UMBC Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research
Distinguished Computational Science Lecture Series

Tales of Scientific Computation at Ames and in NASA

Dr. Hans Mark

University of Texas Cockrell School of Engineering, Austin, TX

4:00pm Thursday, 22 May 2014, ITE 456, UMBC

This is personal story about how high performance computing was developed at the NASA-Ames Research Center and elsewhere in NASA. There were people at Ames who were first class aerodynamic scientists and who could use computers. Thus, it was decided that some procurement short cuts were justified. We acquired computers in three quantum steps. First, in 1969, there was an IBM duplex 360/67 which was captured by a “midnight supply operation” from the Air Force. Next, in 1972, the ILLIAC IV at the University of Illinois became available because of an act of domestic terrorism and financial help from DARPA. Finally in 1975, there was one of Seymour Cray’s CDC 7600s, also from an Air Force source. In 1981, by which time Seymour Cray had his own company, a Cray 1S appeared at Ames, followed in 1984 by CDC Cyber 205 and a Cray X-MP/22. The last named machines were made available because of shameless earmarking by NASA Headquarters. However, confession being good for the soul, the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center also benefited from the earmarking with twenty million dollar fund to develop a truly massively parallel computer, the Goodyear MPP with 16,000 processors, which was delivered in 1984. Now we are working with people at Ames on a quantum computer manufactured by D‐Wave Systems, Inc. The machine was installed at Ames last year and we are now working on various “benchmark” tests and developing operating systems for the machine. We believe that there is great promise for much more capable computing machines in this new quantum technology.

Dr. Hans Mark is a leading expert in the fields of both aerospace design an national defense policy. For fourteen years Dr. Mark was associated with the University of California’s Nuclear Weapons Laboratory at Livermore, serving as Physics Division Leader from 1960 to 1964. He was named Under Secretary of the Air Force an Director of the National Reconnaissance Office in 1977. While Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, he initiated the development of a new reconnaissance satellite system an the upgrade of two others. As Secretary of the Air Force (1979 to 1981), Dr. Mark initiated the establishment of the U.S. Air Force Space Command. During his tenure as Deputy Administrator of NASA from 1981 to 1984, Dr. Mark oversaw the first fourteen Space Shuttle flights and was a leading contributor to the establishment of the U.S. Space Station Program. Over the past twenty years, Dr. Mark has served as Chancellor of the University of Texas System (1984 to 1992) and is still actively involved in research and teaching at the University of Texas Cockrell School of Engineering in Austin, TX. From 1998 to 2001, Dr. Mark was on leave from the University to serve in the Pentagon as Director of Defense Research and Engineering. Dr. Mark received an A.B. Degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has been member of the National Academy of Engineering for three years an holds six honorary doctorates.

Host: Prof. Milton Halem, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Data Analytics for Sustainability

Professor Katharina Morik
TU Dortmund University, Germany

11:00am-12:30pm, Thursday 22 May 2014, ITE 456, UMBC

Sustainability has many facets and researchers from many disciplines are working on them. Particularly knowledge discovery always considered sustainability an important topic (e.g., special issue on data mining for sustainability in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal, March 2012).

• Environmental tasks include risk analysis concerning floods, earthquakes, fires, and other disasters as well as the ability to react to them in order to guarantee resilience. The climate is certainly of influence and the debate on climate change received quite some attention.
• Energy efficiency demands energy-aware algorithms, operating systems, green computing. System operations are to be adapted to a predicted user behavior such that the required processing is optimized with respect to minimal energy consumption.
• Engineering tasks in manufacturing, assembly, material processing, and waste removal or recycling offer opportunities to save resources to a large degree. Adding the prediction precision of learning algorithms to the general knowledge of the engineers allows for surprisingly large savings.

Global reports on the millennium goals and open government data regarding sustainability are publicly available. For the investigation of influence factors, however, data analytics is necessary. Big data challenges the analysis to create data summaries. Moreover, the prediction of states is necessary in order to plan accordingly. In this talk, two case studies will be presented. Disaster management in case of a flood combines diverse sensor data streams for a better traffic administration. A novel spatiotemporal random field approach is used for smart routing based on traffic predictions. The other case study is in engineering and saves energy in the steel production based on the multivariate prediction of the processing end-point by the regression support vector machine.

