Come out to the student organization tabling at Quadmania on Saturday from 1-6 pm to visit the SGA Election Board.  We’ll have information about the candidates running as well as FREE TSHIRTS for the first 100 people to visit us and take our voter pledge.  These shirts will be ALL the rage next week, and you’ll want to make sure you’re stylin’!

See you there!

Congratulations to our Computer Science and Electrical Engineering undergraduate students who have recently been selected as Undergraduate Research Award (URA)Scholars. The URA provides undergraduates with up to $1,500 to fund their original research projects. The work is done in conjunction with a faculty mentor, and is then presented at UMBC's  Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD) in April. This year, these students and their faculty advisors will be recognized at URCAD on Wednesday, April 25 at noon in the University Center, Room 312.

David Eisen
Computer Engineering, Senior
Faculty Advisor: Fow-Sen Choa

David’s research focuses on the study of cultured neuron inhibition and excitation via optical stimuli from mid-IR (MIR) quantum cascade lasers (QCL).

“It was very exciting news to hear my URA proposal was accepted. This is my first research experience and proposal, so I believe this award will give me the confidence to pursue other opportunities in the future. The URA will give me a hands-on learning experience in the field of photonics research by working alongside Professor Choa as well as graduate students. Not only does this look good on a resume, but it gives me a chance to really get a taste for what real world challenges and rewards await after graduation.”

Julian Field
Computer Engineering, Junior
Faculty Advisor: Tinoosh Mohsenin

Julian will be doing research in UMBC's Energy Efficient and High Performance Computing Lab. His task will be the development and mapping of a many-core processor for the purpose of performing ultrasound imaging applications. Many cores on the processor will improve performance and reduce the running time of the processes. The processor will be designed using the Verilog hardware description language (HDL) and will be implemented by programming the design into a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Using an FPGA not only reduces the cost of the design, but it also speeds up implementation.

"I felt very honored to receive the award, and I believe that it is going to help me in several ways. It allows me to get paid for doing research in a field that fascinates me and in which I hope to work in the future. Besides the obvious financial benefit, the award adds weight to my research when I list it on my resume, and this should be of great value when I apply to graduate school and for Computer Engineering jobs and internships in the future."

Thomas A Hervey
Information Systems/ Geography, Sophomore
Aneep Bindra
Computer Science, Sophomore
Zachary Hullihen
Computer Science, Junior
Faculty Advisor: Marc Olano 

"Lights, Camera, Motion, Action: The Dance Application of Microsoft's Kinect and Intelligent Stage Lighting."

"Receiving this award has given me a stronger incentive to work my hardest and apply myself beyond [the] academic realm. This award will be beneficial because it will provide necessary funds for unusual but necessary research tools. I look forward to strengthening my presentation skills at URCAD next year as well as refining my organizational skills through planned documentation and procedures during the actual experimentation. The award overall certainly creates a sense of confidence within the research community. I find it likely that students that are not active in research will hear about the award and benefits through their friends' experiences, and current URA scholars will continue research through new projects." -Thomas A. Hervey

Alex Morrow
Computer Science, Sophomore
Faculty Advisor: Marie desJardins

"Quantitative Evaluation of Dimension Reduction for Visualization and Analysis."

Alex’s research branches off of his current research on visualization and analysis techniques to facilitate user understanding of the uncertainty associated with statistical models that have been learned from data. Alex will analyze and evaluate dimension reduction methods. Using a set of quantitative metrics compiled by his research advisors Dr. Marie desJardins and Dr. Penny Rheingans, Alex will compare the performance of several dimension reduction techniques in a number of different application domains.

Adam Page
Computer Engineering / Math
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Tinoosh Mohsenin

Adam’s research involves designing an energy efficient and high performance error correction Low Density Parity Check Decoder circuit for IEEE 802.11ad standard, the next generation of Wireless Local Arena Network (WLAN). The design will include an efficient architecture for the decoder using Verilog coding and VLSI implementation.

“I am both honored and excited to receive this award. I know the URA will give me the opportunity to apply knowledge I have gained from all of my courses into a real world application.”

Don’t forget to meet our URA scholars at URCAD next Wednesday, April 25 at noon in the University Center, Room 312.

Masters Thesis Defense

Heart Disease Prediction: A Data Mining Approach

Soma Das

2:00pm Monday, 23 April 2012, ITE 201B

Data mining is a field of computer science that combines statistical analysis and machine learning to detect hard-to-discern patterns from large amounts of data. It employs different algorithms to learn different patterns from training or experience and apply it to classify, predict or identify patterns. The healthcare environment is very information rich. There is a wealth of clinical data available within the healthcare systems. Also due to recent advancement of genomic research vast amount of genetic data are also available. Effective analysis tools are needed to discover hidden relationships and trends in these data. These tools are necessary to correctly diagnose people at risk of disease based on the derived knowledge from the data.

