Distinguished Lecture Series, UMBC Department of Information Systems

Statistical Methods for Integration and Analysis of Opinionated Text Data

Dr. ChengXiang Zhai
Professor and Willett Faculty Scholar
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

10:00am Thursday 21 April 2016, ITE 459, UMBC

Opinionated text data such as blogs, forum posts, product reviews and online comments are increasingly available on the Web. They are very useful sources for public opinions about virtually any topics. However, because the opinions are scattered and abundant, it is a significant challenge for users to collect all the opinions about a topic and digest them efficiently. In this talk, I will present a suite of general statistical text mining methods that can help users integrate, summarize and analyze scattered online opinions to obtain actionable knowledge for decision making. Specifically, I will first present approaches to integration of scattered opinions by aligning them to a well- structured article or relevant ontology. Second, I will discuss several techniques for generating a concise opinion summary that can reveal the major sentiments and opinion points buried in large amounts of opinionated text data. Finally, I will present probabilistic generative models for analyzing review data in depth to discover latent aspect ratings and relative weights placed by reviewers on different aspects. These methods are general and can thus potentially help users integrate and analyze large amounts of online opinionated text data on any topic in any natural language

ChengXiang Zhai is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also holds a joint appointment at the Institute for Genomic Biology, Statistics, and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. His research interests include information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing, machine learning, and bioinformatics, and has published over 200 papers in these areas with an H-index of 58 in Google Scholar. He is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, and Information Processing and Management, and the Americas Editor of Springer’s Information Retrieval Book Series. He is a conference program co-chair of ACM CIKM 2004, NAACL HLT 2007, ACM SIGIR 2009, ECIR 2014, ICTIR 2015, and WWW 2015, and conference general co-chair for ACM CIKM 2016. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a recipient of multiple best paper awards, Rose Award for Teaching Excellence at UIUC, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, IBM Faculty Award, HP Innovation Research Program Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

The Arduino microcontroller is a great device for anyone who wants to learn more about technology. It is used in a variety of fields in research and academia and may even help you get an internship. Our instructors have used the Arduino for researching self-replicating robots and remote-controlled helicopters, hacking into a vehicle’s control system, and using radars to detect human activity in a room. Some of the hackathon projects by our IEEE members include developing a drink mixer that wirelessly connects with a Tesla Model S and a full-body haptic feedback suit for the Oculus Rift. The Arduino is a wonderful tool and is fairly easy to use. Everyone should learn how to use it! If you plan to do research, this tool is definitely a must.

UMBC’s Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is hosting two Level 2 workshops this semester. They are hosted this Saturday, April 9th, and next Saturday, April 16th. These workshops will be ITE 239 from 2pm to 6pm.  These intermediate workshops are open to anyone who satisfies one of the following: (1) has taken or currently enrolled in CMSC 202 or CMPE 212, (2) has taken the Level 1 Arduino Workshop or (3) has equivalent experience.

You can  register here for either workshop. Contact Sekar Kulandaivel (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) if you have any questions.

You only need to bring your laptop and charger and download and install the Arduino IDE, which can be downloaded from here. We hope to see many of you this weekend and next! You REALLY don’t want to miss out on this opportunity.

Karuna Joshi (UMBC) and Seung Geol Choi (USNA) present during the USNA-UMBC Partnership Symposium. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC and U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) faculty researchers presented updates on five collaborative cybersecurity projects funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) during the inaugural USNA-UMBC Partnership Symposium, hosted by UMBC’s Office the Vice President for Research on March 22, 2016. The five projects presented are supported by three-year grants from the ONR, most of which are entering their second year of funding.

When the joint research initiative launched a year ago, Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research at UMBC, described it as “the start of a long-term partnership.” The recent symposium was the first formal opportunity for the research teams to formally present their progress on tackling major cybersecurity challenges outlined when the partnership began.

Read more about the joint research and symposium here.

For the past ten years the UMBC Game Developers Club has organized a Digital Entertainment Conference with a day of games industry veterans speaking on a variety of topics.  The event is free, open to all, and includes lunch.

UMBC’s 11th annual Digital Entertainment Conference will be held from 11:00am to 5:00pm on Saturday, April 30, 2016 in Skylight Lounge on the 3rd floor of the Commons.

Presenters

• Marc Olano – UMBC Professor & Game GFX Programmer
• Eric Jordan – Senior Software Engineer at Firaxis
• Tom Symonds – Artist at Stardock Games
• Ching Lau – Senior Environment Artist at Zenimax
• Nate Flynn – Owner/Developer at Geek Monster Games

Schedule

Note: Q&A with the presenter occurs between each hour

11:00am-11:45am    Tom Symonds :: Life in the Art Department
12:00pm-12:45pm   Marc Olano :: Graphics Research for Games
01:00pm-02:00pm  LUNCH! Pizza and Drinks
02:00pm-02:45pm  Eric Jordan :: Game Industry Careers
03:00pm-03:45pm  Nate Flynn :: Convention Booths
04:00pm-04:45pm  Ching Lau :: Of Teaching in the Classroom

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Firmware Instruction Identification
using Side-Channel Power Analysis

Deepak Krishnankutty
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

11:15am-12:30pm, Friday, April 8, 2016, ITE 237

Power supply transients of encryption devices have been analyzed from the perspective of performing attacks to extract secret key or confidential information. Such attacks are based on exploiting the correlation between the power consumption of the device under attack and its underlying logic operations. However, side channel leakage through the power supply of instruction level events occurring on soft/hard core processors has not been extensively studied. Power traces of firmware running on general purpose processing units observed at low frequencies tend to reveal not just the variations in current consumption during individual clock cycles, but also information related to the sequence of instruction executions. In this talk, we present results from Side-Channel Analysis performed over multiple power supply pins and demonstrate the relationship between the power transients and machine-level instructions on an instance of the openMSP430 processor on an FPGA. This process is also applicable to standalone ASIC instances. Our approach is based on templates constructed from principal components representing instructions identified from the power profiles of different instruction sequences. The templates are then utilized for determining the order of clock cycles per instruction. This technique can be used to predict the sequence of clock cycles per instruction from the observed power profiles and identify anomalies caused by modification of code on a tightly constrained embedded system.

Deepak Krishnankutty is a PhD student in computer engineering at UMBC, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Host: Alan T. Sherman, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays. (April 22, Brian Kelley, Securing the cloud. May 8, Enis Enis Golaszewski, Hash bit sequences).