Further reading:

• Katharina Morik, Kanishka Bhaduri, Hillol Kargupta “Introduction to Data Mining for Sustainability”, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal, Vol. 24, No.2, pp. 311 – 324, 2012.
• Nico Piatkowski, Sangkyun Lee, Katharina Morik “Spatio-Temporal Random Fields: Compressible Representation and Distributed Estimation”, Machine Learning Journal Vol.93, No. 1, pp: 115-139, 2013.
• Jochen Streicher, Nico Piatkowski, Katharina Morik, Olaf Spinczyk “Open Smartphone Data for Mobility and Utilization Analysis in Ubiquitous Environments” In: Mining Ubiquitous and Social Environments (MUSE) workshop at ECML PKDD, 2013.
• Norbert Uebbe, Hans Jürgen Odenthal, Jochen Schlüter, Hendrik Blom, Katharina MorikA novel data-driven prediction model for BOF endpoint. In: The Iron and Steel Technology Conference and Exposition in Pittsburgh (AIST), 2013.
• Alexander Artikis, Matthias Weidlich, Francois Schnitzler, Ioannis Boutsis, Thomas Liebig, Nico Piatkowski, Christian Bockermann, Katharina Morik, Vana Kalogeraki, Avigdor Gal, Shie Mannor, Dimitrios Gunopulos, Dermot Kinane, “Heterogeneous Stream Processing and Crowdsourcing for Urban Traffic Management” Procs. 17th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, 2014.

Katharina Morik is full professor for computer science at the TU Dortmund University, Germany. She earned her Ph.D. (1981) at the University of Hamburg and her habilitation (1988) at the TU Berlin. Starting with natural language processing, her interest moved to machine learning ranging from inductive logic programming to statistical learning, then to the analysis of very large data collections, high-dimensional data, and resource awareness.

Her aim to share scientific results strongly supports open source developments. For instance, RapidMiner started out at her lab, which continues to contribute to it. She was one of those starting the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining together with Xindong Wu, and was chairing the program of this conference in 2004. She was the program chair of the European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML) in 1989 and one of the program chairs of ECML PKDD 2008. She is in the editorial boards of the international journals “Knowledge and Information Systems” and “Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery”. Since 2011 she is leading the collaborative research center SFB876 on resource-constrained data analysis, an interdisciplinary center comprising 12 projects, 19 professors, and about 50 Ph. D students or Postdocs.

Host: Hillol Kargupta, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

UMBC and University of Porto (FEUP) are offering a new course aimed at helping students work within the global context and training engineers capable of solving global, multidisciplinary problems: "The Next Generation Engineer - Global Engineering".

Simultaneously taught to future mechanical engineers by FEUP and UMBC, the course was recently awarded by the Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education (NASPA),with prize "Best Practices in International Higher Education Award" in the category Global Partnerships.

For students in the senior year of Mechanical Engineering (MIEM) of FEUP and UMBC, classes were delivered via videoconference with teachers Dr. Marc Zupan (UMBC and researcher at FEUP), Dr. Anne Spence (UMBC), Dr. António Barbedo Magellan, Dr. Abel Santos and Dr. José Bessa Pacheco, Department of Mechanical Engineering, FEUP. During class students were grouped into cross-continent teams and challenged with developing work on global and multidisciplinary problems, proposing solutions acceptable to the cultural and social framework of the country to which it is addressed or globally.

Teachers at FEUP and UMBC highlight that through this course students are able to develop skills and competencies important for future generations of engineers who have to work on increasingly globally focused projects.

One of the tasks, that as designers, we are constantly being asked to tackle is to build impressive and fitting web-based portfolios for clients, friends, and even ourselves. Portfolios stand as a virtual calling card, connecting your work with people across the world wide web at the click of a ‘Stumble’ or search result link. Making it a must thing to get right.

Today we bring you a compilation of web design resources that will help you in your quest of portfolio perfection. From start to finish, these useful tools are the proverbial bee’s knees of portfolio arsenal enhancers. With them on your side, you should be able to craft a design that does more than delivers the work it presents to the online masses, but that honors it.

jGallery

jGallery is a free jQuery photo gallery with albums and preloader featuring 41 configuration parameters, 43 transition effects, unlimited scalability and more!

Event Gallery 3

Event Gallery 3 offers a unique way to present your images on your Joomla Site even allowing you to sell your images directly from your own website.

Galleria

Galleria is a free JavaScript framework that simplifies the process of creating beautiful, responsive image galleries, no programming skills required.

Vanillabox

Vanillabox is a simple, bare bones jQuery lightbox plugin with no pre applied design. Use this as the starting point for a completely customized design.

flipLightBox

flipLightBox is a responsive lightbox jQuery plugin with a unique flip effect as each image opens and closes.

Ion.ImageSlider

Ion.ImageSlider is an image slider and lightbox all in one with cross browser compatability and support for multiple touch devices.

Hatch

Hatch is a simple free portfolio WordPress theme built on the Hybrid Core framework with a responsive layout optimized for mobile browsing.

Blueimp Gallery

Blueimp Gallery is an image and video gallery, carousel and lightbox that is fully customizable, responsive and touch-enabled.

CollagePlus

CollagePlus is an image gallery plugin for jQuery that will arrange your images to fit within an exact container with a number of customizable options.

Galereya

Galereya is a responsive, easily customizable jQuery gallery with a stylish, and engaging, masonry layout that visually draws users into the work.

Unique

Unique is a free WordPress theme that displays your portfolio in a fully responsive grid type showcase. The name about says it all.

