Qualcomm's Research & Development team in San Diego has a number of cutting edge projects lined up for next summer and will hire 20+ interns on their team during Summer 2013. The opportunities below are just a section. See the complete list here.

Intern Context Analysis and Reasoning (Qualcomm Research San Diego)

QUALCOMM Research is looking for highly motivated and self-driven systems engineering interns to work on challenging problems related to context awareness on mobile platforms.

Job Function

Mobile phones have transformed from being a communication device to smart and powerful personal computing platforms. Over recent years, with a wide variety of sensors available on smart phones, there has been an exploding interest in context aware applications that use sensor information to infer user situation and interest. These applications utilize different types of hard sensor data (such as GPS, WiFi, accelerometer, gyro, Bluetooth, pressure sensor, etc.) and soft sensor data (such as user calendar, user profile, data from social networks such as Facebook posts and Twitter feeds) to infer user situations and provide a useful service.

QUALCOMM Research is looking for highly motivated and self-driven systems engineering interns to work on challenging problems related to context awareness on mobile platforms.

Responsibilities

Positions are available in the following areas: Situation Inference on Mobile Devices

The goal of this intern project is to research algorithms for inferring user situations from smartphone sensor data. This involves developing machine learning and probabilistic graphical models to fuse low-level inferences from multiple sensor streams. The intern will work on developing techniques and on-device algorithms.

Always-On Context Awareness

Since context is fundamentally 24/7, one of the key challenges is to enable situation inference that is always-on, or “in the background,” and to do this within the power requirements for background tasks. The goal of this intern task is to analyze context aware algorithms and smartly optimize them for execution on QUALCOMM smartphone platforms.

Privacy

The goal of this internship task is to develop a framework for privacy in smartphones that provides a good tradeoff between the amount of private data collected and utility of the application. The intern will look into different aspects of privacy in smart phone and examine approaches to: (1) include privacy aspects into sensor data collection and inferences made from different types of data, (2) incorporate privacy in data models and ontologies, and (3) automatically learn user preferences and user privacy settings for different context aware applications.

Skills/Experience

Seeking candidates with strong background in one or more of the following areas:

• Machine learning, statistics, and signal processing
• Hands on experience with probabilistic inference techniques, Bayesian networks, graphical models, Hidden Markov models
• Working knowledge on semantics, reasoning, ontology definitions
• Experience working with rule based systems
• Privacy aspects of data acquisition
• Sensor data analysis and modeling
• System design and analytical reasoning
• Strong coding skills on C++, Java, and Android is a plus.

UMBC will once again host the Global Game Jam. The weekend-long game development event will be held this year from January 25-27. UMBC is one of hundreds of host sites around the world. Other local sites include College Park, the Universities at Shady Grove, and George Mason.

“I expect an exciting mix of students, friends, alumni, and game developers for a weekend of creative fun,” says Dr. Olano, director of UMBC’s Game Development Track. Last year he and Visual Arts professor Neal McDonald ran the event out of UMBC’s GAIM Lab where game developers of all levels gathered to conceive and create video games around a common theme.

Last year the theme was Ouroboros, a symbol of perpetual renewal. The theme inspired games like Bit Exhaust, a space-invaders-esque Windows phone game and Snake ‘N Bake (pictured above), a two-player game where a snake must help a cupcake make it to the oven before the tasty confection gets hit by a fireball.

The theme for this year’s competition will be announced at 5 p.m. on January 25^th so that all parts of the game development process—from coming up with a game concept to finishing a playable video game–will have to be carried out during one single adrenaline-filled weekend.

Visit globalgamejam.org to register for the event. Thanks to support from Next Century Corporation, registration for the UMBC site is free and open to anyone 18+.

MS Thesis Defense

Simultaneous Feature Acquisition and Cost Estimation

Zachary Kurtz

11:00am Thursday, 6 December 2012, ITE 325b

This thesis will address classification problems with two sources of cost: the cost of acquiring feature values and the cost of incorrect classifications. In particular, I address problems with feature costs and instance-dependent misclassification costs. Many real-world applications, such as medical diagnosis, contain both feature acquisition costs and instance-dependent misclassification costs. The goal of my research is to minimize the total cost of classifying an unknown instance. This goal is accomplished with a new approach: Simultaneous Feature Acquisition and Cost Estimation (SFACE), which combines feature acquisition methods with a regression algorithm that estimates misclassification costs. The estimated cost values are used to estimate the expected cost reduction for the acquisition of each feature. SFACE is evaluated by comparing the total cost of operation to the cost incurred by existing cost-insensitive, cost-sensitive, and feature acquisition algorithms. The results show that SFACE results in lower total cost for the tested datasets.

