Washington City Paper has been covering a story about D.C.’s Certified Business Enterprise (CBE) contracting system and today responded to Mayor Gray’s statement that he’ll soon announce “a number of reform efforts” to the CBE. Gray has not provided details about those reforms, though they might involve additional staffing at the Department of Small and Local Business Development, which currently has no employees dedicated to investigating fraud in the CBE program, despite perceptions of fraud.

Where should they look for expertise on how to fix the program? UMBC political science professor George R. LaNoue told the paper, “I don’t know of anybody who has looked at the D.C. program.” Expressing concern over the dearth of data he continued, “These are very complicated issues, and for the most part people haven’t studied them.”

A limited number of $500 travel fellowships are available to for the International Field Research (IFR) Program in spring 2013. Apply now to take HAPP 403, learn qualitative field research methods, and travel to Switzerland in June to complete your research.

Join UMBC staff and former IFR participants for pizza and information on October 4, 4-5pm in Administration Building, room 218.

Check us out on YouTube!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfCSgqz9hR8&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Applications are now being accepted.  

CSEE professor Hillol Kargupta is one of fifteen Data Mining experts featured in a new book: Journeys to Data Mining: Experiences from 15 Renowned Researchers (Springer, 2012).

The book assembles the career journeys of fifteen experts in the field, answering questions like: “What are your notable success stories”, “What did you learn from your failures”, and “How would you advise a young researcher to make an impact?” Written in a narrative style, the book is a great tool for current Ph.D. students who are trying to find their own success in the field of Data Mining.

Kargupta, who has been teaching at UMBC since January 2001 is also the co-founder of AGNIK INC, a data analytics company for mobile, distributed, and embedded environments. An IEEE fellow, Kargupta has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles. He has a host of awards to his name including the IBM Innovation Award (2008), an NSF CAREER award in 2001 for his research on ubiquitous and distributed data mining, and 2010 IEEE Top-10 Data Mining Case Studies Award for his work at Agnik. More information about Dr. Kargupta’s research accomplishments can be found on his website.

In the book, Kargupta’s personal account is called: “Making Data Analysis Ubiquitous: My Journey Through Academia and Industry.”

His account begins:

“It was one of those late fall mornings in Urbana. I was working on some of the final pages of my dissertation. I got a note from Mike Welge of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) whom I came to know during the course of my work with my Ph.D. advisor David Goldberg. Mike was leading a data mining project for Caterpillar, the US heavy duty equipment manufacturer. Caterpillar clients bring their equipment to their worldwide service center for maintenance and repair. Their service staff types in short descriptions of the work done on the equipment and saves that information in the computer. Caterpillar wanted to link this data from different service centers, analyze, and identify which equipment and parts are failing frequently and related decision support tasks. The problem became more challenging because their employees often used different abbreviations and spelled names incorrectly to describe the work done on the equipment. Mike wanted to address this as an unstructured text data mining problem and asked me if I would like to collaborate. I joined their meetings and started thinking about the problem in a bigger context.”

You can continue reading on Springer’s website.