our correlation-aware indexing, replication, and data placement which make big data analytics faster and more scalable.

Finally, if time allows, I will also introduce another on-going project to develop a scalable transactional processing system on modern hardware in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.

Hideaki Kimura is a doctoral candidate in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. His main research interests are in data management systems. His dissertation research with Prof. Stan Zdonik is on correlation-based optimizations for large analytic databases. He also worked on transaction processing systems exploiting modern hardware at HP Labs.

Host: Anupam Joshi
See http://csee.umbc.edu/talks for more information

Interactive visual computing for knowledge discovery
in science, engineering and training

Dr. Jian Chen
University of Southern Mississippi

1:00pm Wednesday 7 March 2012, ITE 325b UMBC

Advances in simulations and lab experiments are producing huge datasets at unprecedented rates, and deriving meanings from these data will have far-reaching impacts on our lives in many areas of science, engineering, and medicine. Visualization and interactive computing provide great tools for exploiting these data in scientific discovery and engineering innovations. A limiting factor in the scientific use of visualization tools is the lack of guiding principles to identify and assess visualization methods that are helpful in scientific tasks. In this talk, I present research designed to advance knowledge discovery through the design and evaluation of interactive visualizations. Experiments on image illumination and density are described that successfully address this limitation in brain imaging for medical diagnoses. I also present the theoretical foundations that have led to the various choices in visualization design. In the second part of the talk, I argue that most existing tools designed for scientific discovery fail to address the dynamic nature of the discovery workflow. I present a new visualization tool, VisBubbles, that integrates programming, visualization, and interaction in one environment to create fluid workflows in which new hypotheses can be tested efficiently. VisBubbles augments interactive computing and analysis of time-varying motion data of bat flights by enabling dynamic displays, thus facilitating scientists' quest for new knowledge. I present the design methods we have followed in our long-term collaboration with biologists and engineering scientists on motion analysis. Finally, I present future work I envision in interactive visualization that will be critical in developing future visualization tools for science, engineering, and training.

Jian Chen is an assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Southern Mississippi. She is the founder and director of Interactive Visual Computing Lab. Her research is in the broad area of interaction and visualization, with current focuses on the emerging field of scientific visualization theory and workflow analysis. She has published numerous articles in top journals and international conferences. Her panel on combining human-centered computing and scientific visualization received honorable mention at the 2007 IEEE Visualization Conference. She was a postdoc at Brown University with Drs. David H. Laidlaw (CS) and Sharon Swartz (BioMed) from 2006 to 2009. She has a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and Master’s degrees in both Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering. Her research has been funded by DHS and NSF.

Host: Penny Rheingans

See here for more information

• Two years (min) of engineering coursework (Mechanical Engineering preferred)
• Familiarity with electronic design tools (AutoCAD, MDT, Inventor) a plus
• Excellent communication skills
• Familiarity with LEAN, Six Sigma a plus
• Familiarity with technical writing, social media, sales/marketing materials desired

EE Graduate Seminar

Spectrum Wars: LightSquared vs. GPS

Professor Chuck LaBerge
Professor of the Practice, CSEE Dept/UMBC

11:30am-12:45pm Friday, 2 March 2012, ITE 231

The radio-frequency spectrum is a limited resource. Within the US, commercial use of the spectrum is administered by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), while government use of the spectrum is administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Currently, the regulatory community is locked in a battle about spectrum utilization in the vicinity of 1.5 GHz. This struggle pits millions of users of GPS technology for position and time information against technical innovators desiring to bring 4G wireless communications to millions of users in underserved populations. So who wins the spectrum wars?

The talk will outline the technologies involved, and provide a time-line of the regulatory actions to date. There are some innovative things going on here, and some simple analysis will show why there are points of contention. A final resolution cannot be provided at this time, because the issue is currently an open discussion in FCC. And, as might expected, there are financial and political ramifications as well.

This talk will provide an interesting insight into how the 'real world' works.

Dr. LaBerge is Professor of the Practice of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the CSEE at UMBC, where he teaches a wide variety of courses ranging from Introductory Circuits to Error Correcting Codes. From 1975-2008, he was employed by Bendix, which became AlliedSignal, which became Honeywell through a series of corporate mergers. He retired in July 2008 as the Senior Fellow for Communications, Navigation, and Surveillance in Honeywell's Aerospace Research and Technology Center.

Dr. LaBerge has worked on precision landing systems and a wide variety of aeronautical radios and applications. He's recognized as an expert in issues involving interference to aeronautical systems. His technical, writing, and editorial contributions have received numerous citations from regulatory bodies, and he was the winner of the Best Paper of Conference at the 2000 IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference.

Dr. LaBerge is a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of Tau Beta Pi, and an inductee in the Order of the Engineer. He received his BES-EE and MSE-EE, degrees, both with Honors, from The Johns Hopkins University and the PhD. in Electrical Engineering from UMBC. His three kids are older than his students. He's been married to his patient wife for almost 38 years.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

Using Static Analysis to Diagnose
Misconfigured Open Source Systems Software

Ariel Rabkin, UC Berkeley

1:00pm Monday 5 March 2012, ITE 325b UMBC

Ten years ago, few software developers worked on distributed systems. Today, developers often run code on clusters, relying on large open-source software stacks to manage resources. These systems are challenging to configure and debug. Fortunately, developments in program analysis have given us new tools for managing the complexity of modern software. This talk will show how static analysis can help users configure their systems. I present a technique that builds an explicit table mapping a program's possible error messages to the options that might cause them. As a result, users can get immediate feedback on how to resolve configuration errors.

Ari Rabkin is a PhD student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley working in the AMP lab. His current research interest is the software engineering and administration challenges of big-data systems. He is particularly interested in applying program analysis techniques to tasks like log analysis and configuration debugging. His broader interests focus on systems and security, including improving system usability by making systems easier to understand, the connections between computer science research and technology policy, developing program analysis techniques that work acceptably well on large, complex, messy software systems.

Host: Anupam Joshi
See http://csee.umbc.edu/talks for more information