Voting to Honor My Family

Here is a great video from CNN that shows yesterday’s talk on Twitter. Uncensored and unedited, social media sites are fantastic ways to understand what average citizens in the country were thinking about on this historic day.

We are excited to announce that a Task Force has been established to research and develop a plan for establishment and implementation of shared services centers at UMBC.  In accordance with UMBC's tradition, the Task Force will seek input from all UMBC stakeholders, and will maintain open two way communication as to its progress.  The task force is confident that our work will contribute to UMBC's reputation and future as we stay focused on the academic program, supporting people, and pursuing our priorities of effective and efficient administrative infrastructure to accommodate our continued growth.

We encourage the UMBC community to provide ideas and input to the task force as we move forward.  We have established this myUMBC group to provide updates on progress and as a vehicle to communicate with us. Please go to your myUMBC home page, choose "Groups" from the drop down menu, then "Browse/Search Groups" for the "Shared Services Centers at UMBC" group. Click the blue "Follow Group" button on the top left. This will enable you to communicate with the Task Force and enable the Task Force to provide you with updates as we move forward on this initiative.  

We look forward to working with all of you.

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