[CSEE-colloq] CRA-W Distinguished Lecture Series, Mon 4/16/2012, UMBC

[Tim Finin]

UMBC will host three events as part of the CRA-W Distinguished
Lecture Series on Monday, 16 April 2012.  Visiting speakers are
Dr. Ellen Zegura, Professor and Chair of the School of Computer
Science, Georgia Tech, and Dr. Jeffrey Forbes, from the National
Science Foundation, on leave from Duke University.  Their
biographical sketches are at the end of this message.  UMBC
Professor Marie desJardins will serve as the host for all three
events.  See http://csee.umbc.edu/talks for more information.

CRA-W, the Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status
of Women in Computing Research, is an action oriented organization
dedicated to increasing the number of women participating in
Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) research and education at all
levels.

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     PANEL DISCUSSION: GRADUATE SCHOOL: BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER

               10am Monday 16 April, 2012, UC 310, UMBC

                    Dr. Ellen Zegura, Georgia Tech
           Dr. Jeffrey Forbes, National Science Foundation
           Mr. James MacGlashan (UMBC CSEE Ph.D. Candidate)
              Ms. Alyson Young (UMBC HCC Ph.D. student)

As part of CRA-W's Distinguished Lecture event on Monday, April 16,
we will be holding a panel about grad school and beyond.  The
panelists are our two Distinguished Lecture visitors and two UMBC
Ph.D. students. Topics will include why going to grad school,
deciding between an M.S. and a Ph.D., how to succeed during grad
school, and career possibilities after grad school. The panel is
targeted at undergraduates who are considering applying to grad
school, as well as graduate students in their early years.  Light
refreshment will be served

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                     COMPUTING IN CIRRUS CLOUDS:
              THE CHALLENGE OF INTERMITTENT CONNECTIVITY

                             Ellen Zegura
           Professor and Chair, School of Computer Science,
                             Georgia Tech

              1:00-2:00pm Monday 16 April 2012, ITE 325B

Mobile devices are increasingly relied on for services that go
beyond simple connectivity and require more complex
processing. Improved connectivity options for mobile devices have
enabled applications that transcend an individual device's
capabilities by making use of remote processing and storage.  The
primary approach in wide use today to enable such remote processing
makes use of cloud computing resources to offload the "heavy
lifting" that may be required in some mobile applications to
specially designated servers or server clusters. In reality, a
mobile device often encounters, albeit intermittently, many entities
capable of lending computational resources. We call these
alternative settings "cirrus clouds". In this talk I will discuss
the unique challenges posed by intermittent connectivity and
describe some early progress on managing such a setting.  This is a
joint work with Mostafa Ammar, Mayur Naik and Cong Shi. Light
refreshment will be served

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      COMPUTING FOR GOOD: EXPERIENCES IN HUMANITARIAN COMPUTING

                             Ellen Zegura
           Professor and Chair, School of Computer Science
                             Georgia Tech

             4:00-5:00pm Monday 16 April 16, 2012, UC 310

Almost four years ago, I was involved in the creation of Computing
for Good (C4G), a Georgia Tech College of Computing initiative
centered around using computing to help solve pressing societal
problems. The primary activity of C4G has been a project-based
course taught once per year and taken by seniors (satisfying the
capstone requirement) and masters-level graduate students.  Projects
with life beyond one semester are frequently taken up by master's
students as MS projects.  Over the last year, I have had the
opportunity to work closely with the Carter Center and their Mental
Health Program in Liberia. With students in the C4G fall 2010
course, my experiences have included technology consulting,
technology training, technology integration, and technology
invention. I have also had the chance to observe first hand a set of
additional country-wide challenges where computing might play a
role.  In this talk, I will describe my experiences and highlight
additional opportunities for computationalists.  A recenption will
follow the talk.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

PROFESSOR ELLEN ZEGURA received the BS degree in Computer Science,
the BS degree in Electrical Engineering, the MS degree in Computer
Science and the DSc degree in Computer Science from Washington
University, St. Louis. Since 1993, she has been on the faculty in
the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. She currently serves as
Professor and Chair of Computer Science. She received an NSF CAREER
Award in 1995, a Washington University distinguished Alumni Award in
2008, and was selected as an IEEE Fellow in 2010. She was elected to
the CRA Board of Directors in 2011.  Professor Zegura has conducted
research and taught in computer networking for over 20 years. Her
research interests include the Internet, with a focus on its
topological structure and services, as well as mobile wireless
networking. In network topology, she is the co-creator of the GT-ITM
suite of Internet topology modeling tools, which remains in use 15
years after its original release. In mobile wireless networking, she
and her colleagues invented the concept of message ferries to
facilitate communications in environments where network connectivity
is unreliable and/or sparse. Almost four years ago, she helped
create the Computing for Good initiative in the College of
Computing, a project-based teaching and research activity that
focuses on the use of computing to solve pressing societal problems.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY FORBES is an Associate Professor of the Practice
of Computer Science at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He
is currently on leave with the National Science Foundation as a
Program Director for the Education and Workforce Program in the
Division of Computer and Network Systems, Directorate for Computer
and Information Science and Engineering. He received his B.S. and
Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University and the
University of California, Berkeley, respectively. His research
interests include computer science education, intelligent agents,and
social information processing.