Fall 2010 End of Quarter Colloquium

For the sake of sharing some of the topics presented at the end of each quarter, here are some of the items being shared at the Fall 2010 colloquium.


Institute of Technology Student Colloquium

Fall Quarter 2010

Speaker Session One (CP 105):

09:30am - 10:30am

Anomaly Detection in Power Plant Data Streams

John Patanian (Chair Dr. Ankur Teredesai, Dr. Orlando Baiocchi, Drs. Raj Subbu, Weizhong Yan, Feng Xue)



Anomaly detection answers the question, "Is my complex system

behaving normally?". Anomalies may correspond to damage in industrial equipment. In this scenario, if damage can be detected early then remedial action can be taken before a catastrophic event occurs. We are developing, comparing, and applying several anomaly detection algorithms to detect multiple types of power plant faults. Ensemble methods will be used to develop anomaly detectors with improved robustness and accuracy. We will then compare the performance of our algorithms against anomaly detection using standard statistical process control. The ensemble fault detectors will be incorporated into demonstration system that is built upon a complex event data processing software framework, will consume simulation power plant data and ag equipment faults.


(via skype)


Keyword Bidding in Sponsored Search Using an Estimation of Distribution Algorithm

Aparna Sundara Rajan (Dr. Matthew Alden, Dr. Ankur Teredesai, Dr. Daniel Zimmerman)

Keyword based sponsored search is an important mode of advertisement through the Internet today. It provides an important source of revenue for search engines that allocate advertising space for advertisers. This advertising space is allocated to different advertisers through auction mechanisms since there are very few positions available for the huge number of advertisers wanting to publish their advertisements. For each probable keyword that could be searched by web search users, a keyword auction is conducted in which interested advertisers bid an amount that they are willing to pay each time their ad is clicked. The order in which the advertisements are displayed on the ad space is determined by the ranking of these bids. Deciding how much to bid is a real challenge for an advertiser; if the bid is too low with respect to the bids of other advertisers, the ad might not get displayed in a favorable position; a bid that is too high on the other hand might not be profitable either, since the attracted number of conversions might not be enough to compensate for the high cost per click.


In this project we develop an intelligent bidding strategy using an Estimation of Distribution Algorithm. We assume that the advertisers have a fixed set of keywords for which they are interested to bid for higher positions among the sponsored links. We validate our bidding strategy using instances of Trading Agent Competition Ad Auctions (TAC/AA) \footnote{aa.tradingagents.org} game, where we implement our strategy as competing bidding agents. Winning agents from each tournament of games are used to evolve bidding strategies over several iterations. We expect that through this evolution we will be able to create better bidding strategies in terms of profits made over TAC/AA game instances.



Streambased Keyword Monitoring

Mythreyee Sunil (Dr. Ankur Teredesai)



10:30am – 11:00am

Augmentation of Re-ranking Approaches and their Evaluation in real time web

Garima Tiwari, Hannah Adele Craswell, Arda Shayandeh (Dr. Ankur Teredesai, Dr.Jenny Sheng)


I worked with Arta and Garma to design and implement a Facebook application for the Augmentation of Re-ranking Approaches for Twitter Search project. The application allows users to select a category/topic and then rank 5 tweets in that area by most informative. With user submitted data we then are able to compare it to the project's auto-ranking algorithms in order to support the validity of the way the algorithms rank tweets. My contribution to this project focused on the design of the application and coding it to work with the Facebook API.



11:00am – 11:45



OSPI Internship

Hannah Adele Craswell (Dr. Ankur Teredesai)


I have been working on my internship through the Education department here at UWT. My project was to work on a team to build a web system for the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI). ­­­­­OSPI has funded many state needs projects over the past decade, though they have no clear idea of what these funds are being used for. This web system has two parts to it. The first part is a way for OSPI to know what the projects are using the funds for. The system also tracks the performance of each project to ensure funds are being used to their full potential. The second part of this web system is an information portal. This part informs the general public (parents, educators… etc) of what projects the state is funding, what trainings they offer, and how to contact the projects for more information or to request a training.



Liberty Mutual – Safeco Information Technology Internship

Derek Atwood (Dr. Ankur Teredesai, Scott Wright)


My main project over the summer was to look at a major process and map the entire process to determine bottlenecks and improve the process. I mapped it by creating an interactive web page that detailed each step of the process.


Desktop Application Support Analyst Intern

Ron Van Co (Andrew Fry)


My Internship was for the City of Seattle as a Desktop Application Support Analyst. The problems we’re faced with at the City were the deployment of 350’s PC to vary site location and remote locations of City of Seattle. We faced varies different challenges such as proper software configurations, understanding the network infrastructure, and knowledge of basic shell scripting. These types of challenges were necessary in order to do our work properly. As a company we want to provide the best customer service to our customers and tend to any problems that arise after deployment. Our goal was to get users to quickly adapt to new changes after they received their PC. We provide on-call support for the vary site locations and remote locations after the next business day of deployment to make sure users can properly do their work. A lot of customers of the City don’t know the technical components of the computer and when talking to them we need to understand their point of view when they can’t understand the complication of a computer. I learned about when I worked for the City of Seattle and goal of IT. The goal as IT was to provide support for all users across the city about their computer and anything technical that they can’t understand. We provide on-call support all day at the City and when users need help with their PC we help. Some the solutions we use to help users are by phone, or in person. We try to do things over phone if necessary but if not we make a trip out to the user’s PC to fix the issues. Having a new PC is new to everyone and we try to make it easy for the user to manage. Overall, the internship was a great opportunity for me to learn the politics of a work environment and how to work alongside a team of interns and come out successful. I was rewarded an extension of my internship up to a year and I continue to work there until this day.



11:45am – 2:00pm (Andrew Fry)


Internship with StreamAudio

Tim Larson


This internship study was based on the examination of the internals and fundamentals of the online audio streaming and hosting company StreamAudio. The focus of this presentation will consist of the basics of audio streaming and hosting, as well as an exploration of the difficulties of interning for a current employer. Specific topics will include the technologies and software behind hosting and streaming audio, network and hardware infrastructure, systems monitoring, market research, advertising, and client support. As well a brief background about the company and their service provider will be discussed to serve as a fundamental foundation.



Internship At Global Scholars

Gurpreet Singh


The goal is to get experience and use the knowledge of internship towards my major as an Information Technology Systems. For my goal to success I started looking for internship, with the help of Professor Andrew Fry who is our Internship faculty sponsor. Professor Fry gave me lot of ideas how to approach towards your internship. I tried and I got the result pretty soon, when I got called for the interview with Global Scholars. A company that strong’s the education community with online tutoring and developing lots of software for teachers and students to their learning or teaching environment.

From Global Scholars I got a computer, my own desk and company email address for communication. I was excited; my first project is to display the output of xml files by using Microsoft Visual studio C#. I had to come with my own idea how to do it and I do had lot of problems while doing it but whenever I got stuck I have developer people to help me out. And I finished the job felt great. After that he asked me to do a web form and put it on IS server. Now I am working on it currently. My working experience was so far developing program and test it and make it work, which is not my prime aspect. But making a website also comes under developing but putting it on web server is the IT part. I love working at Global Scholars and I am slowly finding my way towards the goal.



Internship with Wizards of the Coast

Brent Douglas

I did my internship at Wizards of the Coast at their Renton corporate headquarters. Wizards of the Coast provided me a diverse learning environment where I have been able to work closely with the most experienced people in their field at the company. My main focus has been working with the Software Systems Engineer as well as the Build Release Engineer in working and maintaining the whole server infrastructure at Wizards of the Coast. What I will be presenting is my main focus in work. This has been in working with a lot of virtualization through the use of VMware Vsphere Client in deploying and maintaining virtual machines across the server farm. I will also be showing a little about how I have scripted a kickstart file to make deploying linux boxes much less tasking which proves to be highly efficient. In addition, I will also add my experience in gathering info using the SNMP protocol in gathering system information and data which I have written a bash script to easily compare and collaborate the various statistics from every box on the server farm.



Summer Internship at Prepared Response in Tacoma

Nucharee Prabkhet


This internship was focused on the research and development of a dynamic maps application for Prepared Response.Inc. The application provided quick access to local and wide range area maps. Allowing users to edit maps in real time.



ITS Internship with Avanade

Timothy David Deas (Avanade Sponsors Chris Dury, Tim Jorgensen, and Adam Carter)


My time at Avanade (IT Consulting company) as an intern in the ITS Support role has been very enlightening. Avanade is in the power of three with Accenture and Microsoft as the parent companies. As an ITS Support intern, I have been able to assist in the ITS Operations department by implementing varies improvement methods such as web services in SharePoint development, daily process improvements, customer satisfaction, system engineering by making a script to automation installations, and business morale. I will present an overview of experience I have gained at Avanade that involve the ITS department, marketing department, and the whole company as a whole and how I interacted with each. Also, there are many other great things that I was involved in at Avanade that brought me to grow beyond my previous professional self-composure. After displaying the various ways in which I was able to provide to the growth of Avanade and myself, I will incorporate the global side to Avanade’s business side. I will expand upon the processes that Avanade is involved with and the goals that we took on to make businesses all over the world successful.



The IT Infrastructure Transformation Of The Rescue Mission

Ed Resleff

Background - The Rescue Mission (a.k.a. Tacoma Rescue Mission) had four servers – two at the Admin location, one at the New Life Square location, and one at the Tyler Street location. All were operating Windows Server 2003. The entire server network was more than three years old with the main server being more than 5 years old, and two of the four main servers were over 90% capacity. In addition, other prior system drawbacks were age, reliability, capability, upgradability, processing capacity, and overburdened storage facility. In response to these issues, a plan was made and implemented to upgrade to new systems using current technology.

Implementation - The goal of the server migration project was to upgrade the Rescue Mission’s aging and outdated server network to better meet the needs of the executives, employees and ultimately those who benefit from the work of the Mission.

The two newly installed systems use the latest technology – New Quad core-dual proc Processors, 64-bit O/S, and the latest 128-bit encryption. This fits the Rescue Mission’s new IT model of providing for future computing needs – specifically, the new Serenity Client Tracking Tool, resolves underlying issues with current O/S & Exchange 2007 (email accounts),and allows for future user-community expansion plans. Leverages purchased O/S licenses that were idle – Win 2008 R2/Exchange 2007 and, sets up for the new MSSQL License for the Serenity upgrade.

Major Benefits include:


1. Scalable – Long-term strategic plans – Live Streaming & video archival

2. Redundancy – long-term – dual hosts

3. Life expectancy – 3-5 years

4. Expansion capabilities – expansion of storage space (3.5 TB+), RAM

5. Matches the new Internet configuration – Integra MPLS

6. Works with Mac equipment – Entourage



02:00pm – 3:00pm (Seth Syberg)


Triple Threat Slots Web Application

Aaron Tran


The motivation to do this project, is early on in college I took a couple of different programming language courses, one of my professors had a lecture one day about programming being fun. I was curious so I inquired further. The professor encouraged me to create something like a slot machine game before I graduate from college. And he had me hooked ever since. The goal behind this was to create a web application or game that would satisfy the entertainment of the user. The approach we took in our course was dividing the project into different steps or iterations. Most importantly we prepared thoroughly before diving into the actual project itself. The ending result will hopefully be a fun product for the user. This web application should be good enough, where if it were to be edited or added onto, the web application could potentially be even better.



South Sound Industry Internship Database

Joshua Miller

The South Sound Industry Internship database is a PHP / MySQL website dedicated to providing the students of the University of Washington’s Institute of Technology with an easy and accessible resource to search for and find internships around the Puget Sound. In order to ensure this goal a MySQL database was created to store the data and a PHP based website is used to search and navigate the information. The website also supports a small number of administrators that can add, remove and update values within the database. They are filtered by their UWNet IDs to ensure that unauthorized users cannot tamper with the database.



Problems, Policies and Solutions Concerning E-Waste

Sean Grady


Provides an in depth discussion regarding the exponentially growing amount of electronic waste production across the globe. The paper provides the definitions of e-waste, along with the monumental impact it has on the environment and society. Present and proposed policies are analyzed with the goal of differentiating the good and bad avenues that are being used to tackle the problem. Areas of interest start on a global scale then move towards a focus on the United States and State-wide solutions. The aim of the research is to identify public apathy towards e-waste, and in turn raise awareness towards a policy paradigm that would highlight a solution based on shared responsibility among consumers, producers, and municipalities.




Speaker Session Two (CP 106):

09:30am - 10:30am)



Access Control for Distributed e-Health Systems

Durga Devi Devaraj (Dr. Yan Bai (Chair), Dr. Lirong Dai

Conventional access control models like role based access control are suitable for regulating access to resources by known users. However, these models have often found to be inadequate for open and decentralized multi-centric systems where the user population is dynamic and the identity of all users are not known in advance. Some existing works address specific pieces of this problem. Here, we have a comprehensive approach to build a trust based access control model for medical record access in such dynamic systems. We are building a distributed authentication model for secure and legitimate communication between different hospitals. There are two phases in this project – discovery phase and communication phase. In discovery phase, we use gossip protocol to exchange list of trusted entities between hospitals. JSON message format is used for communication. In the communication phase, the hospitals handle requests based on the trust information gathered in discovery phase. In this phase, we will investigate partial failure and security scenarios in this distributed system.


Filtering spam images in social networks
Amita Lakkad (Dr. Yan Bai, Dr. Donald Chinn, Dr. Matthew Alden)

Recently, malicious users spread spam messages in image formats instead of text formats in order to avoid being detected by traditional text-based spam filters. To increase the popularity of spam images, spammers start posting messages through social media and social networks. Content-based image retrieval methods are insufficient in detecting the spam images. We, therefore, developed an efficient anti-spam technique to detect and filter spam images in social networks.

