How often does an international conference that you’ve always wanted to attend come to your very own back yard? Luckily for me, this was the case with the 2012 International Sustainable Campus Network (ISCN) Symposium in Eugene, Oregon this summer. With the theme “The Power of Partnerships,” the event focused on the importance of expanding sustainability initiatives beyond traditional campus boundaries to incorporate local and regional efforts.

ISCN itself exemplifies the importance of partnering:

• The initiative is supported and directed by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), while its Secretariat is managed by Sustainserv.
• ISCN strives to build on and complement initiatives at local, national, and multi-national levels such as the work of EAUC and AASHE.
• “Members” comprise nearly 40 signatory institutions (all of which are leading research universities) to a sustainable campus charter. Signatories commit to setting targets toward three shared charter principles, and to regularly and transparently report on their progress.
• ISCN provides a “global forum” in which signatories exchange information, ideas, and best practices for achieving sustainable campus operations and integrating sustainability in research and teaching.

The 6th annual ISCN symposium – the first in North America - demonstrated this global forum in action as well as the “partnerships” theme. The event was co-hosted by the University of Oregon, held in UO’s impressive LEED Silver Lillis Business Complex. With approximately 100 participants, there was an intimate atmosphere even in plenary sessions. Among the many highlights for me were:

• Keynotes by David Orr and Jason McLennan (Living Building Institute)
• Plenary speakers Leith Sharp, Mark Orlowski, and others from around the world.
  (Note: most of the plenary talks are posted on the symposium website, along with the conference agenda, speaker bios, and an attendee list.)
• Dinner and an awards ceremony in a sustainability-oriented winery, complete with a bicycle-powered band.
• Working groups that met several times throughout the conference to advance three topics: “building performance,” “campus-wide planning and target-setting,” and “integration of research, teaching, and facilities.” See the website for reports from each working group.
• Delicious, locally sourced meals (including lunch in the patio of Lillis Business Complex)
• A luncheon plenary talk in a special suite atop UO’s Autzen Stadium, with pedicab transportation available to and from the Stadium for those who desired
• Many great opportunities for me to connect with AASHE members and others from around the globe, and learn about their initiatives, successes, and challenges

During dinner at a sustainability-oriented brewery, I was honored to speak to the group about AASHE and its growing international outreach and partnerships. I mentioned events happening that same week at the Rio+20 Summit where AASHE and more than a dozen international partners:

• Organized an official U.N. side event: Aiming Higher: Unlocking Higher Education’s Potential for Sustainable Development.
• Promoted and endorsed the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative
• Prepared and endorsed the People’s Sustainability Treaty on Higher Education

I’m still processing everything that I learned from this symposium. It was, as one participant put it, like a “mini-AASHE conference,” from the buzz of excitement to the lively workshops, to the inspiring awards (be sure to read the winning entries on the website).

Despite being presented with the chilling facts of our civilizational crisis and the insufficient societal response to date (“glacial” would be too fast to describe the pace of change), a clear sense of hope pervaded the meeting. From David Orr’s Oberlin Project and U Oregon’s Sustainable City Year Program to the growing number of living buildings rising on college campuses and elsewhere, to China’s and India’s admirable efforts at (re)developing campuses in sustainable ways, the conference was largely about finding solutions by working in partnership. I came away with a list of collaborative ideas for AASHE, iSCN, and our international partners, and look forward to following up in coming months.

Many thanks to Bernd Kasemir, ISCN’s program manager, as well as Debra Shepard and Matthew Gardner at Sustainserv/ISCN Secretariat, for the excellent work they do in organizing these annual symposiums (and for the complimentary registration extended to AASHE). My highest compliments also to Steve Mital and other staff at U Oregon who took care of our every need, and made us all want to come back soon to their lovely, emerald campus.

