UMBC's cyber defense team, the Cyber Dawgs, will host an interdisciplinary talk and screening of the film Game of Pawns at 7:00pm on Tuesday, April 30, 2013 in room 102 of the ITE building (LH8). The film is a true story of an American student who was recruited by the Chinese government to infiltrate a U.S. intelligence agency.

The event is sponsored and run by InfraGuard, an organization that acts as a partnership mediator between the FBI and US businesses. The talk will be nontechnical and will present an overview of the dangers that might arise when dealing with foreign businesses or representatives. It should be of interest to students considering studying abroad, pursuing international relations or business, or anticipating working for a government agency.

CSEE Colloquium

Queuing and Long Lines: How to run efficient elections

Dr. William A. Edelstein
Visiting Distinguished Professor of Radiology
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

1:00pm Friday, 3 May 2013, ITE227, UMBC

Computerized touchscreen "Direct Recording Electronic" (DRE) voting systems have been used by over 1/3 of American voters in recent elections, including in Maryland. In many places, insufficient DRE numbers, in combination with lengthy ballots and high voter traffic, have caused long lines and disenfranchised voters who left without voting. We have applied computer queuing simulation to the voting process and conclude that far more DREs, at great expense, would be needed to keep waiting times low. Alternatively, paper ballot-optical scan systems can be easily and economically scaled to prevent long lines and meet unexpected contingencies. We have developed a heuristic "Queue Stop Rule" that can be applied to prevent long lines at voting stations. We have also carried out queuing simulations of other parts of the voting process, for example, voter check-in and ballot scanning. Our results can be used to help plan cost-effective election systems that will produce expeditious elections.

William Edelstein, physicist, received BS and PhD degrees in that subject from University of Illinois and Harvard, respectively. His career has principally focused on the development of MRI, starting in Scotland in 1977 and continuing from 1980 at the GE research lab in Schenectady, NY. He has been Visiting Distinguished Professor of Radiology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine since 2007. His MRI work has been recognized with many honors, including the 2005 Industrial Applications of Physics Prize from the American Institute of Physics. His interest in election systems began several years ago in NY State during the debate to replace lever voting machines.

MS Thesis Defense

Text and Ontology Driven
Clinical Decision Support System

Deepal Dhariwal

9:00am Tuesday 23 April 2013, ITE325b, UMBC

This thesis discusses our ongoing research in the domain of text and ontology driven clinical decision support system. The proposed framework uses text analytics to extract clinical entities from electronic health records and semantic web analytics to generate a domain specific knowledge base (KB) of patients’ clinical facts. Clinical Rules expressed in the Semantic Web Language OWL are used to reason over the KB to infer additional facts about the patient. The KB is then queried to provide clinically relevant information to the physicians. In the first phase, standard text pre processing techniques such as section tagging, dependency parsing, gazetteer lists are used filter clinical terms from the raw data.

In the second phase, a domain specific medical ontology is used to establish relation between the extracted clinical terms. The output of this phase is a Resource Description Framework KB that stores all possible medical facts about the patient. In the final phase, an OWL reasoner and clinical rules are used to infer additional facts about patient and generate a richer KB. This KB can then be queried for a variety of clinical tasks. To demonstrate a proof of concept of this framework, we have used discharge summaries from the cardiovascular domain and determined the TIMI Risk Score and San Francisco Syncope Score for a patient. The goal of this research is to combine factual knowledge about patients, procedural knowledge (clinical rules), and structured knowledge (medical ontologies) to develop a clinical decision support system.

Committee: Dr. Anupam Joshi (chair), Dr. Michael Grasso, Dr. Tim Finin, Dr. Yelena Yesha

MS Thesis Defense

Text and Ontology Driven
Clinical Decision Support System

Deepal Dhariwal

9:00am Tuesday 23 April 2013, ITE325b, UMBC

This thesis discusses our ongoing research in the domain of text and ontology driven clinical decision support system. The proposed framework uses text analytics to extract clinical entities from electronic health records and semantic web analytics to generate a domain specific knowledge base (KB) of patients’ clinical facts. Clinical Rules expressed in the Semantic Web Language OWL are used to reason over the KB to infer additional facts about the patient. The KB is then queried to provide clinically relevant information to the physicians. In the first phase, standard text pre processing techniques such as section tagging, dependency parsing, gazetteer lists are used filter clinical terms from the raw data.

