Events from the AJ Clark School of Engineering http://eng.umd.edu/events/ Thu, 16 May 2013 13:38:56 EDT http://eng.umd.edu/images/clark_logo_4email.gif http://eng.umd.edu/events/ Thursday, May 16, 2013 4:00 PM, 2460 AV Williams, Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar Series"Grounding natural language in robot control and perception systems" The Computer Vision Laboratory and the Maryland Robotics Center are co-hosting; the seminar is co-sponsored by the Computer Vision Lab and Lockheed Martin. Dieter Fox Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering Director, UW Robotics and State Estimation LabUniversity of Washington HostYiannis Aloimonos Abstract Robots are becoming more and more capable at reasoning about people, objects, and activities in their environments. The ability to extract high-level semantic information from sensor data provides new opportunities for human robot interaction. One such opportunity is to explore interacting with robots via natural language. In this talk I will present our recent work toward enabling robots to interpret, or ground, natural language commands in robot control systems. We build on techniques developed by the semantic natural language processing community on learning combinatory categorical grammars (CCGs) that parse natural language input to logic-based semantic meaning. I will demonstrate results in two application domains: First, learning to follow natural language directions through indoor environments; and, second, learning to ground object attributes via weakly supervised training. It’s a joint work with Luke Zettlemoyer, Cynthia Matuszek, Nicolas Fitzgerald, Yuyin Sun, and Liefeng Bo and the support is provided by Intel ISTC-PC, NSF, and ARL, and ONR. Biography Dr. Dieter Fox is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he heads the UW Robotics and State Estimation Lab. From 2009 to 2011, he was also Director of the Intel Research Labs Seattle. He currently serves as the academic PI of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing hosted at UW. Dr. Fox obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn, Germany. Before going to UW, he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the CMU Robot Learning Lab. Dr. Fox's research is in artificial intelligence, with a focus on state estimation applied to robotics and activity recognition. He has published over 150 technical papers and is co-author of the text book "Probabilistic Robotics". He is a fellow of the AAAI and received several best paper awards at major robotics and AI conferences. He is also an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and was program co-chair of the 2008 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Fox currently serves as the program chair of the 2013 Robotics: Science and Systems conference. http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8384 http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8384 Thursday, May 16, 2013 7:00 PM, KEB 2211, ANNOUNCEMENT: Ph.D. Research Proposal Exam Name: Hui Su Committee: Professor Min Wu (Chair) Professor K.J. Ray Liu Professor Shihab Shamma Date/time: Thursday, May 16, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM Location: KEB 2211 Title: Multimedia Spatial and Temporal Alignment http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8440 http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8440 Friday, May 24, 2013 4:00 PM, 2120 AVW Bldg. , ANNOUNCEMENT: Ph.D. Research Proposal Name: Arpit Jain Committee: Professor NAME (Chair) - Dr. Larry S. Davis Professor NAME - Dr. Rama Chellappa Professor NAME - Dr. Min Wu Date/time: Friday, 24th May, 11 am-12pm Location: 2120 AV Williams Building Title: Scene and Video Understanding http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8441 http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8441 Monday, May 27, 2013 7:00 PM, Room 2460, AVW Bldg. , ANNOUNCEMENT Ph.D. Research Proposal Exam: Omur Ozel Committee: Professor Sennur Ulukus (Chair) Professor Anthony Ephremides Prrofessor Nuno Martins Date/time: May 27, 2013 / 2:00 PM Location: AVW 2460 Title: Multi-agent Learning for Distributed Decision Marking and The Role of Network Structure in Distributed Control http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8421 http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8421 Sunday, July 07, 2013 1:00 PM, , July 07, 2013 - Friday, July 26, 2013 The Young Scholars Program invites high school students to an amazing pre-college experience at the University of Maryland. From July 7-26, 2013, students with exceptional ability and promise pursue academic interests, discover career opportunities, earn three college credits, and explore the independence of university life. Students enroll in one 3-credit course and choose to live on campus or commute daily. Outside of the classroom students engage in seminars, workshops and social events. Eligible faculty/Staff can use their tuition remission benefit to cover a portion of the program cost. Hurry while spaces remain! Website: www.oes.umd.edu/index.php?slab=young-scholars-program For more information, contact: Office of Extended Studies +1 301 405 0627 cmckeown@umd.edu www.oes.umd.edu http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8245 http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8245 Monday, June 17, 2013 6:00 AM, JW Marriott, Washington DC, The 2013 EIA Energy Conference is a premier forum for addressing energy issues in the U.S. and around the world. $85 Student Rate - Register Today! June 17–18, Washington, DC. http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8442 http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8442 Monday, June 03, 2013 1:30 PM, UMD Bioprocess Scale-up Facility, The University of Maryland, College Park, in cooperation