Tech + Research Workshop
Date: November 8 - 10, 2019
Location: The Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering and the Armory
NOTE: The registration for Tech + Research has closed.
The Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland and the Center for Women in Computing are pleased to present the second year of Tech + Research: Welcoming Women to Computing Research. This is a three day research workshop geared towards engaging undergraduate women in computing. During this workshop, student teams will come together and collaboratively work together to use technology to solve pressing issues.
Parallel to Technica, the largest all-women and non-binary hackathon in the nation, students will participate in the Research track at Technica The weekend event will bring together computing faculty from institutions across the state of Maryland to serve as mentors on projects in their research areas. Along with providing hands-on research experience in a dynamic hackathon setting, the weekend workshop will include sessions introducing attendees to the basics of computer science research (CSR) and highlight the exciting opportunities that come with pursuing a graduate degree in computer science.
Note: Please be aware that this event involves separate programming from Technica, and the majority of the programming will take place away from Technica, and instead with the Maryland Center for Women in Computing. We will attend the ceremony Sunday afternoon with Technica.
IMPORTANT: YOU MUST REGISTER FOR BOTH TECHNICA AND TECH + RESEARCH
Purpose
This workshop hopes to give undergraduate CS women an opportunity to learn about future computer science research opportunities and to provide hands-on experience engaging in CS research in a hackathon setting. Additionally, we plan for this event to give undergraduate women to meet computing faculty and current graduate students as well as to socialize and collaborate with like-minded peers. By providing a positive intellectual, social, and emotional environment for the participants to meaningfully engage in computing research, we hope to directly address the gender gap the currently exists in CS departments in higher education.
Attendees of this event will not only be expanding on their computer science skills, they will also be given the opportunity to meet and network with many individuals who are present in the computer science community at the University of Maryland.
Workshop participants will:
- Meet others who share their curiosity and interest in computer science.
- Explore the research experience in computing related domains.
- Work hands-on with researchers.
- Work in a team to tackle a research problem.
- Present their research with their team
- Broaden understanding of the possibilities of graduate school and the application process.
Surrounding area schools and departments were invited to submit research projects. Projects from the following departments have been submitted:
University of Maryland, College Park
- Department of Computer Science
- Department of Electrical and Computing Engineering
- College of Information Systems
- College of Education
Projects
Most applications use a database system to store state for that application. Most database systems/data stores require advanced knowledge of the structure of the data to be stored for an application in order to be able to compress and access stored data state reliably and quickly. The structure of the data is defined in what’s called a “database schema”. Unfortunately, modern applications are highly dynamic, and the structure of the state for the application changes over time. A schema is changed via a process known as “schema evolution”. Schema evolution is a complex operation that may require restructuring the existing data, which may require moving large amounts of data around. This restructuring process takes time and results in temporary inconsistencies in a data set while it is ongoing. In order to perform these complex changes safely and reliably, application administrators have historically resorted to shutting down the services to perform schema evolution, which results in perceived system downtime by the end user. Unfortunately, this unavailability is unacceptable for many modern applications that require “around the clock availability”, such as telecommunication systems, payment systems, medical facilities, etc. As a result, there has been some recent efforts on developing online schema evolution systems that aim to remove or reduce the downtime during offline schema evolution. In this project, we aim to evaluate these existing online schema evolution tools on a wide variety of schema migration workloads and identify their limitations.
Researchers
Darnell-Kanal Professor of Computer Science UMD Department of Computer Science
Post-Doctoral Associate UMD Department of Computer Science
This project will investigate opportunities provided by augmented reality (AR) technology to support learning of foreign languages. AR devices allow users to perceive (see and hear) additional information that is blended seamlessly into their physical environment. This provides many possibilities to enhance the environment of a user with information in a foreign language. For example, objects in the user's environment could be tagged with their names in a foreign language and text-to-speech synthesis could be used to pronounce their names. In addition, the user could interact with virtual objects or even avatars in a foreign language, which will be seamlessly presented in the real environment of the user. This project will leverage AR displays and existing services for object recognition, machine translation, and AR rendering to develop a prototype app that explores the possibilities of these technologies for foreign language learning.