Visage

Visage is a clean jQuery lightbox that is customizable through provided configuration options and API hooks.

jQuery Responsive Thumbnail Gallery Plugin

jQuery Responsive Thumbnail Gallery Plugin is an easy to implement jQuery plugin for creating image galleries that scale to their container.

Shadowbox.js

Shadowbox.js is a highly customizable, unobtrusive lightbox that offers flexibility free from any frameworks.

Unslider

Unslider is an open source, responsive jQuery slider with touch support. It says it all in the header. With full control you can implement this slider with all its flexibility and fluidity.

jQuery Fullsizable Plugin

jQuery Fullsizable Plugin takes the full available browser space for image viewing. It also supports the native HTML5 fullscreen API in modern browsers.

Simple Image Gallery

Simple Image Gallery is a Joomla plugin that will turn any folder in your Joomla website into a grid style image gallery and lightbox. Perfect for presenting the work in your portfolio.

Full Width Image Slider

Full Width Image Slider is a simple 100% width slider that uses CSS transitions and scales down to mobile size with ease.

Justified Gallery

Justified Gallery is a jQuery plugin that creates a justified image gallery that rearranges itself as the page is resized.

Smooth Diagonal Fade Gallery

The Smooth Diagonal Fade Gallery uses CSS transitions to create a smooth diagonal fade effect for your portfolio. It might be just the accent your design is missing.

Roundfolio

Roundfolio Is a free single page portfolio template featuring round elements. It’s easy to customize and edit so you can get your new portfolio up and running quickly.

17 HTML5 Responsive Galleries & Components Bundle – only $37!

It’s coming.

It bided its time infecting camels.

But now the demon has escaped. A mutation has set the virus free. 

And it is here!…the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome! (MERS).

Millions will fall prey to it merciless infection, civilization will collapse, and The Walking Dead will experience a revival as a sitcom.

 Well, maybe not.

Actually, the World Health Organization declared that the virus is not (yet) a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. So hold off on the panic. In the mean time, here’s a handy MERS fact sheet:

What is it?

Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, is a type of coronavirus. The coronavirus family also includes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus that caused a worldwide outbreak in 2003.  

Less dramatically, coronaviruses are a major cause of the common cold. 

Where did it come from?

MERS was first diagnosed in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, back in 2012.

Why should we be scared of MERS?

About 25% of patients infected with MERS die.

Since MERS is a virus, it cannot be treated with antibiotics. So far, there is no vaccine. 

MERS bears some similarities to SARS, which killed hundreds of people in 2003.

More than one hundred people have already died of MERS. Two cases have been identified in the United States. 

Why not panic? 

MERS does not pass easily between humans. It is certainly less contagious than SARS.  

According to Dr. Ann Schuchat, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, the 

“Risk to the general public remains very low.”

Roll credits. 

PhD Dissertation Proposal

Learning and Executing Energy Efficient, Context-Dependent
Rules for Privacy and Security Management on Mobile Devices

Prajit Kumar Das

8:00am Friday, 16 May 2014, ITE325b

There are ongoing security and privacy concerns around mobile platforms that are increasingly being used by citizens. For example a newly discovered security flaw in WhatsApp that allows hackers using a malicious app to read chat messages stored on the SD card. The Brightest Flashlight application was reported to have logged precise location and a unique user identifier, which have nothing to with its intended functionality. Current mobile platform privacy and security mechanisms are limited to an initial installation phase permission acquisition method. In addition to that, the permissions are of the all or none form. This means that either the users accept all the permissions requested by the mobile app or they cannot use the app in question. Even if permissions were not structured as such, typically, users do not understand the permissions being requested or are too eager to use the application to even care to read them. These issues are present in all major mobile operating systems. Given the penetration of mobile devices into our lives, a fine-grained context-dependent security and privacy control approach needs to be created.

We propose a framework that will allow us to learn the privacy and security rules for a particular user, on their mobile devices. We do this by employing a simple user feedback mechanism. The rule learning framework consists of a “learning mode” where it observes and learns from user behavior and a “working mode” where it implements the learned rules to protect user privacy and provide security. The rules are represented to the user in plain English using an easily understandable construct. The rules are internally written in a logic based language and using Semantic Web technologies. The antecedents of the rules are context elements that are derived from an ontology using a query engine and an inference mechanism. The main contributions of our work include learning modifications to current rules and learning new rules to control the data flow between the various data providers on the user’s mobile device, including sensors and services and the consumer of such data. The privacy and security rule execution consumes significant energy due to the context detection. We create an energy model that allows us to make energy cost optimizations with regards to rule execution. We use a three-fold solution for achieving the said energy cost optimizations.

Committee: Drs. Anupam Joshi (chair), Nilanjan Banerjee, Dipanjan Chakraborty (IBM), Tim Finin, Tim Oates, Arkady Zaslavsky (CSIRO)