Each year, the Alumni Association Scholarship program helps amazing students succeed at UMBC. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing some of their stories with you. This week, meet scholarship recipient Paige Khoury ’12.

When you meet Paige Khoury ’12, dance, it’s easy to see why the new grad has trouble sitting still. Not only does she dance and choreograph, she’s also a dedicated volunteer – and even, recently, a budding filmmaker.

As one of four Alumni Association Scholarship winners for the 2011-2012 school year, Paige puts her passions to work wherever she goes, and UMBC is all the better for it.

“Dance helps my soul thrive,” said Khoury, whose choreographed piece, “Catalyst,” was performed by other students in the 2012 UMBC’s Undergraduate & Creative Achievement Day. “There really aren’t words to describe it. Dance is something that anyone can do…anybody is capable of it, and I love that.”

While dancing takes up a lot of her time, Khoury also truly enjoys giving back through volunteer work. She spent a month in Haiti during the summer of 2010 helping earthquake victims rebuild their lives. The volunteering – which she completed as a part of her church’s mission work – shaped her world outlook, she says.

“We helped out at an orphanage with 50 children in it that was run by one woman all by herself,” she says, showing off a bracelet given to her by a little boy named Albert, who latched onto her her first day in the torn country.

“I cherish this,” says Khoury, who has stayed in touch with Albert, and who is working from afar to raise money for the people in his village.  “He had nothing, and he gave this to me…he showed me that possessions aren’t important. Only people are important.”

Newly graduated, Khoury is taking some time to figure out what she wants to do long term. She knows she wants to help people. She wants to dance. Perhaps she could combine the two somehow, she says.

Ever grateful for the chances her scholarships gave her (she also earned a partial Linehan Artists Scholarship for dance), she also hopes to stay involved with UMBC.

“Every year, I’ve struggled to pay for school,” she says. “The scholarship allowed me to pursue dance and the things I love…it really helped make this year great. Thank you.”

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– As a sort of going away present to the Class of 2012, Paige orchestrated (and choreographed!) a video “lip dub” entitled “Study Rock Anthem” (to the tune of “Party Rock Anthem” by LMFAO). Watch it here. 

British writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

And for many of us, that’s exactly how the beeps and pings and connecting dings that keep our schedules, steer our cars to the right destination, and even maintain our bonds with family and friends over great distances seem to work. Like magic.

But to the humans behind the technologies – including Silicon Valley-based UMBC alumni at Apple and Google – it’s anything but abracadabra. It’s a combination of hard work, entrepreneurial drive and visionary imagination at its geekish best.

Let’s meet some of the minds behind the magic of our technologies.

by Jenny O’Grady

Photos by Timothy Archibald. Illustrations by Meredith Nelson.

* * * *

How a UMBC alumnus found more than (voice) recognition for his work on the iPhone’s enigmatic Siri technology.

Sometimes, Harry Chen needs to get away. Far away.

When he’s surrounded by the sands of Death Valley, California, even the GPS can’t find him. He can’t check his email, or video chat with his parents in Hong Kong, or stream music from his favorite Pandora station. And he likes that solitude.

“Sometimes you’ve got to go to the desert,” says Chen, a UMBC computer science alumnus (B.A. ’98, M.S. ’00, Ph.D. ’04) who helped develop Siri, the voiceresponsive “personal assistant” found inside the latest Apple iPhones.

“You stay out there, and when you come back, you see such a big contrast of civilization,” he continues. “And it makes you appreciate life a lot more. Everything we created – one way or another – is kind of superficial, but also kind of essential.”

In a world where computing has left the desktop and lives in the clouds, Chen is a bit of a tech superstar. The work that he and his colleagues have done makes it easy for everyone from tweeners to grandfolks to whisper wishes into the palms of their hands to find the closest pizza, send an email or solve a math problem.

Reflecting on his short-yet-impressive career, the energetic 35-year-old software engineer is quick to note the importance of the nearly ten years he spent at UMBC. He says that the people and the environment of discovery at the university helped shaped him into the kind of thinker capable of seeing models and years ahead to the next cool thing.

Building The Basics

Like many blossoming tech geeks in the early 1990s, Chen first contemplated the inner workings of computers as a teenager, sitting at home in Hong Kong, his thumbs occupied by the bright red buttons of that era’s ubiquitous Nintendo controller.

“While I was playing, I’d get so curious. How did all those characters come about? I started thinking about how some games would make very predictable moves, and why some are not predictable at all,” he says. “Later on, my dad bought me a computer…and the games on that were sort of like the ones with a snake going in different directions. It made me very interested in understanding more about computer instructions.”

When Chen left home for Towson University in 1994, the world of web-based computing was just beginning to blossom. At the urging of his parents, he began a course of study in pharmacy, but a job opening at the campus library allowed Chen to help customers with computers. He started building simple websites with his friends. After taking a few classes, Chen discovered he had an aptitude for programming.

Suddenly, the future – including a transfer to UMBC – seemed obvious to him. It didn’t take Chen long to make himself at home in the university’s computer science department, where he turned artificial intelligence algorithms into Java code for computer science research projects, won highly-sought internships at Hewlett-Packard, and generally wowed his peers.

“One thing we always liked so much about Harry is that he liked to charge into things,” says Dr. Tim Finin, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering who specializes in artificial intelligence and who served as Chen’s Ph.D. advisor. “He was not afraid to just drop in and start working on something.”

At the time, many of UMBC’s computer science researchers focused on pervasive computing – which aims to unobtrusively connect and share data between the many devices in our lives. Chen took to it like a teen to texting, and reveled in collaborating with fellow students to test new ideas.

