UMBC is hosting a site for the 2009 Global Game Jam on January 30-February 1, 2009. This is a two day game development contest sponsored by the International Game Developers Association and held simultaneously in 49 sites from 20 countries.

At 5pm local time on Friday, January 30, each site will be told the parameters of the game they all must produce. Participants pitch ideas, form teams, and get to work producing the best game they can in 48 hours. The UMBC site will have a good mix of computers and development platforms including Windows (XP), Mac (Leopard), XBox 360 (with Creators Club), PlayStation 3 (running Linux) with a diverse software environment that inlcludes Visual Studio, Maya, XNA Game Studio, NVIDIA PhysX and Adobe Creative Suite. For more information see the UMBC Global Game Jam page.

The Global Game Jam participants do not have to be UMBC students, and the Jam is open to participants of all levels of skill and experience. There is no registration fee for the Baltimore Jam site at UMBC, but space is limited so advance registration is required.

This event is sponsored by the UMBC Games, Animation and Interactive Media program, an innovative academic program with tracks available for students pursuing a degree in computer science or a degree in visual arts.

Congratulations to the UMBC Chess team and their advisor and our colleague, UMBC CSEE Professor Alan Sherman, for a first place tie in the 54th Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship.

UMBC tied for first place with University of Texas at Dallas (B Team) in the sixth and final round of the three-day 2008 Pan-Am Championship which was held in Dallas. This year 29 four-person college teams competed in the annual event which is known as the “World Series of College Chess“. UMBC has now won the Pan-Am tournament a record eight times. The final standings are available at swchess.

The two first place winners will meet again with the third and fourth place teams, the University of Texas Brownville and Stanford, in the special Final Four of Chess tournament, which is held in spring 2009.

The UMBC chess team: front row, L to R: WGM Sabina Foisor, GM Timur Gareev, GM Sergey Erenburg, and GM Leonid Kritz, board one, Back row: UMBC coaches GM Sam Palantnik and NM Igor Epshteyn. Photo Alexey Root.

Disco is a Python-friendly, open-source Map-Reduce framework for distributed computing with the slogan “massive data – minimal code”. Disco’s core is written in Erlang, a functional language designed for concurrent programming, and users typically write Disco map and reduce jobs in Python. So what’s wrong with using Hadoop? Nothing, according to the Disco site, but…

“We see that platforms for distributed computing will be of such high importance in the future that it is crucial to have a wide variety of different approaches which produces healthy competition and co-evolution between the projects. In this respect, Hadoop and Disco can be seen as complementary projects, similar to Apache, Lighttpd and Nginx.

It is a matter of taste whether Erlang and Python are more suitable for the task than Java. We feel much more productive with Python than with Java. We also feel that Erlang is a perfect match for the Disco core that needs to handle tens of thousands of tasks in parallel.

Thanks to Erlang, the Disco core remarkably compact, currently less than 2000 lines of code. It is relatively easy to understand how the core works, and start experimenting with it or adapt it to new environments. Thanks to Python, it is easy to add new features around the core which ensures that Disco can respond quickly to real-world needs.”

The Disco tutorial uses the standard word counting task to show how to set up and use Disco on both a local cluster and Amazon EC2. There is also homedisco, which lets programmers develop, debug, profile and test Disco functions on one local machine before running on a cluster. The word counting example from the tutorial is certainly nicely compact:

from disco.core import Disco, result_iterator

def fun_map(e, params):
    return [(w, 1) for w in e.split()]

def fun_reduce(iter, out, params):
    s = {}
    for w, f in iter:
        s[w] = s.get(w, 0) + int(f)
    for w, f in s.iteritems():
        out.add(w, f)

results = Disco("disco://localhost").new_job(
		name = "wordcount",
                input = ["http://discoproject.org/chekhov.txt"],
                map = fun_map,
		reduce = fun_reduce).wait()

for word, frequency in result_iterator(results):
	print word, frequency

UMBC will again host the 2008-09 FIRST Lego League Maryland State Championship on January 31, 2009. 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.”

UMBC’s FLL activities are led by Mechanical Engineering Professor Anne Spence.

Registration is now open for the Global Game Jam at UMBC, January 30-February 1, 2009! The Global Game Jam is a game development contest sponsored by the International Game Developers Association and held simultaneously in 41 sites across the globe. At 5PM local time, each site will be told the parameters of the game they all must produce. Participants pitch ideas, form teams, and get to work producing the best game they can in 48 hours. The Global Game Jam participants do not have to be UMBC students, and the Jam is open to participants of all levels of skill and experience. More information is available on the UMBC GAIM blog.

There’s a very interesting late addition to UMBC’s spring schedule — CMSC 491/691A, a special topics class on parallel programming. Programming multi-core and cell-based processors is likely to be an important skill in the coming years, especially for systems that require high performance such as those involving scientific computing, graphics and interactive games.

The class will meet Tu/Thr from 7:00pm to 8:15pm in the “Game Lab” in ECS 005A and will be taught by research professors John Dorband and Shujia Zhou. Both are very experienced in high-performance and parallel programming. Professor Dorband helped to design and build the first Beowulf cluster computer in the mid 1990s when he worked at the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Shujia Zhou has worked at Northrop Grumman and NASA/Goddard on a wide range of projects using high-performance and parallel computing for climate modeling and simulation.

