Twenty-three CSEE graduate students will present their research at UMBC's 35th Annual Graduate Research Conference (GRC) on Wednesday 20 February 2013. Oral and poster presentations will take place between 9:00am and 12:30pm in the Commons and University Center. There will be a lunch at 1:00pm in the UC Ballroom followed by a panel on civic engagement from 1:30 to 2:15 in which UMBC graduate students, faculty and administrators will discuss activities fostering civic engagement, including graduate level courses with a community engagement component, GSA's Food for Thought project, and Dr. Shaun Kane's Accessibility Hack Day.

Here are the presentations from CSEE students.

09:00am-10:30am Oral Presentations I (Commons 329)

• Sumeet Bagde, Iterative quantum algorithms
• Jared Dixon, Laser Photothermal Therapy Using Gold Nanorods
• Ben Johnson, A Reference Advisor to an Automatic Text Understanding Engine
• Yatish Kumar Joshi, Autonomous Recovery from Multi-node Failure in Wireless Sensor Networks
• Lisa Mathews, A Collaborative Approach to Situational

9:00am – 10:00am, Poster Presentation I (University Center 312)

• Shihyu Chen, Weighted Radial Basis Function Kernels- Based Support Vector Machines for Multispectral Magnetic Resonance Brain Image Classification
• Prajit Das, Energy efficient semantic context model for managing privacy on smartphones
• Deepal Dhariwal, Text and Ontology driven Information Extraction from Clinical Narratives
• Roshan Ghumare, Distributed Average Consensus in WSN
• Clare Grasso, Identifying Safety Risks Due to Medical Treatment in Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease using KDD
• Neha Sardesai, Develop a System Analysis Model for Trace Gas Detection using a Pulsed Laser and QEPAS
• Puneet Sharma, A Cross-Layer Approach to Detection of Hardware Trojans
• Jennifer Sleeman, Online Unsupervised Coreference Resolution for Semi- Structured Heterogeneous Data
• Shiming Yang, An Adaptive Observation Site Selection Strategy for Road Traffic Data Assimilation

11:00am – 12:15pm, Oral Presentations II (Commons 329)

• Randy Schauer, Reducing Thermal Impact using Probabilistic Energy-Aware Job Scheduling
• Jon Ward, On the Use of Distributed Relays to Increase Base Station Anonymity in Wireless Sensor Networks
• Fahad Zafar, Computational Observer Approach for Assessment of Stereoscopic Visualizations in 3D Medical Data Sets
• Guohao Zhang, Is More Realism Better? Towards Finding the Effectiveness of Visual Realism on Three-Dimensional Streamtube Visualization

11:00am – 12:00pm, Poster Presentation II (University Center 312)

• Arnav Joshi, Generating a linked data resource for software security concepts and vulnerability descriptions
• Vlad Korolev,Machine Learning Methods for Assessment of Risk of Chronic Disease
• Sandhya Krishnan, Social Media Analytics : Digital Footprints
• Ravendar Lal, Information Extraction of Security related entities, concepts and relations from unstructured text
• Varish Mulwad, Exploiting Semantics in Graphical Models for Generating Linked Data from Tables

It was a case of lab envy that inspired professor Marie desJardins to dream up ACTIVE, the new dynamic laptop lab that will sprout up in the Engineering/Computer Science building next fall.

The culprit? CASTLE, the Active Science Teaching and Learning Environment created by the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences in 2010 (pictured below). While teaching in the space for one of her courses, she looked at the low-profile computer screens, wall-mounted monitors, and circular workstations and thought: “Why don’t we have one of these?”

When the Hrabowki Fund for Innovation was announced, Dr. desJardins and a team of CSEE professors including Penny Rheingans, Tim Finin, and Charles LaBerge submitted a proposal to make a similar lab space a reality. This February, the team was awarded a Hrabowski Innovation Implementation and Research Grant to create ACTIVE (Active Computing Teaching and InnoVation Environment), a new classroom that will make group work and active learning a priority.