“Harry was, and probably still is, very good at that level. He could very effortlessly turn ideas into working prototypes,” says Finin. “It’s a really significant skill to be able to have an idea and then very quickly test it out…to be able to implement enough of it to get some feedback to know whether it’s a brilliant idea, whether it’s something that will pan out.”

The Smartest Room in the Building

Many computer science students at UMBC take jobs right after they finish undergraduate studies. But an iffy job market in the late 1990s and then the dot.com bubble’s burst a few years later kept Chen in school.

Chen’s decision to wait to test the market turned out to be a good one. He used that time to develop a concept that helped shape his future research.

Imagine a room that answers your questions, or anticipates your needs and then fulfills them. Chen imagined that room – and then figured out how it might be brought to life.

“The graduate student’s life is really about exploration and to be free to identify your interests,” he says. “It’s almost like an accident when you find something you really like to work on and you just know it.”

Chen had spent some time interning at the Hewlett-Packard Labs, which were – at the time – at the forefront of mobile computing research and development. So when Chen returned to UMBC, he figured out what he wanted to design: a conference room broker. This system would retrieve and translate data from the devices within the room itself to solve problems for occupants while also considering user-privacy issues.

“So you walk into a meeting room,” Chen explains, “and the room understands how many people are in that room, what those people do…so the room says, ‘Oh, there’s a projector,’ and the projector would say, ‘I want to show a PowerPoint presentation. I can do that.’”

The smart room would also locate the presentation on Chen’s phone, download it, and show it – after automatically darkening the room. It might know that one of the meeting attendees wants a copy of the PowerPoint, and then simply download it to their phone. The room might even detect that an attendee’s hotel room is several miles away – and offer to call them a taxi.

“The idea is that people will use technology without thinking about it, which is just like you pick up chopsticks or a utensil and you just use it, you don’t think about it,” he says. “So that’s an idea, to try to encourage people to build technology for everyday people, to solve everyday problems.”

Imagining this room would help Chen shape his later work.

Taking Chances – and Detours

Following graduation from UMBC, both Chen and his wife Gigi Yim, who earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in information systems from UMBC in 2004 and 2007, pursued jobs in the Baltimore area. They even bought a house.

But the lure of Silicon Valley – and the fast-paced, creative life it offered – called to Chen.

“At one point, I thought: life is too short. I woke up one morning and I wrote my wife an essay and I said these are the reasons why we should just move to the West Coast,” he says, smiling. “Kind of like writing a paper: these are my reasons. I sent the email in the morning, and in the evening, I come home, and she says, ‘OK. Let’s do it.’”

Within days, they were looking for new jobs and making plans to move west. Yim took a job at Netflix, and Chen wound up at a vaguely-named startup working on a secret project involving voice recognition. (This startup – Siri – would later be bought by Apple.)

Right away, Chen felt confident they had made the right choice.“There’s a mentality here among a lot of people…a sort of hunger drive to make something” in Silicon Valley. “I always feel like you capture people’s smartness in thin air here,” he adds. “Somehow, you just breathe in people’s knowledge.”

“Harry, from day one, was pretty clear. Silicon Valley was where he wanted to end up,” says Dr. Anupam Joshi, a professor of computer science and another of Chen’s graduate school advisors. He observes that some students simply crave the risk and reward of the Silicon Valley environment.

“Some of it could be – for all we know – genetic hard wiring,” Joshi says. “That is why some people become race car drivers and others, like me, drive five miles below the posted speed limit.”

Valley Life: 101

Drive down Route 101 from San Francisco, and you see signs of our burgeoning tech civilization everywhere.

Billboards touting the latest cloud software. Silver-sided buildings in seemingly endless business parks that are home to startup upon startup. Even the street names themselves – like Apple’s famous Infinite Loop, or the punningly named Disk Drive in San Jose – conjure images of innovation and dreams.

Strolling around the manicured Apple campus in Cupertino, California, Chen speaks quickly. Excitedly. He says Silicon Valley is a place where ideas can be imagined without fear, where innovation is rewarded.

“People here have a passion for technology and innovation,” he says. “They want to change the world. They take risks. Most of the time they fail, but sometimes they succeed. So they step out, dream up some crazy idea and say ‘If I fail, fine. I’ll dream another one.’”

Even so, Chen acknowledges that nothing happens overnight. If you think about the gadgets that have occupied your pockets over the last 10 years, the technology required to power them crawled more than it leapt. The palm-held organizers of the mid-’90s, for example, were little more than tiny personal computers; today’s equivalent relies on web networking and interaction with other devices. Who knows what tomorrow’s devices will look like?

“Especially in the [artificial intelligence] research field, you can’t just jump to the dream right away,” Chen says. “You kind of have to think about yourself climbing a mountain. You have to do the work to get up there…you can’t just shoot straight up because that’s impossible. And once in a while you will have to make a detour, and because certain technology or culture has changed, you have to adapt to that.”

Back at UMBC, Joshi acknowledges that Chen’s metaphor is rooted in the reality of how creativity works. “That’s part of the fascination of this field, I think, going back to the creative process,” he says. “So much is yet not done. So much power is available through the computational process…we just have to channel it. We’ve barely scratched the surface.”

For Chen, it’s often enough just to see these products in use by the people he loves. When he was an undergraduate student, he communicated with his parents in Hong Kong by hand-written letter; today, he uses FaceTime to video chat with them whenever he wants.

Chen isn’t able to discuss what he’s working on now at Apple – a company known for keeping a tight leash on its ideas and products until they are introduced. But when you ask Siri a question on your new iPhone and get an answer, consider yourself at the doorway of Chen’s smart room, engaging with his work.

