Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git’s features (learning ease, tiny footprint and fast performance, services like GitHub) have caused many to choose it over older alternatives like Subversion and CVS. If you want to find out how you can use Git, come the LUG Git tutorial this Wednesday.

The UMBC Linux Users Group will sponsor a lecture and workshop on Git led by Alexander Bauer from Noon to 1:00pm on Wednesday, February 26 in the ITE 240 computer laboratory at UMBC. “Git” is a term that has become familiar to a great many of us in the technical world, whether as users or as developers. With the rise of such services as GitHub and BitBucket, and an increasing number of open source projects being hosted as Git repositories, yet many people are still unfamiliar with its use and potential use cases. During the workshop you can use your own laptop or a lab computer.

The UMBC ACM Student Chapter will kick off the Spring Hi-Tea series this week at 3:00pm on Friday, February 20. Hi Tea is a student-run social event held (nearly) every Friday from 3:00 to 3:30 in the third floor hallway of the ITE building outside the CSEE Department suite (325 ITE). All students, staff, faculty and friends of the CSEE Department are welcome to attend. Each week, a group of students will plan and assemble simple refreshments for the event. See our photo sets for pictures of past Hi-Tea events.

This week the event host is the IEEE Student Branch and next week it will be the Ebiquity Research Group.

This time we are changing the competition model to bring in more participants and give away more prizes. We are also modifying the judging process to bring in more votes from the faculty, staff and students who are attending the event. We will continue to have faculty and/or staff judges at the same time, that would help us find a right balance for the judging process. Although the competition rules remain the same, we are now going to have four winners and instead of a knockout tournament format we will have points based ranking format. Here are the rules:

• Form groups of one to three members. Teams do not have to have all members from the same lab. So feel free to form a group with any of your friends from the CSEE Department.
• Create a name for your team or use your lab’s name.
• The winning team will be chosen from a weighted combination of points given by judges and attendees.
• Each week one or more teams may participate. All of them would get points on the judging criteria from the judges and attendees.
• Points obtained through the semester would be ranked and the top four team would receive the prizes.
• Each team should limit their presentation to $25. Each team MUST save their receipts to obtain their reimbursement. We will inform you how to get the reimbursement.
• Teams will be judged on creativity, presentation, and budget planning. It is preferred that you list how you managed your expenses for the judges to verify limit-to-$25 rule.
• The Hi-Tea competition will proceed through the semester and at the end of the semester the winners would be announced.

For questions, comments, and registration, send email to one of the Hi-Tea committee members: Genaro Hernandez Jr. (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ), Primal Pappachan (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) or Sunil Gandhi (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ).

Efficient Secure Multi-party Computing and Its Applications

Dr. Yan Huang
University of Maryland, College Park

1:00-2:00pm Monday, 24 February 2014, ITE 325b, UMBC

Secure Multiparty Computation offers cryptographically strong guarantees on the secrecy of data used in collaborative computing among untrusted parties. It has many important applications ranging from peer-to-peer secure auction to privacy-preserving data mining. In this talk, I will present my experience in making secure computation practical. I will also share my vision on how to blend modern cryptography, programming languages, and artificial intelligence research to solve interesting cyber-security problems.

Dr. Yan Huang is a research associate at the University of Maryland and the Maryland Cybersecurity Center. Dr. Huang is interested in developing secure protocols, with applications in private collaborative data mining, secure cloud computing, and cyber-physical systems. His research combines techniques from systems, cryptography, and programming languages to build secure systems. He is the creator of FastGC, a practical secure computation software framework, which has been downloaded more than 500 times and used in several research projects by both academia and industry labs world-wide. Dr. Huang graduated from University of Virginia with a Ph.D in Computer Science in 2012.

The Baltimore Code Craftsmanship meetup group will hold its monthly meeting at 7:00pm on Thursday, February 20 in room 107 of the Sondheim Building on the UMBC Campus. The meetup is for students, faculty and software developers in the Baltimore area that care about the quality of their work and want to practice and improve their programming skills, share what they know and learn new things from others.

This is a hands on coding user group with no presentations. Each meeting will be a dojo where we will go through a challenging software craftsmanship exercise that focuses on clean code, test-driven development, design patterns, and refactoring. We will pair up and practice on a kata in order to learn and apply the values, principles, and disciplines of software craftsmanship. Come with your laptop equipped with your favorite programming and automated unit testing environment. If you don’t have a laptop, come anyway, we will need only one laptop for every two people. Be prepared to pair up, learn, share and have fun!