10:00am - 11:30am (Yan Bai)


Internship at Mantech
Ashley Jones

ManTech International Corporation delivers innovative technology and technical service solutions to federal government customers. Some of the agencies they support are DHS, FBI, DOD, NSA, and NASA. The internship at ManTech was primarily based on the design and creation of UML models for one of their existing software systems. Reverse engineering was used to create the UML models. This position was supported by the software developers to aid in any assistance necessary to create accurate models. This presentation will cover the details of UML modeling and why they are an important part of software development.


Internship with Avanade
Hai Nguyen

Avanade is a technology services company that specializes in enterprise business solutions leveraging the Microsoft platform. Avanade was founded in 2000 by Accenture and Microsoft Corporation, serves customers in more than 24 countries worldwide with more than 11,000 professionals. My internship placement was in Technical Communications with the Client Services Group, which is part of the Information Technology Services department. My presentation will focus on: my experience of working in a mid-sized technology company, working on a multitude of different projects, challenges and learning opportunities, and my future outlook within Avanade.


Privacy Issues in eHealth 2.0
Dan Su (Amy)

eHealth 2.0 is becoming increasingly popular. Like other Web 2.0 services, privacy is a huge issue. The privacy concerns in eHealth 2.0 are even more critical because of the existence and/or widespread use of sensitive health information. We study the existing privacy control strategies of Web 2.0 and eHealth 2.0 applications, and compare and contrast their similarities and difference. A privacy control framework for eHealth 2.0.is proposed.


11:30am - 12:30pm (Dr. Jenny Sheng, Dr. Sam Chung)


An Efficient, Secure JAUS Implementation in C++ and Java
Joel Morrah, Leo Hansel, Ho-Kyeong Ra, Miles Raymond

abstract: JAUS is standard that facilitates interoperability between unmanned vehicles, regardless of manufacturer or programming language. To accomplish this, the JAUS standard has a very strict set of messages that are specified down to the byte level, as well as a hierarchical structure for each UV and the system as a whole. We have implemented a basic communication program to follow the message set and the message passing scheme specified by the JAUS standard.
Several JAUS implementations are currently available, such as OpenJAUS, JAUS++, and Activist, but we decided to create our own. The reason for this is that both JAUS++ and Activist are poorly documented and the code does not execute. OpenJAUS executes, but is poorly documented and has extra features, some of which are not specified in the JAUS Working Group documentation. Our goal is to create a JAUS version that is easy to understand, use, is as close to compliant with the JAUS standard as possible, and is secure.


12:30pm – 01:15 (Guy Johnson)

Internship at Mutual of Enumclaw

(Cory Hankemeier)

Mutual of Enumclaw is an insurance company based in Enumclaw. Information Systems are a key in the operations of the company, as claims are logged into databases, and applications are virtualized. My presentation will address my internship at Mutual, company culture, technology, and projects I worked on.


Working with Lionbridge

Tyler Patnode

Lionbridge is a business that provides localization, development, and software testing services. Among these services is search rating, a service that employs raters to examine the relevance and safety of search results on three major search engines: Google, Bing, and Yahoo. In this presentation, I will discuss my job as a Lionbridge search rater, including the company itself, my job, the quirks of an online work environment, and the experience I've gained.


01:15pm – 2:15pm (Dr. Matthew Alden)


Quality Assurance at Mindbloom

Faiz Quraishi


Mindbloom, Inc. focuses on using social media to assist users in pursuing life goals. The site offers the ability for uses to find other with similar goals and use peer encouragement through social media. The gaming paradigm of Mindbloom is used to motivate its users to actually complete their goals. As a quality assurance intern at the company I was responsible for the automated testing for the functionality of Mindbloom’s web application. Part of my duties involved testing user scenarios, so that the application functioned correctly regardless of what users tried to do. I was also responsible for testing new feature added to the application’s back end. All my tests were automated to allow quick research and results. The internship allowed me to use programming skills acquired from school in creating tests that worked efficiently and reliably. In addition to this I was also able to observe real world software development and assurance during my weeks interning.


02:15pm – 03:00pm


Switch Replacement Project

Jake House

The switch replacement project is one of the latest upgrades for the network infrastructure at the Highline School District, applying the new and updates networking equipment a strong backbone for at least 10 schools became, faster, and more reliable. This project greatly improved the efficiency of work for district staff, teachers and students. Using new hardware for the network, my partner and I configured the new hardware to work with the existing networks. Throughout the project as a group of 4 of us, we were able to install 99 new wireless access points and many large SuperX, and 48 port switches.