• MacBook Pro Retina, 13-inch 
• 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5
• 8GB 1867 MHz DDR3
• 128GB Flash storage
  
• Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 MB

The excavation needed to fix the leaking pipe meant that traffic needed to be re-routed. Above, Baltimore City employees getting new traffic patterns going.

On Tuesday morning, UMBC Facilities Management was notified of a pipe leak that occurred just outside the driveway entrance to UMBC’s Naval ROTC Building.

The pipe, which transits water to the surrounding Baltimore County community, burst early Tuesday morning. The pipe spit out water that froze the branches of nearby evergreens.

According to an employee of Baltimore City, who was getting ready to start work at the site, pipe bursts are a common occurrence this time of year.  The current changing of weather can cause tension under the soil, causing pipes to simply break open and let whatever is in them leak out, the worker said.

The UMBC Facilities Management employee managing the incident said that the area where this event occurred took place is just outside UMBC property.  “It is a Baltimore County issue,” said the manager Bob Kelley.

Because the incident had to do with a water main problem, Baltimore City’s team was the one to respond to it.  “Anything that has to do with water pipes in Baltimore City or Baltimore County, Baltimore City takes care of,” said an employee who declined to give his identity.

The employee said that he will be conducting an excavation of the area surrounding the pipe. Later, other employees to patch up or fix the pipe leak.  Flags reading “BGE / BURIED GAS” were scattered throughout the area to ensure that no gas pipes are burst in the excavation process.

Water flow to the surrounding Baltimore County community will be cut off until the issue is resolved.  An employee told a concerned passer-by that water should be running again no later than 8 p.m. tonight.

The water supply cut-off is only affecting two small parts of campus. They are the Naval ROTC building and the Alumni Offices Building.  No employees seemed to be working at the Alumni building. One ROTC Staff member confirmed the water was not running in building as of late Tuesday morning.

UMBC’s Naval ROTC building lies on the edge of campus, along with the Alumni House, also affected by a water shortage on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for UMBC Facilities Management said that the issue would likely not be a major one.  However, the incident did create traffic patterns on Wilkens Avenue.

At midday Tuesday, a helicopter was hovering over and about the affected area for about 13 minutes.

Baltimore County employees should arrive within the following days to refill the excavated hole with soil.

The incident should not affect students’ commute Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning.

The post ROTC building pipe burst prompts Baltimore City response appeared first on The Retriever.

Dissertation Proposal

Cognitive Analytics Framework to Secure Internet of Things

Sandeep Nair Narayanan

1:00-3:30pm, Monday, 28 November 2016, ITE 325b

Recent years have seen the rapid growth and widespread adoption of Internet of Things in a wide range of domains including smart homes, healthcare, automotive, smart farming and smart grids. The IoT ecosystem consists of devices like sensors, actuators and control systems connected over heterogeneous networks. The connected devices can be from different vendors with different capabilities in terms of power requirements, processing capabilities, etc. As such, many security features aren’t implemented on devices with lesser processing capabilities. The level of security practices followed during their development can also be different. Lack of over the air update for firmware also pose a very big security threat considering their long-term deployment requirements. Device malfunctioning is yet another threat which should be considered. Hence, it is imperative to have an external entity which monitors the ecosystem and detect attacks and anomalies.

In this thesis, we propose a security framework for IoTs using cognitive techniques. While anomaly detection has been employed in various domains, some challenges like online approach, resource constraints, heterogeneity, distributed data collection etc. are unique to IoTs and their predecessors like wireless sensor networks. Our framework will have an underlying knowledge base which has the domain-specific information, a hybrid context generation module which generates complex contexts and a fast reasoning engine which does logical reasoning to detect anomalous activities. When raw sensor data arrives, the hybrid context generation module queries the knowledge base and generates different simple local contexts using various statistical and machine learning models. The inferencing engine will then infer global complex contexts and detects anomalous activities using knowledge from streaming facts and and domain specific rules encoded in the Ontology we will create. We will evaluate our techniques by realizing and validating them in the vehicular domain.

Committee: Drs. Dr. Anupam Joshi (Chair), Dr. Tim Finin, Dr. Nilanjan Banerjee, Dr. Yelena Yesha, Dr. Wenjia Li, NYIT, Dr. Filip Perich, Google

UMBC’s equestrian club recently attended the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association show at Frying Park, VA. hosted by George Washington and George Mason University. Over the weekend of of Nov. 5 and 6, the Retrievers improved on Saturday going into Sunday, doing better as a team as the weekend progressed.

Two racers placed at the intermediate division, while one placed at the novice level. Another racer jumped from beginner to advance.

The team spends most of their time together at the horse track to get closer over the year. “There’s a lot of team bonding, we all die at the gym together,” president junior Zoe Fritz said about the team’s cohesive time together.

UMBC’s equestrian club has made its way through the majority of their six shows this semester, and has made the attempt to come together to grow in order to get ready for regionals in the spring semester. To do this, the racers have to place out of their current division at a show, so two Retrievers are currently ready to go to regionals coming up.

Before a show, the Retrievers often get too caught up in the seriousness of the show and become stubbornly intent on it. The team unity comes together to help this trend by the self-described group motto: “Sparkle, baby!” When asked about the group motto, the team could only laugh and smile about it because the friendship and loyalty that brought the group together, also keeps them together.

