·         What:      GE Aviation Deep Dive with Engineering Student Groups

·         When:     Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015

          Time:       3PM

·         Where:     UMBC Commons Flat Tuesdays lower level

·         Who:        Engineering Student Organization Members

GE is mainly looking for Freshmen and Sophomore Mechanical Engineering students this year. We will also be talking in detail about our GE Aviation/UMBC co-op program.

Are you participating in a Fall 2015 internship, co-op, or research experience? Get it recognized on your academic transcript by registering for the Career Center Intern/Co-op/Research Practicum (PRAC). Registering for PRAC provides an official record of your experience, letting future employers and graduate schools know about your hard work. 

WHAT IS PRAC?

PRAC is a zero-credit, pass/fail course that requires a few small assignments and attendance at two professional development workshops. It is designed to help you grow as a professional and support you throughout your experience. You can preview the assignments on page 2 of the syllabus. We also recommend viewing the PRAC orientation video.

HOW TO REGISTER:

Log in to UMBCworks and follow these easy steps. You will be asked to attach a letter or email from your employer verifying that you will be/are working there this fall. This can be a Word document, PDF, or screenshot. Please register online by Monday, September 28. Retroactive enrollments for past experiences are not permitted.

Note: We are also holding a PRAC enrollment drop-in day from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. on Monday, September 28 in the Career Center.  Simply stop in and a coordinator will assist you with your registration.

EARNING CREDIT FOR YOUR EXPERIENCE:

Although PRAC is zero-credit, you may be able to couple it with an academic internship or research course, allowing you to earn credits for your experience. On the registration form, you can indicate whether you're interested in this option. Some courses require PRAC enrollment. Check out your options for earning credit.

Questions? Email us at internships@umbc.edu.

PhD Dissertation Defense Announcement
Electrical Engineering

Polarization-insensitive all-optical dual pump-phase trans-multiplexing from 2 × 10-GBd OOKs to 10-GBd RZ-QPSK using cross-phase modulation in a passive nonlinear birefringent photonic crystal fiber

Tanvir Mahmood

2:00pm Thursday, 24 September 2015, ITE325b

Considering the network size, bit rate, spectral and channel capacity limitations, different modulation formats may be selectively used in future optical networks. Although the traditional metropolitan area networks (MANs) still use the non-return-to-zero on-off keying (NRZ-OOK) modulation format due to its technical simplicity and therefore low cost, QPSK format is more advantageous in spectrally efficient long-haul fiber optic transmission systems because of its constant power envelope, and robustness to various transmission impairments. Consequently, an important problem may arise, in particular how to route the OOK-data streams from MANs to long-haul backbone networks when the state of polarization (SOP) of the remotely generated OOK is unpredictable. Hence, the focus of this dissertation was to investigate a polarization-insensitive (PI) all-optical nonlinear optical signal processing (NOSP) method that can be implemented at the network cross-connect (X-connect) to transfer data from a remotely and a locally generated OOK data simultaneously to more effectual QPSK format for long-haul transmission. By utilizing cross-phase modulation (XPM) and inherent birefringence of the device, the work demonstrated, for the first time, PI all-optical data transfer utilizing dual pump-phase transmultiplexing (DPTM) from 2 × 10-GBd OOKs to 10-GBd RZ-QPSK in a passive nonlinear birefringent photonic crystal fiber (PCF). Polarization insensitivity was achieved by scrambling the SOP of the remotely generated OOK pump and launching the locally generated OOK pump and the probe off-axis. To mitigate polarization induced power fluctuations and detrimental effects due to nearby partially degenerate and non-degenerate four wave mixings, an optimum pump-probe detuning was also utilized. The PI DPTM RZ-QPSK demonstrated a pre-amplified receiver sensitivity penalty < 5.5 dB at 10−9 bit-error-rate (BER), relative to the FPGA-precoded RZ-DQPSK baseline in ASE-limited transmission system. The effect of the remotely generated OOK pump OSNR degradation on the PI DPTM RZ-QPSK was also investigated and it was established that 10−9 BER metric was attainable till the remotely generated OOK pump reached the threshold OSNR limit of 34 dB/0.1nm. Finally, DWDM transmission performance of the PI DPTM RZ-QPSK signal was evaluated using a 138-km long recirculating loop and it was demonstrated that the PI DPTM RZ-QPSK can be transmitted over 1,500 km before it reached ITU-T G.709 7% HD-FEC overhead limit. This propagation distance was well beyond the transmission requisites of any typical metro network (≈ 600 km). Furthermore, it was demonstrated that, within the threshold limit, OSNR degradation of the remotely generated OOK pump had minimal impact on the transmission distance of the PI DPTM RZ-QPSK before it reached 7% HD-FEC overhead limit.

Committee: Drs. Gary M. Carter (Chair), Anthony M. Johnson, Fow-Sen Choa, Tinoosh Mohsenin, Thomas E. Murphy (ECE,UMCP), William Astar

Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal

Verifiable Randomness and its Applications

Christopher Vatcher

10:30am Thursday, 24 September 2015, ITE 325b

We propose to create a public verifiable randomness beacon, to integrate with the Random-Sample Voting system, constructed to be secure against adversaries who have even almost complete control over the system’s source of public randomness including the entropy source.