“It feels surreal,” Chen concludes, “because the things I talked about four or five years ago seem like a dream, and today, it doesn’t seem like a dream anymore.”

Read about UMBC alumni working at Google here.

Students in the Erickson School’s Project 2061 class have high expectations for technology and its power to meet human needs. Working across disciplines, they’ve created new possibilities for the future of senior care.

By Dinah Winnick

It’s hard to imagine ourselves five years into the future, let alone 50. But one group of UMBC students has confronted this challenge head-on in search of inspiration for new designs to improve the lives of older adults.

Their course, “Project 2061” was spearheaded by the Erickson School, UMBC’s newest college. Founded in 2004, the school offers undergraduate and graduate curricula that combine the studies of aging, public policy and management.

The Erickson School created Project 2061 after being invited to showcase UMBC student research at a conference on the future of aging. The project quickly attracted faculty and students from engineering, information systems, design, management of aging services (MAgS) and interdisciplinary studies (INDS) to collaboratively develop new technologies for older adults living in the year 2061.

As it turns out, the endeavor’s success hinged on something simple and personal: students’ reflections on their own imagined future needs and desires. The class created three avatars based on students’ life experiences – “Abdulla,” “Ashley,” and “Spencer” – to help them explore both the problems aging can bring and how design can meet those challenges.

“Abdulla,” for instance, was based on Project 2061 participant Abdulla Aljneibi ’12, mechanical engineering. His avatar is 90 years old and recovering from a stroke that has left him struggling with memory, speech and motor impairments. Yet he is determined to live independently and enjoy activities such as cooking, daily prayer and going to the theater.

For Judah Ronch, dean of the Erickson School, creating personas like “Abdulla” proved the key to making Project 2061 click.

“This is always the challenge in teaching about aging,” says Ronch, “Until you make it about us it’s very removed. If it’s always about them, it’s highly abstract, it’s not very real, and there is not a sense of urgency about it because [typical students] are 25 or 20 and we’re talking about 60 years down the road.”

Everything changes, Ronch observes, “once you start talking about yourself and [asking], ‘How will this affect me?’”

BUILDING A TEAM

In May 2011, LeadingAge — a research and advocacy group focused on the lives of older adults — asked the Erickson School to create an exhibit on the future of aging.

LeadingAge planned a celebration of its 50th anniversary in October 2011 with a conference that would bring 8,000 participants to Washington, D.C. The group wanted to highlight dramatic changes in senior living from 1961 to the present, and also articulate a bold vision for the next 50 years.

Ronch says the exhibit “was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up.” So he recruited faculty and students from across UMBC to create the school’s presentation as part of a new, boundary-breaking course in the Erickson School.

To teach the class, Ronch enlisted Tim Topoleski, a professor of mechanical engineering who studies mobility and the mechanics of joint replacements. Catherine Neylan, assistant professor of design, and Amy Hurst, assistant professor of information systems, followed, attracted to the course by their shared interest in design for people with disabilities.

These faculty recruited students from a range of majors. Neylan observes that technology and social problems are now so complex that “we need collective intelligence to build the things that we build.”

Eventually, 19 UMBC students joined the effort. Early in the process, MAgS major Joe Yoon proposed that the class should create specific design personas based on students in the course and then craft flexible technologies to meet those avatars’ specific needs. His idea was a game-changer.

“In all of our scenarios of how this would be used,” recalls Hurst, “we never said, ‘How would grandma use this?’ We said, ‘How would I use it in 50 years.’ I think that fundamentally changed a lot of the designs [and] helped the students be more creative and engaged.”

Yoon’s proposal also forced students to ponder uncomfortable possibilities. As Steven Hall, a junior majoring in graphic design, observes: “I don’t think anybody’s going to want to think, ‘What’s my life going to be like in 50 years? I’m going to have cataracts and be overweight. I’m going to have my foot amputated from diabetes.’”

The students had to deal with uncertainties about their lives and the world in 50 years. “You can’t take the current older adult population and simply throw them 50 years into the future,” argues Colleen Bennett, a gerontology Ph.D. student and Project 2061 teaching assistant. The project depended on young people confronting their own fears and desires for later life.

“Every generation is different, and then they age,” says Hurst. “Traditionally, people are very bad at abstracting and predicting what they would want in the future, but they can tell you what they want now and how they feel about things.”

REALIZING A VISION

The three personas gave Project 2061 students a concrete foundation to build on.

“Once we had a starting point,” says Aljneibi, “the ideas started flowing.”

The class worked quickly to conceptualize, research, and render designs for technologies to meet functional needs: eating, sleeping, hygiene, and entertainment/social engagement. Living environments in the future might be quite different, they reasoned, but basic human needs will remain the same.

Occasionally, there were hiccups. The blurred lines of interdisciplinary work and the indefinite nature of the problems that the project aimed to address frustrated some of the students, especially early in the process.

“You would think design and engineering would be closer, but they both want to have a product and their process is so different,” observes Meyerhoff Scholar Jasmine Jones ’12, computer science and INDS. At times, she adds, students misinterpreted their failure to communicate across a disciplinary “language barrier” as actual disagreement over ideas.

“They are beginning to learn that the real world is not as clear-cut as their well-designed classes,” says Hurst.

In four weeks, however, a dozen designs took shape, all of them informed by contemporary technologies and targeted to meet users’ specific needs.

One group devised a “Smart Closet” that reminds users with memory and other cognitive impairments when and how garments need to be cleaned. It also lets users know when they last wore a favorite dress or tie, and even what clothing is appropriate for particular activities or occasions.

