We were happy to see recent UMBC alumnus Akshay Java’s work on Twitter is mentioned in an article, Utility in the Jumble of Tweets, in yesterday’s New York Times.

“Some developers are creating tools to help companies keep an eye on the buzz. Akshay Java, a scientist at Microsoft, is trying to figure out a way to identify which experts are most influential on given topics by automatically analyzing the content of their tweets and who is in their Twitter network. Companies like Microsoft could use that information to figure out which twitterers they should contact to create buzz about a new product.”

Hadoop has become one of the most popular frameworks to exploit parallelism on a computing cluster. You don’t actually need access to a cluster to try Hadoop, learn how to use it, and develop code to solve your own problems.

UMBC Ph.D student Vlad Korolev has written an excellent tutorial, Hadoop on Windows with Eclipse, showing how to install and use Hadoop on a single computer running Microsoft Windows. It also covers the Eclipse Hadoop plugin, which enables you to create and run Hadoop projects from Eclipse. In addition to step by step instructions, the tutorial has short videos documenting the process.

If you want to explore Hadoop and are comfortable developing Java programs in Eclipse on a Windows box, this tutorial will get you going. Once you have mastered Hadoop and had developed your first project using it, you can go about finding a cluster to run it on.

Earlier this week the Baltimore Sun’s Andrew Ratner had a story on Twitter, When did Twitter take over the universe?. The story had this interesting quote from UMBC’s Zeynep Tufekci:

Some people who study technology aren’t sure Twitter will endure.

“Frankly, I think a lot of twittering is somewhat faddish, whereas I never thought Facebook was. … People I interviewed and surveyed would talk of serious feeling of deprivation without Facebook and I’ve hardly heard anyone say that about twitter,” Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor who teaches the sociology of technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, wrote in an e-mail. “Will people Twitter five years from now? Perhaps, but I would not be surprised if they did not, or at least as much.”

This November will be the first time any end-to-end cryptographic system will be used in a binding governmental election.

UMBC Professor Alan Sherman and his students have been helping develop the Scantegrity open source election verification technology for optical scan voting systems. It uses privacy preserving confirmation numbers to allow each voter to verify her vote is counted and that all the votes were counted correctly.

The group has been working with Takoma Park MD to use this in a binding governmental election later this year. Alan recently wrote:

“On Saturday April 11, there will be a mock election in Takoma Park, MD, using the Scantegrity II high-integrity voting system being developed in part at the UMBC Cyber Defense Lab. Anyone is welcome to come and vote – polls will be open 10am-2pm in the Community Center at 7500 Maple Ave. This mock election is preparation for the Nov 2009 municipal election in Takoma Park which will also use Scantegrity – the first time any end-to-end cryptographic system will have been used in a binding governmental election.”

Here’s the text a short article on the election from the April 2009 Takoma Park newsletter.

This Arbor Day: Plant the Seeds for Election Verifiability

Election integrity is a major issue both nationally and internationally. During the City’s annual Arbor Day celebration, Takoma Park will try out what may be one solution. From 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. on April 11, City residents and their families and friends are invited to participate in a mock election administered by the City and its Board of Elections. The point of this mock election is to give voters an opportunity to test out and provide feedback to the City on the voting system it will use in the November 2009 municipal elections.

First among the many characteristics that set this system apart from those previously used by the City is that voters will be able to confirm that their ballots were counted.

As part of their ballot, voters will receive a confirmation code that they can write down, take home and check online to make sure their votes were counted. The confirmation number does not say how you voted and your vote remains private. What it does say, however, is that your vote is included in the final tally and that the machine read your vote correctly.

The system is paper-based and works like an optical scan voting system, making it easy to use. The only difference is that when you vote, instead of a completely black bubble, you will see the confirmation number appear as shown in the illustration above.

Writing down and checking the confirmation number is optional. So, this Arbor Day, while enjoying the festivities, drop by the Community Center Azalea Room to see how the system works. Try it out, ask questions, give feedback, and enjoy the refreshments!

To obtain more information on the Arbor Day Mock Election, visit the City’s website at www.takomaparkmd. gov. Questions may also be addressed to the City Clerk’s office at 301-891-7267 or Clerk@takomagov.org.