This semester, the future site will be transformed from an abandoned classroom to a “dynamic laptop laboratory”. desJardins and co. envision a room with movable furniture and easily-accessible floor power outlets. The idea is to create an open space that will make it easy for students to collaborate and for teachers to interact with students. This physical re-design is being supported by a grant from BAE Systems and the Northrop Grumman Foundation.

Instead of filling the space with bulky, expensive desktop computers that will be outdated in a few years, the lab will network students’ personal laptops using special software. It will allow for screen and application sharing between computers, an instant messaging tool between teachers and students, the ability to edit and create documents collaboratively, and more. desJardins explains it as a virtual infrastructure laid over the physical space.

“The key innovation is that courses that have traditionally been taught in a primarily lecture-based format will be able to take advantage of the physical space and software support to incorporate group activities, collaborative online problem solving and programming, real-time quizzes, and interactive laboratories that are interspersed with mini-lectures,” says Dr. desJardins. These teaching techniques will ultimately help students learn better.

A section of Dr. desJardins’ CMSC 101:  Introduction to Computing is one of four pilot courses that will be taught in ACTIVE come fall 2013. Others include Dr. Rheingans’ CMSC 346: Data Visualization, Dr. Finin’s CMSC 331: Programming Languages, and Dr. LaBerge’s CMPE 450: Computer Engineering Capstone.

Some classes have been begging for such a set up. CMSC 101 relies on group activities to help students—especially women and underrepresented minorities—feel engaged and incorporated into the Computer Science community. Last year it suffered when taught in a traditional computer lab, where the rows of cumbersome computers made it impossible for students to see the board or to break into teams. ACTIVE will make Dr. LaBerge’s Computer Engineering Capstone even more true to working in the industry by emulating state-of-the-art industrial research and development companies like Apple and Microsoft.

This summer, all four professors will re-design their classes to best make use of the space.

Dr. Tim Finin says that adapting his Principles of  Programming Languages class will “be a challenge,” but, a worthwhile one. Increasing active learning in the class will help transfer students —who typically take it in their first semester—with the often-difficult adjustment. Dr. Finin is considering techniques like “Pair Programming” and having students program in-class.

He sees the new space as a “step in trying to understand how we can teach better by exploiting new technology.” Finin thinks that the relationship between technology and education is bound to grow. “[Technology] could potentially have as big an impact on education as online-shopping had on retail sales, or as the web had on the news industry,” he says.

desJardins predicts that ACTIVE will help professors learn how to teach better, switching the focus from teaching content to teaching skills. Throughout the semester, the team will evaluate the effectiveness of their classes and share their findings at the Provost’s Teaching and Learning Symposium. They hope to share their experiences, and the space, with other professors at UMBC—professors who one day might say to themselves: “Why don’t we have one of these?”

It was a case of lab envy that inspired professor Marie desJardins to dream up ACTIVE, the new dynamic laptop lab that will sprout up in the Engineering/Computer Science building next fall.

The culprit? CASTLE, the Active Science Teaching and Learning Environment created by the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences in 2010 (pictured below). While teaching in the space for one of her courses, she looked at the low-profile computer screens, wall-mounted monitors, and circular workstations and thought: “Why don’t we have one of these?”

When the Hrabowki Fund for Innovation was announced, Dr. desJardins and a team of CSEE professors including Penny Rheingans, Tim Finin, and Charles LaBerge submitted a proposal to make a similar lab space a reality. This February, the team was awarded a Hrabowski Innovation Implementation and Research Grant to create ACTIVE (Active Computing Teaching and InnoVation Environment), a new classroom that will make group work and active learning a priority.

This semester, the future site will be transformed from an abandoned classroom to a “dynamic laptop laboratory”. desJardins and co. envision a room with movable furniture and easily-accessible floor power outlets. The idea is to create an open space that will make it easy for students to collaborate and for teachers to interact with students. This physical re-design is being supported by a grant from BAE Systems and the Northrop Grumman Foundation.

