The UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department seeks to fill two tenure-track faculty positions for its Computer Science program and is especially interested in candidates whose research areas include security and data analytics and related fields. Apply by January 15, 2015 for full consideration.

UMBC has a large and vibrant computing community with nearly 100 faculty and more than 3100 students enrolled in computing programs that include computer science, cybersecurity, computer engineering, electrical engineering, information systems, human-centered computing, intermedia and digital arts, and bioinformatics.

Our location in the Baltimore-DC corridor puts us in the center of one of the largest concentrations of federal agencies and research and development centers and many industrial research labs, including the new Cybersecurity Federally Funded R&D Center. We benefit from an excellent computing infrastructure that includes several high-performance computing clusters and participation in the National LambdaRail network.

The CSEE Department also has three new positions for full-time lecturers. The College of Engineering and Information Technology has a position for a full-time lecturer or Professor of the Practice to focus on the needs of incoming computing majors through teaching, advising, and helping develop programs in computing. This person will work closely with faculty in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department and Information Systems Department. UMBC’s Information Systems department is accepting applications for three tenure track faculty positions in data science, software engineering and human-centered computing.

Dissertation Defense

TABEL — A Domain Independent and Extensible
Framework for Inferring the Semantics of Tables

Varish Vyankatesh Mulwad

8:00am Thursday, 8 January 2015, ITE325b

Tables are an integral part of documents, reports and Web pages in many scientific and technical domains, compactly encoding important information that can be difficult to express in text. Table-like structures outside documents, such as spreadsheets, CSV files, log files and databases, are widely used to represent and share information. However, tables remain beyond the scope of regular text processing systems which often treat them like free text.

This dissertation presents TABEL — a domain independent and extensible framework to infer the semantics of tables and represent them as RDF Linked Data. TABEL captures the intended meaning of a table by mapping header cells to classes, data cell values to existing entities and pair of columns to relations from an given ontology and knowledge base. The core of the framework consists of a module that represents a table as a graphical model to jointly infer the semantics of headers, data cells and relation between headers. We also introduce a novel Semantic Message Passing scheme, which incorporates semantics into message passing, to perform joint inference over the probabilistic graphical model. We also develop and explore a “human-in-the-loop” paradigm, presenting plausible models of user interaction with our framework and its impact on the quality of inferred semantics.

We present techniques that are both extensible and domain agnostic. Our framework supports the addition of preprocessing modules without affecting existing ones, making TABEL extensible. It also allows background knowledge bases to be adapted and changed based on the domains of the tables, thus making it domain independent. We demonstrate the extensibility and domain independence of our techniques by developing an application of TABEL in the healthcare domain. We develop a proof of concept for an application to generate meta-analysis reports automatically, which is built on top of the semantics inferred from tables found in medical literature.

A thorough evaluation with experiments over dataset of tables from the Web and medical research reports presents promising results.

Committee: Drs. Tim Finin (chair), Tim Oates, Anupam Joshi, Yun Peng, Indrajit Bhattacharya (IBM Research) and L. V. Subramaniam (IBM Research)

UMBC GM Niclas “The Dark Knight” Huschenbeth plays GM Nadezhda Kosintseva from UT Dallas in the fifth round of the Pan-Am chess tournament.

Congratulations to the UMBC chess team for placing third in the 2014 Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship and qualifying to advance to the President’s Cup on April 5-6 at the New York Athletic Club.  This tournament, known as the Final Four of College Chess, will determine the 2015 U.S. college team chess champion.

The UMBC team in this year’s Pan-Am consists of GM Niclas Huschenbeth, IM Levan Bregadze, IM Tanguy Ringoir, GM Akshayraj Kore and WGM Nazi Paikidze (alternate).

The final standings were: Webster University A (5.5 points), the University of Texas at Dallas A (5 points), the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (5 points) and Texas Tech University A (4.5 points). UTD placed ahead of UMBC by virtue of winning their match.

You can view the final results on the tournament website and review selected games on Monroi.

Photo by Marlayna Demond. Sitting (left to right): Joel DeWyer, Business Manager; Dr. Alan T. Sherman, Director and GM Sam Palatnik, Coach. Standing (left to right): GM Akshayraj “The Indian Knight” Kore; IM Levan “The Georgian Gangster” Bregadze; GM Niclas “The Dark Knight” Huschenbeth, Captain; IM and WGM Nazi “The Black Widow” Paikidze and IM Tanguy “The Belgium Butcher” Ringoir.

The UMBC chess team won its match (4-0) against Lindenwood University in the first round of the 2014 Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship being held this week in South Padre Island, Texas. Five more rounds will be played over the next three days to determine winner and the top four USA schools, which will compete in the President’s Cup championship April 5-6 at the New York Athletic Club to determine the U.S. college team chess champion.

UMBC’s chess team has won or tied for first place a record ten times at the Pan-Am and a record six times at the President’s Cup. The UMBC team in this year’s Pan-Am consists of GM Niclas Huschenbeth, IM Levan Bregadze, IM Tanguy Ringoir, GM Akshayraj Kore and WGM Nazi Paikidze (alternate).

CSEE professor Alan Sherman, director of UMBC’s chess program, reports that the field is especially strong this year with 22 International Grandmasters (GM) or International Woman Grandmaster (WGM) and notes that “At least one strong school will not make the Final Four”.