Here’s an item of possible interest to UMBC alumni in the area. The UMBC Alumni Association is holding a special tour and evening of networking at the National Cryptologic Musuem from 6-8pm on Wednesday March 25. If you have never visited the museum, it’s an opportunity to see some very interesting exhibits on ciphers and codes, including a working enigma machine. UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski will be there to meet with and talk to the participants. You can get more information and register for the event online or contact Monique Armstrong (phone: 410-455-1879).

We are early in the era of big data (including social and/or semantic) and more and more of us need the tools to handle it. Monday’s NYT had a story, Hadoop, a Free Software Program, Finds Uses Beyond Search, on Hadoop and Cloudera, a new startup that offering its own Hadoop distribution that is designed to beasier to install and configure.

“In the span of just a couple of years, Hadoop, a free software program named after a toy elephant, has taken over some of the world’s biggest Web sites. It controls the top search engines and determines the ads displayed next to the results. It decides what people see on Yahoo’s homepage and finds long-lost friends on Facebook.”
…
Three top engineers from Google, Yahoo and Facebook, along with a former executive from Oracle, are betting it will. They announced a start-up Monday called Cloudera, based in Burlingame, Calif., that will try to bring Hadoop’s capabilities to industries as far afield as genomics, retailing and finance. The company has just released its own version of Hadoop. The software remains free, but Cloudera hopes to make money selling support and consulting services for the software. It has only a few customers, but it wants to attract biotech, oil and gas, retail and insurance customers to the idea of making more out of their information for less.

Cloudera’s distribution, curently based on Hadoop v0.18.3, uses RPM and comes with a Web-based configuration aide. The company also offers some free basic training in mapReduce concepts, using Hadoop, developing appropriate algorithms and using Hive.

Congratulations to three time UMBC alumnus Jim Clements who was named as the 23rd president of West Virginia University yesterday. Jim received three degrees from UMBC: a BS in Computer Science (1985) and both an MS and PhD in Information Systems (1993). He joined the Towson University Computer and Information Science Department 1989 and later served as its chair. He has served as Towson’s Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs since 2002.

If you are a high school or middle school student who is interested in
computers and also in languages, you should consider participating in the 2009 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO). This might be the first step on a path that could lead to your helping to create the next Google!

NACLO is a competition for middle-school and high-school students focused on solving problems involving linguistics and computational linguistics. WOrking the problems only requires keen analytical ability and good problem-solving skills — no prior background in linguistics, foreign languages or computer science is required.

NACLO consists of two rounds — an initial round on February 4 open to all students and a subsequent invitational round on March 11 for contestants who have advanced from the first. Winners of the second round will be invited to participate in the International Linguistics Olympiad. Last year, two US teams went to Bulgaria to compete in the sixth International Linguistics Olympiad and gold medals in individual and team events.

Support for NACLO is provided by Google, the Associaton for Computational Linguistics, and the National Science Foundation, which said in an August press release :

“Aside from being a fun intellectual challenge, the Olympiad mimics the skills used by researchers and scholars in the field of computational linguistics, which is increasingly important for the United States and other countries. Using computational linguistics, these experts can develop automated technologies such as translation software that cut down on the time and training needed to work with other languages, or software that automatically produces informative English summaries of documents in other languages or answer questions about information in these documents. In an increasingly global economy where businesses operate across borders and languages, having a strong pool of computational linguists is a competitive advantage. With threats emerging from different parts of the world, developing computational linguistics skills has also been identified as vital to national defense in the 21st century.” (src)

Students can participate at the NACLO site at UMBC, which is sponsored by the UMBC Institute for Language in Information Technology. Check out their poster and sample problem If you like this kind of puzzle and others like it, sign up to be part this exciting competition.

Students should register online by January 20. Late registrations may be accepted up to February 3 if space is available. The UMBC NACLO event will take place on Wednesday February 4 in room 312 of the University Center. For more information, contact one of the local organizers: Professors Marjorie McShane (marge@umbc.edu), Sergei Nirenburg (sergei@umbc.edu) and Margaret A. Russell (margaret.a.russell@gmail.com).

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.