Another design team emerged with a “Lavish Lavatory”—which auto-adjusts toilet and rail height to account for changes in strength and balance over time. The design’s flexibility means it can help communal facilities better meet the needs of diverse individuals. It also discreetly and unobtrusively monitors waste and automatically sends relevant health data to each user’s physician.

Eating properly is important at any age, so another group designed a “FoodPro,” that monitors the refrigerator and pantry, keeping track of grocery inventory, expiration dates and nutritional content. It also helps users prepare meals that meet their particular dietary needs, taking into account health conditions, lifestyle choices and food preferences.

These projects formed the core of the Erickson School’s LeadingAge exhibit— “My Surroundings, My Well-Being”— which centered on personal experiences with technology.

The student designers took the exhibit opportunity as a chance to demonstrate how individuals would use their products in home environments. They acted as docents to the conference exhibit, explaining to visitors how each invention would serve “Ashley,” “Abdulla” and “Spencer” in their future lives.

Helping people connect with the exhibit in a personal way was a priority for Aljneibi—and not simply because he lent his identity to the design process. He also belongs to a close-knit multigenerational family with a grandmother facing mobility problems.

“When she goes into the shower,” he says, “it’s always in our heads: ‘What if she slips? What if she falls?’” For his family, respecting her boundaries means resisting the impulse to help her in the shower. In what ways could his team’s designs enable her, and people like her, to more safely bathe by themselves?

Though he approached the course from a neuroscience background, Talmo Pereira, an INDS major and Meyerhoff Scholar, took the tenets of user-centered design to heart.

“Considering that the environment should adapt to the user,” he suggests, “the mutability of the environment is one of the things that will most compensate for differences in culture and preferences, and certainly limitations.”

The exhibit received an enthusiastic response from vendors, senior care professionals, and LeadingAge organizers, who immediately invited the students back for 2012.

FULL SPEED AHEAD

Creating an exhibit with an October deadline left everyone involved in Project 2061 with the question of how to best make use of the rest of the semester. Focus on prototyping the exhibit designs or generate new concepts? Continue team projects or pursue independent research? The answer was different for each participant.

Aljneibi chose to continue his team project on bath designs. “When I came to the States I wasn’t fine with communal bathing, especially in the gym,” he reflects. “I used the handicapped one because I needed my privacy.” For him, this experience— uncomfortable though it felt—was an inspiration. After all, if the United States continues to grow increasingly diverse, certainly consumers would appreciate flexible bathing technologies.

Steven Hall ’11 and Pavlo Yankovetz ’11, both in graphic design, explored how visualizing health data in particular ways may offer older adults a sense of self-awareness and empowerment. They argue that information can motivate or stifle health-seeking behaviors, depending on how it is conveyed. “If you’re just giving someone numbers, that’s not helpful or useful. We want those numbers to mean something,” says Hall.

Meyerhoff Scholar Deanna Easley ’12, mechanical engineering, worked to develop safer flooring for older adults, who are often injured in falls. Having broken her own wrist in a fall, Easley understood the mental and physical traumas of injury and lengthy recovery.

“People told me, ‘At least you didn’t break the hand you write with,’” recalls Easley. “But I’m a pianist. I need both hands.” With a deep understanding of how injury can wreak havoc on one’s sense of self, plus input from MAgS students, Easley designed flooring that would not only enhance safety, but also offer aesthetic appeal and emotional comfort to potential consumers.

INNOVATION STARTS AT HOME

Academic leaders at UMBC applaud the new class, arguing that it breaks new ground at a university already known for its commitment to promoting undergraduate success through active learning.

“Project 2061 represents a striking example of UMBC’s ability to create innovative and multi-disciplinary approaches to teaching and learning that address significant future challenges,” says Provost Philip Rous.

“In the process of researching real problems, our students not only gain knowledge, they also co-create knowledge and contribute to the field,” says Diane Lee, Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education.

Connecting research to reality and realizing its potential for lasting impact isn’t simply a hypothetical draw to students. For Meyerhoff Scholar Jasmine Jones, Project 2061 is about “actually making a difference right now” rather than just “writing up a piece of code and turning it in.”

Ashley Johnson ’12, MAgS, who helped her classmates understand the needs of “Ashley,” a 111-year-old former psychologist who loves to garden and meditate in the year 2061 but struggles with dementia, diabetes and hearing loss, agrees: “I’m never asking, ‘Will I use this in the future?’ I know I will.”

Students aren’t the only beneficiaries of this work. As Don Engel, Assistant Vice President for Research, articulates: “Universities support research both to expand human knowledge and to engage students in the forefront of their disciplines. Project 2061 demonstrates how interdisciplinarity and a focus on real-world challenges produce compelling results and provide a valuable education to students and faculty alike.”

Part of Project 2061’s success, it turns out, was also rooted in participants’ refusal to play it safe. Not only did they take risks with ideas, but students and the faculty broke out of their intellectual comfort zones when they crossed disciplinary boundaries.

When you predict the future, says Ronch, “you have to be prepared to be wrong.” This kind of risk-taking requires what he calls “a special kind of iconoclasm: looking at a blank space and seeing what could fill it.”

In a June 6 piece for E&E Publishing’s daily environmental news website Greenwire, associate professor Earl Ellis, geography and environmental systems, spoke with reporter Paul Voosen in regards to the U.N.’s release of its fifth Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-5) ahead of this month’s “Rio+20: United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development” to be held in Rio De Janeiro.