Colossians 3:15-17 (NIV)

15 Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. 16 Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. 17 And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Reflection:

Like a concert pianist performing the grand finale of a beautiful piece of music, Paul captivates us with the crescendo of his ending exhortation to the church. Let peace and thankfulness dwell in our hearts! Let the message of Christ fill us and transform us! Sing out the songs of our hearts to our Father! And all of this, every word, every melody and every action, is for the glory of God!

Responding to the Transmission:

The notes and progression of Paul’s exhortation are perhaps the reflection of the gospel transformation in our lives. From the peace and thanksgiving in our inner beings to the message of Christ for us and for others to the songs from our hearts, these all flow from the Spirit living in us. Let’s pray that we will continue to be transformed by His Spirit song that plays through our lives and for others in this generation to also hear and receive the good news of the gospel.

• Move-in Date: Saturday, August 25, 2012 (Includes new transfer students living in Walker)
• Move-in Time: Assigned times are listed in your Assignment Packet.
• Walker residents can move-in between 9:00 A.M. and 3:30 P.M
• ***Check-in online*** to make your move-in process go faster! (available August 13th)

Colossians 3:12-14 (NIV)

12 Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13 Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14 And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.

Reflection:

Words like “shopping” and “fashion” may bring about different reactions from men vs. women but it’s usually hard to find a person who does not like to receive and wear new and nice clothes.

Tim Gunn, from the reality TV show “Project Runway” is known for his phrase, “Designers, make it happen!” For hours, days and weeks, designers work frantically to find and produce a design that will impress the judges.

Thankfully we do not have to design and make our own clothes. We have a Designer who has already prepared the most amazing wardrobe for us. In the passage, Paul encourages the Colossian believers to clothe themselves in the Spiritual characters that God has designed for us. He urges us to get rid of the old clothes of filth, malice, and corrupted ways that we used to wear before we met Christ. Now we are to put on brand spanking new clothes of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness, and ultimately love. And the best part is these will never go out of fashion!

Responding to the Transmission:

Let’s ask the Lord to help us to clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness and love through the power of His Spirit. As we clothe ourselves in these Spiritual characters, may those around us take notice of the Spirit’s work in our lives and be drawn to who God is and what He has done for us in Christ.

Kirk Haslbeck successfully defended his thesis. Kirk developed an approach and implemented a tool to measure patients' risk for successful re-identification in the re-identification attacks under various data publishing scenarios by using the Census 2010 data. Congratulations to Kirk and his family!

PhD Preliminary Examination

Design and Analysis of Underwater
Acoustic Networks with Reflected Links

Lloyd Emokpae

2:00pm Monday, 13 August 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

Underwater acoustic networks (UWANs) have applications in environmental state monitoring, oceanic profile measurements, leak detection in oil fields, distributed surveillance, and navigation. For these applications, a set of nodes are employed to collaboratively monitor an area of interest and track certain events or phenomena. In addition, it is common to find autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) acting as mobile sensor nodes that perform search-and-rescue missions, reconnaissance in combat zones and coastal patrol. These AUVs are to work cooperatively to achieve a desired goal and thus need to be able to, in an ad-hoc manner, establish and sustain communication links in order to ensure some desired level of quality of service. Therefore, each node is required to adapt to environmental changes and be able to overcome broken communication links caused by external noise affecting the communication channel and due to node mobility. In addition, since radio waves tend to get absorbed in the water, it is common for most underwater applications to rely on acoustic rather than radio channels for long range communications. However, acoustic channels pose multiple challenging issues, most notably the high transmission delay due to slow signal propagation and the limited channel bandwidth due to high frequency attenuation. Furthermore, the inhomogeneous property of the water medium affects the sound speed profile while the signal surface and bottom reflections leads to multipath effects.

In this dissertation proposal, we address these networking challenges by developing protocols that take into consideration the underwater physical layer dynamics. We begin by introducing a novel surface-based reflection scheme (SBR) which takes advantage of the multipath effects of the acoustic channel. SBR works by using reflections from the water surface, and bottom, to establish non-line-of-sight communication links. SBR makes it possible to incorporate both line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight links by utilizing directional antennas, which will boost the signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver while promoting non-line-of-sight usage. Furthermore, we employ a directional underwater acoustic antenna which is composed of an array of hydrophones that can be summed up at various phases and amplitudes resulting in a beam-former. Networking protocols have been developed for node discovery, localization, medium access arbitration and geographical routing to exploit the SBR communication model.

