Professor Eric Roberts of Stanford will talk tomorrow (4:00pm Thur 24 April, 231 ITE) on Rediscovering the Passion, Beauty, Joy, and Awe: Making Computing Fun Again. He’s well known as a master teacher and his his insights into teaching computer science will well worth hearing. Here is the abstract for his talk.

Has anyone considered the possibility that it’s just not fun any more? — Don Knuth, October 2006

Over the last five years, computing education in most developed countries has faced a seeming paradox: despite projections that the field offers tremendous employment opportunities and extraordinary growth potential for the foreseeable future, student interest in pursuing computing degrees has plummeted. In response, many educators have called for a massive overhaul of computing curricula to increase its attractiveness to students. In this talk, I argue that such efforts are misdirected in that they fail to respond to the underlying causes of the enrollment decline, which are the following:

• Fears about the long-term economic stability of employment in the computing industry continue to have a profound effect on student interest in our discipline.
• The kind of exposure students get to computing at the elementary and secondary level tends to push people away from the discipline long before they reach the university.
• The image of work in the field — and, more importantly, all too much of the reality of work in the field — is unattractive to most students and no longer seems fun, particularly in comparison to other opportunities that bright students might pursue.

I will conclude the talk with suggestions as to what universities, schools, industry, and government can do to address this problem.

Jiawei Han will give a talk tomorrow, Research Challenges In Data Mining at 10am in UMBC’s
LH8 (1st floor ITE building). Here’s the abstract.

“Research in data mining has led to advanced knowledge discovery technologies and applications. In this talk, we will discuss some emerging research issues for advanced technologies and applications in data mining and discuss some recent progress in this direction, including (1) exploration of the power of pattern mining, (2) analysis of multidimensional, heterogeneous and evolving information network, (3) mining of fast changing data streams, (4) mining of moving object data, RFID data, and data from sensor networks, (5) spatiotemporal and multimedia data mining, (6) biological data mining, (7) text and Web mining, (8) data mining for software engineering and computer system analysis, and (9) data cube-oriented multidimensional online analytical analysis.”

The talk is part of a distinguished lecture series sponsored by the UMBC Information Systems Department. Here’s a flier.

Today’s Baltimore Sun has a good page-one story, Video games, from scratch, on the new UMBC games, animation and interactive media programs. The reporter visited the Anatomy of a Video Game which is being taught by Katie Hirsch (UMBC CS/ART ‘05). As luck would have it, another UMBC alumnus, Eric Jordan (UMBC CS ‘07), was also there giving a guest lecture. Both Katie and Eric work at Breakaway, one of the many Baltimore area game companies. The course includes students who are majoring in visual arts ans well as those majoring in computer science, making an interesting mix that mirrors the teams that create commercial computer games. The article has some good quotes from both the instructors and students and from Professor Marc Olano, who directs the computer science game program.

The sixth annual UMBC Computer Mania Day will be held at UMBC on Saturday, May 3, 2008. The event provides a half day of technology-related activities for up to 800 middle school girls and their parents and teachers. Girls are the focus, but boys are welcome. This program is designed to provide a broad-based introduction to the ways in which different careers make use of technology. Several sessions are planned including ones on robotics and on social computing. There is also a separate adult program designed for parents. Computer Mania Day is free, but space is limited and registration is required to hold a place. Free gift bags from Dell will be given to the first 800 students who register and attend!

Sandia and Oak Ridge national laboratories have established the Institute for Advanced Architectures to work toward computers that are a million times faster than todays supercomputers.

“An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a petaflop, itself a thousand times faster than a teraflop. Teraflop computers —the first was developed 10 years ago at Sandia — currently are the state of the art. They do trillions of calculations a second. Exaflop computers would perform a million trillion calculations per second.” (link)

Initial funding of $7.4M is provided by congressional mandate from the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

This Spring UMBC will mount our first “regular” undergraduate class as part of its new programs on games, animation and interactive media. The class, Anatomy of a Video Game, will be taught by UMBC Alumna Katie Hirsch, who graduated with dual degrees in Computer Science and Visual Arts and who works at and Breakaway Games in Hunt Valley MD.

“This class dissects the process of developing a video game from an introductory perspective. The class will give artist and programmers an opportunity to focus on their specific areas of interest within the development pipeline while learning to work across their disciplines. The class will include production and design as well as art and programming specific topics.”

This course, as well as several others this spring, will take advantage of UMBC’s new GAIM Lab that is equipped with a generous gift of 20 Xbox consoles from Microsoft.

On Tuesday 22 January the agents mailing list (agents@cs.umbc.edu) will be offline between 21:00 and 23:00 UTC as we transition from Majordomo to GNU Mailman. Mail sent to the list at this time will bounce.

The agents list was begun in 1994 by Ray Johnson, then at the Lockheed Palo Alto AI Center and moved to UMBC in 1996. Majordomo represented the state of the art for mailing list software in 1996, but development stopped sometime around 2001. Moving to Mailman will make it easier for us to manage the list and let users manage a wider range of their own subscription options. The list currently has about 2000 subscribers.