The article focused on GEO-5’s emphasis on “planetary boundaries” as an important aspect of future environmental policy, which “are roughly based on the limits estimated during the past 10,000 years of human activity, and… have been seized upon by policymakers seeking a guide to the future of life on Earth”, wrote Voosen. Ellis, a co-author of the paper “Planetary Opportunities: A Social Contract for Global Change Science to Contribute to a Sustainable Future” for BioScience with a number of other scientists which calls for a middle path that “increase[s] the probability of achieving societal benefits while reducing negative outcomes for Earth systems”, told Voosen that the “physical boundaries” concept remains questionable on a number of issues ranging from its scientific weaknesses to its overemphasis in the media, concluding that “many [scientists] are convinced that focusing on the [boundaries] approach will weaken, rather than strengthen, the role of science in informing society in environmental decision making.”

The original article “Rio+20: Ahead of summit, U.N. report embraces ‘boundaries'” can be read at Greenwire‘s website here.

British writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

And for many of us, that’s exactly how the beeps and pings and connecting dings that keep our schedules, steer our cars to the right destination, and even maintain our bonds with family and friends over great distances seem to work. Like magic.

But to the humans behind the technologies – including Silicon Valley-based UMBC alumni at Apple and Google – it’s anything but abracadabra. It’s a combination of hard work, entrepreneurial drive and visionary imagination at its geekish best.

Let’s meet some of the minds behind the magic of our technologies.

by Jenny O’Grady
Photos by Gabriela Hasbun

Stroll down the yellow brick walkway that leads to Building 43, and a trio of girls on colorful bikes rides by, dinging their handlebar bells and singing “Hello!”

Take a right, and you’re in a garden of busts that depict everyone from Lloyd Bridges to Jacques Cousteau. Beyond that, a T-Rex skeleton feasts on helpless plastic pink flamingos. There’s a delicious savory breeze – does it come from one of the free cafeterias or the employee-run herb garden? – and a burst of laughter from a group of young engineers playing beach volleyball nearby.

Oh, right: and today’s free haircut day. That’s life in the Googleplex for you.

Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, is often depicted as a Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory of high-tech geekdom. It’s frequently listed on Top 10 lists of amazing workplaces. But what’s it really like to work at a company with a product so popular that it’s become a verb?

“It is very good to foster a culture where people are engaged, want to be at work, and that allows you to concentrate your time on what you’re trying to do in the day,” says Jeffrey Burgan ’83, computer science, director of network engineering for Google Access, which delivers high speed internet. “People work very hard here, so if the place can take the burden off in other areas – like get an oil change or a haircut, or to have washers and driers so people can do their laundry – it definitely helps.”

Google is known as much for the sheer difficulty of its confounding job interviews as it is for the replica of SpaceShipOne in its lobby. The secret to the company’s success seems to lie in its careful balance of work and play, and other UMBC alumni at Google agree that its unique culture pushes them to be more creative and constructive.

Jeetendra M. Soneja M.S. ’04, computer science, is the tech lead for Google Analytics API. He works in an outlying office, but finds the company culture persists across Google’s many campuses.

“One thing that is common across all the Google offices all over the world is the friendly and helpful nature of the fellow Googlers,” he says. “This leads to a very healthy working environment and is one of the best things why I love working here. The work environment is also fun and relaxing, and yet focused and one that promotes and rewards innovation.”

Robert Banz ’95, computer science, has worked as a site reliability engineer at Google for four years. (“We make sure Google is ‘always on,’” he says.) Before that, he worked at UMBC, which gives him a bit of special perspective about what’s extra cool about working at the Mountain View campus.

“Everyone says it’s the free food options, so I’ll go with something else. I’d say I was surprised how much it felt like a university campus,” he said.

Banz also believes the atmosphere of Silicon Valley is a significant influence on the famed Google culture. “Silicon Valley and San Francisco, but really the entire Bay Area, has this amazing critical mass of passionate creative, scientific, and engineering talent,” he says. “These groups mix socially; mutual curiosity leads to unique ideas. I think that’s the secret to the creative engine, and the source of very engaging and entertaining conversation.”

Sandor Dornbush M.S. ’06, computer science, sometimes runs to work with his black lab, Coltrane. Other times, he takes the free Google shuttle. Today, he wheels his bike into a meeting room playfully covered in a soft padded material. Photos of the Burning Man festival hang nearby.

“Despite all the games, and the food and everything, I honestly don’t think I’ve played a single game of pool in my six years here,” says Dornbush, an engineer for Google Play, who knows his work ultimately comes first.

“People talk about the Google 15 (because of the free food), but I’ve actually found the opposite,” Dornbush says. “For the first time, many people have access to really good food, and they have access to the gym, and they see people around them taking care of themselves, and they start to drop pounds. So despite the fact that there’s all this free stuff, people work really hard. And it’s a culture that encourages that.”

Associate Professor Timothy Nohe, Visual Arts, and Charlotte Keniston ’14, Imaging and Digital Arts, recently collaborated with students from the Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School for a project documenting the school’s Station North neighborhood. The project My Station North: Sounds Surrounding Us involved Nohe and Keniston providing five students ages 10-11 simple point-and-shoot cameras and audio recorders to go and interact with the diverse collection of area residents, ranging from bricklayers, to bike shop collective members, to artists based in the Copycat Building. The results are to be exhibited at an installation opening in Gallery CA at the City Arts building on June 7^th at 5:00 p.m.

Speaking on June 5th with Tom Hall for WYPR’s Maryland Morning, Nohe spoke of his  and Keniston’s motivations for working with the students at Baltimore Montessori, saying, “We really wanted students to get out and walk the neighborhood and really meet people, and really see the environment. To knit the school closer into the neighborhood. That’s a neighborhood that thinks of itself as Station North, but also is Greenmount West, and we were trying to tie these two entities together.”

