It’s very nice to see ebiquity alumna Akshaya Iyengar (MS, 2011) helping Wikipedia during its fund raising campaign. If you visit Wikipedia you might see her gracing a page you get, as I did just a minutes ago. See this screenshot and read her statement on why she has been donating to Wikipedia here. Her generosity has inspired me to contribute also.

Here’s a word cloud that visualizes the 200 most significant words extracted from over 400 papers from our research group over the past ten years. Significance was estimated by tf-idf where the idf data is from a collection of newswire articles (thanks Paul!). The word cloud was created with Wordle.

DARPA is developing a new component to track “quiet submarines” to be part of the Navy’s Anti Submarine Warfare toolkit and is using a software game to collect effective strategies for its use.

“Before autonomous software is developed for ACTUV’s computers, DARPA needs to determine what approaches and methods are most effective. To gather information from a broad spectrum of users, ACTUV has been integrated into the Dangerous Waters™ game. DARPA is offering this new ACTUV Tactics Simulator for free public download.

This software has been written to simulate actual evasion techniques used by submarines, challenging each player to track them successfully. Your tracking vessel is not the only ship at sea, so you’ll need to safely navigate among commercial shipping traffic as you attempt to track the submarine, whose driver has some tricks up his sleeve. You will earn points as you complete mission objectives, and will have the opportunity to see how you rank against the competition on DARPA’s leaderboard page. You can also share your experiences and insights from playing the simulator with others.”

This is a kind of crowdsourcing — leveraging the experiences of a large number of people playing a game. Applying various kinds of machine learning algorithms to the simulator data could be an effective way to train an autonomous tool for this task.

UMBC, SAIC, the National Cyber Security Alliance, the Tech Council of Maryland, and the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development have joined to hold the Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference on October 21-22, 2001. The event is designed to increase cyber awareness as a career choice in Maryland, improve the appreciation for cyber oriented curriculum in college and high schools, and convey cyber defense as a sport to increase interest in careers involving cyber security.

The competition will be divided into high school, collegiate and professional divisions. Qualifying rounds take place over the Internet between April and August 2011 using SAIC's Cyber Network Exercise System (CyberNEXS), a scalable training, exercise and certification system.  The top eight teams in each division will meet at the MDC3 event in October for the final round followed by an award ceremony at UMBC. MDC3 participants will also be able to learn from and network with other cybersecurity professionals, researchers, and scholars at the conference, which will include presentations, a career fair and a vendor exhibition.

For more information see this press release and the SAIC MDC3 site.

The UMBC CSEE Department invites applications for a non-tenure track, full-time lecturer position to teach a variety of undergraduate computer science courses. Both a demonstrated ability to teach such courses and a strong interest in teaching undergraduates are essential. Applicants must have, or be about to receive, an M.S. or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science or a related discipline. Applications should be submitted by 15 March 2011 and the position will start on 23 August 2011.

UMBC will host the 2011 FIRST Lego League Maryland State Championship on Saturday February 26 in the UMBC Retriever Activities Center.

FIRST Lego League (FLL) an international competition for elementary and middle school students that is run by the FIRST organization with support by Lego. FLL teams use Lego Mindstorms kits to build small autonomous robots built with a limited number of sensors and motors that complete to perform predefined challenge given tasks.

"Guided by adult mentors and their own imaginations, FLL students solve real-world engineering challenges, develop important life skills, and learn to make positive contributions to society. FLL provides students age 9-14 with an opportunity to challenge their math and science skills in an internationally recognized competitive environment. FLL combines a hands-on, interactive robotics program with a sports-like atmosphere. Teams of up to 10 players focus on team building, problem solving, creativity, and analytical thinking to develop a well thought out solution to a problem currently facing the world – the Challenge."

The UMBC organizers, led by UMBC Mechanical Engineering Professor Anne Spence, need volunteers from the UMBC community to help on the tournament day as well as to help set up in on Friday. If you are interested in helping please register online. Volunteering to help in the Maryland FLL championship is a great way to help engage young people in science and technology and have some fun doing it.