Instead of filling the space with bulky, expensive desktop computers that will be outdated in a few years, the lab will network students’ personal laptops using special software. It will allow for screen and application sharing between computers, an instant messaging tool between teachers and students, the ability to edit and create documents collaboratively, and more. desJardins explains it as a virtual infrastructure laid over the physical space.

“The key innovation is that courses that have traditionally been taught in a primarily lecture-based format will be able to take advantage of the physical space and software support to incorporate group activities, collaborative online problem solving and programming, real-time quizzes, and interactive laboratories that are interspersed with mini-lectures,” says Dr. desJardins. These teaching techniques will ultimately help students learn better.

A section of Dr. desJardins’ CMSC 101:  Introduction to Computing is one of four pilot courses that will be taught in ACTIVE come fall 2013. Others include Dr. Rheingans’ CMSC 346: Data Visualization, Dr. Finin’s CMSC 331: Programming Languages, and Dr. LaBerge’s CMPE 450: Computer Engineering Capstone.

Some classes have been begging for such a set up. CMSC 101 relies on group activities to help students—especially women and underrepresented minorities—feel engaged and incorporated into the Computer Science community. Last year it suffered when taught in a traditional computer lab, where the rows of cumbersome computers made it impossible for students to see the board or to break into teams. ACTIVE will make Dr. LaBerge’s Computer Engineering Capstone even more true to working in the industry by emulating state-of-the-art industrial research and development companies like Apple and Microsoft.

This summer, all four professors will re-design their classes to best make use of the space.

Dr. Tim Finin says that adapting his Principles of  Programming Languages class will “be a challenge,” but, a worthwhile one. Increasing active learning in the class will help transfer students —who typically take it in their first semester—with the often-difficult adjustment. Dr. Finin is considering techniques like “Pair Programming” and having students program in-class.

He sees the new space as a “step in trying to understand how we can teach better by exploiting new technology.” Finin thinks that the relationship between technology and education is bound to grow. “[Technology] could potentially have as big an impact on education as online-shopping had on retail sales, or as the web had on the news industry,” he says.

desJardins predicts that ACTIVE will help professors learn how to teach better, switching the focus from teaching content to teaching skills. Throughout the semester, the team will evaluate the effectiveness of their classes and share their findings at the Provost’s Teaching and Learning Symposium. They hope to share their experiences, and the space, with other professors at UMBC—professors who one day might say to themselves: “Why don’t we have one of these?”

This semester we have a departure and arrival to announce. Professor Yung-Jui (Ray) Chen has retired. Ray has been with UMBC for twenty-four years. He taught courses in electronics and circuit theory and initiated research in compound semiconductors here at UMBC. He served as Program Director for the Electrical Engineering program in its early days. We hope to see him often and wish him well.

On the arrival side, Dr. Pedram Sadeghian has joined our department as a computer science lecturer. Pedram comes to us from Howard Community College (HCC), where he spent more than five years as an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Computer Science and Information Systems. Welcome aboard Pedram!

In October, Professor Anupam Joshi was named director of the new UMBC Center for Cybersecurity. Dr. Joshi and co-director Dr. Richard Forno, Graduate Program Director Cybersecurity, will work together to advance UMBC’s position as a leading research university in the field of Cybersecurity.

The CSEE department continues to do well in its mission. Last Academic Year we recorded approximately $5 million in research expenditures in spite of the very difficult funding environment. We have reached a milestone of producing 238 PhD’s since 1986.

On the teaching forefront, the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation has awarded an Implementation and Research Grant to a team led by professor Marie desJardins for “Active Computing Teaching and InnoVation Environment” (ACTIVE). ACTIVE will be  a dynamic “laptop laboratory” that will support innovation in computing courses–with a particular focus on improving the retention and success of women, underrepresented minorities, and transfer students. The laboratory will extend active-learning environments, such as CASTLE and the new English writing labs, to a new area of the university.

Looking towards the future, we anticipate searching for a new tenure-track Assistant Professor in Computer Science. Have a great Spring semester. Keep up to date by visiting www.csee.umbc.edu.

Go Ravens

Dr. Gary Carter
Chair, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering