Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Deriving Insights from Data:
Peek at Research Challenges for some Industry Verticals

Dr. Manish Gupta
Vice President and Director
Xerox Research Center India

3:00pm Monday, 4 November, 2013, ITE 325b, UMBC

We are entering an era that will usher dramatic changes in several industries via exploitation of data. With the proliferation of data from sensors that are becoming ubiquitous and increasing digitization of data that used to be in non-electronic form, there are opportunities to completely transform the way the world is run. We present examples of such opportunities in the Financial, Healthcare, Education and Infrastructure domains. We also describe unique challenges like scale and heterogeneity in growth markets like India, which often require different approaches to solving these problems. Diving deeper into the healthcare industry, we present preliminary work that shows the applicability of remote sensing and data analytics not only to measure body vitals such as temperature and heart rate, but also to diagnose diseases such as breast cancer and atrial fibrillation (a form of cardiac arrhythmia) in the future. As more of the patients’ medical history gets captured in electronic health record systems, there is a further promise of applying real-time predictive analytics (based on accurate models for diagnosis and treatment of various diseases, utilizing the latest medical literature) to assist doctors in practicing personalized, evidence-based medicine. We describe outstanding challenges, including data privacy, machine learning over heterogeneous forms of data, and financial incentives design, which we believe must be addressed to enable transformational impact.

Dr. Manish Gupta is Vice President at Xerox Corporation and Director of Xerox Research Centre in India. Previously, Manish has served as Managing Director, Technology Division at Goldman Sachs in India, and has held various leadership positions with IBM, including that of Director, IBM Research – India and Chief Technologist, IBM India/South Asia. From 2001 to 2006, he served as a Senior Manager at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he led the team developing system software for the Blue Gene/L supercomputer. IBM was awarded a National Medal of Technology and Innovation for the invention of Blue Gene by US President Barack Obama in 2009. Manish earned a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Delhi in 1987, an M.S. from the Ohio State University in 1988 and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 1992. He has co-authored over 75 papers, with more than 5,000 citations in Google Scholar (with an h-index of 41) in the areas of high-performance computing, compilers, and virtual machine optimizations, and has been granted more than 15 US patents. While at IBM, Manish received an Outstanding Innovation Award, two Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and the Lou Gerstner Team Award for Client Excellence. Manish is an ACM Fellow.

hackUMBC is a 24 hour hackathon for UMBC students held in the UMBC Skylight room from 7:00pm Friday December 6 to 7:00pm Saturday December 7. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and caffeine will be provided.

The event is open to all UMBC students of any skill level, from innovators to designers to hardcore coders. Join other hackers for 24 hours of teamwork and exploration as you compete to grow projects from scratch, all while expanding your connections to other students, industry leaders, and professors.

All kinds of computing systems are game: Web, desktop, server, mobile, wearable,enbedded, entertainment, game and hardware projects are all welcome. Projects will be judged based on creativity, technical difficulty, polish, and usefulness. More than $2500 in prizes will be awarded.

For more information and to register, see the hackUMBC site.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is pleased to announce the availability of scholarships (includes internships) to college sophomore students majoring in STEM disciplines related to oceanic and atmospheric science, research, or technology, and supportive of the purposes of NOAA's programs and mission, e.g., biological, social and physical sciences; mathematics; engineering; and computer and information sciences. 

NOAA is accepting applications from students who will have Official Junior status in Fall 2014.

Undergraduate Scholarships (for students who are currently sophomores):

·         Educational Partnership Program Undergraduate Scholarship:  http://www.epp.noaa.gov/ssp_undergrad_page.html

Application Deadline:  January 31, 2014

·         Ernest F. Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship Program:  http://www.oesd.noaa.gov/scholarships/hollings.html

Application Deadline:  January 31, 2014

Eligibility requirements are: 

·         US Citizenship

·         3.0 GPA

·         Sophomore in college studying a NOAA science: atmospheric science, biology, cartography, chemistry, computer science, engineering, environmental science, geodesy, geography, marine science, mathematics, meteorology, oceanography, physical science, photogrammetry, physics, etc. at the time of application.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us!

