Month: April 2014

Baltimore Code Craftsmanship April Meetup, 7pm Thr Apr 24 at Betamore

The April Baltimore Code Craftsmanship practice will be held at Betamore the premier startup incubator in Baltimore.  Come hone your software skills, mingle with the crowd,  develop connections for the future.   This is also a chance to enjoy the Federal Hill nightlife after the meeting. The meeting will be held in conjunction with UMBC ACM Student Chapter. The event is open to all UMBC students, however programming ability is required. Interested faculty members can join in too! This can also be a good opportunity to network with professionals from various companies and get yourself noticed for any job opportunities that exist.

When: Thursday, April 24th, 6.30 pm (Networking)
Where: 1111 Light Street, 4th Floor Baltimore MD

This is a hands on coding user group with no presentations. Each meeting will be a dojo where we will go through a challenging software craftsmanship exercise that focuses on clean code, test-driven development, design patterns, and refactoring. We will pair up and practice on a kata in order to learn and apply the values, principles, and disciplines of software craftsmanship. Come with your laptop equipped with your favorite programming and automated unit testing environment. If you don’t have a laptop, come anyway, we will need only one laptop for every two people. Be prepared to pair up, learn, share and have fun!

More info can be read at  http://www.meetup.com/Baltimore-Code-Craftsmanship/events/176386692/

Research @ CSEE: Quantifying validation of Non-Testable Programs

We would like to invite you for the next talk in our UMBC ACM techTalk Research@CSEE series. Professor Mohammad Raunak, who is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Loyola University Maryland will talk about “Quantifying validation of Non-Testable Programs”. Dr. Raunak will talk about his work in developing verification as well as validation approaches for software testing and how it can extended  to non-testable programs.

Abstract: An important aspect of software testing is the development and use of different adequacy criteria, often referred to ascoverage criteria. These criteria help guide verification and validation (V&V) activities, and thus improve overall quality of software. However, all adequacy criteria assume the presence of test-oracles, which is not applicable for the set of programs often termed as `non-testable.’ Simulations, machine learning algorithms, and other non-deterministic software are examples of such programs. There has been little research to develop verification or validation related adequacy criteria for these types of programs. In this paper, we argue that developing such adequacy criteria are not only possible, but crucial for quantifying and communicating how well V&V activities have been applied on a program. We propose one approach to a validation coverage criteria and indicate how it can be extended to other V&V related coverage criteria for `non-testable’ programs.

Speaker Bio: Mohammad Raunak is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Loyola University Maryland. His primary research interest involves verification, validation, and analysis of complex software and simulation systems. He is also interested in modeling and analyzing software and other human-intensive processes. Dr. Raunak received his MS and PhD in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts Amherst. His email and web addresses are raunak@loyola.edu and http://www.cs.loyola.edu/~raunak/.

Event Details:
Talk: Quantifying validation of ‘Non-Testable’ Programs
Theme:  Software System Modeling & Simulation
Date: Friday, April 18, 2014
Time:  11 am – 12 pm
Room: ITE 346

Please RSVP for the talk here: http://my.umbc.edu/events/24044/

Call for nominations for ACM student chapter officers

We would like invite nominations from the graduate students in the CSEE department for student officer positions of the UMBC ACM student chapter, for academic year 2014 – 2015 (Fall 2014 to Spring 2015).

ACM or the Association for Computing Machinery, is a premier organization that promotes computing and technology around the US and the world. On the campus, the ACM student chapter is affiliated and supported by the UMBC graduate students association (GSA). The goal of the ACM student chapter is to foster interaction between all students, both graduate and undergraduate, in the CSEE department, provide a forum for student interaction, and opportunities for members to expand their knowledge of computing.

The positions available (and their general responsibilities):

Chair: is responsible for the overall management of the student chapter; Co-ordinate with rest of the student officers in planning events; Represent the student chapter at the GSA meetings.
Vice-Chair: Work with the chair to ensure smooth functioning of the chapter; Represent the student chapter at the GSA meetings in the absence of the chair.
Secretary: Co-ordinate with other student chapter officers for event planning; Point of contact for the student chapter;
Treasurer: Manage the ACM student chapter accounts; annual budget; expenditure during events

These positions are open to graduate students only. If elected, you would be required to signup as an ACM student member. Membership fee is $19 only.

Please email us the position you would like to run for (there will be elections if we get multiple nominations for a position). Alternatively you can nominate any other person for the positions above. In that case, please send their name, email address and which position you would like to nominate them for.

Please send in your nominations by end of day, Monday, April 14, 2014 to acmofficers at lists dot umbc dot edu. Elections will take place the following week (venue, date and time to be announced later).