Special Topics Courses
Computer Science
Computer Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Spring 2004
revised
January 7, 2004
The following special topics courses will be offered by the UMBC CSEE
Department for the Spring 2004 semester. Some are cross listed with other
departments and programs and some are offered for both undergraduate and
graduate credit. Undergraduates can always enroll in a graduate course
with the permission of the instructor. For more information on the content,
scope or expected workload for any of these courses, please contact the
instructor.
ENES 200 Introduction to Entrepreneurship
TU 7:00-9:30pm Netzer
A special undergraduate course on "entrepreneurship" will be offered
this spring by Michael Netzer, Dean, School of Applied and Information
Technology, Community College of Baltimore County. The course, ENES 200
-- Introduction to Entrepreneurship, will meet Tuesdays from 7:00pm to
9:30 PM in ITE 237. It will provide an overview of the basic concepts
of entrepreneurship focusing on the nature, environment, and risks of
new venture formation and technology commercialization. Topics include
opportunity recognition, intellectual property, and market assessment,
developing an organizational structure, and financing the product or service
idea. The course is organized around lecture/discussion of the fundamentals
with an applied course project. For more information, see the syllabus
or contact Michael Netzer at mnetzer@ccbc.edu
or mnetzer@comcast.net.
CMSC 491/691A Security in Wireless and Distributed Systems
TUTH 11:30-12:45pm Joshi
This three credit course will cover the fundamentals of security in emerging
open, dynamic environments created by wireless networks, embedded/handheld/wearable
computers, and the WWW. Traditional approaches, which assume closed, physically
protected networks and rely on authentication to establish authorization
do not work well in this environment. We will study the issues involved,
and the recent efforts from the research community in the area. While a
text may be prescribed, most of the reading will be from papers. There will
be exams and a significant group project done in the new CyberDefence Lab
with Cisco equipment. In addition, Graduate students in the course will
be expected to present and discuss assigned papers in the class. Prerequisites:
CSEE senior or graduate (or equivalent). Must have UG level background in
systems (CMSC421) . Talk to the instructor if you would like to take the
course, but are not sure of your background.
Students will learn basic skills that are essential to becoming a successful researcher.
The objective of the course is to teach research skills in a systematic
fashion, early in a student's graduate program. Lecture topics will include
research methodology, experimental design, career options, professional
ethics and academic integrity, and oral and written presentation techniques.
CMSC faculty members will give short invited presentations on their own
research. Students will be required to perform a literature survey (on a
topic in their own research area), construct a research proposal that includes
an experimental design, and write a paper summary in the style of a formal
scientific paper. Additional assignments will include giving an oral presentation
in the class, attending technical talks, writing a CV, and creating a personal
web site.
CMSC 491/691C Introduction to Natural Language Processing
MW 5:30-6:45pm Nirenburg
Natural language processing (NLP) was the first non-numerical application
of computing over 50 years ago. The ultimate goal of NLP is to enable
computers to communicate with people the same way as people communicate
among themselves -- using English, Chinese, Spanish or any other natural
language. The major applications of NLP today include machine translation
of natural languages, information extraction from open text, text summarization,
automatic question answering and others. These applications -- either
standalone or integrated with reasoning or other specialist systems --
are important to our society today and will become progressively more
important in the future. The course will introduce the students to the
basic problems, methods and applications of NLP.
CMSC 691D Machine Learning
MW 3:30-4:45pm Oates
Research in the field of machine learning seeks to understand how computer
programs can be built that automatically improve their performance at some
task with experience. Among the many successes of this field are a program
named TD-gammon that learned to play backgammon by playing games against
itself. TD-gammon plays as well as the best human players. Another
celebrated success is a program that learned how to drive a car on public
highways by monitoring the actions of human drivers and then drove almost
completely autonomously across the entire country. This course will cover
core topics in machine learning, including the following: designing a
learning system, concept learning and the general-to-specific ordering,
version spaces, decision trees, empirical evaluation of learning systems,
Bayesian learning, computational learning theory, instance-based learning,
learning sets of rules, analytical learning and reinforcement learning.
At
the end of the course students should have the skills needed to select and
apply machine learning techniques to problems in their own research.
CMSC491/691E Computer Graphics for Games
MW 3:30-4:45pm Olano
Prerequisite: CMSC 435/634 or consent of instructor
This course is an introduction to some of the computer graphics methods
commonly used in 3D computer games. Computer graphics encompasses a wide
variety of algorithms and techniques, many more than can be covered in just
one or two courses. This course is similar in style and scope to CMSC 635/Advanced
Computer Graphics, but uses computer games as a focus and motivation to
explore a different set of graphics algorithms. Topics include using and
manipulating scene graphs, design of interactive applications, collision
detection, geometric level of detail, potentially visible set computation,
and hardware procedural shading. Students will learn several common algorithms
in each topic area in sufficient depth for implementation.