Researchers
Graduate Student UMD Department of Computer Science
The Flycycle is a unique virtual reality based system, developed by Advanced Technology and Research Corporation in Beltsville, MD, that integrates both upper and lower body workout through a 2 degrees-of-freedom platform; the upper body motion allows to control the platform’s roll and yaw angles, whereas a cycling system with variable resistance allows for a lower body workout. Oculus Rift is integrated with the Flycycle to achieve a virtual reality system. It is comprised of a head mount display, two touch controllers, and two sensors to translate the user’s head movement into virtual reality. Students will have the chance to explore the Flycycle’s potential as an immersive exercising machine, or even a rehabilitation system, while learning to program games and perform sensor fusion at the cutting edge of the virtual reality world.
Researchers
Assistant Professor UMD Department of Mechanical Engineering
Graduate Student UMD Department of Mechanical Engineering
Property based testing is an increasingly popular approach to software testing where the programmer specifies "properties" that their code should satisfy (for example, applying a list reverse function twice should result in the original input list). The goal of a property based testing tool is to find minimized example inputs that violate the specified properties. Property based testing allows for better input coverage than techniques like unit testing, where the behavior of code is evaluated on a few programmer-selected inputs, and generates more useful inputs than random testing, where the behavior of the code is evaluated on many randomly-generated inputs.
In this project, participants will evaluate the performance of an existing property based testing tool for the Python language. The scope for this project includes comparing property based testing tools to random testing tools, comparing property based testing tools for Python to similar tools for other languages, and finding bugs in real-world Python code.
Researchers
Professor, Associate Chair of Undergraduate Education UMD Department of Computer Science
Graduate Student UMD Department of Computer Science
Graduate Student UMD Department of Computer Science
We are increasingly moving to a world where mobility is a shared resource. Bike-sharing, car-sharing, and scooter-sharing are common in most urban places in the United States. While shared mobility has numerous advantages for the end-user, there are numerous issues that cities and the service providers are grappling with. For example, it is not uncommon to see scooters piled up at popular destinations. This project will design innovative solutions for improving shared mobility services. In particular, we encourage you to think of solutions that will leverage the fact that such vehicles can autonomously drive and redistribute themselves. Dataset of bike locations and demands from Capital Bikeshare will be provided.
Researchers
Assistant Professor UMD Department of Computer Science
Graduate Student UMD Department of Computer Science
Learning a probability model from data is a fundamental problem in machine learning and statistics. Building on the success of deep learning, there has been a modern approach to this problem using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). GANs view to this problem as a game between two sets of functions: a generator whose goal is to generate synthetic samples that are close to the real data training samples and a discriminator whose goal is to distinguish between the real and fake samples. In this project, we aim to leverage some of the state-of-the-art GAN architectures to produce realistic but fake samples from a complex image dataset.
Researchers
Assistant Professor UMD Department of Computer Science
There is a growing interest in technologies designed to foster ‘aging in place’ in today’s world. Imagine growing older in a familiar place, with a variety of technology supporting your lifestyle, health & safety at any and every age! ‘Aging in Place’ technologies range from health-monitoring wearables to motion sensors that remind you of daily activities. Nowadays many researchers and developers are taking an interest in designing technology for people with dementia. While the advancements in this domain are impressive, the acceptance & adoption rates of these technologies remain quite low. This is partly due to the lack of employing a user-centric approach while designing technologies meant particularly for people with dementia. Join us as we immerse ourselves in designing to address these technological challenges! Your design contributions and evaluation ideas will aid important and real research that is currently being conducted by UMD researchers. We are looking for fresh perspectives and creative minds. No prior experience with design or technology is required!