Join the meetup and register to attend at the meetup event page.

Linguistic and System Support for Structured Parallel Programming

Dr. I-Ting Angelina Lee
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

12:00-1:00 Thursday, 20 February 2014, ITE 325b, UMBC

Parallel programming is hard, due to issues such as scheduling and synchronization. Most parallel programs today deal with these issues using low-level system primitives such as pthreads, locks, and conditional variables. Although these low-level primitives are flexible, they, like goto statements, lack structure and make it difficult for the programmer to reason locally about the program state. Just as the use of goto has been mostly deprecated in favor of structured control constructs, we can simplify parallel programming by replacing these low-level primitives with linguistics that enable well-structured parallel programs.

To enable structured parallel programming is not merely a matter of linguistic design. The underlying system must also efficiently support the linguistics. In this talk, I will describe my work on pipeline parallelism, a parallel pattern commonly used in streaming applications, as an example of linguistics for structured parallel programming. I will also draw examples from my research to demonstrate how novel mechanisms in operating systems and hardware, not just the runtime, can help provide efficient support for the linguistics.

I-Ting Angelina Lee is a postdoctoral associate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, working with Prof. Charles E. Leiserson. Her areas of interest include designing linguistics for parallel programming, developing runtime system support for multithreaded software, and building novel mechanisms in operating systems and hardware to efficiently support parallel abstractions. Her work on “memory-mapped reducers” won best paper at SPAA 2012. Intel has released an experimental branch of Cilk Plus that incorporates support for parallel pipelining based on her work. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in 2012 under the supervision of Prof. Charles E. Leiserson. She received her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from UC San Diego in 2003.

Host: Tim Oates, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Eighteen Baltimore-area startups and organizations looking to hire technology talent will participate in NET/WORK Baltimore from 4:00pm to 7:00pm on Thursday, February 20 at Emerging Technology Center (101 N. Haven St., Baltimore).

The companies are focused on a variety of sectors, including cybersecurity, game development, mobile computing, web design, education, healthcare and more.

Tickets are $5 (free for students with ID) and include free professional headshots and a happy hour 6:00-7:00. RSVP here.

Eighteen Baltimore-area startups and organizations looking to hire technology talent will participate in NET/WORK Baltimore from 4:00pm to 7:00pm on Thursday, February 20 at Emerging Technology Center (101 N. Haven St., Baltimore).

The companies are focused on a variety of sectors, including cybersecurity, game development, mobile computing, web design, education, healthcare and more.

Tickets are $5 (free for students with ID) and include free professional headshots and a happy hour 6:00-7:00. RSVP here.

Eighteen Baltimore-area startups and organizations looking to hire technology talent will participate in NET/WORK Baltimore from 4:00pm to 7:00pm on Thursday, February 20 at Emerging Technology Center (101 N. Haven St., Baltimore).

The companies are focused on a variety of sectors, including cybersecurity, game development, mobile computing, web design, education, healthcare and more.

Tickets are $5 (free for students with ID) and include free professional headshots and a happy hour 6:00-7:00. RSVP here.

Leidos National Security Operations CTO discusses cybersecurity at Shady Grove

The UMBC Graduate Cybersecurity Program at the Universities at Shady Grove is pleased to host James D. (Don) Bowers, CTO and Chief Scientist of Leidos (formerly SAIC) National Security Operations for a discussion on current cybersecurity operations and the challenges of operating across the complex cyber spectrum.

The event will take place from 6:00-8:00PM on Tuesday, March 4, 2014 in Building III Room 4215 at the Universities at Shady Grove. Light refreshments will be served.

Speaker Bio: James D. (Don) Bowers is a Chief Scientist with 28 years of experience in securing cyber, telecommunications, RF, and SCADA networking projects. He is a CISSP and is currently the Chief Technology officer for Leidos’ National Security Operation. For the last 18 years and has been a key technical resource for many infrastructure security projects at Leidos (formerly SAIC.) During this time he led several critical internal research and development programs, including work involving public safety communications and wireless interoperability. His latest research projects involve cyberthreat operations and “big data” solutions to ingest, correlate, and visualize disparate data types and sources for true predictive situational awareness. During his 28-year career in the area of cyber and information security within the federal civilian, DoD, and commercial markets, Mr. Bowers has supported a number of programs and agencies including DARPA, DHS (TSA, US VISIT, Wireless Management Office, FEMA), TVA, NRC, FAA, FBI, Treasury and Interior Corning, Motorola, and others.