Read more about Adam's research here...

(by Jessica Guzman-Rea)

My Social Work 200 class—Social Issues/Social Action, funded by BreakingGround—focuses on civic engagement in Baltimore City and the surrounding counties in the practice of social work. For this post I asked my student Danielle Bouchard '15, social work, to speak about her work with the Office of Forensic Services... (continue reading)

The Hobbit: Midnight Premiere

(seb)

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Bus departs the Commons Circle @ 11:00pm

All Guests = $5

Ticket #: 238 of 260

On December 12, CSEE professor Hillol Kargupta will receive the 10-year Highest-Impact Paper Award from the IEEE International Data Mining Conference (ICDM) in Brussels, Belgium.

The winning paper—“On the Privacy Preserving Properties of Random Data Perturbation Techniques”—discusses privacy-preserving data mining and it also received the 2003 ICDM Best Paper Award. It is co-authored by former UMBC PhD student Souptik Datta (CS '08) and Dr. Kargupta’s colleagues at Washington State University—Qi Wang and Professor Krishnamoorthy Sivakumar.

Privacy Preserving Data Mining (PPDM) is important in many domains where the data is privacy sensitive and exposing the data to a third party for mining is not an option. Researchers have come up with many PPDM algorithms that attempt to protect data privacy while allowing analysis of the data for detecting patterns. Many of these algorithms make use of randomized techniques. This paper offers a perspective on the structure of random noise using theories of random matrices and their spectral properties in order to analyze their role in preserving data privacy while still keeping data patterns intact for analysis. It points out that spectral properties of random matrices can be exploited to create attacks on many commonly used privacy-preserving data mining algorithms.

Kargupta and his associates point out is that you must be very careful when using random noise to protect data, since it can be easily filtered out. “Random noise is really not that unpredictable,” explains Kargupta, since it has a pattern of its own.

Out of all of the papers on data mining published within the last ten years, this year Dr. Kargupta’s paper was chosen by IEEE as the most impactful paper in its field.

Reuters: Tis the season to protest and not passively purchase.

It may not be news to many that the winner of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize was the European Union.

What is news is the continuing protests to that award.

The ceremony to accept the prize took place in Norway on December 10th, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.

But by many critics and Peace Prize laureates are not staying silent. They say the “peace” prize should not be awarded to an organization, which “relies on military force to ensure security.” 

What is the prize exactly? $1.2 million.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee (which consists of five members) nominated three female activists last year with much praise, but has had a series of gaffes prior to this year.

CNN says it’s not a coincidence that this is occurring during major European protest over their financial crisis. Especially when you consider the other groups nominated who resisted government forces in Russia, Cuba, and Tunisia. 

We want to remind all Europeans about what we have achieved on this continent and that we should not let it start disintegrating again and getting nationalism and extremism (to) grow on this continent, because we know what that leads to,

Jagland said, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee and a high European Council official.

Others view the history differently

While there have never been wars inside EU territory, the confederation has not been able to prevent European wars outside its borders. When the deadly Balkans wars erupted in the 1990s, the EU was unable by itself to stop them. It was only with the help of the United States and after over 100,000 lives were lost in Bosnia was peace eventually restored there, and several years later, to Kosovo.

Many government leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel support this win. Many citizens disagree, particularly those from Italy and Greece

How can you award a prize to someone that has pushed my country and the whole of southern Europe back to the Middle Ages?

says Dimitris Kodelas, a member of the Greek Parliament for the left-wing opposition group Syriza

On a positive note, if this year’s prize is not returned (at least the dollars), new nominations are being accepted for next year’s award. Hundreds were sent in last year.

There is a huge petition for Malala Yousafzai to win in 2013. Here’s one of several. She braved a gunshot from the Taliban in expressing her support for women’s education in her country. Nominations close in February.

Who would be your choice for the Nobel peace prize?