By the end of 2012, Google plans to unveil their latest addition to the tech world: a pair of android-based digital glasses, reports the New York Times. With a built in camera, the glasses will monitor the wearer’s surroundings and present them with relevant information about nearby businesses, or information about friends who might be nearby. Like smartphones, the glasses will harness third-party 3G or 4G for internet access. The glasses are being developed by the Google X team based out of a top-secret lab in Google headquarters where the company’s top-minds have been thinking up plans for futuristic products like space elevators and driverless cars.

Priced about the same as a smartphone—$250 to $600—the glasses are reported to have the rugged and futuristic look of a pair of Oakley Thump glasses. The proposed navigation system for the glasses will be a series of subtle head nods.

A PCWorld article shed a not-so-favorable light on the proposed Google product, saying that glasses could be potentially hazardous if worn while driving. The glasses, like other mobile devices, also raise questions about personal security and the potential of Google harnessing “Big-brother”-like influence over its customers. It’s likely, too, that the product is bound to cause concern about the health implications of having a small screen sitting only a few inches from your eye.

SASA Banquet

South Asian Student Association

Friday, February 24, 2012

7:00pm

University Center, Ballroom

UMBC ID = FREE (limit 1 per ID)

General Admission = $7.00

Ticket #: 244

Se7en Fashion Show

Black Student Union

Saturday, February 25, 2012

7:00pm

University Center, Ballroom

UMBC ID = FREE (limit 1 per ID)

General Admission = $10.00

Ticket #: 156

Philly Bus Trip - SOLD OUT

Norouz

Persian Student Association

Saturday, March 3, 201

8:00pm

University Center, Ballroom

UMBC ID = FREE (limit 1 per ID)

General Admission = $15.00

Ticket #: 8

fun.

Student Events Board

Sunday, March 4, 2012

8:00pm (doors open at 7:00pm)

University Center, Ballroom

All Guests = $10.00 (must show UMBC or photo ID)

Ticket #: 1163

D. C. Bus Trip

Student Events Board

March 31, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 10:00am

All Guests = $15.00

Ticket #: 29

FSO-MANETs: Free-Space-Optical Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Dr. Murat Yuksel
Computer Science and Engineering
University of Nevada, Reno

1:00pm Monday 27 February 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

The recent proliferation of wireless technologies and choices available to user applications has triggered a tremendous wireless demand, and wireless nodes are expected to dominate the Internet soon. Reports show that usage of mobile Web and WiFi by smartphones is increasing sharply, with more than 80% of their data consumption landing on WiFi points, and this statistic does not even include a major smartphone brand, the iPhone. Accommodating this exploding wireless demand with cellular capacity does not seem possible in the long run. As the radio spectrum (RF) spectrum is getting scarcer and saturated by recent innovations in attaining high spectral efficiency gains such as hierarchical cooperative MIMO, we urgently need innovations that will enable leveraging of new wireless spectrums and substrates in order to respond to the exploding mobile wireless traffic demand. Further, the capacity gap between RF wireless and optical fiber backbone speeds will remain huge because of the limited availability of RF spectrum. Enabling optical spectrum in wireless communications is the needed revolution for ultra-high-speed mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) of the future.

In this talk, I will present our work on exploring the potential for free-space-optics (FSO), a.k.a. optical wireless, in the context of very-high-speed mobile ad-hoc and opportunistic networking. We introduce basic building blocks for MANETs using FSO and present initial prototypes for multi-hop FSO building blocks and protocols operating under mobility. 3-D spherical structures covered with inexpensive FSO transceivers (e.g., LED/VCSEL and photo-detector pair) solve issues relevant to mobility and line-of-sight (LOS) management via availability of several transceivers per node. Such structures facilitate electronic LOS tracking (i.e., “electronic steering”) methods instead of traditional mechanical steering techniques used in FSO communications. By abstracting FSO directionality and LOS characteristics, our work also explores issues relating to routing and localization, and develops layer 3 protocols. FSO has been used at high-altitude communications, and this research enables FSO communications at lower-altitudes and in ad-hoc settings with redundancy of cheap optoelectronic components. This research also contributes to the new application of using solid-state lighting technology due to potential integration of illumination and communication functions in the same devices. Please refer to our project website for further information.

Murat Yuksel is an Assistant Professor at the CSE Department of The University of Nevada – Reno (UNR), Reno, NV. He was with the ECSE Department of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, NY as a Postdoctoral Research Associate and a member of Adjunct Faculty until 2006. He received a B.S. degree from the Computer Engineering Department of Ege University, Izmir, Turkey in 1996. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Computer Science Department of RPI in 1999 and 2002 respectively. His research interests are in the area of computer communication networks with a focus on protocol design, network economics, wireless routing, free-space-optical mobile ad-hoc networks (FSO-MANETs), and peer-to-peer. He is a senior member of IEEE, life member of ACM, and a member of Sigma Xi and ASEE.

Host: Anupam Joshi

Image from http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/virginia-gov-a-vp-hopeful-alters-abortion-ultrasound-stance/

While most of us associate wands with Harry Potter, the fairy tale term has taken on a shocking new meaning this week.

This is thanks to politicians in Virginia who, in a fit of Pro-life fervor decided to go pro-wand.

The wand in question is a device utilized for internal ultrasounds may often be described as “wand-like,” it’s far from magical.

This wand was part of one of the three anti-abortion laws that have been moving through the Virginia General Assembly.  The ultrasound legislation has received the most volatile response from the public.

In its original form, the bill required any woman getting an abortion to undergo a highly invasive, transvaginal ultrasound using, you guessed it, the dreaded wand.

This provoked a huge response from opponents, who gathered about 33,000 petition signatures opposing the measure. It didn’t take very long for Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell  to alter recent legislation regarding ultrasounds for women seeking abortions.

As he explains:

“No person should be directed to undergo an invasive procedure by the state, without their consent, as a precondition to another medical procedure.”

The House set about quickly amending the bill after Gov. McDonnell’s statement. Thus, the legislation that passed the Virginia House of Delegates today by a 65-32 vote still mandates an ultrasound, but the procedure will be done externally, on the woman’s abdomen.

Though a few aspects of the bill may have been mitigated, the debate still rages on.

Should a woman be forced to get an ultrasound, however noninvasive it may be? How much more will it cost to perform one? Will women have to bear the brunt of the ultrasound’s cost when the original procedure they sought was an abortion?

It appears it might take a real magic wand to resolve this issue once and for all.

Stripe, a San Francisco startup with an online-payment system, is hosting a simple online cybersecurity capture the flag (CTF) challenge. See their blog post for the details.

“The hardest part of writing secure code is learning to think like an attacker. For example, every programmer is told to watch out for SQL injections, but it’s hard to appreciate just how exploitable they are until you’ve written a SQL injection of your own.

We built Stripe Capture the Flag, a security wargame inspired by SmashTheStack’s IO, to help the community (as well our team!) practice identifying and exploiting common security problems.

After completing our CTF, you should have a greatly improved understanding of how attackers will try to break your code (and hopefully will have fun in the process!).”

If you can crack their system, they’ll send you a t-shirt. Since security is important to their business, maybe they will also talk to you about a job.