Victoria Dancy and Sandra Sarvis
NOAA Office of Education
studentscholarshipprograms@noaa.gov

By Carrie Wells, The Baltimore Sun

Morgan State University has opened an investigation into a student's allegation that members of a fraternity he wanted to join rejected him because he is gay.

Brian Stewart said he dreamed of joining Morgan's chapter of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity and thought members would be impressed by his academic accomplishments — Stewart said he was a White House intern — but he was rejected the day after his interview.

He believes it is because of his sexual orientation, citing social-media messages using an anti-gay slur that someone sent him and told him were between fraternity members.

"I couldn't even be angry because I was so hurt," he said.

Members of the fraternity chapter and the national organization did not respond to requests for comment.

A Morgan State spokesman, Jarrett Carter Sr., said the university opened an investigation into Stewart's allegation after he lodged a complaint last week.

"The university doesn't tolerate or accept any kind of discrimination," Carter said. "It's something that the university takes very very seriously."

Carter said that discrimination — in Greek life or elsewhere — is against university policy and that those found in violation can face disciplinary action after a review by a panel of students, faculty and staff.

Stewart, a 20-year-old senior business major, said he wanted to join Kappa Alpha Psi — Morgan's chapter is called Alpha Iota — because his pastor and mentor from his youth was a member. He said he grew up poor in Annapolis and that his mentor had a major influence on his life.

"What he offered to me, I wanted the ability to offer that to someone else," Stewart said.

Stewart said he is no longer interested in pledging the fraternity but that he filed a complaint because he wanted to raise awareness.

"I didn't know I was going to have no control — that my interview meant nothing, my achievements meant nothing, because they had already made up their minds," Stewart said.

cwells@baltsun.com

twitter.com/cwellssun

The U.S. Census Bureau cordially invites you to the U.S. Federal Statistical Agencies Fall Outreach Symposium.  The symposium will feature sessions on Statistics for Journalists and Statistics in the New Media Era.  We believe it will be a great opportunity for your students to learn about the extensive statistics from the federal government.  These statistics are widely used by communications professionals in journalism and public relations.  Presenters will discuss the official statistics produced by their agencies:

 

November 14, 10:00 to 12:00: Statistics for Journalists, Bureau of Labor Statistics Conference Center

 

Journalism students and reporters from broadcast, print and online media outlets will find this session helpful to their understanding of lesser-known federal statistical agencies, official statistics produced by these agencies, and how they can access and use official statistics, studies and analyses in their reporting. Presenters will include representatives of the Economic Research Service, National Center for Education Statistics, Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, and National Center for Health Statistics.

 

November 14, 1:00 to 3:00: Statistics in the New Media Era, Bureau of Labor Statistics Conference Center

This two-hour session focuses on digital and new media; in particular on some of the new media covered in the President’s Digital Strategy such as API’s, apps, infographics and other data visualizations.  Agencies will share examples of how they are adapting new technology and how this helped them give the public easier access to data.

 

There is no registration fee for the symposium. However, advance registration is required to ensure access to the BLS Conference Center. A detailed list of ALL presentations can be found in the attachment included on this news post.

To register, send an email to Wendy Martinez at martinez.wendy@bls.gov with “Symposium” in the subject line and include the attendees full name, a list of the session(s) attendee plans to attend, and any special needs, e.g., handicap access. For more information, see the press release.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Acoustic-Tactile Rendering of Visual
Information for the Visually Impaired