Committee: Dr. Marie desJardins (Chair), Dr. Tim Oates and Dr. Michael Grasso

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Energy Efficient Platforms for
High Performance and Embedded Computing

Dr. Tinoosh Mohsenin
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00pm Friday, 7 December 2012, ITE 227, UMBC

Future embedded, high performance, and cloud computing must meet limited energy capacity, cost, and sustainability. These devices will regularly execute over one tera-operations per second (TOPS) with a variety of diverse workloads—from baseband communications to wearable medical devices—while operating on a 5 to 25 Watt-hour cellphone/tablet battery. The need for greater energy efficiency, smaller size and improved performance of these devices demands a co-optimization of algorithms, architectures, and implementations. This talk presents several programmable and application specific solutions that illustrate the cross-domain optimization.

The design of system-on-Chip blocks becomes increasingly sophisticated with emerging real-time computational and limited power budget requirements. Two such algorithms, Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) decoding and Compressive Sensing (CS), have received significant attention. LDPC decoding is an error correction technique which has shown superior error correction performance and has been adopted by several recent communication standards. Compressive sensing is a revolutionary technique which significantly reduces the amount of data collected during acquisition. While both LDPC decoding and compressive sampling have several advantages, they require high computational intensive algorithms which typically suffer from high power consumption and low clock rates. We present novel algorithms and architectures to address these challenges.

As future systems demand increasing flexibility and performance within a limited power budget, many-core chip architectures have become a promising solution. The design and implementation of a programmable many-core platform containing 64 cores routed in a hierarchical network is presented. For demonstration, Electroencephalogram (EEG) seizure detection and analysis and ultrasound spectral doppler are mapped onto the cores. The seizure detection and analysis takes 900 ns and consumes 240 nJ of energy. Spectral doppler takes 715 ns and consumes 182 nJ of energy. The prototype is implemented in 65 nm CMOS which contains 64 cores, occupies 19.51 mm2 and runs at 1.18 GHz at 1 V.

Dr. Tinoosh Mohsenin is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County since 2011. Prior to joining UMBC, she was finishing her PhD at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Mohsenin’s research interests lie in the areas of high performance and energy-efficiency in programmable and special purpose processors. She is the director of Energy Efficient High Performance Computing (EEHPC) Lab where she leads projects in architecture, hardware, software tools, and applications for VLSI computation with an emphasis on digital signal processing workloads. She has been consultant to early stage technology companies and currently serves in the Technical Program Committees of the IEEE Biomedical Circuits & Systems Conference (BioCAS), Life Science Systems and Applications Workshop (LiSSA), International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED) and IEEE Women in Circuits and Systems (WiCAS).

More information and directions: http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks

Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research (CHMPR)
Distinguished Computational Science Lecture Series

Parallel Real-Time OLAP on Multi-Core Processors

Frank Dehne
Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
http://www.dehne.net

3:00 p.m. Thursday, 6 December 2012, ITE 456, UMBC

One of the most powerful and prominent technologies for knowledge discovery in Decision Support systems is On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP). Most of the traditional OLAP research, and most of the commercial systems, follow the static data cube approach proposed by Gray etal. and materialize all or a subset of the cuboids of the data cube in order to ensure adequate query performance. Practitioners have called for some time for a real-time OLAP approach where the OLAP system gets updated instantaneously as new data arrives and always provides an up-to-date data warehouse for the decision support process. However, major problems for real-time OLAP are significant performance issues with large scale data warehouses. The aim of our research is to address these problems through the use of efficient parallel computing methods. We present a parallel real-time OLAP system for multi-core processors. To our knowledge, this is the first real-time OLAP system that has been parallelized and optimized for contemporary multi-core processors, providing the opportunity for real-time OLAP on large scale data warehouses. Our system allows for multiple insert and multiple query operations (transactions) to be executed in parallel and in real-time. We evaluated our method for a multitude of scenarios (different ratios of insert and query transactions, query transactions with different sizes of results, different system loads, etc.), using the TPC-DS “Decision Support” benchmark data set. The tests demonstrate that our parallel system achieves a significant speedup in transaction response time and a significant increase in transaction throughput. Since hardware performance improvements are currently achieved not by faster processors but by increasing the number of processor cores, our new parallel real-time OLAP method has the potential to enable OLAP systems that are real-time and efficient/feasible for large databases.

