UMBC CSEE alumni Don Miner and Brandon Wilson have started a Meetup group for Hadoop users in and around the Baltimore area to discuss Hadoop technology and use cases.

Apache Hadoop is one of the most popular open-source tools used to harness clusters of computers to process, analyze or learn from massive amounts of data. Whether you are new to Hadoop or an experienced user, this is a great opportunity to improve your knowledge and network with others in the Baltimore computing technology community.

The first meeting will be held from 7:00pm to 9:30pm on Thursday, 19 February 2015 at AOL/Advertising.com at 1020 Hull St #100, Baltimore, MD (map). Join the group here.

Two of UMBC’s regular hackathon participants took 3rd place at MHacks, a competitive 1000 student hackathon at the University of Michigan this past weekend!

CSEE students Michael Bishoff (President, HackUMBC) and Sekar Kulandaivel created a haptic feedback suit that makes virtual reality more immersive. To do this, the team created 12 vibrating modules that are placed on the user’s arms, legs, chest, and head. When various events occur in the virtual environment, the user will feel a vibration in the appropriate location on their body. For example, when a user falls in a virtual environment, they will feel a vibration in their legs, or when a user gets hit in their arm, they will experience a vibration on the appropriate arm.

For placing third, the duo won a trip to Seoul, South Korea in the summer to represent UMBC at the Global Hackathon, a 2000 person hackathon event backed by the mayor of Seoul. The event’s goal is to increase innovation and produce projects that make a global impact. Attendees of the event will include other brilliant students from around the world!

Mike and Sekar incorporated Oculus Rift technology, which they won at UMD’s 2014 Bitcamp hackathon.

Interested in maker-faires and participating in future hackathons? Join hackUMBC!

Each year for 9 weeks during the summer, the MPC co-sponsors a Research Internship Program. The program has brought hundreds of the best science and engineering undergraduates from across the country to conduct graduate-level materials research. Students can select from a wide array of projects available.

This year's Summer Scholar Internship Program will run from June 8 - August 8, 2015.

For more information about the Internship Program, please refer to the Summer Scholar Quick Facts and the FAQ portion of our website.

The application deadline is February 13, 2015. 

CSEE’s Dr. Rick Forno was a panelist for Schmoocon 2015’s closing plenary session on January 18 in Washington, DC. The session, entitled “Get Off My Lawn: Examining Change through the Eyes of The Old Guard” brought together four longtime security practitioners to discuss in a free-flowing (if not somewhat curmudgeonly) manner the state of Internet security over the years while fielding audience questions and avoiding Schmooballs tossed their way.

Joining Rick on the panel were Carole Fennelly (independent New York area security consultant), Ben Laurie (Google), and Space Rogue (L0pht). Schmoocon founder Bruce Potter moderated the session.

ShmooCon is an annual east coast hacker convention held in Washington, DC offering three days of demonstrating technology exploitation, inventive software and hardware solutions, and hosting open, unfiltered discussions of critical information security issues. Tickets to the conference routinely sell out within seconds, and the acceptance rate for proposals traditionally hovers around 20%.