Okay, I’ll admit it.  I’m a sandwich fiend.  I love them.  Yes, at Panera, I always get a “You Pick Two” with a half a sandwich and soup.  No, I have not calculated all the different possibilities I could obtain, but I have tried quite a few.  I love making sandwiches.  They are perfect to entertain with.  I’ve always liked playing around with new flavors when it comes to tuna, chicken, egg, and potato salads (check out my recipes for potato salad and my aunt’s sandwiches!)  For something lighter, healthier, and unexpectedly good, try out this recipe for tuna salad.  If you’re not a tuna fan, by all means, go ahead a substitute with chicken, egg, or whatever protein you like!

Ingredients: Makes 2 servings

• 2 cans of tuna (packed in water or oil—doesn’t matter!)
• 6 oz. of plain Greek yogurt
• 1 lemon, zested and half of it for the juice
• 2 cloves of fresh garlic, minced or grated into a paste

*If you don’t like fresh garlic, substitute with 1 tsp of garlic powder/salt.  However, fresh garlic is highly recommended

• 1/3 cup of grated cucumber

*Substitute with chopped spinach leaves if you aren’t a fan of cucumber! (I used spring mix since I ran out of cucumber!)

• 2 Tbsp of honey
• Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

1.      Drain your tuna well and flake into a mixing bowl.

2.      Add the yogurt, lemon zest, juice of half of a lemon, garlic, cucumber, honey, salt, and pepper.

3.      Mix all ingredients well.

4.      Serve atop salad, in sandwiches, or with crackers!  Enjoy!

Ingredients used for the tuna salad!

Serving suggestion

2011 CSEE Research Review

photos · program · posters · location · call for papers

The 2011 research review event was the largest to date, with more than eighty people attending. You can see pictures from the poster session and some of the presentations online.

The CRR-11 program committee selected students for best research based on submitted papers.

• Amy Ciavolino, Eliana Feasley, and Robert Deloatch were selected for best undergraduate research for their work Playing to Program: Towards an Intelligent Programming Tutor for RUR-PLE
• Pramod Jagtap was chosen for best research by a Masters student for his thesis work on Privacy Preservation in Context Aware Geosocial Networking Applications.
• Richard Carback won best research by a PhD student for his research on Scantegrity II Municipal Election at Takoma Park: The First E2E Binding Governmental Election with Ballot Privacy.
• Wenjia Li was selected for honorable mention for his PhD research on A Holistic Framework for Securing Mobile Ad Hoc Networks.

CSEE faculty who attended used range voting to honor three students for best poster presentations.

• First place was awarded to Justin Martineau for his work on Domain Independent Textual Sentiment Analysis.
   
• Second place was given to Charles Lohr for his work on Semantic Light: Building Blocks.
   
• Third place was awarded to Varish Mulwad for his work on Generating Linked Data by Inferring the Semantics of Tables.

1 Corinthians 15:9-10

⁹ For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. ¹⁰ But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. ¹¹ Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.

Reflection

In one of the most quoted parts of the book Cost of Discipleship, the author Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes a distinction between “cheap grace” and “costly grace.”  Cheap grace is “grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”  In essence, it means that the death and resurrection of Christ are “without effect” – no impact, influence or change.  In contrast, costly grace is a “call to follow Jesus.”  Because of the high cost that Christ paid for our sins, God’s grace compels us to live a life surrendered to, and led by, this calling.  For Paul, he counted the cost of grace.  Because Christ left an indelible mark in his life, he proclaimed “I am who I am” only and all because of God’s grace.  It changed the way he saw his past, formed his present days, and shaped his perspective on eternity, even if it meant suffering, persecution and more work than anyone else.

Reflecting on the Transmitted Message:

May our lives be shaped completely by God’s grace and dependent entirely on God’s power.  Take a moment to pray and surrender to God, letting go of our self-reliance and trusting only in God’s power.  As we live today at home, work or school, in fellowship with brothers and sisters, or ministering to unbelievers, may we proclaim “I am who I am” only and all because of the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

KEVIIIIIIIIIIN! The Home Alone home is up for sale… for a mere $2.4 million.

17 people are dead after a 6 hour gun battle in Iraq.

France gave us the Statue of Liberty. They’re now giving New Zealand a mummified head. I think we got the better end of the deal.

In the next life, you could be a tree.

Actually, you could be a tree in this life, thanks to this urn that turns you into a tree after you die. The urn is made of a coconut shell and has a seed inside. People can even choose what kind of tree they will eventually be a part of. And it’s completely biodegradable!

Don’t worry. Cremation isn’t the eco-friendly way to go out in style. The Return to Sender coffin is also biodegradable and cheap to boot!

Not only can urns and caskets be eco-friendly, so can graveyards! A city near Barcelona, Spain did not have many open places that got a lot of sunlight during the day. One of the few places was a graveyard, which is now completely solar powered.

MS Thesis Defense

Group Centric Information Sharing
using Hierarchical Models

Amit Mahale

10:00am Tuesday, 10 May 2011, ITE 346, UMBC

Traditional security policies are often based on the concept of “need to know” and are typified by predefined and often rigid specifications of which principals and roles are pre-authorized to access what information. A recommendations of the 9/11 commission was to find ways to move from this traditional perspective toward one that emphasizes the “need to share”. Ravi Sandhu and his colleagues have developed the Group centric secure information sharing model (gSIS) as a new model that is more adaptible to highly dynamic situations requiring information sharing. We present an implementation of gSIS and demonstrate its usefulness to usecases in information sharing in social media. Our contributions include the prototype implementation, extension to the model such as hierarchical groups and necessary and sufficient conditions, and the use of the semantic Web language OWL for representing the central gSIS concepts and associated data. Our framework uses a pragmatic approach of using semantic web technology to represent and reason about the hierarchy and procedural method to compute access decisions relying on the gSIS semantics.

Thesis Committee:

• Dr. Tim Finin (chair)
• Dr. Anupam Joshi
• Dr. Yelena Yesha
• Dr. Laura Zavala