The group has a fundraiser coming up at Buffalo Wild Wings sometime after Thanksgiving.

UMBC’s equestrian club is a small team, but a tight knit group that has built its growth through friendship and comradery.  Despite being a tight-knit group, the team is always looking out for new members. For the Retriever girls, the social connections they have developed is the greatest part of the club.  This togertheness is sure to get more of the Retrievers to have success in the spring shows, and to continue the success at regionals in the year to come.

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Sundar Singh is credited for bringing the song “I have decided to follow Jesus” to its popularity. Here’s the account of how this song was written.

About 150 years ago, there was a great revival in Wales, England. As a result of this, many missionaries came from England to northeast India to spread the Gospel. The region was known as Assam and comprised hundreds of tribes. The tribal communities were quite primitive and aggressive. The tribesmen were also called head-hunters because of a social custom which required the male members of the community to collect as many heads as possible. A man’s strength and ability to protect his wife was assessed by the number of heads he had collected. Therefore, a youth of marriageable age would try and collect as many heads as possible and hang them on the walls of his house. The more heads a man had, the more eligible he was considered. Into this hostile and aggressive community, came a group of Welsh missionaries spreading the message of love, peace, and hope of Jesus Christ. Naturally, they were not welcomed.

One Welsh missionary finally succeeded in converting a man, his wife, and two children. This man’s faith proved contagious and many villagers began to accept Christianity. Angry, the village chief summoned all the villagers. He then called the family who had first converted to renounce their faith in public or face execution. Moved by the Holy Spirit, the man sung his reply, “I have decided to follow Jesus.  No turning back.”

Enraged at the refusal of the man, the chief ordered his archers to arrow down the two children. As both boys lay twitching on the floor, the chief asked, “Will you deny your faith? You have lost both your children. You will lose your wife too.” But the man replied, again singing, “Though none go with me, still I will follow. No turning back.”

The chief was beside himself with fury and ordered his wife to be arrowed down. In a moment she joined her two children in death. Now he asked for the last time, “I will give you one more opportunity to deny your faith and live.” In the face of death the man sung, “The cross before me, the world behind me. No turning back. No turning back.”

He was shot dead like the rest of his family. But with their deaths, a miracle took place. The chief who had ordered the killings was moved by the faith of the man. He wondered, “Why should this man, his wife and two children die for a Man who lived in a far-away land on another continent some 2,000 years ago? There must be some supernatural power behind the family, and I too want that supernatural power.” In a spontaneous confession of faith, he declared,”I too belong to Jesus Christ!” When the crowd heard this from the mouth of their chief, the whole village accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior.

This account of faith eventually reached Sundar Singh, who put these words into a song “I have decided to follow Jesus.”

Today, let’s spend time in worship singing this song (in either the traditional version or the more modern Hillsong version), and as we sing let’s be more fully assured of our lives in Christ.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8jvfdDtoqY

-GK

The traditional mindset in sports is that teams succeed by dictatorships. Whether a coach or a manager, teams in all types of sports centralize by being led by one totalitarian expert who makes all the calls for the team. This puts all the glory and blame on one man; if the team continues to succeed the coach becomes a legend, but in failure, the coach is exiled into forgotten territory.

Lombardi got the super bowl award named after him for his great success, while Jim Zorn is less than a footnote in Redskins history. But trends have shown that this is a more than ineffective strategy. Making decisions through one person, rather than getting different viewpoints and opinions, is counterproductive to group success.

The greatest representation of this trend is the French soccer team, Olympique Lyonnais. The team’s history was more than forgetful, that is, until bought in the 80s by Jean-Michel Aulas. As the team’s new chairman, he began to reconstruct with a process built around the team being organized economically. The team managed to sneak its way into France’s top league, and within the decade was regularly finishing top three in the league.

Lyon continued to adjust and transition, making all personnel decisions through a group of educated informants, and the team’s success culminated in its first French title in 2001. Thus began an era of domination that lasted until 2008.

Although Lyon itself may be a large city in France, the team had never been a soccer powerhouse in the country before. Lyon was only able to have a period of domination in French soccer because its scouting, coaching decisions and signings were all leagues ahead of its competition due to the power of groupthink.

Other teams in Europe all began adjusting to this model, adding more minds into the conversation when it came to team building. Still, no major team has taken the steps to build their team as efficiently as Olympique Lyonnais.

This trend is not merely limited to soccer, either. Most American sports leagues, historically, have one coach always as the team face who makes the bulk of the decisions only with certain duties deferred to the lower coaching stations.

However, in recent years this trend has been countered by the rise of a separate position: the general manager. Only the Patriots have their coach, Bill Belichick, as their general manager and he is a understandable exception as his own personal knowledge surpasses most of the minds in the league.

In the last few decades in the NFL, NBA and MLB, the general manager has been an increasingly important position in the locker room that has taken more and more powers in personnel decisions in drafting and scouting. The general manager regularly works with the coaches and the ownership groups to make the best decisions for the team, showing a little bit of the decentralization that that helped make Lyon successful.

“Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis rejuvenated the sports minds around America in reference to how we think about baseball and what it takes to become successful. The book condemned a lot of traditional thinking and focused on the benefits of using sports statistics to become more effective in team building.

Just as Michael Lewis once did, it is time to throw out the old style way of thinking in sports and further break down decision making in sports into groups, so we can get more talented products of the games we love.

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