Nancy Kusmaul, associate professor of social work, a scholar and advocate for the rights of older adults and professional caregivers, received the “Outstanding Individual in Academia” award from the Congressional Research Institute for Social Work and Policy in March 2024 at a ceremony on Capitol Hill. Kusmaul’s work is informed by her 10 years of experience as a social worker and over a decade of novel scholarship. 

As co-chair of the Committee on Aging for the Maryland Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, Kusmaul helps advance programming for seniors, professional development for social workers in the aging field, and inform policy and legislation. In 2019, Kusmaul served as a  Health and Aging Policy Fellow at the office of U.S. Senator Ron Wyden and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services learning about how Congress and the executive branch create policies that affect care for frail older adults. 

Social work advocacy and policy

“During my time as a nursing home and hospital social worker, I witnessed the day-to-day impact of policy on practice, when families had to choose between the best of less-than-desirable options. As a scholar, I answer questions and promote policies to improve those options,” says Kusmaul. Her research and advocacy focus on improving nursing home care and organizational culture as well as the understanding of trauma experiences on direct care workers, care recipients, and their families.

 “Advocacy is a central tenet of social work, and this award recognizes my time, collaboration, and leadership in this area on behalf of older adults and their families,” says Kusmaul who recently published “Let’s cut out the ageism and the notion of getting ‘too old’” in the Baltimore Sun.

Kusmaul’s first textbook, Aging and Social Policy in the United States, is one of the first textbooks designed to provide students with an in-depth understanding of the conditions and policies at the local, state, and federal level that affect the rights and interests of senior citizens.

Measuring nursing home care

Her work continues in the classroom and the “lab” as a co-investigator in a new interdisciplinary research project with principal investigator Roberto Millar, M.A ’19, sociology, Ph.D. ’20, gerontology, a policy analyst advanced at The Hilltop Institute at UMBC, and co-investigator, Ian Stockwell, associate professor of information systems. For the first time, the researchers will also combine data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Care Compare database and results of the Maryland Family Satisfaction Survey. The survey assesses the experiences of family members with loved ones in Maryland nursing homes and, Kusmaul’s research, offers a unique approach to measuring quality of care.

“There are no national measures of nursing home quality that consider the experiences of family members,” she explains. “When we think about what quality is and the outcomes we’re measuring, we have to think about the different perspectives of what is good nursing home care.”

Halaevalu Fonongava’inga Ofahengaue Vakalahi, president and chief executive officer of the Council on Social Work Education, who attended the March event in D.C., said, “This award is absolutely well-deserved because Nancy is a champion of all things aging and gerontology. There could not be anyone more fitting for this award!”

Learn more about UMBC’s School of Social Work.

It’s the first day of class. You’re looking around, bright-eyed and a little nervous, and then your instructor smiles at the class and says, “One day you are all going to die.” Are you offended? Shocked? Titillated? Horrified? Collectively, the class titters. Already social bonds are forming as Christine Armstrong Mair, associate professor of sociology who specializes in gerontology, continues her spiel. “And if we’re all lucky, that won’t be for a long time.”

As sociologists, says Mair, or more broadly as leaders in an educational setting, “it’s not our task to make somebody think a certain way. Our task is to show them what exists in society and help them feel empathy for the human experience.”

At its most pedestrian roots, empathy is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. How can someone else’s emotional experience inform your own personal perspective?

In the best-case scenario, a college campus is a microcosm of its society: a crosshatch of races, ages, and socio-economic backgrounds. And UMBC holds true to those measures. But something different happens when you step into the Loop—you sit next to someone who didn’t go to your high school. You eat at the same table with someone outside of your cultural background. You take a test side by side with someone who voted differently than you. And even more than sharing space, you start sharing notes and books and stories—even your own story—with these strangers and then suddenly they’re no longer strangers.

When empathy is on the table, students and colleagues expand their capacity for hard work. You might change your thesis to address human trafficking or leave your home island to work toward healthy aging for all populations. So pull up a chair, step into someone else’s shoes, and partake in this grand educational potluck.

She contacted Vandana Janeja, then chair of information systems, and explained the project she wanted to complete for her Ph.D. During her master’s, Karabatis had tried to conduct a research project on human trafficking for a class with Janeja but couldn’t find a robust data set to use for her project and ended up having to leave the work incomplete. This time, she pitched using the stories of trafficked people. “Instead of dealing with numbers, numbers as data, I am now dealing with stories as data—the stories of people being trafficked,” says Karabatis.

It’s not been easy going. Many trafficked people are not open about their stories, for fear of retribution or simply because of how horrific the experience was. Additionally, it’s hard for Karabatis to take in their trauma. “I’m reading about all these abuses,” says Karabatis. “I’m reading about sex trafficking, labor trafficking, organ trafficking, human smuggling. I can’t imagine—how can a human being do something like that to another human?”

Eventually though, with the end goal of combating the network of smuggling routes, Karabatis says, you need to reach a level where you can try to put your emotions aside: “You need to detach yourself from these emotions if you want to do something to help these people. If your emotions are the only thing driving you, you wouldn’t be able to produce the research. Use these emotions as a spark and then put them on the side.”

Snyder has made the most of the FDC’s offerings, including inviting Hodges’ team to observe his teaching and offer feedback. He starts many of his classes with some tools for students to learn about self-regulation, basically how to use available resources to make the most of education. He introduces them to Bloom’s Taxonomy, which places rote memorization at the bottom of the pyramid and evaluating and creating a unique argument at top. “I want the students to know, I’m not asking to memorize anything,” says Snyder, “but we need to learn to be critical when we’re thinking about media and communication texts and how these things operate.”

Giving students tools to succeed in college—go to office hours, block out time for studying, get enough sleep—may seem basic and far afield from teaching and practicing empathy, but in the taxonomy of educational success, says Snyder, this foundation leads to the heavy-lifting tools at the top of the pyramid.

Snyder helps them harness existing interests, in tech or media, and then run with it, academically. He wants them to ask, “‘How can I turn that switch? What is the thing that I can grab onto? What do I really want to know about?’”