Alan Sherman reports that “UMBC advances to Final Four of College Chess, placing 2nd at 2010 Pan-Am Intercollegiate, after losing to arch rival UTD in close, hard-fought match last evening in Milwaukee. 28 teams competed in this six-round team Swiss event, including Stanford, Yale, Univ of Chicago, Univ. of Toronto.” The top four teams are UT Dallas, UMBC, UT Brownsville and Texas Tech. See here for the final standings of all 28 teams.

The Tech Council of Maryland is the state’s largest technology trade association and has more than 500 members. It is sponsoring a series of meetings on cyber security:

“Understanding that the conversation about cyber security needs to continue among all stakeholders, the Tech Council of Maryland is moving its CyberMaryland Forum throughout the state. The Forum is open to anyone with an interest in the cyber security industry.”

The next CyberMaryland Form meeting will be held this coming Wednesday morning at UMBC:

“The next meeting of the CyberMaryland Forum will be held on Wednesday December 8, 2010 from 8:30 to 11:30 am at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Our content will cover the latest developments in the state’s initiative to be the “Epicenter for Information Security and Innovation”, the development of the UMBC/Northrop Grumman Cyber Incubator program to help grow fledgling cyber security companies and other hot topics in the cyber security industry. To learn more about the CyberMaryland Forum, contact Mark Glazer at 240-243-4045 or mglazer@techcouncilmd.com.

The Tech council encourages UMBC faculty, staff and students to participate and is waiving the registration fee for the UMBC community. The meeting will be held in the main conference room at UMBC’s South Campus Technology Center at 1450 South Rolling Road.

China’s Tianhe-1A is being recognized as the world’s fastest supercomputer. It has 7168 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and achieved a Linpack score of 2.507 petaflops, a 40% speedup over Oak Ridge National Lab’s Jaguar, the previous top machine. Today’s WSJ has an article,

“Supercomputers are massive machines that help tackle the toughest scientific problems, including simulating commercial products like new drugs as well as defense-related applications such as weapons design and breaking codes. The field has long been led by U.S. technology companies and national laboratories, which operate systems that have consistently topped lists of the fastest machines in the world.

But Nvidia says the new system in Tianjin—which is being formally announced Thursday at an event in China—was able to reach 2.5 petaflops. That is a measure of calculating speed ordinarily translated into a thousand trillion operations per second. It is more than 40% higher than the mark set last June by a system called Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that previously stood at No. 1 on a twice-yearly ranking of the 500 fastest supercomputers.”

The NYT and HPCwire also have good overview articles. The HPC article points out that the Tianhe-1A has a relatively low Linpack efficiency compaed to the Jaguar.

“Although the Linpack performance is a stunning 2.5 petaflops, the system left a lot of potential FLOPS in the machine. Its peak performance is 4.7 petaflops, yielding a Linpack efficiency of just over 50 percent. To date, this is a rather typical Linpack yield for GPGPU-accelerated supers. Because the GPUs are stuck on the relatively slow PCIe bus, the overhead of sending calculations to the graphics processors chews up quite a few cycles on both the CPUs and GPUs. By contrast, the CPU-only Jaguar has a Linpack/peak efficiency of 75 percent. Even so, Tianhe-1A draws just 4 megawatts of power, while Jaguar uses nearly 7 megawatts and yields 30 percent less Linpack.

The (unofficial) “official” list of the fastest supercomputers is TOP500 which seems to be inaccessible at the moment, due no doubt to the heavy load caused by the news stories above. The TOP500 list is due for a refresh next month.

Read a good book lately? Why not nominate it for the 2011 UMBC New Student Book Experience, which invites new UMBC students to read the selected book and engage in formal and informal discussions about it as the new year starts.

We are looking for books that (1) are compelling, intellectually stimulating, engaging on multiple levels and capable of generating interesting discussions; (2) address issues meaningful to students of diverse backgrounds; (3) are not widely required in Maryland high schools or made into a recent film; and (4) are available in paperback and not overly long.

You can nominate one or more using this handy Facebook app. The app uses the Google Books API to help identify books given a partial title, so it’s easy to use. After recoding your nomination, you’ll have an opportunity to make an optional post to your Facebook page like the one below, so your friends can see what you suggested. Nominations will close on October 31, 2010 and the selection will be announced in the Spring.