By verifiable randomness, we do not mean we can prove a sequence of bits to be random. Instead, verifiability means it is possible to prove: (a) a consumer used uniform bits originating from a specific entropy source and therefore cannot lie about the bits used; and (b) the bits used were unpredictable prior to their generation and, with overwhelming probability, were free of adversarial influence. This is in contrast to ordinary public randomness where parties must agree to trust some randomness provider, who becomes a target of corruption. Verifiable randomness is an enhancement of public randomness used to perform random selection in voting, conduct random audits, preserve privacy, generate random challenges for secure multi-party computation, and public lottery draws. Random-Sample Voting specifically requires verifiable randomness for random voter selection and random audits.

Our work extends the work of Eastlake and Clark and Hengartner by considering (a) adversaries who have fine control over the entropy source and (b) physical entropy sources, which we can make verifiable.

Our specific aims include (a) creating adversary models for three entropy source abstractions based on trusted providers, sensor networks, and distributed proof-of-work systems; (b) create a verifiable random beacon that integrates each model; (c) integrate our work with the Random-Sample Voting system; and (d) integrate with NIST’s beacon and propose a verifiable randomness standard based on our work.

Our method is to weaken the trust assumption on the entropy source by introducing verifiable entropy sources, which have mechanisms for limiting adversarial influence and accumulating evidence that their outputs obey a known distribution. Combined with an appropriate randomness extractor, we can generate verifiable random bits. Using sources like weather, we will construct a verifiable randomness beacon: a public randomness provider unencumbered by generous and often unfounded trust assumptions. Such a beacon can serve as a singular gateway for accessing and aggregating multiple entropy sources without compromising the randomness provided to consumers.

Committee: Drs. Alan T. Sherman (Chair), Konstantinos Kalpakis, Weining Kang (Math/Stat), David Chaum (Random-Sample Voting), Aggelos Kiayias (University of Athens)

National Hispanic Heritage Month: 

Do you want to learn more about U.S. American and global holidays?

Are you interested in learning more about different customs, events, and heritage months? 

Do you like to try ethnic-specific recipes?

If your answer is ‘yes’ to any of the above questions, here is a great resource for you!

Check out our online Diversity Resource Calendar  accessible through your myUMBC login that provides detailed information on U.S. American and global holidays, customs, events, heritage months and ethnic-specific recipes.

The calendar is also available on Student Life's website:

http://osl.umbc.edu/diversity/mosaic

We’re proud to announce the Critical Social Justice: Baltimore 365 keynote “Baltimore in Action: Always Rising,” which will feature prominent social justice advocates from across the city. Rather than having a single keynote speaker as we did in past years with Franchesca Ramsey and Jay Smooth, we look forward to hosting a dynamic conversation among several of the leading voices working to create change in our community.

Our featured keynote panelists include:

• Rev. Dr. Heber Brown, III, faith-based activist and community organizer
• Dr. Marisela B. Gomez, public health advocate and author
• Tawanda Jones, activist and sister of Tyrone West
• Jacqueline Robarge, founder of Power Inside
• Kwame Rose, social activist and hip-hop artist
• Moderated by radio host Marc Steiner 

The keynote event will be held on Tuesday, October 20th in the University Center Ballroom. Doors open at 6:30pm and the keynote will begin at 7pm, immediately followed by a meet-and-greet reception with the panelists.

This event is free and open to the public. If you have questions or need accommodations, please contact the Women’s Center at womens.center@umbc.edu. 

Want to learn more about our panelists? Stay tuned this week as we profile each speaker and highlight what you need to know!

The UMBC CSEE Seminar Series Presents

Technical challenges and opportunities
in studying the brain’s network activity

Dr. Hanbing Lu
National Institute of Drug Abuse, NIH

12:00-1:00pm, Friday 25 September 2015, ITE 325b

Brain structures do not work in isolation; they work in concert to produce sensory perception, motivation and behavior. Recent advances in fMRI technology offer the opportunity to investigate brain’s network activity. Data are accumulated suggesting that dysregulations within and between network activity are implicated in a number of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease and drug addiction. Despite wide application of this approach in systems neuroscience, the fundamentals of brain network activity remain poorly understood. Animal models permit invasive manipulations and are uniquely advantageous in this regard. In this talk, Dr. Lu will discuss technical challenges and opportunities in studying brain networks by integrating multiple modalities, including MRI, electrophysiological recording, optical and electromagnetic neural modulation.

Dr. Hanbing Lu received his doctorate training in Biophysics at the Medical College of Wisconsin, during which he developed hardware and imaging sequence for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in rodents. He is currently a staff scientist in the Neuroimaging Research Branch, National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIH. Dr. Lu pioneered animal models to investigate brain’s large scale networks. Current efforts include integrating multiple modalities to better understand the neurobiology of brain’s network activity

Hosts: Professors Fow-Sen Choa (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) and Alan T. Sherman (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. )

· More talks and directions ·