CyberPoint is seeking Paid Summer Intern Scientists and a Jr. IT Specilist. US Citizenship required. APPLY VIA UMBCworks.

CyberPoint delivers innovative, leading-edge cyber security products, solutions and services to customers worldwide. We discover the threats and vulnerabilities that expose data, systems, and infrastructure to compromise, and we design defenses that provide critical protection. Our approach is tailored to our customers’ need to reduce risks and ensure ongoing protection in a world of continuously emerging cyber threats. At CyberPoint, we seek out hard problems, develop new products and solutions, and drive innovation in cyber security. Employing world-class engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, and other industry experts, CyberPoint supports a broad array of commercial and government customers.

Paid Summer Intern Scientist Needed (UMBCworks position 9255053)

Join CyberPoint Labs as a summer intern scientist and conduct research in program analysis, machine learning, and high performance computing. Skills that will be needed include Python, C/C++, Intel x86 and ARM assembly language, and/or functional programming (Haskell, OCaml, Erlang). Some candidate projects include:

• Using Dynamic Bayesian Networks to develop risk models for IT infrastructure.
• Developing CUDA integration into Unified Parallel C or other PGAS systems.
• Developing machine learning based network models of insider threat activity.
• Developing malware analysis scripts using Intel PIN tool, DynamoRIO, and IDA Pro/Immunity scripts.

They will consider all years, rising junior, senior and graduate level students. US Citiznship and 3.00 GPA or above GPA required.

Jr IT Specialist— Temp to Hire position (UMBCworks position 9255090)

CyberPoint International is adding to its Corporate IT Team. The Jr IT Helpdesk will work as a member of the IT Service Desk team providing daily system support including hardware, operating systems and applications, installation and modifications. Troubleshoot system and user problems. Manage user accounts. Perform system maintenance on software; evaluate, test and integrate upgrades to hardware; upgrade operating systems and applications. Investigate problems, research and develop effective and logical solutions considering operational policies and information assurance requirements.

They are looking for an enthusiastic team player with outstanding customer service skills and a strong drive to learn and develop your technical skills. CyberPoint is open to hiring a current student and we can work around your school schedule. The ultimate goal is to have this position convert to a Full time role with an outstanding benefits package. Hourly pay is $16-18/hr + based on experience. Candidate must be a US Citizen

CyberPoint is seeking Paid Summer Intern Scientists and a Jr. IT Specilist. US Citizenship required. APPLY VIA UMBCworks.

CyberPoint delivers innovative, leading-edge cyber security products, solutions and services to customers worldwide. We discover the threats and vulnerabilities that expose data, systems, and infrastructure to compromise, and we design defenses that provide critical protection. Our approach is tailored to our customers’ need to reduce risks and ensure ongoing protection in a world of continuously emerging cyber threats. At CyberPoint, we seek out hard problems, develop new products and solutions, and drive innovation in cyber security. Employing world-class engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, and other industry experts, CyberPoint supports a broad array of commercial and government customers.

Paid Summer Intern Scientist Needed (UMBCworks position 9255053)

Join CyberPoint Labs as a summer intern scientist and conduct research in program analysis, machine learning, and high performance computing. Skills that will be needed include Python, C/C++, Intel x86 and ARM assembly language, and/or functional programming (Haskell, OCaml, Erlang). Some candidate projects include:

• Using Dynamic Bayesian Networks to develop risk models for IT infrastructure.
• Developing CUDA integration into Unified Parallel C or other PGAS systems.
• Developing machine learning based network models of insider threat activity.
• Developing malware analysis scripts using Intel PIN tool, DynamoRIO, and IDA Pro/Immunity scripts.

They will consider all years, rising junior, senior and graduate level students. US Citiznship and 3.00 GPA or above GPA required.

