UMBC’s 37th Annual Graduate Research Conference will take place between 9:00am and 5:00pm on Wednesday, 25 March 2015. The GRC program includes both oral and poster presentations, lunch and a keynote panel, a research information fair and a reception. The event is free, but online registration is requested.

Here is a summary of the presentations from Computer Science and Electrical Engineering students. See the GRC program for abstracts and a complete list of presentations and posters from all UMBC graduate programs.

Session I 9:00am-10:15am in UC 312

• Prajit Das – Computer Science
  FaceBlock: Semantic Context-Aware Privacy for Mobile Devices
• Ari Rapkin Blenkhorn – Computer Science
  Real-time GPU Rendering of Atmospheric Glories
• Tanmay Kulkarni – Electrical Engineering
  Palladium Nanowire Based Enzymatic Biofuel Cell
• Robert Weiblen – Electrical Engineering
  Increased Laser Damage Threshold in As2S3 Motheye Structures
• Muhammad Rahman – Computer Science
  Semantic Information Extraction from RFP Documents

Session II 10:30am-11:45am in Commons 329

• Muhammad Rahman – Computer Science (Oral Presentation)
  Open Information Extraction and Topic Modeling on Academic Profiles
• Vladimir Korolev – Computer Science (Oral Presentation)
  PROB: A Tool for Tracking of PRovenance of Big data Computational Experiments
• Jennifer Sleeman – Computer Science (Oral Presentation)
  Improving Entity Disambiguation for Wild Big Data Through Contextualization and FineGrained Entity Type Recognition

Session II 10:30am-11:45am in Sherman Hall 145

• Jon Ward – Electrical Engineering (Oral Presentation)
  Distributed Beamforming Relay Selection to Increase Base Station Anonymity in Wireless Sensor Networks
• Yin Huang – Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
  An Eigensolver for large sparse graph with Accumulo and D4M
• Abhay Kashyap – Computer Science (Oral Presentation)
  Rapalytics: When Data Science meets Rap!
• Zheng Li – Computer Engineering (Oral Presentation)
  Tongue-n-Cheek: Non-contact Tongue Gesture Recognition

Session II 10:30am-11:45am in Sondheim 103

• Piyush Waradpande – Computer Science (Work in Progress)
  Use of Doppler Radars in Activity Recognition
• Genaro Hernandez – Computer Science (Work in Progress)
  Toward Category Detection for Physically-Grounded Language
• Deepak Krishnankutty – Computer Engineering (Work in Progress)
  Multi Vantage Point Analysis of Power Supply Signatures
• Jorge Teixeira – Electrical Engineering (Work in Progress)
  Advantages and Improvements of BER/WER Performance Evaluation of Error Correcting Codes Using Dual Adaptive Importance Sampling (DAIS)

Session II 10:30am-11:45am, Poster Presentations in Library 7th floor

• Shaokang Wang – Electrical Engineering
  Soliton Wake Instability in a SESAM Modelocked Fiber Laser
• Isaac Mativo – Computer Science
  Clinical Predictive Modeling with Patient Reported Data
• Yichuan Gui – Computer Science
  A Pairwise Algorithm to Overcome the Local Minimum Problem in Training
• David Harris – Computer Science
  Developing User Interface Frameworks to Facilitate Usage Amongst Technologically UnderServed Populations
• Hsiao-Chi Li – Electrical Engineering
  Progressive Band Processing of Orthogonal Subspace Projection in Hyperspectral Imagery
• Lisa Mathews – Computer Science
  A Collaborative Approach to Situational Awareness for CyberSecurity
• Yu Wang – Computer Science
  Isosurface Smoothing using Marching Cubes and PN-Triangles
• Yue Hu – Electrical Engineering
  Impact of the Coulomb Interaction on the Franz-Keldysh Effect in a High-Current Photodetector
• Hadis Dashtestani – Computer Science
  Massively Distributed Online Neuroscience for Improving Virtual Experience

Session III 1:45pm-3:00pm, Poster Presentations in UC 312

• Bryan Wilkinson – Computer Science
  A Resource for Evaluating Adjective Scales
• Adam Price – Computer Science
  Big Data Analytics for Expanding Alice Analysis for the United States
• Seyed Ehsan Jamali Mahabadi and Yue Hu – Electrical Engineering
  Gain Recovery in Quantum Cascade Lasers
• Brian Stevens – Computer Engineering
  Characterization of Glucose Responsive Phenylboronic Acid-Based Hydrogel Using Optical Coherence Tomography

CSEE Ph.D. student Kavita Krishnaswamy is featured in this video created by Suitable Technologies, maker of the Beam telepresence system.

