For the seventh year in a row, UMBC is the Baltimore-area host site for the Global Game Jam (GGJ).

In a game jam, people come together to make a video game — a hackathon for game development. Participants join small teams at the jam, and over a few days create new, unique and creative video games based on the jam’s theme and rules.

The GGJ is the world’s largest game jam event and takes place over 48 hours at 100s of physical locations worldwide. The 2015 GGJ will start at 5pm on Friday, January 23 and end at 5pm Sunday, January 25. For more information and to find out how you can register to participate at the UMBC site, visit the UMBC GAIM blog.

The JHU Summer Research Expeditions in Computational Sciences, Systems and Engineering program is an intensive, ten-week program to help undergraduates immerse themselves in research and taste the excitement of inventing. Participants will be part of a research team, including one or more JHU CS faculty and/or graduate student mentors and will be expected to make contributions to a challenging research topic. Example areas of research include Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Interactive Visualizations, Healthcare Cost-Effectiveness and Mobile Computing.

Participants will present their summer findings in a poster and a final presentation session. In addition to research, they will take in a class that teaches scientific presentation skills, go on lab and company tours and meet and socialize with peers from institutions around the country.

The program runs from May 25 to July 31 and includes a stipend of $4,500 and housing, if needed. Apply online before March 2 with your choice to two SRE projects and a copy of your resume and transcript. Two letters of recommendations are also required.

Email or call Anita Sampath (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. , 410-516-6841) if you have questions about the application process.

The JHU Summer Research Expeditions in Computational Sciences, Systems and Engineering program is an intensive, ten-week program to help undergraduates immerse themselves in research and taste the excitement of inventing. Participants will be part of a research team, including one or more JHU CS faculty and/or graduate student mentors and will be expected to make contributions to a challenging research topic. Example areas of research include Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Interactive Visualizations, Healthcare Cost-Effectiveness and Mobile Computing.

Participants will present their summer findings in a poster and a final presentation session. In addition to research, they will take in a class that teaches scientific presentation skills, go on lab and company tours and meet and socialize with peers from institutions around the country.

The program runs from May 25 to July 31 and includes a stipend of $4,500 and housing, if needed. Apply online before March 2 with your choice to two SRE projects and a copy of your resume and transcript. Two letters of recommendations are also required.

Email or call Anita Sampath (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. , 410-516-6841) if you have questions about the application process.

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.

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

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.