Students attend and speak at the EPaDel MAA fall meeting

On Saturday November 6, 2010, the Math Club sponsored a trip to the fall meeting of the EPaDel (Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware) section of the MAA (Mathematical Association of America) held at LaSalle University in Philadelphia. This fall's meeting was a special joint meeting with the New Jersey section of the MAA. There were invited talks given by Dr. William Dunham of Muhlenberg College ("Two (More) Morsels from Euler"), Dr. Brian Hopkins of St. Peter’s College ("Partition Dynamics ABCs: Avalanche Models, Bulgarian Solitaire, and Combinatorial Proofs"), and Dr. Sarah Greenwald of Appalachian State University ("Rubik's Cube Games on Spheres: Geometry of Spherical Orbifolds"), plus there were a number of talks given by undergraduate and graduate students from across the region.

Two of our own gave talks. Debra Bruch spoke on "The Harmony between Math and Music". She showcased how mathematics plays a central role in many principles of sound and music. Brett Eyer's talk, titled "The Dependencies of Euclid", revealed the relations between various propositions in Book 1 of the Elements of Euclid, culminating in a demonstration of those used to establish the Pythagorean Theorem. (Note: Brett is scheduled to give an encore presentation of his talk at the next Math Club meeting following the Thanksgiving break.)

Altogether, six students from Penn State Harrisburg, Debra Bruch, Tyler Derr, Brett Eyer, Khizra Hussain, Gege Pincin, and Micah Victoria, attended and enjoyed the variety of talks, not to mention several other tangential experiences. (Please feel free to ask any who attended about the dynamics of Bulgarian solitaire, the work of Bourbaki, or the perplexities of higher dimensional spheres.) Both Debra Bruch and Micah Victoria won special books as door prizes.

The EPaDel section of MAA holds both fall and spring meetings. The Math Club is making plans to sponsor a trip to the Spring 2011 meeting, which is planned to be held at the Harrisburg Area Community College, which is nearby. If you have interest in attending the spring meeting please contact either Brett Eyer or Khizra Hussain.

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Ronald A. Walker
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Computer Science and Mathematical Sciences
Penn State Harrisburg
777 West Harrisburg Pike
Middletown, PA 17057 USA
Phone: (717)948-6673
Email: rawalker (at) psu (dot) edu

Peter Okosun Presents Research on Privacy in the Traffic Probe Message Service

On November 19^th, Peter Okosun, a graduate student in Computer Science at Penn Harrisburg, presented a research paper at the DSRC 2010 Workshop, held in conjunction with QShine 2010 in Houston, Texas.  The research, joint work with Prof. Jeremy Blum, was titled, “Maximizing Mix Zone Effectiveness for the Mitigation of De-Anonymization Threats in the Traffic Probe Message Service.”  The abstract is listed below:

The Traffic Probe Message Service uses vehicle-to-roadside wireless communication to collect kinematic and other state data from participating vehicles.  The draft standard requires vehicles to use pseudonymous identifiers in order to hide their identity.  Whenever vehicles transmit state data to base stations called roadside equipment, the vehicles change their identifier and halt the collection of state data for a random period.  These changes are designed to prevent a de-anonymization attack from reconstructing a vehicle’s path through the road network. Thus, the roadside equipment creates mix zones, which given enough vehicles within a zone and sufficient changes in vehicle mobility patterns, can reduce the success of de-anonymization attacks.  In highway scenarios, optimal mixing is likely in the regions near highway interchanges.  This paper hypothesizes that given the rules snapshot generation, the optimal place for pseudonym changes is upstream of the middle of an interchange.  Simulations of various traffic conditions in a large highway scenario support this hypothesis, and suggest that roadside equipment be placed such that they create pseudonym changes at these locations in order to maximize the ability of mix zones to mitigate de-anonymization threats.

Previously, Blum and Okosun had presented a broad set of recommendations for privacy protection in the Traffic Probe Message Service in the paper, “Privacy Implications of the Traffic Probe Message Service.”  This paper was presented at the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference in Madeira, Portugal.

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Jeremy Blum, D.Sc.
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Penn State Harrisburg
777 W. Harrisburg Pike
Middletown, PA 17057
Email: jjb24@psu.edu
Phone: (717) 948-6686

Students Compete in the ACM Mid-Atlantic Regional Programming Competition

Two teams from Penn State Harrisburg competed in the 2010 ACM Mid-Atlantic Regional Programming Contest on November 6.  The Penn State students included Matthew Godshall, Jennifer Green, Christopher Jackson, Jason Jones, Amanda Minner, and John Seaman.

This competition included 157 teams from colleges and universities in the region spanning from New Jersey through North Carolina.  These teams came from schools including Virginia Tech, University of Maryland, University of Virginia, University of North Carolina, College of William and Mary, and Duke University.  A team from Duke University won the competition. 

Teams were given eight problems to try to solve in five hours.  The team scores were based on the number of problems correctly solved.  In the case of a tie, the total time required to solve the problems is used as a tie-breaker.  However, any incorrect submission resulted in a penalty of 20 minutes being added to the total time.

The problem sets for the ACM competitions are notoriously difficult.  Teams can find that a small mistake in their proposed solution prevents them from successfully solving a problem.  Moreover, it can be very difficult to determine the nature of the mistake due to the very limited information provided by the automated grading system.  Both teams worked hard in the competition.  And the team, comprised of Jennifer Green, Amanda Minner, and John Seaman, was able to place ahead of nearly 100 teams.  The teams are now looking forward to programming competitions in the spring, including one that will be held for local teams at nearby Dickinson College.  

If you are interested in participating in upcoming programming contests, please contact Prof. Jeremy Blum at jjb24@psu.edu.

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Jeremy Blum, D.Sc.
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Penn State Harrisburg
777 W. Harrisburg Pike
Middletown, PA 17057
Email:  jjb24@psu.edu
Phone:  (717) 948-6686

Magic Tricks, Card Shuffling, and Dynamic Computer Memories

On November 2, the ACM, Math, and IEEE clubs sponsored a talk by Dr. S. Brent Morris at Penn State Harrisburg.   The talk, entitled “Magic Tricks, Card Shuffling, and Dynamic Computer Memories,” began with a card trick.  This card trick was a staple of Dr. Morris’ repertoire, as he worked his way through college and graduate school as a magician. 

The card trick uses a series of perfect shuffles.  In a perfect shuffle, the cards from two halves of a deck are perfectly interlaces, alternating one card from one half and one card from the other half.  With his interest in both math and magic, Dr. Morris worked out the mathematics that underlies his magic trick.  In fact, the mathematics of the perfect shuffle became the topic for his doctoral dissertation.  He muses that he may have the only doctorate ever awarded in card shuffling.

After he graduated, he went to work for the National Security Agency (NSA).  His first task at the NSA was to design an efficient Dynamic Computer Memory Circuit.  When presented with this problem, a light bulb went off in his head – the mathematics behind the most efficient implementation of this circuit were the exact same mathematics as those for the magic trick.

Dr. Morris has been nominated by the Mathematical Association of America to be one of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Nifty Fifty Speakers.  Given the response of students at Penn State Harrisburg, this nomination was well deserved.

If you would like to be notified about future speakers and events, please send an email to jjb24@psu.edu.

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Jeremy Blum, D.Sc.
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Penn State Harrisburg
777 W. Harrisburg Pike
Middletown, PA 17057
Email:  jjb24@psu.edu
Phone:  (717) 948-6686