CMSC 491/691F Information Assurance
MW 2:00-3:15pm Sherman
Prerequisites: CMSC 421, 441, and 481 or permission of instructor
Selected recent research topics in information assurance, such as social
engineering, buffer overflow, malicious code, intrusion detection, denial
of service, information warfare, computer forensics, recovery and
response, enterprise security, clandestine channels and emissions
security, security analysis, security models and formal techniques, and
national policy for information assurance.
Each student will present two recent research papers, carry out and
present an original research project of their own (or in a small group),
and participate actively in class. In addition, there will be a small
number of written assignments. There will be no exams. All requirements
will follow the standard expectations of professional researchers in
computer science, including the grant proposal process, writing technical
reports, and making conference presentations.
This course is offered as an advanced networking course with special
focus on multimedia communications in wired and wireless networks. An
undergraduate knowledge of computer networks is essential and a
graduate course in networks is desirable. We will discuss
applications, protocols and standards as they relate to multimedia
data. The motivation for designing this course comes from the fact
that the next wave of research in networking and data management will
come from finding efficient means of locating and disseminating
multimedia rich content to wired and mobile users alike.
CMSC 491/691H Wearable Information Systems
TUTH 4:00-5:15pm Segall
This is an invitation to explore the future of mobility through the added
dimensions of Wearable Information System research. Our research agenda
will includes the exploration of human aware computer models able to proactively
serve the user by taking clues from human emotions, human physiology and
human situations. Our exploration will be in the context of searching
for
solutions for sample societal challenges, social practices and experimenting
with new modes of expression. Our goal is to conceptualize and prototype
innovative Wearable Information Models and Systems.
CMSC 691I Computational
Information Retrieval
TUTHR 4:00-5:15 pm Kogan
Prerequisite: MATH221, MATH251, CMSC202 or consent of instructor.
The course is designed as an introduction to automatic texts processing
and information retrieval. Topics include a vector space model, linear
algebra, clustering, and optimization techniques. Students are expected
to participate in class projects involving the creation, management, and
processing of large document collections. This project will require programming
in languages such as Perl/CGI, C/C++, or Java.
CMSC 691I Computational
Information Retrieval
TUTHR 4:00-5:15 pm Kogan
Prerequisite: MATH221, MATH251, CMSC202 or consent of instructor.
CMSC 491U Unix Security Administration and Policy
TuThr 7:00-8:15pm, Chris Cather
Legal, policy, and technical aspects of computer security and their inter-relationships.
Technical overview of the Unix operating system from a configuration and
system administration standpoint. Using Unix as a basis, students will develop
and evaluate the legal and policy issues inherent in system administration
based on Federal standard NSTISSI 4012. Required work includes technical
projects, exams, and writing projects in which students must implement security
policies. Covers all elements of the NSTISSI 4012 standard and more. Prerequisite:
CMSC421
Additional electives and advanced courses
Here some additional electives and advanced courses that may be of interest.
This course is a study of a class of programming languages and tools known
as scripting languages. Topics include writing scripts to control and connect
other programs, strengths and weaknesses of interpreted languages, extending
scripting languages to include new functionality, embedding functions of
a scripting language in other tools, syntax and usage of regular expressions
and the role of open-source software. Programming projects in multiple languages
will be required. Languages studied may include Unix shell, Perl, CGI, PHP,
Javascript, and Tcl/Tk. Prerequisite: CMSC 331.
This course is an introduction to software design patterns. Each pattern represents a best practice solution to a software problem in some context. The course will cover the rationale and benefits of object-oriented software design patterns. Several example problems will be studied to investigate the development of good design patterns. Specific patterns, such as Observer, State, Adapter, Strategy, Decorator and Abstract Factory will be discussed. Programming projects in the Java language will provide experience in the use of these patterns. In addition, distributed object frameworks, such as RMI and Jini, will be studied for their effective use of design patterns.
This course provides a technical introduction to mobile radio telephony.
Topics include: the evolution of mobile radio communications; transforming
signal representation between time and frequency domains; allocation and
assignment of communication channels for cellular phones; signal modulation
techniques; and wireless networks. An in-depth study of the GSM and IS-95
CDMA cellular phone systems will also be presented. Prerequisites: CMSC
313 or CMPE 312; and MATH 152.
This course will cover some basic techniques and algorithms for representing
and reasoning about information and knowledge. It is designed to be useful
and relevant for students interested in artificial intelligence, databases,
and web-based information systems. Topics will include: rule-based systems,
frame-based representation languages, description logics, constraints,
truth maintenance systems, representing and reasoning about time, processes,
uncertainty, etc, using and marinating ontologies, knowledge sharing,
etc. We'll also look at how some of these techniques are being used in
in support of intelligent agents, advanced databases, ecommerce applications,
advanced web systems, and software engineering tools. Students will learn
to use one of more advanced software tools for building and maintaining
large ontologies and we'll examine several large general purpose ontologies.
CMSC 628 Mobile computing
TuThr 1:00-2:15 Sivalingam
CMSC 682 Networking technologies
TuThr 4:00-5:15 Sidhu
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