UMBC ACM Tech Talk

Giving Successful Technical Presentations
Prof. Cynthia Matuszek, UMBC

2:00pm Wednesday 18 November 2015, ITE325

Giving talks is one of the core tasks of a researcher. Technical presentations are how we accomplish some of our most important tasks: talks are the first step in getting other people excited about our work, getting suggestions and feedback, teaching, and applying for jobs and grants. Nonetheless, the art and science of giving a really good technical talk is one we are more likely to leave to chance than to deliberately train in. Not only does this mean we aren’t accomplishing everything we could with our presentations; we’re missing a chance to distinguish ourselves by improving a comparatively rare — but learnable — skill.

In this talk, I will describe the idea of the “culture of conveying information,” and give a number of specific suggestions for improving technical talks — including tools, rules of thumb, social conventions, and suggestions for making your talks engaging, informative, and memorable.

Cynthia Matuszek is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department where she heads the Interactive Robotics and Language lab. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 2014, where she was a member of both the Robotics and State Estimation lab and the Language, Interaction, and Learning group. She is published in the areas of artificial intelligence, robotics, ubiquitous computing, and human-robot interaction. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, natural language processing, and machine learning.

Celebrating Thanksgiving reminds us how grateful we are for nature and everything it gives us – but our modern food system can take a heavy toll on our environment. In fact, estimates suggest that one-fifth or more of climate-changing pollution comes from the food industry.

Between toxic pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizers, genetically modified foods and factory-farmed animals, making sustainable choices can seem overwhelming. But Interfaith Power & Light has the resources you need to have a sustainable, healthy holiday.

Click here for IPL’s guide to a Green Thanksgiving celebration.

Name: Robert Ford

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: Coastal Resources Inc.

Position Title: Environmental Technician

Major(s)/Minor(s): Environmental Science

Expected Graduation Year: May 2016

Briefly describe your internship, co-op,  or research opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

At Coastal Resources, I have had the opportunity to work on a variety of different projects across many disciplines. From simple data entry to fish surveys, I am on my toes every single day, as there is something new to learn through each job/experience. As an intern, I assisted with tasks which included wetland delineation, field surveys, and the assessment of flora/fauna across the Mid-Atlantic Region. More specifically, these projects required me to become sufficient in a multitude of tasks including data entry, taking measurements of trees, and even being able to catch fish!

Describe the process of obtaining your internship, research, or co-op opportunity.

I had been searching for an internship within the environmental field for quite sometime and had a few interviews along the way, and even a few offers for intern positions, until I came upon this opportunity. My mother told me that one of her patients at the Anne Arundel Medical Center worked for an ecological consulting company (Coastal Resources). It just so happened that they had an intern position that they wanted to fill. Through a few email exchanges and an interview, I was able to obtain the position! 

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?

I have had the chance to work with some of the brightest and passionate people in the environmental field. That being said, being able to assimilate myself among these individuals has been an eye-opening experience. Although I was one of the youngest and most inexperienced people that is working at CRI, I proved to myself that a confident attitude and the desire to learn will get you anywhere, both mentally and socially.

How do you believe you have made an impact through your work?

I believe this has impacted me greatly, as I mentioned above. Most of all, I believe that the work that I am doing currently is going to help me pursue my love of the environment, and this has the potential to lead to other things. Within this job field, there are tons of ways to innovate and improve other's way of living, and through this, I think that we can start to tackle some of our environmental woes. 

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

Stay social. I would have never found this opportunity or even be able to get through the interview process had I not developed my social skills. I believe that hard work and searching for that next job/internship are going to help, but you need to stay social to get that opportunity, succeed in the interview process, and excel in your interactions with co-workers. We live in a socially-driven world.

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Want to be the next Intern of the Week? Make sure to fill out this form and stay tuned. New interns are announced every Friday!

ENEE MS Thesis Defense

Blind source separation for detection of abandoned objects:
Exploiting different types of diversity

Suchita Bhinge

2:30pm Friday, 13 November 2015, ITE 325B

Due to the increase in security concerns, automated detection of abandoned objects has become an important application in video surveillance. Because of its increasing importance, a number of techniques have been proposed recently to automatically detect abandoned objects. The general procedure implemented for detection of abandoned objects includes background subtraction or foreground object extraction followed by post-processing steps in order to classify the foreground object as an abandoned or non-abandoned object. However, these techniques make use of a number of user-defined parameters such as track time, co-ordinates of the object/owner, the vicinity of the object, and properties of the object such as its shape, color, among others.

In this thesis, we present a new technique based on blind source separation (BSS) for detection of abandoned objects that does not keep track of the extracted objects or owners and does not require a dual background scheme for stationary object extraction. Order selection is an important step for our implementation of blind source separation based scheme since this step captures the signals with high energy and disregards signals that are not relevant to the detection of abandoned objects. In this thesis, we show that the performance of ICA improves when an algorithm that assumes a flexible source distribution along with multiple types of diversity, such as higher-order statistics and sample dependence is used for the estimation of the source components. ICA, however, can only model one dataset at a time, thus limiting its usage to monochrome frames. In order to address this issue, we also present another implementation of blind source separation called independent vector analysis (IVA), a recent extension of ICA to multiple data that takes the dependence across multiple datasets into account while retaining the model of independent components within each dataset. We show that the proposed blind source separation techniques performs successfully in complicated scenarios such as crowd, occlusion, and illumination changes.

Committee: Drs. Tulay Adali (chair), Joel Morris and Mohamed Younis

The UMBC IEEE Branch will hold an Arduino workshop on Saturday November 14th and next Saturday November 21st from 2:00-6:00pm in SHER 003 (Lecture Hall 4). It’s a great opportunity for people to learn about microcontrollers and circuit basics and how to use Arduino for building cyber-physical systems for home automation, robotics, games and more.

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!

UMBC’s Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is hosting two Level 1 workshops this semester. They are hosted this Saturday (Nov. 14th) and next Saturday (Nov. 21st). The workshop will be SHER 003 (Lecture Hall 4) from 2pm to 6pm. Please register online to sign up for either workshop. Contact Sekar Kulandaivel (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) if you have any questions.

The workshop is open to all majors (minimum coding experience recommended). You only need to bring your laptop and charger and download and install the Arduino IDE. We hope to see many of you this weekend! You REALLY don’t want to miss out on this opportunity.