William R. Soltesz ’72, financial economics and mathematics, one of UMBC’s early Student Government Association presidents, passed away on September 13 at his home in New Jersey. He was 62 years old.

Soltesz, who grew up in Catonsville, served as president of the SGA from 1970 to 1971, and “was pivotal in working with faculty and students to keep the university open during a time when many other fledgling universities closed due to student riots and political pressures related to the Vietnam War,” his obituary reports.

Read an essay about these times at UMBC by Soltesz’s classmate, former Retriever Weekly editor Manus O’Donnell ’72, English, here.

Soltesz later received his M.B.A. from Loyola University in Baltimore, and served as vice president or chief financial officer for several Fortune 500 companies, including Alexander and Alexander and Sara Lee’s Shasta Beverages Division in Baltimore. At the time of his passing, Bill had served as the C.F.O. of Budd Van Lines in Somerset, NJ for over 20 years. He served on the Chester Borough (N.J.) Zoning Board and enjoyed swimming, the study of foreign culture and history through extensive world travel, and studying the American Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

Soltesz’s daughter, Tracy Soltesz ’01, political science, recalls that her father was especially touched by the teaching of Dr. John M.Titchener, emeritus professor of philosophy, who worked with Soltesz closely on various SGA initiatives throughout his tenure. Soltesz is also survived by a son, two brothers, and two grandchildren.

Interment will be this Friday, November 9, at 2:30 p.m. at the Lake View Memorial Park, 2724 Liberty Road, Sykesville, MD, 21784. A memorial reception will be held afterwards from 4 to 6 p.m. at The Rumor Mill Fusion Bar & Restaurant at 8069 Tiber Alley, Ellicott City, MD, 21043. Alumni and friends are welcome to attend and share stories. For questions, please email kesrya@gmail.com.

Ph.D. Thesis Defense Announcement

Semantically Rich, Policy Based Framework to Automate Lifecycle of Cloud Based Services

Karuna P. Joshi

10:00am 19 November 2012, ITE 325B

Managing virtualized services efficiently over the cloud is an open challenge.  Traditional models of software development are very time consuming and labor intensive for the cloud computing domain, where software (and other) services are acquired on demand. Virtualized services are often composed of pre-existing components that are assembled on an as-needed basis. We have developed a new framework to automate the acquisition, composition and consumption/monitoring of virtualized services delivered on the cloud.  We have divided the service lifecycle into five phases of requirements, discovery, negotiation, composition, and consumption and have developed ontologies to represent the concepts and relationships for each phase. These are represented in Semantic Web languages. We have developed a protocol to automate the negotiation process when acquiring virtualized services. This protocol allows complex relaxation of constraints being negotiated based on user defined policies. We have also developed detailed ontologies to define service level agreements for cloud services. To illustrate and validate how this framework can automate the acquisition of cloud services, we have built two applications from real world scenarios. The Smart cloud services application enables users to determine and procure the cloud storage application that matches most of their constraints and policies. We have also built a VCL broker application that allows users to automatically reserve the VCL Image that will best meet their requirements. We have developed a framework to measure and semi-automatically track quality of a virtualized service delivery system. The framework provides a mechanism to relate hard metrics typically measured at the backstage of the delivery process to quality related hard and soft metrics tracked at the front stage where the consumer interacts with the service. While this framework is general enough to be applied to any type of IT service, in this dissertation we have primarily concentratated on the Helpdesk service and include the performance rules we have created by mining Helpdesk data.

Thesis Committee:

• Dr. Yelena Yesha (chair)
• Dr. Tim Finin (co-chair)
• Dr. Milton Halem
• Dr. Yaacov Yesha
• Dr. Aryya Gangopadhyay

The first Club Sports Day will be on February 16, 2013 in the RAC starting at 9:00am and ending no later than 5:30pm. There will be hat tournaments in the following sports: basketball, soccer and volleyball. Each team has 4 reserved spots; and to keep those spots, we must submit event waivers and $10/spot to Whitney by December 20th at noon (plenty of time).

Want to compete and represent Booya?

Sign up on the event page to indicate your interest. We only have 4 spots so sign up early, as soon as you can. If you are selected to play, you will be emailed the event waiver to submit with $10 to PJ or directly to Whitney, SCC coordinator. There will also be a waitlist.

If you aren't selected to play, join others in supporting your teammates by cheering them on!

As I sit here in the quiet of the fading night, I think it is starting to sink in. WE WON!