with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research, is offering a two-day fermentation microbiology workshop on state-of-the-art fermentation processes and practices. The workshop provides hands-on experience and instruction with various fermentation systems and acquaints attendees with the techniques, methodologies, principles and applications of aerobic bacterial and fungal fermentation. The workshop provides an opportunity for participants not only to learn the principles of bacterial and fungal fermentation scale-up at the bench, but recent advances and up-to-date applications of this methodology. http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8281 http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8281 Thursday, May 16, 2013 3:00 PM, Room 2168, AVW Bldg., ANNOUNCEMENT: PhD Dissertation Defense Name: Domenic Forte Committee Professor Ankur Srivastava, Chair/Advisor Professor Rama Chellappa Professor Joseph F. JaJa Professor Shuvra S. Bhattacharyya Professor Amitabh Varshney, Dean's Representative Date/Time: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 10 am Location: AVW 2168 Title: Design, Fabrication, and Run-time Strategies for Hardware-assisted Security Abstract Today, electronic computing devices are critically involved in our daily lives, basic infrastructure, and national defense systems. With the growing number of threats against them, hardware-based security features offer the best chance for building secure and trustworthy cyber systems. In this dissertation, we investigate ways of making hardware-based security into a reality with primary focus on two areas: Hardware Trojans and Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). Hardware Trojans are malicious modifications made to original IC designs or layouts that can jeopardize the integrity of hardware and software platforms. Since most modern systems critically depend on ICs, detection of hardware Trojans has garnered significant interest in academia, industry, as well as governmental agencies. The majority of existing detection schemes focus on test-time because of the limited hardware resources available at run-time. In this dissertation, we explore innovative run-time solutions that utilize on-chip thermal sensor measurements and fundamental estimation/detection theory to expose changes in IC power/thermal profile caused by Trojan activation. The proposed solutions are low overhead and also generalizable to many other sensing modalities and problem instances. Simulation results using state-of-the-art tools on publicly available Trojan benchmarks verify that our approaches can detect Trojans quickly and with few false positives. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are circuits that rely on IC fabrication variations to generate unique signatures for various security applications such as IC authentication, anti-counterfeiting, cryptographic key generation, and tamper resistance. While the existence of variations has been well exploited in PUF design, knowledge of exactly how variations come into existence has largely been ignored. Yet, for several decades the Design-for-Manufacturability (DFM) community has actually investigated the fundamental sources of these variations. Furthermore, since manufacturing variations are often harmful to IC yield, the existing DFM tools have been geared towards suppressing them (counter-intuitive for PUFs). In this dissertation, we make several improvements over current state-of-the-art work in PUFs. First, our approaches exploit existing DFM models to improve PUFs at physical layout and mask generation levels. Second, our proposed algorithms reverse the role of standard DFM tools and extend them towards improving PUF quality without harming non-PUF portions of the IC. Finally, since our approaches occur after design and before fabrication, they are applicable to all types of PUFs and have little overhead in terms of area, power, etc. The innovative and unconventional techniques presented in this dissertation should act as important building blocks for future work in cyber security. http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8410 http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8410 Monday, May 20, 2013 8:00 PM, Room 2168, AVW Bldg. , ANNOUNCEMENT: PhD Research Proposal Exam Name: Waseem A. Malik Committee: Prof. Nuno C. Martins (Chair) Prof. Steve Marcus Prof. Sennur Ulukus Date/Time: Monday, May 20, 2013 at 3-5pm Place: Room 2168, A.V. Williams Building Title: Security Perspective in Model Based System Optimization http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8446 http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8446 Friday, May 31, 2013 6:00 AM, Apply online, The Clark School scholarship application form is now available for current students to complete online at: http://www.engrscholarships.umd.edu/scholarships/current-students and for new transfer students at: http://www.engrscholarships.umd.edu/scholarships/new-transfers As indicated on the award letters for any students who receive a scholarship this or past academic years, scholarship awards are not renewed automatically and scholarship funding is not guaranteed each year. You must complete the on-line scholarship application each year by the May 31st deadline. Additionally, students must be enrolled full-time (at least 12 credits) and maintain a minimum cumulative 3.0 GPA during the term of the award. Exceptions can be made for the semester a student plans to graduate with his/her engineering degree. We also strongly encourage scholarship applicants to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) each year as many scholarships have a financial need requirement. http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8399 http://www.ece.umd.edu/events/index.php?mode=4&id=8399