Jr IT Specialist— Temp to Hire position (UMBCworks position 9255090)

CyberPoint International is adding to its Corporate IT Team. The Jr IT Helpdesk will work as a member of the IT Service Desk team providing daily system support including hardware, operating systems and applications, installation and modifications. Troubleshoot system and user problems. Manage user accounts. Perform system maintenance on software; evaluate, test and integrate upgrades to hardware; upgrade operating systems and applications. Investigate problems, research and develop effective and logical solutions considering operational policies and information assurance requirements.

They are looking for an enthusiastic team player with outstanding customer service skills and a strong drive to learn and develop your technical skills. CyberPoint is open to hiring a current student and we can work around your school schedule. The ultimate goal is to have this position convert to a Full time role with an outstanding benefits package. Hourly pay is $16-18/hr + based on experience. Candidate must be a US Citizen

CyberPoint is seeking Paid Summer Intern Scientists and a Jr. IT Specilist. US Citizenship required. APPLY VIA UMBCworks.

CyberPoint delivers innovative, leading-edge cyber security products, solutions and services to customers worldwide. We discover the threats and vulnerabilities that expose data, systems, and infrastructure to compromise, and we design defenses that provide critical protection. Our approach is tailored to our customers’ need to reduce risks and ensure ongoing protection in a world of continuously emerging cyber threats. At CyberPoint, we seek out hard problems, develop new products and solutions, and drive innovation in cyber security. Employing world-class engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, and other industry experts, CyberPoint supports a broad array of commercial and government customers.

Paid Summer Intern Scientist Needed (UMBCworks position 9255053)

Join CyberPoint Labs as a summer intern scientist and conduct research in program analysis, machine learning, and high performance computing. Skills that will be needed include Python, C/C++, Intel x86 and ARM assembly language, and/or functional programming (Haskell, OCaml, Erlang). Some candidate projects include:

• Using Dynamic Bayesian Networks to develop risk models for IT infrastructure.
• Developing CUDA integration into Unified Parallel C or other PGAS systems.
• Developing machine learning based network models of insider threat activity.
• Developing malware analysis scripts using Intel PIN tool, DynamoRIO, and IDA Pro/Immunity scripts.

They will consider all years, rising junior, senior and graduate level students. US Citiznship and 3.00 GPA or above GPA required.

Jr IT Specialist— Temp to Hire position (UMBCworks position 9255090)

CyberPoint International is adding to its Corporate IT Team. The Jr IT Helpdesk will work as a member of the IT Service Desk team providing daily system support including hardware, operating systems and applications, installation and modifications. Troubleshoot system and user problems. Manage user accounts. Perform system maintenance on software; evaluate, test and integrate upgrades to hardware; upgrade operating systems and applications. Investigate problems, research and develop effective and logical solutions considering operational policies and information assurance requirements.

They are looking for an enthusiastic team player with outstanding customer service skills and a strong drive to learn and develop your technical skills. CyberPoint is open to hiring a current student and we can work around your school schedule. The ultimate goal is to have this position convert to a Full time role with an outstanding benefits package. Hourly pay is $16-18/hr + based on experience. Candidate must be a US Citizen

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is looking for students for its paid Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF.)

SURF offers students in STEM fields PAID summer research under the guidance of one NIST's scientists and engineers. The 11-week program at NIST's Gaithersburg, MD campus is May 23 through August 9. There is also a SURF program at NIST's Boulder, CO campus from May 20 – August 2). Participants receive a $5,500 stipend and additional travel and housing allowances as necessary.

UMBC applications must be submitted through the Office of Undergraduate Education. Send an email message to Janet McGlynn (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) to receive application information.

Eligibility:U.S. citizenship or permanent resident status, undergraduate status (can be a senior graduating in May), and at least 3.0 or higher cumulative GPA.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is looking for students for its paid Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF.)

SURF offers students in STEM fields PAID summer research under the guidance of one NIST's scientists and engineers. The 11-week program at NIST's Gaithersburg, MD campus is May 23 through August 9. There is also a SURF program at NIST's Boulder, CO campus from May 20 – August 2). Participants receive a $5,500 stipend and additional travel and housing allowances as necessary.

UMBC applications must be submitted through the Office of Undergraduate Education. Send an email message to Janet McGlynn (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) to receive application information.

Eligibility:U.S. citizenship or permanent resident status, undergraduate status (can be a senior graduating in May), and at least 3.0 or higher cumulative GPA.