Researchers
Assistant Professor UMD College of Information Studies
Graduate Student
Graduate Student
Graduate Student
Graduate Student
This project will develop a Virtual Try-on App that can estimate a 3D model of a human body and its outfit directly from a few photographs with little human interaction. Our current system can capture the global shape and geometry of the clothing, and extract the physical and geometric properties of cloth. Unlike previous methods using full 3D information (i.e. depth, multi-view images, or 3D scanned geometry), our approach can achieve garment recovery from a set of single-view images by using physical, statistical, and geometric priors and physics-based cloth simulation for Virtual Try-on of customized apparel to improve the user's online shopping experience.
Researchers
Chair, Professor, CRA DREU Co-Director UMD Department of Computer Science
Graduate Student
Calling contexts, or call paths, refer to the sequence of function invocations that lead to a statement in the code. A calling context tree (CCT) is a prefix tree of all call paths in a program. CCTs allow analysts to understand differences in function behavior that depend on how/from where the function was called. Calling context trees of parallel programs couple performance metrics with call paths, helping understand their execution and performance.
To identify performance bottlenecks, programmers and performance analysts visually explore CCTs to form and validate hypotheses regarding degraded performance. However, due to the complexity of parallel programs, existing visual representations do not scale to large programs running on a large number of processors. The goal of this project is to explore different visual analytics techniques to simplify the visualization of large CCTs.
Researchers
Assistant Professor UMD Department of Computer Science
Schedule of Events
| Friday | 11/8/19 | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 8:00am-9:00am | Check in at The Hotel | The Hotel |
| 9:00am-9:30am | Registration and breakfast | Iribe 1116 |
| 9:30am-10:00am | Introductions | Iribe 1116 |
| 10:00am-12:00pm | Research Bootcamp | Iribe 1116 |
| 12:15pm-1:00pm | Lunch | Iribe 1116 |
| 1:00pm-3:30pm | Research Bootcamp | Iribe 1116 |
| 3:30pm-5:00pm | Team Breakouts | Iribe |
| 5:00pm-6:30pm | Reception and Dinner | Iribe Lobby |
| 6:30pm | Travel to: Check-in at Technica, Board and Brew, or the Hotel | Various |
| 6:30pm-9:30pm | Board and Brew Game Night | Board and Brew |
| Saturday | 11/9/19 | Location |
| 8:30am-9:00am | Travel to Techncia | The Hotel to Reckord Armory |
| 9:00am-10:30am | Breakfast with Technica | Reckord Armory |
| 9:00am-12:00pm | Technica Fair | Reckord Armory |
| 12:00pm-12:15pm | Travel to Tech + Research | Reckord Armory to Iribe |
| 12:15pm-1:00pm | Lunch | Iribe 1104 |
| 1:00pm-6:00pm | Research Work Time | Iribe |
| 6:00pm-7:00pm | Dinner | Iribe 1207 |
| 7:00pm-7:45pm | Research Work Time with Faculty/Graduate Students | Iribe |
| 7:45pm-8:00pm | Travel to Technica | Iribe to Reckord Armory |
| 8:00pm-9:00pm | Technica Anniversary Celebration | Reckord Armory |
| 9:00pm-7:00am | Research Work Time | Iribe, Reckord Armory, The Hotel |
| Sunday | 11/10/19 | Location |
| 7:00am | Begin Check-out of The Hotel | The Hotel |
| 7:30am-8:30am | Breakfast | Iribe 1104 |
| 8:30am-10:00am | Research Work Time | Iribe |
| 10:00am-11:00am | Presentation Preparations | Iribe |
| 11:00am-11:15am | Travel to Technica | Iribe to Reckord Armory |
| 11:15am-12:00pm | Lunch with Technica | Reckord Armory |
| 12:00pm-1:30pm | Presentations | Reckord Armory |
| 1:30pm-2:30pm | Closing Ceremony with Technica | Reckord Armory |
Register to Attend
Who Can Attend?
We welcome all women undergraduates from colleges and universities to apply. Current master's students considering a PhD program may apply and will be considered on a case by case basis. Please apply by October 15th for best consideration. Applications will be accepted until Wednesday, October 23th if space is still avalible.
Registration Process and Fees
Participants will have two options to experience this workshop.