Kavita, who works with CSEE professor Tim Oates, is both a Ford Foundation Predoctoral and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She has also worked at the Quality of Life Technology Center run by CMU and the University of Pittsburgh and IBM Business consulting services.

As a professional researcher with a severe physical disability, Kavita is motivated by a powerful, innate force: autonomy is the soul of independent daily living that is achieved with the advancement of technology. Her research involves the development of robotic systems to provide assistance and increase independence for people with disabilities. She is developing several prototype robotic systems that will support transferring, repositioning, and personal care, with a focus on accessible user interfaces for control that are feasible for persons with severe disabilities.

Kavita attends many events and conferences with the Beam, allowing her independence and mobility to meet, learn, and network with professionals all over the world. The Beam gives her independence to be visible in the community to explore and expand technological boundaries from her home.

If you are interested in the Beam, you can sign up to connect to a Beam at the DeYoung Museum or test drive a BeamPro.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

 Towards Large-Scale Measurement of Vulnerabilities
and Design of Usable New Systems

Prof. Chuan Yue
University of Colorado Colorado Springs

12:00-1:00 Monday, 23 March 2015, ITE325b, UMBC

Security and privacy vulnerabilities are pervasive in computer and network systems. In my research group, we aim to accurately measure and analyze the vulnerabilities of Web, Cloud, and Mobile systems on a large scale; we also aim to design usable new systems that provide better security and privacy protection to millions of users. In this talk, I will first present our research on analyzing the vulnerabilities of popular Web browsers’ built-in password managers and some third-party browser-and-cloud-based password managers. Next, I will present a framework for automatic detection of information leakage vulnerabilities in JavaScript-based browser extensions including password managers. I will explain why it is very challenging to accurately and automatically analyze JavaScript-based browser extensions, justify why our static and dynamic combined approach is practical and appropriate, and further discuss how we may increase the capabilities of this framework to automatically measure and analyze JavaScript related security and privacy vulnerabilities on a large scale. Finally, I will discuss some of our current and future projects on security and privacy research and education, for example, one project is on measuring users’ susceptibility to sophisticated and highly insidious phishing attacks.

Chuan Yue is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. His current research focuses on Web, Cloud, and Mobile Systems Security and Privacy. He received his B.E. and M.E. degrees in Computer Science from Xidian University, China, in 1996 and 1999, respectively, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary in 2010. He worked as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs China, Lucent Technologies for four years from 1999 to 2003, mainly on the design and development of the Web-based Distributed Service Management System for Intelligent Network.

For more information and directions: http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks.

Got Linux? If you’ve ever wanted to try Linux but didn’t know where to start, bring your computer to the Linux Installfest this Friday, March 13 between noon and 5:00pm at the UMBC Commons Mainstreet.  Having Linux on your own computer will give you more control and is a great learning experience.  You can also replicate the environment found on UMBC’s servers (e.g., gl.umbc.edu) which will make doing your homework on them easier.

The UMBC Linux Users Group (LUG) will hold a Linux Install Fest from Noon to 5:00pm on Friday, March 13 on Main Street in the Commons. Experts will help you install a free copy of Linux on your computer using any of several options — dual boot, virtual and more. LUG members can also advise you about the hundreds of legal, free apps available for many Linux versions.

See the LUG site for more information and pictures from previous LUG Installfest. You might also want to join UMBC’s LUG — join the LUG mailing list to get news and reminders of their regular meetings

Contact the LUG faculty adviser, Jon Squire (squire at csee.umbc.edu) with burning questions.

UMBC’s Graduate Research Conference Program (GRC) will be held on campus on Wednesday, March 25, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. There will be a variety of presentations for faculty and students (both graduate and undergraduate). Featured events include professional development workshops, a keynote panel, and a research information fair.

Twenty-eight CSEE graduate students will describe their research in oral or poster presentations. Feel free to attend as many sessions as your schedule allows.

Please note that registration is required for both presenters and attendees. Registration is particularly important, in regards to securing a seat for the lunch and for the professional development workshops.

For more information, visit the Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. .

To register, please go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/37th-annual-graduate-researchconference-registration-13201250295.

Please find a link to the program guide and the events flyer listed below:

• GRC 2015 Program
• GRC Featured Events Flyer

Visual Exploration of Big Urban Data

Dr. Huy Yo
Center for Urban Science and Progress, New York University

12:00-1:00pm Thursday, 12 March 2015, ITE 325b

About half of humanity lives in urban environments today and that number will grow to 80% by the middle of this century. Cities are thus the loci of resource consumption, of economic activity, and of innovation; they are the cause of our looming sustainability problems but also where those problems must be solved. Data, along with visualization and analytics can help significantly in finding these solutions.