He also listens to them, and attempts to model vulnerability in the classroom. “Yes, these are students and they need to understand content, but they’re also humans who are struggling and we’re all struggling and there’s a human condition aspect we can’t ignore as instructors.”

For more than a decade, Rita Choula was the primary caregiver for her late mother who lived with frontotemporal degeneration (FTD), a lesser known form of early onset dementia that typically affects people under the age of 60.

“My mother started saying things like ‘I don’t feel like myself. I feel like I’m losing my mind.’ She used to be someone that was really engaged and outgoing and she started to pull back a bit. She used to be very empathetic, very people-loving, and showed a lot of concern, and it reached a point where that empathy went straight out the window,” recalls Choula ’95, information systems management, M.A. ’16, aging services.

The process of learning what was affecting her mother, who passed away in October 2020, was a long and challenging one for Choula and her family. That’s why in her current role as the senior director of caregiving at the AARP Public Policy Institute, Choula advances equitable, culturally responsive policies and practices by elevating the unique nature of each caregiving experience.

After four years of misdiagnoses and cycling through several neurologists and medical practitioners, Choula’s mother, at age 60, was finally diagnosed with behavioral variant FTD, a subtype of early onset dementia that doesn’t specifically impact memory, but instead causes personality changes, apathy, and a progressive decline in socially appropriate behavior, judgment, self-control, and empathy. 

“It was a true battle to determine her diagnosis. The lack of an early diagnosis left me bitter because it took away a lot of opportunities for us to just be with her,” says Choula. “So much of our journey was me figuring it out and having to educate professionals on it.”

Developing as a leader in aging services

But how did she go from a frustrated family caregiver to a leader in the aging studies field?

Nearly 20 years after receiving her undergraduate degree, Choula returned to UMBC to continue her academic journey at the Erickson School of Aging while in the throes of caring for mother. Her caregiving experience encouraged her to learn more about how to more adequately and holistically care for aging adults and the caregivers that supported them, like herself. 

“The program was shaped in a way that allowed a working caregiver and mother to be able to pursue her dreams of getting a degree, while still helping me navigate a really difficult time in my life,” says Choula. 

Becoming a critical thinker

In the 1990s, UMBC was one of Choula’s top university choices, stemming from the keynote speech delivered at her high school graduation by none other than UMBC’s then-president, Freeman A. Hrabowski, III.

“Hearing this educated Black man speaking about the importance of education and quoting Langston Hughes’ ‘A Dream Deferred’ made me say ‘[UMBC] is where I want to go.”

Choula, who hails from Suitland, Maryland, was interested in information systems management because of UMBC’s strong computer science programs. She found value in coupling her major with a minor in Africana Studies. Her educational experience helped her to “broaden how I saw myself as a Black woman in this world,” Choula shares. 

Choula cites professors emeritus Acklyn Lynch and the late Miriam Decosta-Willis as mentors who helped expose her to many Black scholars and thinkers across the African diaspora. 

“I was challenged across my courses to critically think about what we were learning, to ask those difficult questions, and to work together as a student body on many different issues to push forward change.”

A personal touch

When Choula returned to earn her degree in the Erickson School, she says the professors imparted much more than academic knowledge—they also assisted her in her personal caregiving experience, especially when it came time to transitioning her mother into living at a nursing home facility. “I went to several of my professors and asked how I should navigate this. They picked up the phone to make calls to care facilities on my behalf—it impacted me tremendously and taught me the importance of seeing a student as a whole person.”

Choula’s experience as a Retriever laid the foundation for the work that she does in support of family caregivers. She specifically remembers a class with Joseph DeMattos, president of the Health Facilities Association of Maryland— the state’s largest and oldest long-term care association. Choula noted how DeMattos’ guidance on leadership helped to inform her current career pursuits. “DeMattos taught me how to position myself as a leader, the different types of leadership styles, and what type of impact I want to have not just on my work but on the people who I’m leading,” says Choula.

Choula applies all that she’s learned at UMBC to bring together policy, research, and practice—the three critical areas of aging services. With her expertise, she works to bridge the three areas, centering on identifying and supporting the needs of diverse family caregivers across ethnicities, cultures, and generations.

“I learned so much about myself as a UMBC student. My experience taught me to take on issues from a place of critical thinking and ensure that we center the needs of people while working with them to affect change and impact.”

On a molecular level, the push and pull of an ecosystem may feel too infinitesimal for humans to experience visually. A researcher can track the data in a spreadsheet as a series of characters and marks or explain it with the structure of a scientific article. Microscopes may capture stills or video of tiny worlds, but what about the emotional landscape of life in motion?

“I really am fascinated with the small things we cannot see that are so important,” says Ann Sofie Clemmensen, assistant professor of dance, who spent a year in residence at the Institute of Marine & Environmental Technology (IMET) next to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor working with scientists who study a variety of topics adjacent to aquaculture, environment, and sustainability.

Clemmensen began her residency by diving deeply into the research of the IMET scientists around her—learning about everything from rainbow trout viruses to the ecological wear and tear of red tides. As she built relationships with researchers, she found herself drawn into the details of their studies—and wondering how she might translate what she learned into something that might encourage viewers to learn more about their world.

“There’s a sort of unpacking of the language of that field. Because movement, while it’s not a spoken language, it is language,” she explains, ever the eager translator. “We have to understand the concept we are trying to embody in order for the physical embodiment to carry the meaning.”

Working with student dancers, Clemmensen choreographed and filmed a series of movements and scenes meant to depict biological processes she learned about from her IMET counterparts. In one, students in masks represent the generic differences of virulent and avirulent strains of the VHSV rainbow trout virus. In another, dancer Michaela Emmerich ’24 (covered in clay powder) rolls in the dirt to show the effect of argonite in reducing levels of phosphorus in farming run-off. 

While Clemmensen’s scenes of red tides, green biomass, and white, milky foams are objectively beautiful, don’t be fooled. Nature isn’t pretty, Clemmensen says. But taking a good close look can help us all understand our environment a bit better.

