Walk In Advising Hours October 13th-17th
Got a question? Stop on by! 

Monday, Octoher 13th
10am-11:30am & 1:30pm-3pm

Tuesday, October 14th
10am-11:30am & 1:30pm-3pm

Thursday, October 16th
3pm-4pm

Please remember that Walk-in advising may not be used for registration advising appointments. For information on signing up for an appointment for registration clearance, please read the information posted here.

Advisors are also available by appointment.

Speaker: Dr. Bing Liu
Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)
Date/Time: October 20, 2014 12:00PM-1:00PM
Location: ITE 459

Abstract: Opinion mining (OM) or sentiment analysis is the computational study of people's opinions, sentiments, and emotions expressed in written language. It is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing (NLP) and text mining due to almost unlimited applications and numerous research challenges. OM can be seen as a semantic analysis problem in NLP, but it is also highly targeted and bounded because an OM system does not need to fully “understand” each sentence or document. It only needs to comprehend some aspects of it, e.g., positive/negative opinions and emotions. Due to this targeted and bounded nature of OM, it allows us to perform deeper text analyses to gain better insights into NLP than in the general setting because the complexity of the general setting of NLP is too overwhelming. Thus, although general natural language understanding is still far from us, we may be able to solve the OM problem satisfactorily. OM also offers an excellent platform for NLP and text mining researchers to potentially make major breakthroughs on many fronts of text analysis. In this talk, I will first introduce OM and then discuss a recent study that uses OM as a platform to explore an important idea of intelligent top discovery involving continuous machine learning and big data.

Biographical Information: Bing Liu is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Before joining UIC, he was a faculty member at the National University of Singapore. His current research interests include sentiment analysis and opinion mining, data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP). He has published extensively in top conferences and journals. He is also the author of two books: “Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining” (Morgan and Claypool) and “Web Data Mining: Exploring Hyperlinks, Contents and Usage Data” (Springer). In addition to research impacts, his work has also made important social impacts. Some of his work has been widely reported in the press, including a front-page article in The New York Times. On professional services, Liu has served as program chairs of many leading data mining related conferences of ACM, IEEE, and SIAM: KDD, ICDM, CIKM, WSDM, SDM, and PAKDD, as associate editors of several leading data mining journals, e.g., TKDE, TWEB, DMKD, and as area/track chairs or senior technical committee members of numerous NLP, data mining, and Web technology conferences. He currently also serves as the Chair of ACM SIGKDD, and is an IEEE Fellow.

Interested in learning more about biomedical informatics and biomedical computing? Join us this Thursday, October 2nd, 2014 at 11:30 AM in ITE 406.Come learn about research in the biomedical informatics and biomedical computing areas and interact with other faculty and students.

This meeting is open to all students. Masters and PhD students are encouraged to attend.

What: Biomedical informatics and biomedical computing When: Thursday, October 2nd, 2014 at 11:30 AM Where: ITE

I just noticed that Denny Vrandecic and Markus Krötzsch have an article on Wikidata in the latest CACM. Good work! Even better, it’s available without subscription.

Wikidata: a free collaborative knowledgebase, Denny Vrandecic and Markus Krötzsch, Communications of the ACM, v57, n10 (2014), pp 78-85.

“This collaboratively edited knowledgebase provides a common source of data for Wikipedia, and everyone else.

Unnoticed by most of its readers, Wikipedia continues to undergo dramatic changes, as its sister project Wikidata introduces a new multilingual “Wikipedia for data” (http://www.wikidata.org) to manage the factual information of the popular online encyclopedia. With Wikipedia’s data becoming cleaned and integrated in a single location, opportunities arise for many new applications.”

POSITION: Verisign Labs Internships; Summer 2015

Verisign is the entity responsible for running .COM and .NET, two of DNS’ root instances, and a number of other top level domains; answering 80+ billion queries daily. Not just a leader in the domain industry, the company is also a prominent provider of DDOS protection and a suite of security services.

Verisign Labs, founded just a few years ago, is the operational research lab that generates insights from this wealth of Internet-scale routing and security data. Proprietary data sets, a computing infrastructure built for ‘big data’, and a diverse team of expert researchers are among our most prominent assets.

We are seeking highly motivated summer interns to work with our research scientists on existing and emerging topic areas in our research portfolio. Interns work closely with one or more mentors on a well-defined topic area. Past years’ intern work has resulted in internal product advancements, intellectual property (i.e., patents), and externally facing conference/journal publications. Given Verisign’s broad business capabilities and the diversity of our scientists’ expertise, the Lab seeks interns from a breadth of disciplines. Current projects include DNS privacy/security/stability, large-scale data analytics, DDoS defense, reputation and behavioral modeling, NLP over domain names, and future Internet design — and this is just a small sampling of the topics that our researchers tackle.

In addition to research work, interns participate in programming that embraces the technical, business, and social opportunities the summer provides. These include technical talks, research huddles, social events, and an intern-specific speaker series. The summer concludes with a poster session that gives interns an opportunity to present their work to Verisign’s thought and business leaders.

Verisign Labs is located in Verisign, Inc.’s global headquarters, in Reston, Virginia. The office is in Reston Town Center, an exciting cultural area with a great social atmosphere and close to plenty of outdoor activities. Reston is just about 20 miles from Washington, DC (with metro access), and is a great place to spend an exciting summer doing cutting edge research and relaxing in (and around) the nation’s capital.

Responsibilities:

• Work with technology and business leaders to identify pertinent research questions.
• Perform research tasks under the guidance of a Verisign thought leader.
• Document and present research results in appropriate forums (internal and external).

Qualifications:

• Current enrollment in a US-based PhD or MS degree program in Computer Science or a related field; PhD students are preferred.
• Availability for ~12 weeks of summer 2015 and a willingness to relocate to Reston, VA for that period. There is some flexibility with respect to start dates and duration.
• Involvement in applied/operational research; publications are a significant plus (send a complete CV).
• Experience in one or more of the following technology areas:
  • Internet infrastructure and application protocols, including TCP/IP, DNS, BGP, and HTTP.
  • Internet security and privacy, including DDoS, DNSSEC, and authentication.
  • Internet profiling and measurement, including crawling and content analysis.
  • Applied machine-learning, especially the extraction of metadata and NLP features.
  • Big data technologies (Hadoop, Hive, Pig) and statistical analysis.
  • Strong interpersonal and communications skills.

LEARN MORE here

APPLY DIRECTLY here

See Flyer here

In this week’s ebiquity meeting (10am Wed. Oct. 15 in ITE346), Abhay Kashyap will give a tutorial and demonstration of responsive web design using Twitter Bootstrap. A draft of the slides is available.

Does your webpage look like its from the 90’s? Does it scale well on mobile devices or do you have to finger skate on your the mobile device to navigate the page? Or worse! Do you still not have a personal portfolio page? If the answer is yes, then its time create or update your webpage! With a front end framework like Twitter Bootstrap, you can make a quick upgrade to beautiful, modern and most importantly responsive design for your portfolio page.

The presentation will start with a brief overview of responsive design and Twitter Bootstrap and then continue with a live demonstration. We will download a Bootstrap starter template, customize the theme and content, build a static portfolio page and host it on a UMBC server.

Disclaimer: The presenter is a front end noob and will very likely look like a deer in headlights when confronted with advanced css/js questions.