Luke 9:18-27 (NIV 2011)

¹⁸ Once when Jesus was praying in private and his disciples were with him, he asked them, “Who do the crowds say I am?”

¹⁹ They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, that one of the prophets of long ago has come back to life.”

²⁰ “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”

Peter answered, “God’s Messiah.”

²¹ Jesus strictly warned them not to tell this to anyone. ²² And he said, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”

²³ Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. ²⁴ For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. ²⁵ What good is it for you to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit your very self? ²⁶ If any of you are ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of you when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.

²⁷ “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”

Reflection:

After Peter confesses that Jesus is God’s Messiah, Jesus reveals for the first time that His role as Messiah involves suffering and death. He also makes it clear that his disciples must follow Him on this path.

In a world filled with entertainments and comforts, it can be difficult to deny ourselves and lay down our lives. Yet this is the path marked for Jesus to save the world, and He willingly follows it because He trusts in the plan of the Father.

As a sign of God’s promise, Jesus says that some of his disciples will see God’s kingdom. This promise is fulfilled in verses 28-36, when Peter, James, and John see Jesus in all of His glory.

Response:

May we trust in faith that denying ourselves to follow Jesus will reveal more of God’s glory in our lives. Let’s spend some time committing our hearts to Jesus, worshiping Him and expressing our longing to see Him in all of his glory. Let’s also ask God to empower us to deny ourselves and take up our crosses daily.

Silence of the labs: Why are we still commuting
the way we did 40 years ago?

Professor Ouri Wolfson
University of Illinois at Chicago

1:00pm Friday 2 December 2011, ITE 227

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have been in research and development since the 70's but their impact so far has been relatively small. In this talk I will argue that this is about to change, and that these systems will soon revolutionize the way we commute. I will describe research issues and Information Technology approaches related to ITS. I will focus on urban transportation, and discuss novel applications enabled by mobile wireless technologies. Such applications have the potential to improve safety, mobility, environmental impact, and energy efficiency of urban transportation. The applications are based on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, and they epitomize ITS efforts currently undertaken throughout the world, particularly the IntelliDrive initiative of the US Department of Transportation. I will also relate these efforts to our NSF-sponsored IGERT PhD program in Computational Transportation Science.

Ouri Wolfson is the Richard and Loan Hill Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is the sole founder of Mobitrac, a venture-funded high-tech startup that was acquired by Fluensee Co. in 2006.

Ouri Wolfson authored over 180 publications, and holds seven patents. He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a University of Illinois Scholar for 2009, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He co-authored three award winning papers, served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Association of Computing Machinery during 2001-2003, and participated in numerous conferences as a keynote speaker, general chairman, program committee chairman or member, tutorial presenter, session chairman, and panelist. Most recently he was the keynote speaker at the Mobilware 2010 Conference, and the general chair of the 17th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS 2009) . His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NATO, US Army, NASA, the New York State Science and Technology Foundation, Hughes Research Laboratories, Informix Co., Accenture Co., and Hitachi Co.

Wolfson’s main research interests are in database systems, distributed systems, and mobile/pervasive computing. Before joining the University of Illinois he has been on the computer science faculty at the Technion, Columbia University, and a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs.

Host: Yelena Yesha

WWW, ISWC and WebDB are the top Web conferences based on Microsoft Academic Search citation data.

Last week HCI researcher Antti Oulasvirta has an interesting post on ranking HCI conferences using the average citations per paper based on data from Microsoft Academic Search (MAS). Some of the results surprised him, including that the venerable CHI was not the top conference in this group. His ranking metric for conference significance is essentially the impact factor used for journals, a measure of the average number of citations a paper in a given journal receives in a time period. The IF metric has become widely used in the scholarly journal publication industry since it was defined by Eugene Garfield and first implemented by the company he founded, the Institute for Scientific Information.

Microsoft Academic Search provides citation and publication numbers for conferences in sixteen different subjects domains and a number of sub-domains for each. For computer science, there are 24 sub-domains including one for “World Wide Web” conferences. Following Oulasvirta, we ranked Web technology conferences using the average number of citations received in the last ten years. Starting with 68 Web technology conferences in the MAS collection (not a complete list, btw), I narrowed the set to those that had at least 100 papers in the past ten years and some papers in the past five. This resulted in 26 conferences, eliminating many series that only ran a few times or have stopped. Here are the results.

The results should only be taken as a rough estimate of conference impact. One reason is that IF is only a measure and does not take into account all aspects of scientific importance. For example, as computed here, all citations count equally, including those from high- and low-ranking sources. Another is that while Thompson-Reuters (nee ISI) journal citation data is carefully collected and curated, the Microsoft Academic Search data is the result of a largely automated process that starts with data from Bing. When I tried using the citation information from the past five years, for example, I noted that it reported 23 papers in the past five years for Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems. This is because the conference merged with User Modeling in 2009 to become User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization. Yet another shortcoming is that the MAS list of Web conferences in not complete, for example, omitting the popular ESWC, which has been running since 2004.

The original excel spreadsheet (with full conference names hidden in column B) and a PDF version are available.

Hello Everyone,

UMBC CyberSecurity Professionals