In the second phase, a domain specific medical ontology is used to establish relation between the extracted clinical terms. The output of this phase is a Resource Description Framework KB that stores all possible medical facts about the patient. In the final phase, an OWL reasoner and clinical rules are used to infer additional facts about patient and generate a richer KB. This KB can then be queried for a variety of clinical tasks. To demonstrate a proof of concept of this framework, we have used discharge summaries from the cardiovascular domain and determined the TIMI Risk Score and San Francisco Syncope Score for a patient. The goal of this research is to combine factual knowledge about patients, procedural knowledge (clinical rules), and structured knowledge (medical ontologies) to develop a clinical decision support system.

Committee: Dr. Anupam Joshi (chair), Dr. Michael Grasso, Dr. Tim Finin, Dr. Yelena Yesha

MS Thesis Defense

Text and Ontology Driven
Clinical Decision Support System

Deepal Dhariwal

9:00am Tuesday 23 April 2013, ITE325b, UMBC

This thesis discusses our ongoing research in the domain of text and ontology driven clinical decision support system. The proposed framework uses text analytics to extract clinical entities from electronic health records and semantic web analytics to generate a domain specific knowledge base (KB) of patients’ clinical facts. Clinical Rules expressed in the Semantic Web Language OWL are used to reason over the KB to infer additional facts about the patient. The KB is then queried to provide clinically relevant information to the physicians. In the first phase, standard text pre processing techniques such as section tagging, dependency parsing, gazetteer lists are used filter clinical terms from the raw data.

In the second phase, a domain specific medical ontology is used to establish relation between the extracted clinical terms. The output of this phase is a Resource Description Framework KB that stores all possible medical facts about the patient. In the final phase, an OWL reasoner and clinical rules are used to infer additional facts about patient and generate a richer KB. This KB can then be queried for a variety of clinical tasks. To demonstrate a proof of concept of this framework, we have used discharge summaries from the cardiovascular domain and determined the TIMI Risk Score and San Francisco Syncope Score for a patient. The goal of this research is to combine factual knowledge about patients, procedural knowledge (clinical rules), and structured knowledge (medical ontologies) to develop a clinical decision support system.

Committee: Dr. Anupam Joshi (chair), Dr. Michael Grasso, Dr. Tim Finin, Dr. Yelena Yesha

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Large Data Transfer over the Wide Area Network

Jim Finlayson
Laboratory for Physical Sciences
Advanced Computing Systems Group

1:00pm Friday, 26 April 2013, ITE 227, UMBC

The Department of Defense has challenges related to the transfer of large data sets over distance. This talk will go over some of the investigations into potential solutions in this space.

Jim Finlayson is a File Systems and I/O researcher for the Laboratory for Physical Sciences' Advanced Computing Systems Group. Mr. Finlayson has a long history in data storage infrastructure. He graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park with a BS in Computer Science and later received his MS in Computer Science from The Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering.

The reason for my ire is that we didn’t have websites which told us where to find (rent or buy) cheap college textbooks. But today’s generation just has to type in a URL and hey presto, there are more than a dozen sites plying cheap textbooks for sale or rent.

I am on a slow burn, but let’s take a look at ten websites where you can get college textbooks for cheap.

Note: Most of these sites are US only.