My Station North: Sounds Surrounding Us will be on view at the Gallery CA from June 7th to July 6th.

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, takes your questions.

Q. What books have you been reading of late? And how do you prefer to read: ebooks or paper?

— James Polchin ’89, political science
Founding Editor, Writing in Public

A. One thing that I’ve been reading lately is Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 by David Kennedy, who is a professor at Stanford University (Oxford University Press). This period in American history fascinates me, and both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt fascinate me. She was very helpful in pushing the involvement of women, of blacks, and of artists in the American recovery.

Artists were particularly important. It was customary at that time to say: “We are in the middle of a depression. Why would we be doing anything to help the arts?” Yet there were people in leadership positions – including the Roosevelts – who understood that we need the arts in difficult times. Even more so, perhaps, than in times when we are thriving. We need them all the time. The arts reflect who we are. They make us whole. They express the human condition.

The theme of leadership in that era – which was expressed in FDR and in Eleanor Roosevelt – was optimism. People back then said: “The country’s going down the tubes.” They used the same language we use today. Wall Street versus Main Street. Legislation that was pushed through was being questioned by the Supreme Court, and many Americans wanted to see it overruled.

But the language that was used in recovery and the legislation that was passed spoke volumes about our values. In no case was that more true than the Social Security Act. Before that act, the vast majority of people struggled after their working years. There was no retirement. But that act said that we care about people in their time of need.

For me, the optimism and the values we embraced during that era suggest the hope that we can embrace in the period we are in right now.

As far as how I read, I do prefer books. We have every bit of technology you’d want on UMBC’s campus and at my house. But when it’s all said and done, I enjoy the book. I want to smell it. I want to turn the page. I want to turn the corners of the pages. And I like seeing where I am in relation to the end of the book. You don’t get that without the book itself.

Q. As someone who’s been called upon to make a number of commencement addresses at other universities, what is your approach to offering this important reflection for new graduates?

— Richard Byrne ’86, English

A. First, I want to know the history of the institution. And I want to know what students want to know about.

Last year, one of the most significant experiences for me was speaking at the University of Mississippi commencement. So I studied the history of Ole Miss, and discovered that this beautiful grove, with magnolia trees, where we had thousands of people gathered, had been the site where the men of Ole Miss – students and faculty – had set off for the Civil War. That group of men suffered 100 percent casualties in the Civil War. Regardless of what one feels about the Civil War, the thought of those children and men dying is sad. It’s as sad as the war itself.

And then, knowing that 100 years later, this was also the most violent site of desegregation in American higher education. Ever. Four people killed. And there I was speaking to a predominately white audience. I wanted to talk about Mississippi history as part of American history. And about how the problems of Mississippi were – and are – American problems.

The challenge to every graduating class is “What can I do to make some impact on people who don’t have what I have?” That’s what I want to say, whether it’s at Ole Miss or at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, where I will speak this year.

To send a question to President Hrabowski, click here.

TAKE A SEAT

The first phase of UMBC’s Performing Arts and Humanities Building is on schedule for its Fall 2012 opening. Soon, the departments of English and theatre will move into the building – along with the James T. and Virginia M. Dresher Center for the Humanities, the Linehan Artist Scholars Program and the Humanities Scholars Program.

It’s a big event in UMBC’s history, but did you know that you can already put your personal stamp on the university’s newest building?

UMBC is offering chances to name a seat in the building’s state-of-the-art proscenium theatre. The new theatre is the anchor of the project’s first phase – and as the new home for the university’s award-winning theatre department, there are more than 200 seats available for naming. Those who participate in the campaign will have a plaque engraved with their name (or other text of their choice) affixed to a seat in the theatre.

The $500 gift required to place your name on a seat will directly benefit arts and humanities programming at UMBC through an endowment that will ensure that arts productions and other programs are available for future generations.

The new Performing Arts and Humanities Building is the capstone of UMBC’s recent efforts to highlight the arts and humanities at the university, which also includes a new campaign –“think.create. engage” – which has spurred greater attendance at campus events and communicated UMBC’s arts and humanities efforts to the wider community.

For more information on how to put your name on a seat, check out the new building’s website: www.umbc.edu/pahb/

— Richard Byrne ’86

UPWARD TRAJECTORY

In March, UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III announced that Philip Rous had been selected to fill the university’s most senior academic administrative position: Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs.
“UMBC is very fortunate to have someone of Dr. Philip Rous’s impressive experience and talent to serve as Provost,” Hrabowski observed, “and I know he will do a superb job.”

Rous, a professor of physics, gained much of that experience at UMBC, where he has risen through leadership positions in the faculty and then in university administration over more than two decades in Catonsville. He arrived at UMBC as an assistant professor of physics in 1990, and served in a number of faculty leadership positions – including chair of the physics department and president of the university’s faculty senate.

In 2008, Rous was named interim dean of the university’s College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences. He was named dean of the college in 2010. Last year, after the departure of former UMBC provost Elliot Hirshman, Rous was named interim provost of the university.

In his time as a faculty leader and an administrator, Rous has been a key figure in advancing the university’s drive to become a first-rate public teaching and research university. He helped create the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences’ Active Science Teaching & Learning Environment (CASTLE) which has garnered national attention for its innovative student engagement practices.

Rous received his B.Sc. degree in Physics (First Class Honours) from the University of Bristol, and his Ph.D. from the University of London’s Imperial College of Science and Technology. His tenure as Provost begins officially on July 1.

— Richard Byrne ’86

See “Over Coffee” for an interview with UMBC’s new Provost.