I hope every single Equality Maryland member and supporter knows this is your win.  We won because of our audacious belief that all Maryland families should be treated equally under the law. We won because we always picked ourselves up after the falls and got back in the race. We won because we came together - LGBT, straight, black, white, Latino, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, young and old, rural, suburban and urban, Democrat, Independent and Republican - and embraced the common thread of fairness and dignity. We won because you kept on making those phone calls and knocking on doors. We won becuase every year you showed up in Annapolis and made your presence known. We won because you opened up your wallets when we asked (and asked and asked and asked!) to make ensure we had the funds to persuade enough voters to support marriage equality. We won because you woke up before the sun rose and stood in the cold for hours to staff polling places across the state.  Enjoy this day!

PS - Savor the win, but rest up because we still have work to do. Equality Maryland remains steadfast in our commitment to ensure transgender Marylanders are treated equally under the law. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.

CSEE Colloquium

Active PURLs: An architecture for enterprise information interoperability

Dr. David Wood
Three Round Stones

11:00am Friday, 9 November 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

The World Wide Web differed from other early hypertext systems in the removal of "back links" (the ability of a hyperlinked object to link back to a referring resource). The removal of back links allowed the scalability inherent in the Web's design, but sacrificed the knowledge necessary to update links when content moved. Persistent URLs (PURLs) have been used on the Web since 1995 to provide an inexpensive and partial solution to link updates via HTTP redirection: PURLs do not change their URL, but they may change the target they redirect to. Various iterations of the PURL concept have allowed Web addresses to be updated, clients notified of permanent changes of address and the provision of directions to metadata about a requested resource.

"Active" PURLs are a relatively new (2007) iteration of the PURL concept that allow PURLs to actively participate in the creation of data returned. The Callimachus Project, an Open Source Linked Data management system, now implements Active PURLs as a means to automate the collection, transformation and provision of information from distributed sources. Active PURLs are implemented in Callimachus by means of a PURL service, a new PURL type and an XML pipeline (XProc) implementation.

This talk will introduce Active PURLs and describe how they may be used to address long standing problems in enterprise architecture, especially those of distributed information interoperability, by facilitating a strong separation of concerns between data producers, publishers, administrators, librarians and consumers.

Dr. David Wood has contributed to the evolution of the World Wide Web since 1999, especially in the formation of standards and technologies for the Semantic Web. He has architected key aspects of the Web to include the Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL) service and several Semantic Web databases and frameworks. David is co-chair of the W3C RDF Working Group, co-chaired the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group and is a member of the Semantic Web Coordination Group. David has represented international organizations in the evolution of Internet standards at the International Standards Organization (ISO), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium. David is a founding and contributing member of many Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects, including the Mulgara Semantic Store, Persistent URL (PURLs), Freemix and the Callimachus Project. He is the author of Programming Internet Email (O'Reilly, 1999), editor of Linking Enterprise Data (Springer, 2010) and Linking Government Data (Springer, 2011) and lead author of Linked Data (Manning, anticipated 2013).

Host: Tim FInin, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

— more information and directions: http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks —

(by Joby Taylor)

Diwali Night

Thursday, November 8, 2012

6:30pm

University Center, Ballroom

UMBC ID = FREE

General Admission = $12

Ticket #: 148 of 300

Sex, Drugs, and Broadway

Musical Theater Club

Thursday, November 8, 2012 --- Ticket #: 22 of 100

Friday, November 9, 2012 --- Ticket #: 7 of 100

Saturday, November 10, 2012 --- Ticket #: 5 of 100

7:00pm

The Sports Zone

UMBC ID = FREE

General Admission = $5

Ajooba

SASA

Friday, November 9, 2012

7:00pm

University Center, Ballroom

UMBC ID = FREE (limit 1/ID)

General Admission = $5

Ticket #: SOLD OUT!!!

Arabian Nights

Friday, November 9, 2012

7:00pm

University Center, Ballroom

UMBC ID = FREE

General Admission = $5

Ticket #: 27 of 140

Washington, DC Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 10:00am

All Guests = $5

Ticket #: 37 of 49

SWAG Fashion Show

Alpha Nu Omega

Saturday, November 10, 2012

7:00pm

University Center, Ballroom

UMBC ID = FREE (limit 1/ID)

General Admission = $5

Ticket #: 27 of 399

New York City Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Bus departs the Commons Circle @ 7:45am

All Guests = $30

Ticket #: 6 of 108

The Hobbit: Midnight Premiere

(seb)

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Bus departs the Commons Circle @ 11:00pm

All Guests = $5

Ticket #: 11 of 216