In this talk, I will discuss the challenges of visual exploration of big urban data; and showcase our approaches in a study of New York City taxi trips. Taxis are valuable sensors and can provide unprecedented insight into many different aspects of city life. But analyzing these data presents many challenges. The data are complex, containing geographical and temporal components in addition to multiple variables associated with each trip. Consequently, it is hard to specify exploratory queries and to perform comparative analyses. This problem is largely due to the size of the data. There are almost a billion records of taxi trips collected in a 5-year period. I will present TaxiVis, a tool that allows domain experts to visually query taxi trips at an interactive speed and performing tasks that were unattainable before. I will also discuss our key contributions in this work: the visual querying model and novel indexing scheme for spatio-temporal datasets.

Dr. Huy Vo is a Research Scientist at the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), New York University. His research focuses on large-scale data analysis and visualization, big data systems, and scalable displays. He is also a Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering since 2011. He is one of the co-creators of VisTrails, an open-source scientific workflow and provenance management system, where he led the design of the VisTrails Provenance SDK. He received his B.S. in Computer Science (2005) and PhD in Computing (2011) from the University of Utah and was a two time recipient of the NVIDIA Fellowship awards (2009-2010 and 2010-2011).

Host: Jian Chen

Physics, Simulation, and Computer Animation

Professor Adam W. Bargteil
University of Utah

12:00-1:00 Monday, 9 March 2015, ITE325b

Physics-based Computer Animation has revolutionized the world of special effects. I will talk about several success stories including my academy award winning work on fracture, particle skinning, and large-scale splashing liquids. I will also talk about moving beyond cinematic special effects to create tools for artistic authoring of interactive animations and enabling visually predictive simulations that promise to revolutionize industrial design.

Adam W. Bargteil is an assistant professor at the University of Utah. His primary research interests lie in the area of physics-based animation. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley and spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. From 2005 to 2007, he was a consultant at PDI/DreamWorks, developing fluid simulation tools that were used in “Shrek the Third” and “Bee Movie.”

CSEE Ph.D. student Kavita Krishnaswamy was featured in a recent CNN story, Will robots help the bedridden see the world?. She has been getting a lot of visibility in the last few months via a collaboration with Suitable Technologies, a Palo Alto based company that makes ‘telepresence robots’. They loaned the department one of their high-end Beam systems last Fall to use in our robotics related research, lead by professors Tim Oates and Cynthia Matuszek, and have been inviting Kavita to use their systems in various ways.

For example she presented her dissertation proposal in December via Beam, participated in a panel at the Consumer Electronics Show show in January, has been visiting museums via Beam this month, helped lead a debate on the ethics of brain-computer interfaces this past Monday, and will take part in in a SWSX panel in March.

Here is an excerpt from the CNN story:

“A PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Krishnaswamy has spinal muscular atrophy and requires assistance 24 hours a day. She was able to make the museum trips using a Beam telepresence robot — a remotely controlled 16-inch screen mounted five feet above motorized wheels.
…
“I really enjoy the autonomy. It allows me to focus in on the things I want to see,” said Krishnaswamy. “And it’s not controlled by somebody else. I really like being independent.”

Since her first experience using a Beam to attend a computing conference in Seattle, Krishnaswamy says her life has changed drastically. She has more confidence and her calendar is suddenly filled. In a single day this week, she will take part in a debate on her campus, drop in on the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and be in Washington D.C. for the Human Robot Interaction conference.

Krishnaswamy has never had the ability to stand. The Beam puts her at eye-level and gives her a new perspective on the world, she says.”

The MITRE Human Language Technology department is looking to add a talented intern to work on a research project aimed at developing automated methods for detecting dropped pronouns in informal Chinese text. The intern will contribute to the development and evaluation of algorithms and documentation of results in a technical report. Depending upon results, the report will be submitted to a peer-reviewed scientific publication.

Start: April – mid-June (flexible)

Duration: 8-10 weeks

Location: Annapolis Junction MD preferred, McLean VA/Bedford MA possible

For more information, see here.

The MITRE Human Language Technology department is looking to add a talented intern to work on a research project aimed at developing automated methods for detecting dropped pronouns in informal Chinese text. The intern will contribute to the development and evaluation of algorithms and documentation of results in a technical report. Depending upon results, the report will be submitted to a peer-reviewed scientific publication.

Start: April – mid-June (flexible)

Duration: 8-10 weeks

Location: Annapolis Junction MD preferred, McLean VA/Bedford MA possible

For more information, see here.