BookRenter

Start with the large search box that helps you trawl through 5 million textbooks. BookRenter offers you no-questions asked book return program plus free shipping. The range of categories cover almost all subjects that are taught in colleges (don’t forget to click the little ‘More’ links). BookRenter gives you different rental rates depending on the borrowing periods. You can also buy used books from the BookRenter Basement. What’s more you can take notes (use highlighters for instance) on the books you borrow from BookRenter. You can return in-store at any of the affiliated locations or ship your return with a pre-paid shipping label. (Read Directory mention)

Chegg

Chegg is very similar to the previous book rental website when it comes to book return guarantees, shipping speed, and even social service. Chegg is a selling point for your own books as well as textbook rentals at low prices. The differentiator is that Chegg offers course reviews and grade distributions as well as homework help for a course you select. Along with first hand reviews of a course, you also get a detailed schedule of the books you need for it. Comparing the list price and the rental, Chegg offers significant savings…some go up to 90%. (Read Directory mention)

Textbooks.com

This too is a similar site with a very similar service. Textbooks.com shows that when it comes to cheap textbooks for purchase or rent, no site is too many as it almost mirrors the service offerings of the above two sites. The book rental site has a referral program that lets you earn $5 for each friend you refer to the site for a book rental or purchase. The site offers free shipping on orders above $25.

eCampus

You can sell and ship your used textbooks for free via the buyback program.  Most of it goes back into the textbook rental program on eCampus. You can also choose to buy a book at a low-cost (with savings upto 90%). Some books also have digital copies (eTextbooks) which again come in two versions – online version and an offline viewing version. When it comes to returning your rented textbooks, shipping is free for all orders over $59 and rental return shipping is always free.

Campus Books

This book rental site comes with its own smartphone apps. Campus Books also offers in-store pickup of books along with a very handy local search feature. The iPhone and Android apps use GPS to locate one near you, and you can the site search to get to libraries or retails shops for the book you want. Campus Books also searches a catalog of 8 million books for the best deals available. If you want to rent textbooks, use the rental comparison engine which compares results from ten book rental companies at once.

BookByte

BookByte is a simpler textbook buying and selling service. The Guaranteed Buyback service is appealing because at the end of the term you are not obliged to return the book. You can sell your book back to BookByte for a lower purchase price and a 10% rebate when you return the textbook. Also, if your Guaranteed Buyback order totals over $49.00 then your shipping is free.

Big Words

Bigwords.com is a comparative search engine that compares books across bookstores and brings you the lowest one on new and used textbooks. You can also use it to search for student loans, DVDs, music, and games.

Direct Textbook

Using Direct textbook to hunt for a new or used textbook is a three step process. Simply search for a book, browse through the search results, and then visit any of the 200 stores that the site taps to buy or rent your textbook. The textbook search engine sources online book retail sites like Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and some of the others we cover here. If you are planning to sell your used textbook, the site lets you check the best buyback price at 25+ stores.

 Student Book Trades

The unique feature of the college textbook book site is definitely the monthly free giveaway. Above that, the site is based on trade…you can list your textbooks here (the ones you have and a wishlist of the ones you want) and use it to trade and exchange textbooks with others. Check out the long list of participating colleges on the site.

Name: Nia Hampton

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: Station North Arts and Entertainment District

Location of the Organization: Baltimore, Maryland

Title of Your Position: Fundraising Initiative Intern

Major(s)/Minor(s): Media and Communications

Expected Graduation Date: Spring 2014

1. Briefly describe your internship, co-op, research or service-learning position/assignment, including your day-to-day tasks and responsibilities.

As an intern at Station North it’s my job to research potential grants. My daily tasks include working on my grant proposal as well as administrative duties, such as updating the list serve. I also have to make people sign up for our mailing list at various events and festivals. 

2. What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company and what have you found most challenging?

I’ve enjoyed the events and festivals we’ve planned and co-created. Final Fridays are really fun and Artscape was cool as usual. I also really enjoy researching grants; I’m always surprised by how much money is readily available to help people bring ideas to life. The most challenging aspect of my internship has been dealing with the different personalities and perspectives when it comes to decision-making. 

3. What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another summer activity?

I’ve seen certain aspects of the art world that people don’t necessarily know exist. I’ve learned that ultimately everything really is a business; that although you may have talent, success is really a product of drive, opportunity and intelligence.

4. How do you see your summer work as meaningful? Has it given you a chance to work on issues or with communities that matter to you?

My summer has been extremely meaningful. I’ve discovered my love of the elderly community on a personal level. And now I’m in the process of writing a grant proposal that would make it possible for the older residents of Station North to take art classes next summer.