CMSC 491/691a Special Topics in Computer Science:
Introduction to parallel computing emphasizing the
use of the IBM Cell B.E.

3 credits. Grade Method: REG/P-F/AUD Course meets in
ENG 005A. Prerequisites: CMSC 345 and CMSC 313 or
permission of instructor.

[7735/7736] 0101 TuTh 7:00pm- 8:15pm

There will a free CloudCamp ‘unconference’ in Chantilly VA (outside DC) from 3pm to 9pm on Wednesday 12 November.

“CloudCamp is an unconference where early adapters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.”

Tom Briggs will defend his dissertation, Constraint Generation and Reasoning in OWL, at Noon on Monday 17 November 2008 in ITE 325b. His work has focused on automatically computing reasonable domain and range constraints for Semantic Web properties. Here’s the abstract:

The majority of OWL ontologies in the emerging Semantic Web are constructed from properties that lack domain and range constraints. Constraints in OWL are different from the familiar uses in programming languages and databases, and are actually type assertions that are made about the individuals which are connected by the property. These assertions can add vital information to the model because they are assertions of type on the individuals involved, and they can also give information on how the defining property may be used.
    Three different automated generation techniques are explored in this research: disjunction, least-common named subsumer, and vivification. Each algorithm is compared for the ability to generalize, and the performance impacts with respect to the reasoner. A large sample of ontologies from the Swoogle repository are used to compare real-world performance of these techniques.
    Finally, using generated facts, a type of default reasoning, may conflict with future assertions to the knowledge base. While general default reasoning is non-monotonic and undecidable a novel approach is introduced to support efficient retraction of the default knowledge. Combined, these techniques enable a robust and efficient generation of domain and range constraints which will result in inference of additional facts and improved performance for a number of Semantic Web applications.

Tom’s dissertation advisor is Professor Yun Peng.

Google Maps has added street views of the greater Baltimore area. One thing I had never noticed before (I think it is new) is that if you click on the STREET VIEW button, the roads from which street view is available are marked in blue. This makes it easy to zoom out and get a sense of the coverage. See for example the street view coverage of the

• world
• US middle atlantic area
• UMBC neighborhood

You can see that the Google just did a quick drive-by of UMBC.

I also noticed that you can expand the street view to “full screen” and drive around interesting areas, like nearby main street in old ellicott city.

In this week’s ebiquity meeting (10:30am Tue Oct 14), PhD student Shenyong Zhang will present his recent work with Yun Peng on SMOOTY, a new efficient method for modifying a joint probability distribution to satisfy a set of inconsistent constraints. It extends the well-known “iterative proportional fitting procedure” (IPFP) which only works with consistent constraints. Compared to existing methods, SMOOTH is computationally more efficient and insensitive to data. Moreover, SMOOTH can be easily integrated with Bayesian networks for Bayesian reasoning with inconsistent constraints. A paper on this work, An Efficient Method for Probabilistic Knowledge Integration will apear in the proceedings of The 20th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence next month.

Over on the UMBC GAIM Blog, Marc Olano wrote about UMBC Art 380, a required class in our game track that was in the Baltimore Sun’s Weird 101: Baltimore’s unusual college courses.

History and Theory of Games @ University of Maryland, Baltimore County:

Students attempting to break into the gaming industry take a lot of atypical ­— and very technical — classes, but this is a class everyone can wrap their head around. “Games are as old as people. They are what humans do, when they can,” said professor Neal McDonald. “It’s a serious, interesting, rapidly maturing field of scholarship.” This guy has the best job ever. McDonald plays a myriad of games, some dating back to the Stone Age, to show his budding game designers the origins of today’s games and the infinite possibilities for tomorrow’s.

Somehow I don’t think this class belongs on the list, which includes local courses like The Art of Juggling, The Theology of Eating, The British Invasion, and Fitness for Scuba Divers.

But maybe this is just my bias as a computer scientist. We see the game industry as a very practical business and one that will need a constant flow of better computer science technology to evolve and thrive. Moreover, advances in nearly all areas of computer science are needed, e.g., graphics, AI, HCI, parallel computing, software engineering, distributed computing, social networking, etc.

Besides, I’m pretty well schooled in The British Invasion as it is. Actually, the course on The Theology of Eating does sound pretty interesting.

We plan to hold our weekly ebiquity meetings on Tuesday mornings, from 10:30 to 12:00 in ITE 325b starting on September 2. We’ve not yet received confirmation that the large conference room will be available, so it’s possible that the room will change or even the day. By meeting at 10:30am we hope that Dr. Joshi will be able to join us via the Internet while he is in India. When the time changes later in the Fall we may need to start the meeting at 10:00am.

Our meetings are open and we encourage new students who are interested in our research and joining the group to drop in. We usually ask someone to present something for each meeting — either their own work, an emerging topic or problem, or an interesting new paper. Our initial meeting will be more informal, but returning members should be prepared to describe how you spent your summer and new students to introduce themselves.

As usual, you should watch the ebiquity web site for announcements of the weekly events and/or subscribe to the UMBC ebiquity events feed.

If we do need to change to room or day of the week we will send out another message early in the coming week and make a new update this post on the ebiquity blog. But for now, please reserve Tuesdays from 10:00 to 12:00 for our weekly ebiquity meeting.