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.

Mark Olano posted news on the UMBC GAIM blog that legendary game designer Sid Meier will give a presentation for the at 8:00pm on Thursday, September 4th. The talk, which is free and open to the public, will be held a the The Engineering Society of Baltimore in Baltimore.

Meier is a very influential figure in the game industry and helped to establish the popular simulation game genre through his games like Pirates, Railroad Tycoon and Civilization. He is currently Director of Creative Development for Firaxis Games and has been inducted into the Computer Museum of America Hall of Fame and the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame for lifetime achievement in computer gaming. Here’s the title and abstract for his talk.

Game Programming: Oh say, can you C?
Sid Meier and members of the Firaxis development team

Programming a computer game: There are three types of programming in games: (1) game play on one end, (2) engine on the other, and (3) the layer in between that allows the two others to communicate. Each type of programming is different from the others. Programmers are drawn to one or another type of programming because of its power or beauty. Sid has developed a flexible style of programming that allows him to make instantaneous changes at the game play level. An engine programmer needs a bit more conformity to step in where someone else left off. The programmers in the middle have fun because they can make the other two “worlds” talk to each other. Sid and other speakers will discuss the different types of programming and how they “play nice” together.

If you plan to attend, email volcheck@acm.org for further announcements and updates.

I’ve attended talks at the Engineering Society building, which is on Mt. Vernon Place in Baltimore, which should be easy to get to on the MTA bus that stops at UMBC. It’s a grand old building that was fun to be in.

The UMBC Multicore Computation Center is hosting a free workshop on Frontiers of Multicore Computing 26-28 August 2008 at UMBC. The workshop will feature leading computational researchers who will share their current experiences with multicore applications. A number of computer architects and major vendors have also been invited to describe their road maps to near and long-term future system developments. The FMC workshop will focus on applications in the fields of geosciences, aerospace, defense, interactive digital media and bioinformatics. The workshop has no registration fees but you must register to attend. More information regarding hotel accommodations, tutorials, exhibits and access to the campus can also be found at the website.

Members of the UMBC ebiquity lab will make presentations on our current and planned use of multicore and cloud computing for research in exploiting Wikipedia as as knowledge base and also in extracting communities from very large social network graphs.

My colleague Marc Olano recently blogged about the new Larrabee chip from Intel, which will be described in a SIGGRAPH paper in a session he is chairing. This chip, with multiple old Pentium type cores running at 1GHz, seems a logical culmination of the recent multi/many core trend. IBM’s plans with the Cell/BE, and perhaps with the newer generation Power Chips, are also headed in a similar direction. Short of material scientists doing some magic with high K dielectrics or airgaps or CNFETs or whatever, the trend seems to be away from a single CPU with more transistors running faster and faster to multicored chips not clocked very fast. There’s a good reason for it (heat), as anyone who’s had a high end laptop and actually put it on their laps can testify. Further down the road, even more complex parallel architectures are proposed, with MCMs on chip connecting optically, and perhaps even memory stacked on top of the CPU layer talking optically back and forth! In other words, a few years down the road, the default box on which a system builder will write code will be something other than a single cored CPU. Bernie Meyerson from IBM discusses such issues in his talks — I can’t lay my hands on a publicly available power point, but some of the ideas are discussed in a recent interview.

Do these developments mean that we should be rethinking Programming 1 and 2, especially for CS majors. Do students now need to think parallel or multi-threaded programming from day one? Can that be done without first doing standard imperative programming? Given the less than ideal state of high school CS education, is it realistic to expect that students will get Programming 1 (and maybe 2) in high school? In our department, we’re offering class on programming the Cell/BE, and a course related to GPU programming, but those are typically meant for seniors. How about courses further upstream. Should data structures and algorithms change — maybe concepts like transactional memory need to be introduced ? Should OS change — talk much more about virtualization, and redoing virtual memory when ample NVRAM is available and accessible from a core ?

Cloud computing is a hot topic this year, with IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Intel, HP and Amazon all offering, using or developing high-end computing services typically described as “cloud computing”. We’ve started using it in our lab, like many research groups, via the Hadoop software framework and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud services.

Bill Poser notes in a post (Trademark Insanity) on Language Log that Dell as applied for a trademark on the term “cloud computing”.

It’s bad enough that we have to deal with struggles over the use of trademarks that have become generic terms, like “Xerox” and “Coke”, and trademarks that were already generic terms among specialists, such as “Windows”, but a new low in trademarking has been reached by the joint efforts of Dell and the US Patent and Trademark Office. Cyndy Aleo-Carreira reports that Dell has applied for a trademark on the term “cloud computing”. The opposition period has already passed and a notice of allowance has been issued. That means that it is very likely that the application will soon receive final approval.

It’s clear, at least to me, that ‘cloud computing’ has become a generic term in general use for “data centers and mega-scale computing environments” that make it easy to dynamically focus a large number of computers on a computing task. It would be a shame to have one company claim it as a trademark. On Wikipedia a redirect for the Cloud Computing page was created several weeks before Dell’s USPTO application. A Google search produces many uses of cloud computing in news articles before 2007, although it’s clear that it’s use didn’t take off until mid 2007.

An examination of a Google Trends map shows that searches for ‘cloud computing’ (blue) began in September 2007 and have increased steadily, eclipsing searches for related terms like Hadoop, ‘map reduce’ and EC2 over the past ten months.

Here’s a document giving the current status of Dell’s trademark application, (USPTO #77139082) which was submitted on March 23, 2007. According to the Wikipedia article on cloud computing, Dell

“… must file a ‘Statement of Use’ or ‘Extension Request’ within 6 months (by January 8, 2009) in order to proceed to registration, and thereafter must enforce the trademark to prevent removal for ‘non-use’. This may be used to prevent other vendors (eg Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Yahoo) from offering certain products and services relating to data centers and mega-scale computing environments under the cloud computing moniker.”