If you are a subscriber to either the UMBC agents or agents-digest lists, your subscription will be transferred to the new Mailman-supported list. Subscribers to the old agents-digest list will get a daily digest of messages. Using the agents administration page you can elect to receive messages as they are sent or to get them in digest form. We’ve assigned subscribers random passwords, so you will need to recover your password before making any changes.

You can edit your Mailman configuration now, but we won’t start sending out mail using Mailman until the Tuesday evening. I’ll send out an announcement via the re-hosted list when I know it’s enabled.

An address entered in the Mailman admin page must match your subscribed address exactly. If you are not sure which of your email address is subscribed, check the message headers to see if that reveals it. Failing that, you can try asking the old system by sending poor old majordomo@cs.umbc.edu an email message with the command “which ” in the message body, where is a string you believe to be in your subscribed address. As a last resort, ask me for help (finin@cs.umbc.edu).

You can continue to send mail to the list agents mailing list using the address agents at cs.umbc.edu. If the sending address is recognized as a subscriber, your message will distributed immediately and without moderation. Otherwise, you will be notified that your it awaits moderation, which might take a day or two.

In our old majordomo system, we maintained a separate list of additional pre-approved sending addresses. In general, if your sending address is not the same as your subscribed address, you should change the subscribed address. If you want to be able to send unmoderated messages from several accounts (e.g., your .edu and gmail accounts), you can always subscribe all of your accounts and disable email delivery for all but one.

Messages sent through the Mailman system will be available in an archive. The archive of old majordomo-era traffic is in disarray, but I think we have virtually all of the messages from 1994-2007. Eventually we’ll get it sorted out and online for posterity.

Our old moderation list was so inundated with spam and bounces from bad addresses that it became virtually impossible to moderate effectively. We anticipate that the new system will address both of these problems well and we will be thus be able to manage the moderation process better.

You can get more information about the list as well as manage subscriptions on the admin page and from the Mailman user guide. There are sure to be a few issues when we start using Mailman. If you have questions or suggestions about the list configuration, please let me know or send a message to the list if you think it should be of interest to the community.

The success of social media sites like Facebook, Youtube, Myspace, and Flickr reflect a change in the way people use the Web. Current estimates are that over one third of all new material being added to the Web is user-generated content from sites like these.

Business leaders and VCs have taken note, and this is probably the most active area for new Internet startups and new ventures from established businesses. There’s a demand for people who understand the phenomenon, the technologies that make it work and the new technologies that will enable the next wave of successful services and sites. Who knows, maybe you can be the next Mark Zuckerberg. (If you do, please remember your alma mater.)

If you are still looking for a course to round out your Spring schedule, you might consider CMSC 491S/691S — ‘Social Web Technologies’. This special topics course will meet MW 7:10-8:25pm and be taught by Dr. Harry Chen, who received his Ph.D. from UMBC in 2004. For format will be seminar-style and project-oriented. It will cover (1) how social web technologies such as blogs, social networking, social bookmarking, photo/video sharing and folksonomies can improve the productivity of people and (2) how to apply the latest Web technologies (e.g., Machine learning, text mining, RDF, PhP, GIS, SOA, Javascript) to create social web applications. More information.

The latest CACM has an article by Google fellows Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat with interesting details on Google’s text processing engines. Niall Kennedy summarized it this way on his blog post, Google processes over 20 petabytes of data per day.

“Google currently processes over 20 petabytes of data per day through an average of 100,000 MapReduce jobs spread across its massive computing clusters. The average MapReduce job ran across approximately 400 machines in September 2007, crunching approximately 11,000 machine years in a single month.”

If big numbers numb your mind, 20 petabytes is 20,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (or 22,517,998,136,852,480 for the obsessive-compulsives among us) — enough data to fill up over five million 4G ipods a day, which, if laid end to end would …

Kevin Burton has a copy of the paper on his blog.

Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, MapReduce: simplified data processing on large clusters, Communications of the ACM, pp 107-113, 51:1, January 2008.

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large datasets that is amenable to a broad variety of real-world tasks. Users specify the computation in terms of a map and a reduce function, and the underlying runtime system automatically parallelizes the computation across large-scale clusters of machines, handles machine failures, and schedules inter-machine communication to make efficient use of the network and disks. Programmers find the system easy to use: more than ten thousand distinct MapReduce programs have been implemented internally at Google over the past four years, and an average of one hundred thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google’s clusters every day, processing a total of more than twenty petabytes of data per day.

Dean and Ghemawat conclude their paper by summarizing the key reasons why MapReduce has worked so well for Google.

“First, the model is easy to use, even for programmers without experience with parallel and distributed systems, since it hides the details of parallelization, fault tolerance, locality optimization, and load balancing. Second, a large variety of problems are easily expressible as MapReduce computations. For example, MapReduce is used for the generation of data for Google’s production Web search service, for sorting, data mining, machine learning, and many other systems. Third, we have developed an implementation of MapReduce that scales to large clusters of machines comprising thousands of machines. The implementation makes efficient use of these machine resources and therefore is suitable for use on many of the large computational problems encountered at Google.”