“For many doing art, dance, and data-driven research, it’s like looking at an abstract painting. If you don’t have a little key that can unveil or reveal some of those secrets, then it’s just chaos.”

Assistant professor Ann Sofie Clemmensen worked with researchers at IMET to create a series of videos depicting microscopic processes like red tides and battling dinoflaggelates. Photos courtesy of Clemmensen.

A poem crosses time and space, building in meaning as it travels from person to person, from generation to generation. With each new reader, it becomes something new and specific—but also potentially loses something of itself along the way.

As a trained computer scientist, Foad Hamidi, assistant professor of information systems, is fascinated by the practical challenge of being able to retrieve information lost when data is duplicated—an inevitable fact of digital life. As a lifelong lover of Sufi poetry from his home country of Iran, he also can’t help but wonder how to preserve the heart of these precious words, even as circumstances—generations, distance, cultural leanings—might dilute or change them.

“There’s always some information loss” in data duplication, he explains. “However, a very interesting theorem in information theory also says that if you have a lot of replicas of the same code…you can recover the original message in the presence of errors that was in all these codes.”

Information systems Professor Foad Hamidi has translated a favorite childhood poem into DNA code, wine, and more. Top image (magnified photo of yeast cells with the modified DNA Hamidi made) courtesy of Tagide deCarvalho.

Years ago, Hamidi learned about a song that was encoded by Japanese musician Etsuko Yakushimaru using living bacteria as a sort of language, “and it really made me think of the possibilities of information and culture and data and encoding.” And so, at the start of the pandemic, he began exploring ways of translating the poetry of Hafiz, a 14th-century Persian poet, into new, living forms and of sharing the experience with others.

Hamidi’s bio-art-inspired creative inquiry led him first to interpret the poetry as code—DNA, to be precise—culled from the words themselves. He then created a “poetry-infused transgenic wine” using yeast modified with the DNA encoding of the poem. Craving community, he took the idea to other researchers in music, biology, imaging, and beyond to joyfully build further iterations of the chain. These efforts led to an Imaging Research Center (IRC) Faculty Research Fellowship (with Linda Dusman, professor of music), and today, he continues to explore new translations of the coded poem through music, cellular imagery, and even a cluster of mushrooms growing in Hamidi’s office.

With each new link in Hamidi’s poetic chain, the information is replicated and the “data” is one step closer to being saved through this fascinating theorem. In doing so, Hamidi also is able to bring together curious new friends who might not have had reason to collaborate otherwise.

Although Hamidi’s “translations” may seem outside the box, the practice of making a poem one’s own “has a long history,” he explains. “These poems are the DNA of my culture…so our architecture, our music, our visual arts, our cultural traditions, are very much impacted by poetry.”

In a far corner hangs an enormous painting of a brain, with bright blue lines, red arrows, and clips of phrases suggesting ideas in motion. In every direction above it, threads of red and blue crisscross the room anchoring one artwork to the next—a system of knit synapses representing not only 25 years of research but the artistic process that fuels it.

“What I try to do, above and beyond anything else, is show as transparently as possible what that process looks like,” says Lee Boot, director of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center (IRC), whose retrospective exhibit “Abstracts & Artifacts” showed at Baltimore’s Peale Museum earlier this spring. 

For Boot, that means a room filled with numbers, images—some animated, many bursting with color—and the connective tissue of the personal paintings he created to process information and experiences related to the various subjects of his research.

“The work is immersive. I paint my brain out as a meditative, reflective process. And then that gets honed, and reshaped, and…out of that automatically comes new perspectives and new ways of framing problems.”

Boot lives to solve problems, and believes deeply in the power of combining artists’ ways of thinking with other disciplines to ask questions and find solutions in new ways. Over the years, the IRC has brought together multidisciplinary teams of artists, scientists, and social scientists from state and local agencies, foundations, and other organizations who are open to tackling everything from substance misuse to educational achievement gaps to the epidemiology of pandemics. 

And while technology runs much of what the IRC builds, nothing is quite so essential to the heart of the work as one’s own intuition, says Boot. As a classically-trained painter, that means returning to the canvas and allowing his brush to take him in new directions—not to create something beautiful, per se, but to open himself to ideas accessible only through such a personal process.

With each stroke of the brush, and each new color, he pulls from the deepest reaches of experience, community, and understanding, creating a road map for what’s next. 

“I’m not trying to make something pretty,” he says. “I am trying to understand how a set of issues sits in being, in my psyche, on the landscape of the world as I understand it. I’m trying to see what I cannot see.”

On the table sit three football-sized forms of light plastic. Each has been sculpted in a 3D printer using zigzag motions specifically programmed to mimic the map lit up behind them showing an orange globe splashed with green arcs. Dots on the screen represent locations mentioned in thousands of hip-hop and rap lyrics, as big as the oft-mentioned city of Atlanta and as hyperlocal as the intersection in front of a neighborhood convenience store.

A student gingerly picks up a gold-colored sculpture, and asks, “Is this Kendrick Lamar?” Tahir Hemphill, a faculty fellow, music aficionado, and self-described “creative technologist who works with art,” nods as a collective “oooh” makes its way around the room. 

“It’s data sculpture, literally. It’s making things as real as possible,” says Hemphill, whose ever-evolving body of work, The Rap Research Lab, made its home at UMBC’s Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture this spring. “This is what it feels like to touch a rapper’s rhymes.”

Located at the intersection of hip-hop and data visualization, and built as an interactive teaching space, the lab features the “Mapper’s Delight” tool that, using augmented and virtual reality, cross-references locations from thousands of rap song lyrics along with a variety of other art pieces that speak to Hemphill’s goal of finding “relationships and shapes in the data.”

Over the course of the semester, UMBC students helped Hemphill delve further into the data while middle schoolers from around the state visited the teaching lab with their classes to try their own hands at research using Hemphill’s lyrics database. 

On this particular day, Hemphill demonstrates yet another incorporation of the geographic lyric data. In collaboration, Foad Hamidi helped Hemphill program a robotic arm, and by inserting a LED pen into the robot hand and filming movements at a long exposure, he’s able to make “light pen drawings” of the data, à la Pablo Picasso. 