We used data mining techniques to evaluate the interaction between traditional risk factors and gene variants such as Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) towards Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) susceptibility in a prospective study of older population aged 65 and older. In our thesis we asked two questions whether we can predict CHD at birth or adding genetic information to traditional risk factors predict CHD better than traditional risk factors alone.We also analyzed two popular machine learning algorithms to determine the most efficient method on medical datasets mining. The evaluation is based on a set of performance metrics. We also applied a clustering method to identify different subgroups present in the selected datasets.

We chose eight traditional risk factors of CHD and 23 SNPs that had previously been reported to be associated with CHD. We then tested the association of these SNPs with CHD in cardiovascular Health Study (CHS). Based on previous studies, we pre specified a risk allele for each of 23 SNPs. We assigned coding values for homozygote, heterozygote, and the no risk homozygote SNPs and then combined these with traditional risk factors for each individual before feeding it to machine learning algorithms. We evaluated different classification algorithms using 10 fold cross validation test.

Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves (ROC) were plotted separately based on traditional risk factors alone and traditional risk factors plus SNPs. The increase in the Area Under Curve (AUC) was statistically significant for Whites and suggestive of improved CHD prediction for African American. We also found out that using only SNPs predicts CHD a little bit better than random guessing for only whites. The results gained from analysis suggest Naïve Bayes to be the best classifier for the given domain.

This study demonstrates the concept of using multiple SNPs as independent risk factors and indicates that it can improve prediction of incident CHD. Adding SNPs to traditional risk factors did not improve the prediction model dramatically as we expected but it was statistically significant.

Committee:

• Dr. Michael Grasso (co-chair)
• Dr. Anupam Joshi
• Dr. Yelena Yesha

Courtesy of Talking Points Memo

Were you expecting your next prescription to be filled by Google? Well in the future it might be.

Recently, Google fans have been giving them feedback about their latest idea under production: Project Glass.

The glasses engineered by Google work as a screen that you view while you walk. Get the temperature, the price of a show based on a poster viewed through the glasses, or accept a phone call out of the corner of your eye. All this is possible through augmented reality.

So what’s their beef? How will these glasses work if your vision isn’t 20/20? That sounds like a complex undertaking.

But the main point is, if Google takes over reality, will we be able to visualize, research, and write papers in the future with these glasses? And furthermore, if we wear these frequently, what are the health implications of having a mini computer buzzing near our brains?

I suppose that’s for us to figure out before we purchase. Virtual reality seemed eons away, but with these glasses it looks like it’s right around the corner.

Courtesy of www.nydailynews.com

Remember the Acura Super Bowl Ad with Jerry Seinfeld doing ridiculous things to be the first person to own some car that he probably doesn’t actually care about in real life?

Well, some controversy has been brewing around it, but it has nothing to do with Seinfeld, the car, or even the actual commercial itself.

The real issue actually stems from the casting description for the African American car dealer featured in the commercial:

“Nice looking, friendly. Not too dark. Will work with a MAJOR COMEDIAN.”

See where the controversy comes in? If you’re color blind, you may have missed it. Basically, the casting crew wanted the car dealer in the commercial to be black, but not too black. But why?

According to a spokesperson for the casting team, the skin tone was specified because “lighting and special effects would get tricky” with darker skin.

But some feel that the context of the statement suggests otherwise. Based on how they read it, the specifications appear to insinuate that people with very dark skin may be perceived as not-so-friendly.

Acura has issued an apology for the language of the casting sheet, stressing that they selected the actor for the car salesman part based solely on talent. But some are still speculating about what the casting crew really meant by the description.

Is it possible that there is a malicious insinuation in the casting specifications? Or is it really just an innocuous case of careless phrasing? And if the specification for skin tone truly was made to ensure that lighting and special effects would be well-implemented, does the company even need to apologize for the casting sheet?

Few issues can every really be viewed in just black or white, and it seems that this is yet another example of a controversy that falls in a grey area–but not too grey.

Google’s Webmasters blog has a post on rich snippets and structured data. While this is from Google, Microsoft’s Bing search engine has a very similar approach.

Snippets are “the few lines of text that appear under every search result” that are designed to “give users a sense for what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to their query.” The post points out that the search engine needs to understand the content on a page in order to produce the snippets.

“The snippet for a restaurant might show the average review and price range; the snippet for a recipe page might show the total preparation time, a photo, and the recipe’s review rating; and the snippet for a music album could list songs along with a link to play each song.

You can help search engines understand key information in the content by adding structured data in several formats (Google looks for Microdata (preferred), Microformats and RDFa) and for a small set of topics. These topics are those covered by schema.org: Reviews, People, Products, Businesses and organizations, Recipes, Events and Music.

See the full post for details and links.