NUMBERS AND KNOWLEDGE

As national leaders in promoting diversity on campus, UMBC’s academic leadership and its faculty know that increasing diversity in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields at the highest levels doesn’t just require determination to make change. It also requires hard data and informed discussion.

That’s why it’s significant that UMBC is one of 21 graduate schools across the nation to participate in a new study organized by the Council of Graduate Schools to study completion and attrition among underrepresented minorities in STEM doctoral programs.

The study is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). It will compare data on completion and attrition among all underrepresented minority students in STEM doctoral programs culled over the past 20 years from a diverse set of institutions. The council is also developing a web-based survey for students.

That’s the data part. The study will also examine STEM doctoral programs at participating universities in depth, assessing their policies, practices and interventions that may have had an impact on completion and attrition among doctoral candidates. Schools in the study will also host visits from council program staff and take part in national discussions on Ph.D. completion.

Why study completion and attrition in such depth? The council and the NSF hope to identify and understand the factors that contribute to Ph.D. completion and help reduce attrition in these key academic programs.

The study – and its answers to those questions – will be released in June 2014.

— Nicole Ruediger and Richard Byrne ’86

AWARD OF A CENTURY

Make way, Warren Buffett. Slide over, Rihanna.

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, joined both of those figures and 97 others on the 2012 TIME 100, Time magazine’s annual list of “the 100 most influential people in the world.” (See Hrabowski’s listing here.)

Hrabowski was the only college president to make this year’s list, and in the magazine’s piece on UMBC and its president, Time observed that: “When you think of the top science universities in the U.S., schools like MIT and Caltech may jump to mind. But perhaps the most envied science program in the country is at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.”

Making the Time list also meant an invitation to a gala celebration at New York City’s Lincoln Center in April. In a toast written for the occasion, Hrabowski celebrated the aspirations of his late mother, Maggie Hrabowski, the way that his family placed “faith and education” at the center of their lives, and his love for his wife of 40 years, Jackie Hrabowski.

Hrabowski also spoke about the philosophy that has helped propel UMBC to national recognition.

“I am fortunate to work on a college campus where people are excited about the life of the mind – in fact, we are passionate about chess and serious theater and biochemistry. We take pride in telling students, ‘You don’t have to be rich to be brilliant.’ At UMBC, we say, ‘The party is in the library.’ I could never have imagined, as I marched in Birmingham in 1963, that one day I would be president of a research university with students from 150 countries.”

— Elyse Ashburn and Richard Byrne ’86

On July 1, Philip Rous will become provost at UMBC after serving for a year as the interim provost. In his 22 years at the university, Rous has filled key leadership positions – including president of UMBC’s faculty senate and dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS). UMBC Magazine spoke with him about his view of the university.

Q. UMBC is known for its exceptional undergraduate education experience. How has the university earned that reputation?

A. The importance attached to undergraduate education has been here ever since the founding of the university. Those who came to teach here at UMBC did not just come to be professors or to do research but to found a new university.

Many of those characteristics present at the university’s founding have remained through the years. If you look at photographs of the campus back in the 1960s and 1970s, what you notice is that when you see students, you also see faculty with them. In the classroom. In the lab. Faculty and students working together.  That was very much a characteristic of the people who came here. They wanted to be closely involved with students.

That tradition and objective of a high-quality undergraduate education in a public setting – and access to it – has remained through the years. And we’ve continued to recruit faculty and staff who are similarly committed to that objective. It is a fundamental value of UMBC.

Another value here at UMBC is that we’ve always been innovative and entrepreneurial – and we always want to do better. So if you look at developments here broadly, in research and education, over the years, it’s really a story of staff and faculty working together and with students to develop new approaches to teaching, learning and scholarship with the fundamental objectives being to support student success and to be at the forefront of the discovery of new knowledge.

What specific changes in undergraduate education have occurred over the past 22 years that you have been at UMBC?

The way I look at it is that we’ve gone from a view of the educational endeavor as teaching to a view of education as learning.

There has been a gradual move away from the standard “sage on a stage” type of teaching to a more student-centered learning approach. Most recently this has been happening a great deal in the sciences, but it’s important to remember that when you look at many courses in the arts, humanities and social sciences, this type of focus on active student engagement was already there.

But the big lecture theatre format – with 300 students in the class – that was typical of a physics class when I arrived here is changing. That doesn’t mean we’ve eliminated all the lectures or that the lecture format cannot be effective. But now we have we have developed other new and interesting ways to support student learning that are now a vital part of how we approach our educational mission.

What I saw when I came here, for instance, was the development of tutorial centers on campus. The development of the Learning Resources Center (LRC) to support students, for instance. And then, as you move to the late 1990s, there was a movement toward making our lecture classes more interactive so that we could get students more engaged. So you had the introduction of “clickers” on campus as a way of being able to interact with students in the lecture theatre classroom. And we actually still use them today.

So what I saw when I looked out across campus was that faculty in all of the colleges were trying to innovate within their current facilities and classrooms to improve student learning. The clickers are a good example. Or the creation of discussion sections, which evolved into students solving problems with the support of the teaching assistants and the faculty.  That was the foundation of everything. The faculty was invested in the success of their students.

And what’s happened more recently is that we’ve been able to take that to the next level.

First, we asked what do we need to take it to the next level. In the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS), we have the Chemistry Discovery Center, which is actually a special environment designed to help faculty facilitate what they are trying to accomplish.

These activities are very much in line with what I was hearing from the faculty:  Can we think about the classroom environment now? How does that support student learning? Can we leverage technology in that area? And what about our writing courses and digital humanities?  The outstanding efforts to redesign introductory psychology and the new state-of-the art writing labs in the new Performing Arts and Humanities Building are just two examples. We’re also talking about design and engineering – including spaces like the CNMS Active Science Teaching and Learning Environment (CASTLE) and the Chemistry Discovery Center.