- Students who live more than 15 miles away from College Park, MD will be provided housing.
- Students who live on or near the UMD campus (less than 15 miles away from College Park, MD) will not be provided housing.
Housing does not include Sunday, 11/10/19. Students are expected to check out Sunday morning before programming.
All meals, snacks, and supplies will be provided for both groups from Friday morning breakfast through Sunday lunch. Students are responsible for their own transportation to and from UMCP.
REMEMBER: YOU MUST REGISTER FOR BOTH TECHNICA & TECH + RESEARCH
Register for the Tech + Research Workshop by filling out the following form:
REGISTRATION FOR TECH + RESEARCH HAS CLOSED
Register for the Technica here:
Participant Information
Logistical Information for Attendees
Hotel Accommodations:
The Hotel at the University of Maryland.
Hotel accommodations do NOT include Sunday 11/10/19, if you are planning to stay until Monday, you must find your own accommodations.
Hotel accommodations must be confirmed by October 21st.
Timing:
Students should arrive by 9am on Friday morning. Hotel accommodations are available on Thursday night if requested by October 21st.
Getting to UMD:
Students are responsible for their transportation to and from UMD. The College Park Metro and Greenbelt Metro stations are in the area, but are not considered walkable. Shuttle UMD service is available from College Park Metro. Metrobus and ride share options are available from both stations.
Parking:
Parking will be provided for non-UMD students if you request parking by October 25th.
Meals:
All meals will be covered between Friday morning and Sunday lunch. Please list any specific dietary restrictions on your registration form.
Questions about the registration process, workshop, or logistical information can be sent to mcwic@cs.umd.edu
Questions about Technica can be addressed to hello@gotechnica.org
Reimbursement
In order to be considered for a Travel reimbursement through Tech + Research, you must:
-attend the entire event (Friday at 9am - Sunday closing ceremony)
-actively engage with your research group
-present your research on Sunday
For students who live in the DMV (DC, Maryland, and Northern Virginia), we have a limited number of travel reimbursements for car sharing and public transportation.
For students who live outside of Maryland and more than 30 miles away, you can be reimbursed up to $350 for flights and $100 for train tickets. In order to be considered for this reimbursement, you must book your transporation up to 2 weeks in advance.
General Information
All students participating in the research workshop must arrive by 9am on Friday morning. We have an important bootcamp event to prepare you for the research projects. If you cannot make it on campus by this time, you need to let us know immediately.
You will not be working on your own idea or hack during Technica. During Technica, you will be working with your research team on a specific project you selected as an interest.
You will be assigned your research group the week before Technica. Each team will have their own Slack channel to communicate. Researchers may send out a small amount of pre-reading to help you prepare for the project.
Spread the Word.
View the Technica Flyer Here
View the Tech + Research Flyer Here.
About Technica
On November 9th-10th, the University of Maryland will host Technica, the fifth annual hackathon. Technica is the largest all-women and non-binary hackathon in the world, and welcomed over 850 participants from across the country last year. In the span of 24 hours, Technica gives our participants the opportunity to create new applications, websites or hardware projects.
Technica is not a typical hackathon—it serves as a place where the brightest thinkers in the country can come together to collaborate and share their innovative ideas. Our focus is on providing a welcoming, engaging and creative environment to support women in tech culture. We pride ourselves in helping both beginners and experienced hackers explore technology and develop their skills.
Over the duration of 24 hours, women and non-binary people are immersed in tech culture and encouraged to exercise their imagination to create interesting and innovative hacks.
This year’s theme is “Go Beyond”. At Technica, we want to see women and non-binary folks thrive and go beyond society’s expectations for them. We encourage all attendees to take your tech journey beyond Technica. Don’t stop at our hackathon, attend others and keep creating. Technica is meant to catapult you further in your career, and help you to continue achieving. As you advance in your career, go beyond your duties at work, become a mentor and help to advance the next generation of women in tech. Whatever your goals and aspirations, remember you can always #GoBeyond.
All participants attending Tech + Research must also register for Technica. Register here.