Thrasyvoulos N. Pappas

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Northwestern University

2:30pm Monday, 11 November 2013, ITE 325B, UMBC

After a brief overview of research in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University, we will focus on one particular research problem, the use of hearing and touch for conveying graphical and pictorial information to visually impaired (VI) people. This problem combines visual, acoustic, and tactile signal analysis with and understanding of human perception and interface design. The main idea is that the user actively explores a two-dimensional layout consisting of one or more objects with the finger on a touch screen. The objects are displayed via sounds and raised-dot tactile patterns. The finger acts as a pointing device and provides kinesthetic feedback. The touch screen is partitioned into regions, each representing an element of a visual scene or graphical display. A key element of our research is the use of spatial sound to facilitate active exploration of the layout. We use the head-related transfer function (HRTF) for rendering sound directionality and variations of sound intensity and tempo for rendering proximity. Our research has addressed object shape and size perception, as well as the of a 2-D layout of simple objects with identical size and shape. We have also considered the rendering of a simple scene layout consisting of objects in a linear arrangement, each with a distinct tapping sound, which we compare to a “virtual cane.” Subjective experiments with visually-blocked subjects demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. Our research findings are also expected to have an impact in other applications where vision cannot be used, e.g., for GPS navigation while driving, fire-fighter operations in thick smoke, and military missions conducted under the cover of darkness.

Thrasos Pappas received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 1987. From 1987 until 1999, he was a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. He joined the EECS Department at Northwestern in 1999. His research interests are in human perception and electronic media, and in particular, image and video quality and compression, image and video analysis, content-based retrieval, model-based halftoning, and tactile and multimodal interfaces. Prof. Pappas is a Fellow of the IEEE and SPIE. He has served as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (2010-12), elected member of the Board of Governors of the Signal Processing Society of IEEE (2004-07), chair of the IEEE Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee (2002-03), and technical program co-chair of ICIP-01 and ICIP-09. Since 1997 he has been co-chair of the SPIE/IS&T Conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging.

Host: Janet C. Rutledge, Ph.D.

PhD Defense

Visualizing Sequential Patterns in Large

Datasets Using Levels of Abstraction

Dana Wortman

11am – 2pm, Friday, 1 November 2013, ITE 325b

Student retention and success are important topics in all academic fields and institutions. Faculty seek to understand which topics, theories, or skills defeat students or require strengthening to promote success. Programs seek to understand how to better sequence courses to ensure students are prepared for requisite future courses. Institutions seek to understand how to intervene to promote retention and improve graduation rates. Unfortunately, most statistics gathered by Institutional Research efforts are limited to failure rates, enrollment rates, and graduation rates and do not often explore individual student performance. While these are often further analyzed by various student demographic attributes such as race and gender, these statistical methods alone are insufficient to understand student performance over time and sequential patterns of enrollment or success and failure. This research presents a method using multiple levels of abstraction to visualize performance patterns over time.

To visualize student enrollment and performance patterns, several issues must be addressed including sequential versus concurrent enrollment, spatial layout of course events, and performance over time. Another challenge addressed by this work is that of presenting sequences within the context of the entire program. To address these issues, multiple abstractions are combined in a multi-layered visualization that presents a high-level overview of students enrollment and performance patterns while retaining detailed information regarding individual student progress and performance as they advance through their courses.

The aggregated view represents the lowest level of abstraction, student enrollment and performance are aggregated into a graph structure, presenting patterns of movement throughout the program at the individual course level. The clustered view represents mined sequential patterns of enrollment and performance, illustrating common sequences. The directed view represents the highest level of abstraction and uses two visual elements, heat maps and a vector field, to illustrate overall performance in individual events and movement through the program. Results from multiple cohorts can then be superimposed on the same visualization to enable easy comparisons between patterns. Together, these abstractions provide a focus+context view of student performance, retaining outliers and emphasizing common patterns to illuminate dominant and unique patterns between cohorts of students.

This approach can help educators better understand student progress through the program, performance in individual courses, or student-selected course sequencing and this information can be used to address deficiencies in preparation, skills, or prerequisites. To demonstrate the appropriateness of this approach, performance and enrollment patterns are explored in the Computer Science program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Specifically, this work examines the Gateway policy that requires students to earn a B or higher in the first two required programming courses before progressing with the hopes of validating the existing Gateway but also exploring other possible Gateway courses. Other issues explored within the Computer Science program include race, gender, math placement, and high school scores with the goal of attracting and retaining a more diverse group of students.

Committee: Penny Rheingans (chair), Marie desJardins, Marc Olano, Tim Finin and Diane Lee