With the lights dimmed and the robot arm making ethereal data shapes before their eyes, Hemphill tinkers with his projected spreadsheet in real time. There are just so many threads to follow and infinite stories hidden within.

“My job is to draw them out—pun intended,” he laughs.

Tahir Hemphill, a faculty fellow, music aficionado, and self-described “creative technologist who works with art,” uses data visualization tools to reveal new levels within hip-hop.

Read how artist Hadieh Shafie, M.F.A. ’04, channels the power of language and her childhood experiences in Iran into intricate and colorful pieces of art.

The AI apocalypse is coming. Or it isn’t. Depending on what you read, you might get confused.

One thing is certain: Humans are fired up about smart machines. Much of the attention has focused on ChatGPT, an “artificial intelligence language model designed to generate human-like responses to natural language prompts” (in its own words).

ChatGPT gets coy if you ask whether its existence should be cause for human concern. “It’s important to recognize that I am a tool and not inherently good or bad. It’s how people choose to use me that can have positive or negative consequences,” it says. 

Many researchers, however, are not so noncommittal. They see inherent flaws in the machine learning technology that forms the foundation of tools such as ChatGPT, and they would like to make it better.

While ChatGPT advises that “it’s always a good idea to double-check any important information I provide,” some UMBC researchers are working to build better safeguards into the AI systems themselves—AI the public can trust.

On March 22 of this year, a group including prominent artificial intelligence researchers and tech entrepreneurs released an open letter calling for a six-month pause on the training of powerful AI systems. 

“AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity,” the letter argued. “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”

The letter signers, including two UMBC faculty, expressed alarm at an AI arms race unleashed with the November 2022 public debut of ChatGPT, a celebrity chatbot that answers almost any question or prompt with humanlike ease. In a mere two months, the bot attracted 100 million users, and big tech companies began sprinting to deploy similar technology in their products.

Yet a general unease is accompanying this latest rush for AI gold.

ChatGPT can dazzle users with its eloquent prose (and poetry!), but it sometimes delivers complete falsehoods. People fret that such technology will eliminate jobs and empower scammers and dictators. And beneath it all, many researchers worry that we do not fully understand—nor can we reliably control—how creations such as ChatGPT work.

“At the core of many powerful AI systems today are what are called ‘blackbox’ models,” says Manas Gaur, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (CSEE) at UMBC. The models percolate data through layers of calculations so dense and complex that researchers struggle to track what’s happening inside. The models may excel at certain tasks—like writing sentences in ChatGPT’s case—but they cannot explain why they make the decisions they do. Sometimes they do perplexing, and erratic, things.

“Some people see ChatGPT and similar technology as a progressive tool while others fear it is dangerous,” says Nancy Tyagi, a master’s student in computer science at UMBC who is also working as a researcher in Gaur’s lab. “In my opinion, such tools are inherently risky and need further analysis. If these models are to be used in sensitive areas such as mental health or defense systems, then more work is required to make them safe, controllable, and trustworthy.”

Tyagi is working on a project to build an AI mental health assistant capable of initiating safe and appropriate conversations based on clinical guidelines in mental health. Her project is one of many that Gaur and other AI researchers at UMBC are launching with the aim of ensuring AI tools are accurate, transparent, and safe.

To better understand these researchers’ quest for trustworthy AI, it helps to take a step back and consider how the latest AI trend fits into the big picture.

A Brief History of
Thinking Machines

When the field of artificial intelligence launched in the 1950s, computers were feeble compared to the muscular monsters that power systems such as ChatGPT today. Yet researchers were intrigued by the possibility of teaching them to think like humans. What followed was a roller coaster of booms and busts.

“The history of AI has been marked by periods of hype, followed by some level of disillusionment,” says Tim Finin, CSEE professor and a researcher at UMBC who has been studying AI problems for more than 50 years.

Driving the ups and downs were three interrelated factors: the power (and limits) of the hardware that formed computers’ brains, the data available to train those brains, and the “thinking strategies” AI researchers devised.

In the beginning, researchers taught machines to play games, learn language, and solve mathematical puzzles using a variety of “thinking” approaches. Yet the field hit a wall in the 1970s: Computers couldn’t store enough information or process it fast enough to tackle real-world problems. This was the first “AI winter,” when funding dried up and the topic faded from public view.

The birth of the microprocessor at the end of the decade revitalized AI research. Riding the shoots of this new life, a certain approach to machine thinking rose to prominence—that of the expert system. These AI programs were based on pre-programmed knowledge and logic meant to mirror the reasoning of human experts. Perhaps the most famous expert system was IBM’s Deep Blue, which beat the Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov in a chess match in 1997. 

Expert systems could shine when solving narrowly defined problems (such as winning a game of chess), but they were brittle, says Finin. The systems struggled to adapt to fuzzy and fluid real-world situations, and it was cumbersome to program all the rules that an expert might use to evaluate a problem.

As the limits of expert systems became clear in the 1990s, AI felt the chill of a second winter.

It was another advance in computing hardware that thawed the field again after the turn of the 21st century. The graphic processing units developed to enhance video games supercharged computers’ speed and power at low cost. This, coupled with a flood of free data from the internet, propelled a new type of AI to the forefront: machine learning.

With loads of computing power and heaps of examples to learn from, researchers found surprising success getting computers to teach themselves how to think. The computers start with a question, perform some calculations, and guess the answer. They then compare it to the actual answer. If they are wrong, (which they usually are at first), they fiddle with the calculations and try again. After running billions of calculations, such systems can become quite proficient at tasks such as identifying images of cats and predicting the next word in a sentence.

THE SEASONS OF AI

The growth of the modern field of AI has been marked by a series of rapid spurts, followed by more dormant periods. People often liken these ups and downs to the seasons. During AI summers, public attention shines hot on the field. Yet the bountiful fruit of the season has often grown from seeds of ideas planted during quiet AI winters.