You can view the latest results on the tournament website and watch selected games live on Monroi.

MS Thesis Defense

distratto: Real-time Impaired Driving Detection Using Multiple Textile and Inertial Sensors

Tsu An Chen

1:00-3:00pm Tuesday, 23 December 2014, ITE 341

Statistical data shows that driving-related accidents and human casualties caused by vehicles are on the rise in the US and globally. Most of these accidents are cause by impaired or distracted driving. Existing systems that detect impaired driving use cameras that perform eye and head tracking and do not capture full-body movements that are indicative of dangerous driving. To address this problem, in this thesis we present a system, distratto, that uses capacitive textile sensors embedded into car seats, headrests, and arm rests to capture whole body motion, and inertial and GPS sensors for determining vehicle speed and turns. Using a combination of these sensors and a tiered signal processing algorithm, we infer attributes that are indicative of impaired driving. We have developed a fully functional prototype of distratto that we evaluate in a real vehicle setting. We show that our system can detect impaired driving instances and driver movements with high accuracy.

Committee: Drs. Nilanjan Banerjee (chair), Ryan Robucci, Chintan Patel

We are pleased to announce that we are now accepting applications for Summer 2015 admissions to our BIOLOGY Research Experiences for Undergraduates at the American Museum of Natural History.  Details about the program can be found on our website: http://www.amnh.org/our-research/richard-gilder-graduate-school/academics-and-research/fellowship-and-grant-opportunities/undergraduate-fellowships

To apply, please go to our application website: https://myrggs.amnh.org/Applicant/ApplyOnline_Login.aspx.  Please note that the application deadline for BIOLOGY REU admission is January 30, 2015.

 Please contact Maria Rios at mrios@amnh.org if you need any further information.

The Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2014 bill was passed by Congress this month and signed by the President at the end of last week. The bill provides for “an ongoing, voluntary public-private partnership to improve cybersecurity, and to strengthen cybersecurity research and development, workforce development and education, and public awareness and preparedness, and for other purposes.”

The bill formalizes the role of the National Institute for Standards and Technology in continuing to develop the voluntary Cybersecurity Framework. It includes provisions to promote cybersecurity research, private/public sector collaboration on cybersecurity, education and awareness and technical standards, which includes a federal cloud computing strategy. It also directs NSF to continue the Federal Cyber Scholarship-for-Service program under which recipients agree to work in the cybersecurity mission of a federal, state, local, or tribal agency for a period equal to the length of their scholarship.

Name: Mike Alksnis

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: Maryland Disability Law Center | Title of Your Position: Nursing Facilities Project Intern

Major(s)/Minor(s): Social Work

Expected Graduation Year: December 2014

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

At MDLC, I have enjoyed working with clients and their families to reduce cases of unnecessary institutionalization in nursing facilities, and to ensure the safety, health, independence, and full community integration of clients seeking to make transitions into their own homes. It has been a pleasure to work with the Sunshine Folk, a group of advocates and former nursing facility residents, in pursuit of the same goal. I have also closely followed the development and implementation of Maryland’s Community First Choice (CFC) program, which strives to make these transitions possible for all eligible Maryland residents. I have had the privilege of helping to draft correspondence to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene explaining MDLC’s viewpoint on numerous CFC matters, and have participated in a similar project in cooperation with a State Senator. I have also worked closely with self-advocating CFC participants to help maximize the impact of their voice on the development of the program’s regulations. The staff at MDLC have gone out of their way to make me feel welcome and to create a quality educational experience for me throughout my internship. I could not have asked for a better place to learn as an aspiring social worker!

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

I was connected to my internship at MDLC by UMBC's undergraduate social work program for my field placement, which began in September 2013. Due to MDLC's satisfaction with my performance on the job throughout the 2013-2014 academic year, I was offered a paid 10-week internship over the following summer. I gladly accepted the offer and continued my work in the nursing facilities project through mid-July.

Which of the following resources did you use to find your current experience?

Faculty Connections, UMBC BSW Program

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

The most enjoyable part of my experience at MDLC was the privilege of being allowed to work on projects which interested me. I expressed an interest in advocacy, community organizing, policy, and social justice during my interview in the summer of 2013. MDLC responded by graciously constructing an internship experience that was catered to fostering professional growth in these areas. As a result, I have become more aware of my potential to succeed in specific roles as a future social worker.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

If it were not for MDLC, I would not have become so attuned to the ways in which people with disabilities continue to be oppressed by social and political forces which diminish their dignity, independence, community integration, right to self-determination, and even their health and safety. Due to this internship experience, I recognize there is a far-reaching need for the advancement of the civil rights and human rights of people with disabilities in Maryland and across the US and beyond.

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

I would offer to another student the same advice that was given to me by faculty in UMBC's undergraduate social work program -- if there is a particular type of person that you are disinclined to want to work with, work with them. In other words, get an internship working with a population that you are not interested in working with. There is a very high probability that your perceptions about the group will be challenged and forever changed. There is even a good chance you will discover that you actually enjoy working with that population. Until we have exposed ourselves to the experience, we are relying on preconceptions and biases, which tend to be false. We cannot know how we will function in a particular type of career setting until we give it a try, and there is no better time to conduct such an experiment with yourself than during an internship as a college student, before you have decided on a career path.

Congratulations on graduating! #UMBCgrad