Jonathan Mayhak will be talking about messaging queues. Specifically, using the pubsub design pattern to decouple metric tracking code on the web server from the database. Jonathan graduated from this department and now works as an Application Developer at ReachSmart Interactive. This talk is part of CSCE 242 but is open to all students.

Brad Dunbar will talk about Backbone.js. Brad is an alumnus of our department. He is a front-end engineer. He currently works at Pathable Inc. writing javascript (and coffeescript) and I does a lot of open source work for Backbone and Underscore. This talk is part of CSCE 242 but is open to all students.

Jarrell Waggoner, will show us how to build an extension for the Chrome browser. Jarrell Waggoner is a PhD student in our department. He implemented the nonpartisan me which received some attention. This talk is part of CSCE 242 but is open to all students.

In this interactive walk-through, we will create a custom application from scratch using proven Microsoft tools and technologies and a healthy dose of new approaches to software development. This session will demonstrate how easy it can be to create rich single page applications and robust client experiences while still leveraging .NET languages and tools to define the bulk of the business logic and processes (not just a tangled mess of JavaScript). While this will be a high-level demonstration, it still show how to handle hard-core problems like symmetric client and server-side template rendering, complex custom validation and event-driven model manipulation using both client and server-side rules. Though the problems solved will be hard, the solutions demonstrated will be both elegant and easy to understand. This is an invited talk by Jamie Thomas. This talk is part of CSCE 242 but is open to all students. Jamie Thomas is the Director of Software Development at VC3, an IT and software services company, headquartered here in downtown Columbia, in the IT-ology building.

Appathon contestants will show off their submissions, free lunch and t-shirts will be provided, and prizes will be awarded! There will also be an introductory workshop in android development. So come out and get some free food, some sweet swag, and see the cool stuff your fellow students have created. See event details.

MS Thesis Defense: Gary Fredericks We study a family of network formation models to determine how payment rules affect the final network topologies that emerge. In our model a set of nodes starts out without any edges and the nodes must pay for the creation of edges using one of several different payment mechanisms, for example: one node pays for the whole edge, the cost is shared equally between the two nodes, etc. We show how the set of networks formed by some payment rules are subsets of those formed by other rules. We also perform extensive empirical tests on networks of up to 10 nodes. These tests reveal some interesting patterns in the connectivity, stability, and fairness of the networks generated by the various payment rules given a fixed link cost.

PhD Defense: Zhenhua Liu The open nature of wireless communication makes it easy for adversaries to either inject random signals to wireless channels harming the network availability, or eavesdrop on the communication breaching the location privacy. Those threats are challenging to cope with, because most of them cannot be addressed by traditional cryptographic methods. One of the attacks that can easily imperil the availability of networks is jamming attacks. An adversary can launch a jamming attack either by bypassing MAC-layer protocols and keeping sending packets, or by emitting radio signals to a particular channel. To cope with jamming attacks, in this dissertation, we focus on developing mechanisms to localize jammers. We examine how jammers affect networks in terms of signal strength, nodes’ communication range, and network topologies, and present how to measure these jamming effects. To localize a jammer, we design an Adaptive Least-Squares-based (LSQ-based) algorithm which performs localization by exploiting the changes of communication range. Then, to further improve the localization accuracy, we propose an error minimizing framework that can localize not only one but also multiple jammers through utilizing the strength of jamming signals (JSS). To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed localization schemes, we conducted real-world experiments using a testbed of MicaZ, and then carried out extensive performance studies in large-scale networks by simulation. Another problem that cannot be solved by traditional cryptographic method is the location privacy issue. We study this issue in wireless sensor network because the locations of the sink nodes are critically important to the viability of wireless networks, and such information can be easily determined by attackers. For instance, attackers can eavesdrop on the network communication at several spots and trace back to the sink nodes. Then, they can destroy the sink nodes physically to disable the data collection or dissemination. In this dissertation, we examine the sink location privacy problem from both the attack and defense sides. On the attack side, we present two types of Zeroing-In attacks which allow attackers to identify the sink location by estimating the hop count or the arrival time of a broadcast packet at a few spots in the network. To cope with the Zeroing-In attacks, we propose a directed-walk-based scheme and validate that it is effective in deceiving adversaries at modest energy costs."

Dr. Jason O'Kane will be doing a Talkback at the Nickelodeon Theatre.