Summer 1: Expert systems

AI programs based on knowledge and logic flourished in the 1980s. Examples include systems that can identify unknown chemicals, diagnose diseases, and play chess. The systems are safe and explainable, but fail to adapt to fluid and complex situations.

Summer 2: Machine learning

Starting in the early 2010s, the potent combination of supercharged computing and heaps of free internet data powered AI’s second summer: the golden era of machine learning—an era that we are arguably still in.
AI systems started to recognize images, transcribe and translate language, and create text and art almost like humans do. These systems have surprised even their own creators with their range of abilities, but they are hard to understand, reason with, and control.

Into the future: Hybrid AI

It’s not yet clear when or if the second AI summer will turn to fall. But researchers are already planting the seeds for future advances. Combining the fruits of past summers, researchers hope to make future AI systems that are adaptable and safe, self-taught and able to explain their decisions.

FUN FACT:

UMBC’s first Ph.D. graduate in computer science, Sanjeev Bhushan Ahuja, earned his degree when expert systems dominated AI. His dissertation, published in 1985 and titled “An Artificial Intelligence Environment for the Analysis and Classification of Errors in Discrete Sequential Processes,” advances techniques popular during this time.

This approach to machine learning is called a neural network, so named because it was originally inspired by the way neurons in the brain work. Neural networks lie at the heart of most famous AI applications today, including image classification tools, voice recognition, and text and image generators.

The power (and limits) of
machine learning

When many of the new machine learning systems debuted, their powers seemed almost miraculous. But soon enough, drawbacks emerged. The machines require enormous data sets (and enormous amounts of energy) to learn. They will adopt biases from their training data and sometimes from their interactions with humans. A chatbot named Tay was quickly scuppered after its 2016 release, when users pushed it into spewing racist and sexist ideas.

Machine learning systems can also fail spectacularly in individual instances (even if they get answers correct most of the time). For example, a driver was killed in 2016 when the autopilot in a Tesla car failed to recognize the side of a white trailer truck against a bright sky.

The blackbox nature of state-of-the-art machine learning means the systems are unable to explain or justify their conclusions, giving users—and even their own creators—little insight into their thinking. For the most part, the systems struggle to build consistent worldviews or reason logically.

The weaknesses of learning models also leave them susceptible to malicious manipulation. Adversaries might “poison” the data used to train the models or exploit the model’s opaqueness to hide an attack.

“It is time we fall back from trusting these models,” says Gaur, whose personal push to make AI systems more explainable, robust, and safe is part of a growing international movement.

Another UMBC researcher joining the push is Houbing Song, a professor in the Department of Information Systems at UMBC. Song says that transportation, defense, medicine, and the law are some areas where explainable and safe AI systems are needed the most.

As researchers tackle the challenge of making current AI systems better, they are often returning to ideas from an earlier era of AI.

Hybrid systems to merge logic and learning

If the AI systems of the 1980s married the AI systems of the 2010s, their baby might be the type of system Gaur, Song, and others are working to develop.

These systems look to deliver the learning capabilities of neural networks alongside the safeguards of knowledge and rule-based systems.

In the field of mental health, Gaur points out that current chatbot systems are not well suited to answering patients’ questions since they can give unsafe or off-the-wall responses.

“Guaranteeing these systems’ safety calls for more than just improving their overall performance” he says. “We must also make sure the systems are prevented from giving risky answers.” 

Working with Karen Chen, an assistant professor from the Department of Information Systems, Gaur has written a paper highlighting the properties that AI-powered virtual mental health assistants should exhibit to be considered safe and effective.

Creating “AI Scientists” at UMBC

New scientific discoveries often lay the groundwork for significant advances in human well being. Think of medical treatments that spring from a better understanding of the human body or labor-saving devices we fashion using our knowledge of material properties.

Tyler Josephson, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical, Biochemical, and Environmental Engineering, hopes to turbocharge science’s discovery engine, with a little help from AI.

Josephson has started a new project to translate chemical theories into a machine-readable mathematical language. Once the computers have access to the foundations of science, Josephson believes they could be tasked with logically manipulating that information to reveal new discoveries.

You might wonder if Josephson has any worries about creating his own AI-powered replacement. But he doesn’t think AI scientists will displace the human kind.

“I think scientists have so many different problems to solve. And if we solve them faster with AI, they just open up brand new questions for us to go after next,” Josephson said in an interview about his work with the Canadian radio program Quirks & Quarks.

Together with his students, he is also working to create such systems. Using an approach called knowledge-infused learning, the researchers are looking to anchor their AI systems in clinically approved guidelines. They are also pushing their systems to reveal their thinking so that the approaches can be checked by mental health experts. Sometimes the results reveal that even when a system arrives at a correct conclusion, the information it used to reach that conclusion may be irrelevant to a human doctor’s thinking.

Song has also been coaxing AI learning models to open up. In a recent paper, he and his co-authors developed a tool to identify attacks on an image-recognition program by figuring out which parts of its neural network are most susceptible to manipulation.

In the fall of 2023, he will be teaching a new graduate-level course on a broad category of hybrid AI called neurosymbolic AI. UMBC will be only the second university in the world to offer such a course, he says.

Song arrived at UMBC in January on the heels of winning major honors for his research in computing and engineering and is looking forward to turning more of his attention to this emerging frontier in AI research. He says he eventually hopes to build a world-class AI research institute at his new academic home, focused on delivering learning machines that can be confidently used when safety is a top priority.

“I recognize the need for trustworthy AI,” Song says. “I believe that this field of research is where I can make unique contributions and take on responsibilities for my professional communities and my home institution.”

Technology to benefit society

The initial goal of AI, as defined by a group of researchers credited with launching the field at a 1956 workshop, was to “make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve [the] kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.” But if the aim is human-like thinking, it naturally raises the question: How do humans think?

In a bestselling book titled “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” world-renowned psychologist Daniel Kahneman posits that humans have two thinking systems: a fast one and a slow one. The fast one is the thinking that comes to mind almost without effort, and we use this thinking most of the time. Yet it is prone to errors. The deliberative slow thinking system catches mistakes and enables breakthroughs in understanding.