To complete the dissertation, we plan to first extend the SBR scheme to be robust to Doppler frequency shifts. In our original implementation of SBR, we assume little to no drift between communicating nodes which might be acceptable for some applications. However, when dealing with AUVs, the effects of Doppler could affect the proposed channel impulse response recovery process if it is not handled properly. Thus, we plan on fine-tuning the SBR recovery mechanism to adjust for Doppler frequency shifts in real-time. Secondly, we plan on extending the proposed medium access arbitration protocol to account for varying water surface and bottom roughness which we assumed to be flat in our preliminary simulations. Thirdly, we intend to extend the proposed routing algorithm to account for multiple metrics, e.g., network delay, error rate and energy. Finally, we plan on building an acoustic modem prototype which utilizes a multimodal directional transducer to validate the SBR scheme. We also plan on validating the SBR scheme on the proposed acoustic modem using a water tank.

Committee: Drs. Mohamed Younis (Chair), John Pinkston, Tulay Adali and Ryan Robucci

A recent controversy surrounding the anti-gay marriage comments of Chick-fil-A President and COO Dan Cathy is the subject of the latest Baltimore Sun column by UMBC political science professor Thomas Schaller. In “Chick-fil-A head has a right to speak, not a right to be taken seriously,” Schaller focuses on what he sees as misunderstandings on the part of Cathy’s defenders when it comes to the First Amendment right to free speech.

Schaller suggests that arguing that the backlash against Chick-fil-A constitutes censorship demonstrates ignorance of constitutional and policy matters. He writes, “[t]he First Amendment is no guarantee against being justifiably ignored. And the truth is that many citizens hold foolish, even self-contradictory opinions on a variety of subjects.” Schaller gives examples of where public assumptions and data are out of sync, from the federal budget to health care, arguing that a person’s right to express an opinion does not translate into a guarantee that the opinion be heard or incorporated into policy.

In order to load all lab and lecture hall computers with our standard set of software (known as an "image"), all requests for additions/changes for Spring or Winter 2013  must be received by Wednesday, Oct. 31. Software requested for the fall semester will be carried over to the spring semester.

To be added to the lab & lecture hall image, DoIT must have the following:

• Licensing documents such as End User License Agreements (EULA)
• Technical support documents with technical requirements (including specific version of software requested), and installation and configuration instructions
• Testing script for assessing correct installation and configuration of software
• Provide documentation showing the number of licenses purchased and any additional installation codes or instructions provided by the vendor

Please submit an RT ticket containing the required information or contact 410.455.3838 and a Technology Support Center (TSC) staff member will assist you. If the request is not received by the deadline, there is no guarantee the requested software will be made available.

For an instructor-only demo of software, please use a laptop. If you don't have a laptop, you can reserve and pick up one at AV Services (020 ENGR Bldg).

If you need software installed on the lab image for a one-time purpose (for example, a 2-day workshop in which all users need access to the software), the request should be submitted no less than six (6) weeks prior to the first lab reservation for that class. The software will be removed once you are done.

An e-mail will be sent to the requester once the software is installed, typically 1-2 week(s) before the first use of the software; faculty/instructors need to then test the software to ensure everything is working as expected for class. Support for the software is the responsibility of the instructor or department who requested that the software be installed.

Again, proof of purchase and/or license must be provided for as many copies as will be needed for the students in the class. We cannot install software without appropriate proof of licensing.

Although DoIT will make a reasonable effort to get all software packages to work, we can not guarantee that they will. Some packages may not function because of the network, computer hardware, and lab setup. DoIT cannot be held responsible for software that does not work by class time. Please contact the TSC at 410.455.3838 if you have any additional questions.