Tomorrow’s (!) Washington Post has a good article, In Peru, a Pint-Size Ticket to Learning on how the project is working out in Arahuay, Peru.

“Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books — can’t get enough of their XO devices.

At breakfast, they’re already powering up the combination library/videocamera/audio recorder/musicmaker/drawing kits. At night, they’re dozing off in front of them — if they’ve managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.” (src)

Computer Science departments in North America and Europe are struggling to increase their enrollments after the decline that started when the dotcom bubble deflated. Most are following a strategy to find ways to engage students by showing them that the field is both interesting and socially relevant. I think that the OLPC project and others like it can help do this. It will be motivating for many of our students to target software to this device and produce something for the good of humanity. For example, we can get some of the many students interested in game development to try to port/write educational games to the XO. The XO laptop is custom hardware running a stripped-down Red Hat Linux with a custom user interface and has XO emulators available. Since not much is standard, there will probably be a big need for writing device drivers and porting lots of common open-source packages. Developing software for the XO could be a good project as part of many core computer science, computer engineering and information systems courses.

We have one of these in the department now and I hope that we can get more.

Alternate reality games, also known as immersive games, blend fantasy and reality in ways that blur the difference. We are not talking about virtual reality technology that require their users to don special helmets or use kinematic effectors, but games that embed their narratives and interact with players using everyday aspects of the the real world — Web sites, email, instant messages, phone calls, letters and billboards.

The genre has largely been used by conceptual artists, advertising agencies and marketeers. Here’s how Dave Szulborski describes it on his This is Not a Game site.

“Alternate Reality Gaming, sometimes also called Immersive Gaming, Viral Marketing, or Interactive Fiction, is a rapidly emerging genre of online gaming and is one of the first true art and entertainment forms that was developed from and exclusively for the Internet. Alternate Reality Games have been wildly successful when used for multimillion dollar marketing campaigns, such as the 2004 game I Love Bees, used by Microsoft to help launch the hugely anticipated X-Box video game Halo 2, and the game that started it all, the Beast, used to promote Steven Spielberg’s science fiction epic A.I.: Artificial Intelligence in 2001.”

Wired has an article, Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games, that describes an a viral marketing campaign to promote Nine Inch Nails. Muhammad Saleem blogs about the online viral marketing campaign it used to promote the move The Dark Knight. Finally, ReadWriteWeb has an interesting post, Alternate Reality Games: What Makes or Breaks Them? that attempts to deconstruct ARGs.

Alternate reality gaming is definitely unusual, but it draws on many of the skills any student of gaming should be developing: the ability to construct a rich narrative, the capability to design an environment that reveals itself as players explore and gradually discover and solve underlying puzzles, and the skills to exploit the latest digital technologies.

Many of them are inherently social games as well, encouraging or even requiring groups of people to collaborate and share information to unravel the story.

The Web has become the repository of most the world’s pubic knowledge. Almost all of it is still bound up in text, images, audio and video, which are easy for people to understand but less accessible for machines. While the computer interpretation of visual and audio information is still challenging, text is within reach. The Web’s infrastructure makes access to all this information trivial, opening up tremendous opportunities to mine text to extract information that can be republished in a more structured representation (e.g., RDF, databases) or used by machine learning systems to discover new knowledge. Current technologies for human language understanding are far from perfect, but can harvest the low hanging fruit and are constantly improving. All that’s needed is an Internet connection and cycles — lots of them.

The latest approach to focusing lots of computing cycles on a problem is cloud computing, inspired in part by Google’s successful architecture and MapReduce software infrastructure.

Business Week had an article a few weeks ago, The Two Flavors of Google, that touches on some of the recent developments, including Hadoop and IBM and Google’s university cloud computing program. Hadoop is the produce of an Apache Lucene project that provides a Java-based software framework to distribute processing over a cluster of processors. The BW article notes

“Cutting, a 44-year-old search veteran, started developing Hadoop 18 months ago while running the nonprofit Nutch Foundation. After he later joined Yahoo, he says, the Hadoop project (named after his son’s stuffed elephant) was just “sitting in the corner.” But in short order, Yahoo saw Hadoop as a tool to enhance the operations of its own search engine and to power its own computing clouds.” (source)

and adds this significant anecdote

“In early November, for example, the tech team at The New York Times rented computing power on Amazon’s cloud and used Hadoop to convert 11 million archived articles, dating back to 1851, to digital and searchable documents. They turned around in a single day a job that otherwise would have taken months.” (source)

The NYT’s Derek Gottfrid described he process in some detail in a post on the NTY Open blog, Self-service, Prorated Super Computing Fun!.

The Hadoop Quickstart page describes how to run it on a single node, enabling any high school geek who knows Java and has a laptop to try it out before finding (or renting) time on a cluster. This is just what we need in for several upcoming projects and I am looking forward to trying it out soon. One requires processing the 1M documents in the Trec 8 collection and another the 10K documents in ACE 2008 collection.