UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Human Sensor Networks for Improved Modeling
of Natural and Human-Caused Disasters

Oleg Aulov, Computer Science Ph.D. Student, UMBC

1:00pm Friday, 14 September 2012, ITE 227, UMBC

This talk will discuss the importance of different roles that social media can play in management, monitoring, modeling and mitigation of natural and human-caused disasters. We will present a novel approach that views social media data as a human sensor network. These data can serve as a low-cost augmentation to an observing system, which can be incorporated into geophysical models together with other scientific data such as satellite observations and sensor measurements. As a use case scenario, we analyze the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. We gather the social media data that mention sightings of oil from Flickr, geolocate them, and use them as boundary forcings in the General NOAA Oil Modeling Environment (GNOME) software for oil spill predictions. We show how social media data can be incorporated into the GNOME model to obtain improved estimates of the model parameters such as rates of oil spill, couplings between surface winds and ocean currents, diffusion coefficient, and other model parameters. Other social media mining and citizen science projects performed by groups outside of UMBC, on air quality, earthquakes and the Fukushima disaster will also be summarized as related work.

Oleg Aulov received B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO, in 2004 and M.S. degree in Computer Science with a concentration in Computer Security and Information Assurance from George Washington University, Washington, DC, in 2006. He is currently working toward a Ph.D. degree in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD. His topics of interest include social media mining, citizen science, machine learning, trust establishment and management, information assurance, and social engineering.

For more information and directions see http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks

With the country in the grips of a tight (and extremely long) election, we at USDemocrazy are trying to make sense of it. Sometime a cartoon can make better sense of it than any blog post. Check out this cartoon from the Baltimore Sun.

Hershey Park Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 12:00pm

All Guests = $35

Midnight Premiere: Paranormal Activity

(seb)

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 11:00pm

All Guests = $5

Renaissance Festival Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 10:30am

All Guests = $20

Per the announcement this summer, DoIT will be moving the majority of the services currently hosted in the Public Policy Data center to a newly leased data center located in the UMBC Research Park beginning Monday, September 24, 2012. The new data center has more space, and ample cooling and power that will allow us to expand as UMBC's technology needs grow.

• CWIT Web Server
• T-REX (Finance Only - REX for SA will not be impacted)
• Campus Solutions DevelopmentProduction Will Be Available
  
• (Production support / development database will be available throughout the move)

• 8am to 5pm shut down services, remove wires, fibre
  
• 5:00pm Campus Solutions Development Shut down
• (Production support / limited development database moved to ENG and will be available throughout the move.)
• 5:00pm REX Finance Shut down
  

• Professional movers break down PUP data center
• Move hardware to Erickson/Allegis data center located in the UMBC Research Park
• Re-rack the equipment in Data Center
• DoIT begins rewiring once movers are done

• Prioritize restart of gear and affiliated infrastructure
• Restart all other gear and services

• 8:00am REX Finance restored (possibly earlier depending on how quickly Wed goes)
• 12:00pm Campus Solutions Development restored
• Remaining services restored