Finin compares machine learning models to the fast-thinking system while knowledge and logic-based systems are more like the slow-thinking system. To make today’s faddish, fast-thinking models more competent, researchers such as Gaur, Song, and their students are extending them with slow-thinking capabilities.

We may still be decades away from AI systems approaching the full range of human intelligence. There are many ethical questions to grapple with before we reach a Hollywood-esque future of self-flying cars and android coworkers. Yet the decades of AI research up to this point have already transformed the world. AI concepts underpin the ways we search the web, shop online, and otherwise interact with the digital world.

AI has enormous potential to improve human lives, but we must proceed wisely. UMBC researchers are at the frontiers of AI research, pushing the limits of knowledge and theory, and striving to make the technology better for the benefit of society.

Training Your Robot Assistants

If you hope the AI revolution will bestow humanity with machine “Jeeves” capable of meeting your every need, Cynthia Matuszek has some bad news. “I’m always being asked: ‘When will we have robot butlers?’ I have to say—not any time soon,” says Matuszek, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Matuszek researches how to build robots that understand human commands in complex and chaotic natural environments. She has successfully trained a robot hand that can respond to written prompts such as “Grab the apple.” She is also exploring how to teach robots to understand spoken language and to learn new concepts, such as how to dice a vegetable, if a human shows them how.

Part of what motivates Matuszek’s work is the huge unmet demand for caregivers to assist people as they age. Robots might fill the gap. Matuszek says we likely won’t have “Jack of all trades” helpers, but robots could specialize in certain tasks, such as preparing food or folding laundry.

Another part of what motivates Matuszek is the thrill of being the first person to discover how to do something new. “It’s really just so much fun,” she says.

Kayla Tomas ‘23, information systems, maintained a challenging schedule during her undergraduate years. There were days she rose early, studied, and attended classes in the morning and afternoon, headed to volleyball practice in the late afternoon, paused a half hour for dinner, and then dashed off to lead a dance class in the evening. “It was the support of my friends, my family, and the mentors here at UMBC that made it easier,” she says.

Despite the challenges of a hectic schedule, she wouldn’t have it any other way, given what she gained from each opportunity. As a student athlete, Tomas says that one of her best undergraduate experiences was being on the Division I women’s volleyball team that won the America East Title three years in a row.

“The friendships I made, the breakthroughs I experienced, and the challenges I faced, made me a stronger individual, and this couldn’t have happened without an amazing group of girls I had the privilege in sharing the court with,” Tomas says.

Valuing the whole person

Tomas was a member of the Center for Women in Information Technology (CWIT) Scholars Program, which anchored her not only financially but also psychologically.

“One person I really have to give credit and thanks to, and someone I will continue to maintain a connection with, is Erica D’Eramo, assistant director at CWIT,” Tomas shares. “She has helped me a lot. We have one-on-one meetings, and if I have a question that I can’t figure out, she always knows who to direct me to. But it doesn’t even have to be about school—it can be about just how I’m doing emotionally, mentally, or physically.”

Tomas has also received support from UMBC alumni through the Alumni Endowed Scholarship. “Receiving that award was such a proud moment, because I knew these scholarships are very competitive.” she shares. “They saw a young woman’s drive to make a difference, to support her community.”

Creating a new student group

Beyond her academic work and competition on the volleyball court, dance has played a major role in Tomas’s UMBC experience. She had enjoyed dancing from a young age, and while at UMBC began to attend dance classes and workshops in the Baltimore-Washington area. She noticed the lack of Latin dancing on campus and she knew of other students who shared the same passion, “and so I did something about it,” she says.

Tomas started to offer evening Latin dance classes in the Public Policy Building. “That was a lot of fun, seeing my friends support me,” she says, “and also support dance genres of different cultures.”

“So many students here at UMBC are self-motivated” to try new things, observes Tomas. “They’re go-getters—that’s their mentality. And I love it because it rubs off on me, and I’m sure on other people.”

Emerging as a leader

The experiences of other graduating students mirror those of Tomas. When she began her undergraduate studies at UMBC in 2019, Sianna Serio ’23, computer science, had only one thought in mind: to focus on her academic studies. But within a short period of time, she became involved with the Resident Students Association, began to work for Residential Life, and gave President Valerie Sheares Ashby her first tour of campus.

In her four years on campus, Serio participated in the Society of Women Engineers, Sign of Life, First Generation Network and the UMBC Crafters club. She credits faculty, staff and students alike for keeping her going, saying, “When you’re super focused on doing everything at once, sometimes you don’t get a chance to reflect on how that’s impacting you. My mentors did a really great job of providing support and checking in on me.”

Coaches support a student researcher

Emily Ferketic ’23, physics, enjoyed the remarkable distinction of having a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal under the mentorship of Sebastian Deffner, associate professor of physics. “He saw potential in me that I didn’t see in myself,” she shares.

Despite her rigorous academic schedule, she also excelled on the volleyball court, becoming captain of UMBC’s Division 1 team. In 2021, she won the coveted America East Elite 18 award. Her coaches, too, have been especially engaged. “A few weeks ago, I was presenting my research at Undergraduate Research and Achievement Day. All of my coaches showed up, not only to support me, but also to learn about the work I’ve been doing when I’m not in the gym,” she shares.

A diverse, supportive community

Students who complete double majors face especially challenging demands. Avni Patel ’23, biological sciences and gender, women’s and sexuality studies, achieved academic excellence in both fields of study and also became a community leader at UMBC, revitalizing the Hindu Students Council. “The best part of my UMBC experience was finding a diverse community of peers and mentors where I was appreciated and encouraged to reach my full potential,” she says.

One theme strongly resonates through the experiences of all these students: the UMBC community values the whole person. Whether a student is focusing on academic work, participating in student organizations, competing as an athlete, or engaging with any number of other activities, the university’s culture of mentoring and support is there to help them succeed.

Performers of the music piece “Corporel,” by the French-Slovenian composer Vinko Globokar, must use their own body as a percussion instrument. They beat, scratch, smack, and tap themselves. They chatter their teeth, snore, and cluck their tongue. The composition’s “patterns of sound and gesture” are arresting, “keeping us transfixed even as we flinch,” the L.A. Philharmonic website says in its description of the piece.

To Brandon Gouin ’23, music performance, learning the work was a highlight of his time at UMBC. “This work is a discovery of self and musical potential that resonates deeply within me,” he says. He performed the piece at his senior recital this year, when members of the music community at UMBC were celebrating the opportunity to once again gather in practice spaces and concert halls after the isolation of COVID-19.

Gouin credits his teachers and mentors, especially Tom Goldstein, associate professor of music,and Patrick Crossland, affiliate artist, with helping him reach that moment on stage—as well as with helping him find his path as an artist.

Gouin’s experience is reflective of the experience of many members of the class of 2023. Although each individual has unique talents, passions, and goals, they are brought together by a feeling of gratitude to the UMBC community for helping them find their way. Faculty, staff and fellow students helped them open their minds to new possibilities, and mentored them on their journey to discovering a career path that fits.

Challenging preconceptions

When Gouin arrived at UMBC, he thought performance jobs for percussionists were mostly limited to professional orchestras—a highly competitive and difficult career path for any musician to pursue. However, as he dove into the local music scene, his eyes were opened to other possibilities.

“I began to see opportunities as a contemporary performer by attending the Livewire festival of New Music that UMBC holds every year and watching many performances of music I had never heard of before,” he says. He also attended local experimental music shows at the Red Room in Baltimore and the Rhizome in D.C.

“Audiences at these shows are very engaged, and that is exciting to me as a performer,” he says.

Mentors illuminate new possibilities

Gouin’s professors introduced him to new styles of music and showed him the vibrancy of the contemporary music world. Tom Goldstein directs the UMBC Percussion Ensemble of which Gouin was a member. Goldstein says he often programs works by lesser-known composers, and sometimes pieces by UMBC faculty and student composers.

“I think if the students perform a piece composed by someone they know, they may start to think ‘Hey, I could do something like that, too,’” he says.

Gouin appreciated the exposure to a variety of music and says he has adopted the inclusive mindset of his music professors as he pursues career opportunities after graduation. “My teachers aren’t only in love with one or the other kind of music but commit themselves fully to working with all kinds of music,” he reflects. “I think that kind of mindset is healthier and has more longevity for an artist’s life.”

Other Class of 2023 graduates say they encountered similar opportunities for growth and expression at UMBC. Shaniah Reece ’23, information systems, discovered a love of research and a way to connect her technical skills to her passion for social justice. Hala Algrain, M.P.S. ’23, health information technology, reconnected with a love of teaching, and switched her career plans from industry to academia. Elijah Mugabe ’23, chemistry, threw himself into lab work and a quest to investigate unanswered scientific questions. And Connor McPherson’23, history, found a way to connect his interest in the humanities with a career in the Navy.

Community builds confidence

In addition to finding their path at UMBC, these students also found communities that encouraged them to excel on their academic and personal journeys. They found student groups, faculty mentors, peer advisors, and scholars’ programs that pushed them to succeed and provided the support they needed.

“Undoubtedly, the most enriching part of my time at UMBC has been the remarkable sense of community I have experienced here,” Reece says “It has provided me with opportunities for personal growth, enabling me to evolve holistically. As I reflect upon my experiences, I feel confident and prepared to take on any obstacles that may lie ahead.”

Algrain agrees that the culture of UMBC and the level of support were the best parts of her experience at UMBC.

For Gouin, the chance to connect with mentors who were dedicated performers, as well as enthusiastic teachers, was life changing. He even joined a percussion quartet with fellow and former students that they named “Hi Tom,” in honor of Tom Goldstein.

Goldstein shares that for him the honor goes in the opposite direction.

“I love working with the students—it’s a fantastic part of my life,” he says. “It’s an honor and a privilege to get to know them.”

Read more Class of 2023 stories.

Kayla Tomas

Degrees: B.S., Information Systems
Hometown: Silver Spring, MD
Post-grad plans: Cybersecurity Consultant for KPMG

Kayla Tomas cites UMBC’s Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) Scholars Program for empowering her and giving her a sense of community, especially as a Latina woman in STEM. In CWIT Scholars, a merit-based scholarship for talented undergraduates in computing and other technical fields, she developed friendships, found mentorship, and was able to create a close network of colleagues.

A star athlete, Tomas played on the women’s Division 1 volleyball team all four years of her time at UMBC, and helped guide the team to championships in three consecutive years. She participated as a member of the Hispanic Latino Student Union, and started her own Latin dance team. As a Grit Guide, she gave more than 50 tours of campus.

UMBC’s alumni community has celebrated and supported Tomas through one of the university’s coveted Alumni Endowed Scholarships, awarded to six students each year through support from UMBC’s Alumni Association.

Has there been a mentor or fellow student who influenced your time at UMBC?

“Gina Ralston, a coordinator in admissions and orientation, was a staff mentor who influenced my time at UMBC. She continuously reassured me of how much of a positive impact I have. Gina was my boss when I worked as a Grit Guide. She made me feel appreciated and seen. I loved this job because I got to share my knowledge with younger students who are new to this process, maybe even women looking to be in STEM.”

What has been the best part of your UMBC experience?

“The best part of my UMBC experience would have to be winning the America East title in volleyball three years in a row. So much hard work, time, and dedication went into training, and it truly paid off. The friendships I made, the breakthroughs I experienced, and the challenges I faced, made me into a stronger individual and this couldn’t have happened without an amazing group of teammates. It has always been a dream of mine to play collegiate volleyball at the highest level and I achieved that. Seeing my family at every home and away game always put a smile on my face. They are my rock and have been through the highs and lows with me.”

Hala Algrain

Degree: MPS, Health IT; Graduate Certificate in Data Science
Hometown: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Post-grad plans: Ph.D. in information systems, UMBC

Supportive faculty and staff mentors helped Hala Algrain find her way on what she describes as a long journey to a career that fits her values. 

While pursuing a master’s degree in health information technology, Algrain honed her interests and reconnected with a love of research and teaching. She currently works as a research assistant in the Health Data Lab of Ian Stockwell, associate professor of information systems. She felt an immediate connection to the work, which aligns with her goal of creating intelligent human-centered health systems that address patient needs. Her experience in the lab prompted her to change career plans. Instead of entering industry, she will pursue a Ph.D. in information systems at UMBC. 

Algrain also accessed professional development services and found faculty who guided her to classes that fit her interests and opened new opportunities. “Shout out to the Office of International Students and Scholars,” she says. “They really do have your back.”

What activity, experience, or co-curricular at UMBC was particularly important to you?

“I’ve valued working as a teaching assistant and a research assistant. Connecting with students as a teaching assistant rekindled my love for academia. I enjoyed being able to facilitate another student’s learning experience.”

Is there a particular academic achievement you’re most proud of?

“I’m proud of persevering through a lot of professional dead ends and continuously seeking a higher standard for the level of impact of health systems. It’s incredibly reassuring and exciting to find mentors at UMBC who have the same values of conducting research with real-world impact.”

Assessing the quality of nursing home care has historically been a challenging and complex process that considers only a portion of the factors involved—generally, clinical indicators reported by the nursing homes themselves. UMBC researchers are collaborating on a new measure of nursing home quality that combines care experiences with clinical data. And they are doing it with funding from a new UMBC program designed to support novel research across different teams. 

Principal investigator Roberto Millar M.A ’19, sociology, Ph.D. ’20, gerontology, who is a policy analyst advanced at The Hilltop Institute, is collaborating on the study with Nancy Kusmaul, associate professor of social work, and Ian Stockwell, associate professor of information systems. Their goal is to create “a more complete measure that nursing homes will be able to use to evaluate how they’re doing to improve the resident experience,” says Kusmaul. 

The researchers will, for the first time, combine data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Care Compare database and results of the Maryland Family Satisfaction Survey. The survey assesses the experiences of family members with loved ones in Maryland nursing homes and, Kusmaul notes, offers a unique approach to measuring quality of care.

“There are no national measures of nursing home quality that consider that side of things,” she explains. “When we think about what quality is and what are the outcomes that we’re measuring, we have to think about the different perspectives of what is good nursing home care.” 

Creating a new national model

On a national level, the typical approach to measuring nursing home care focuses on clinical indicators that are measured quantitatively, Millar notes. This includes factors such as number of hospitalizations, vaccination rates, and staff training. It does not include more qualitative data that considers the experiences of people in nursing homes or their families. Maryland is one of only three states that assesses family satisfaction. 

“What’s key here is bringing these two approaches together to see if these quantitative measures from the federal approach are actually predictive of family satisfaction across more qualitative domains,” says Millar. 

“What we’re talking about is perhaps scaling this collection of qualitative data to a national level that does not exist right now,” says Stockwell. “We want to better measure quality of care to drive changes in the nursing home industry that would best help the patients.”

The team hopes to eventually create a more robust technical infrastructure to capture this data. Eventually, they might be able to utilize machine learning and artificial intelligence to better match prospective care recipients with the most suitable care facility. 

Funding new collaborations 

The nursing home study was funded through UMBC’s Office of Research Development via the new CIDER (Center and Institute Departmentally-Engaged Research) program. This internal funding opportunity brings together researchers from different disciplines and types of research units across UMBC. 

At UMBC, a large volume of research and creative activity (RCA) happens within academic departments and colleges as well as outside of them, in a range of research centers and institutes. In fiscal year 2022, centers and institutes outside of academic departments were responsible for 48.6% of UMBC’s sponsored RCA expenditures ($42.3 million), with most of the rest falling within the departments. But while both groups contribute substantially, they don’t often receive shared project funding to collaborate. 

CIDER was designed to increase collaboration between these groups. In this first round, four research teams were each awarded a $50,000 CIDER grant for 18 months to pursue their studies. 

In addition to Millar’s team, the other three winning proposals include research across a very broad range of fields: 

• “Visualizing the Factors in K-12 Education Success” is led by Lee Boot, director of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center (IRC), with co-investigator Amy Tondreau, assistant professor of education, and Anita Komlodi, associate professor of information systems and associate director of the IRC. 
• “Harnessing the Power of Machine Learning to Discover What Powers Distant Galaxies” is led by Antara Basu-Zych, the Center for Research and Exploration in Space Science & Technology II, with co-investigator Sanjay Purushotham, assistant professor of information systems, and Kristen Garofali, NASA. 
• “Model Development for Polarimetric Remote Sensing of Clouds in the Thermal Infrared” is led by Xiaoguang Xu, Goddard Earth Sciences Technology and Research II, with co-investigator Vanderlei Martins, professor of physics, and Jie Gong, NASA.

Don Engel, associate vice president for research development and director of the Center for Space Sciences and Technology (CSST), helped to create CIDER. “We wanted to find a systemic way to make sure that everyone could draw value from being close to other researchers within the institution,” says Engel. “In addition to that, we wanted to make sure that research center faculty have internal funding opportunities that better connect them with the rest of the university. This better integrates them into the university and also makes sure that they have more opportunities to both contribute to and draw from the university’s other strengths and dimensions.”

Additional CIDER program creators include Cynthia Woodcock, director of The Hilltop Institute and Christine Mallinson, professor of language, literacy, and culture (LLC) and director of the Center of Social Science Scholarship. Kara Seidel ’18, psychology, an LLC doctoral student, also provided support in the program’s creation. 

Program founders hope that CIDER can help kick-start successful partnerships that generate additional external support and grow far into the future. “We were really excited to see how much interest we had in this program,” says Engel. “We hope that our researchers can draw from each other’s expertise and this funding opportunity can enable the awardees to get subsequent grant funding.” 

Ian Stockwell finds this kind of collaborative effort essential and can already see its growing impact. “It’s important for UMBC to facilitate the interaction of faculty across departments and in research centers. We are grateful for this opportunity in particular.”