So we’re taking a more deliberate institutional approach to student success. The environment – such as classrooms – is an important part of that. But the effort that it takes to design state-of-the-art facilities like the new writing labs in the new Performing Arts and Humanities Building, environment is nothing without faculty who are able to do all the hard work to understand the research in the field of teaching and learning, revise their curriculum to reflect how students learn, and then carefully assess what they’re doing.

That’s why we’re starting the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation – a new fund for innovation in teaching and learning at UMBC. There will be a competition across campus to actually propose and try out new ideas – and then to assess them to see if they work.

UMBC has increased its research footprint as well. How does that match up with teaching undergraduates?

Often people look at education and research as two separate activities – and it’s even somewhat reflected that way in UMBC’s mission statement.

But in my view, these are both very highly integrated in the research university like UMBC. Research is, essentially, discovery. It means creating new knowledge. But the creation of knowledge and education are very closely tied together and that is why we want our faculty to be at the frontier of their discipline. People who work at the frontier of their field are the best able to educate our undergraduate and graduate students. And faculty engaged in research or scholarship or creative activity can also work with our students so that they can engage in the process of discovery and understand the intellectual foundation of their own curiosity.

There’s also the fact that research is the discovery of new knowledge. And that’s a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. If you could pick some things that are fundamental to our own humanity, curiosity would certainly be one of them. We are compelled to understand our own humanity and the natural world around us. From my perspective, great universities are a fundamental expression of human curiosity and the preservation and nurturing of that ideal.

Part of the growth of UMBC as a research institution can measured in numbers: The university is flirting with a total of $100 million in external research funding per annum – and is now awarding 100 Ph.D.s each year. Where are we headed next as a research university?

My view of where we are going as a modern research university is rooted in the particular context and history of our university. We were founded, primarily, as an undergraduate institution with a liberal arts base but we rapidly developed a very strong reputation for research and graduate education. As we have evolved, we have sometimes looked at large research institutions…. and wondered if that is what we will become. We have also looked at the model of the small liberal arts university, and thought that maybe that’s where we were going.

The important thing is that everything we have done over the past 40 or 50 years has earned us the right to establish for ourselves where we are headed and what we will become.  And my personal perspective is that we will become the new model of a public university that continues to pursue excellence and innovation in education and scholarship without either taking anything away from the other.

External funding, for instance, is a measure of excellence in many disciplines. But we have to be a careful not to generalize that observation as far as defining the excellence piece of it, because there are many disciplines where large amounts of external funding are not available or not really appropriate. Yet a person working in those fields can be a world-class scholar in exactly the same way that a scientist or engineer who is bringing in millions of dollars. Indeed, in order to pursue world class research in the STEM fields, you generally need to have external funding, because they are technology-based. And that is expensive.

The difference is in the disciplines, not in the excellence. And excellence is our common goal. We continue to attract world-class scholars to UMBC – and we are going to continue on down that path.

What upcoming initiatives or plans at UMBC excite you the most as you assume the office of provost?

We’re moving to the next stage of the university’s strategic plan that will follow on from UMBC’s Strategic Framework for 2016. We’re four years ahead of that date but we’re already carefully thinking and beginning conversations about the university’s next strategic plan.

Over the next year, we’re also going to talk about what we have learned through our previous planning exercises. Much of what we’ve accomplished has far exceeded the vision laid out in the 2016 framework. Other things we have not done – or we have not managed to do them effectively. Why is that?

My role in these discussions is to facilitate. I am trying to help our community identify and reach goals which the community itself sets. Part of my role is also to make sure that we have a vigorous discussion about these goals and these ideas over the next few years. So that we have a clear vision about how we are going to grow – and a common vision of the university. I am looking forward to that process.

Another part of my job is to think a lot about the values of our university, and how we put those values into action. Not that we aren’t doing that already. But every one of us is busy. We are doing things that are urgent, and that are right in our face, and that have to get done.

As provost, what I have to do is to figure out what’s really important. These are things that may not be done tomorrow or next week but are critical to our university, faculty, staff and students. What sorts of larger things must we be doing to support the success of our students? What must we do to support faculty and staff reaching their professional aspirations? And also how do we develop new leaders at UMBC? We need to make sure that there are individuals who are ready to take on key leadership roles.

Your academic discipline was theoretical physics. Are there qualities that you’ve been able to transfer from that background as you’ve risen in academic leadership?

The transition to academic leadership is different for every single person who steps into such a role. When I came to the university as an assistant professor, my interest was in teaching and research. That was what I was passionate about. And I remember thinking in those days that I never ever wanted to become an administrator.

But the experience that eventually changed my mind was my involvement in departmental and university service and then having the opportunity to serve first as the vice president and then president of UMBC’s Faculty Senate. And when you are vice president or president of the Faculty Senate, you get to see a lot about how the university actually works. And though I might have thought initially that this would not be interesting, I found out that it was very interesting.

For me, the most interesting aspect of these positions was discovering that everyone here on campus is here because they want to make a difference – students, faculty and staff. And somehow I felt that my interest transitioned from making a difference through the research and teaching I was doing to being able to make a difference to our university community. And I also understood that it wasn’t because I – as an individual – would make a difference, but because I somehow sensed that I could work with people and bring people together around things that they were passionate about.

My approach to leadership is not standing on a mountaintop, waving a big flag. It’s to facilitate what our community wants to do and put our shared values into action. To bring people together who have ideas and want to do the work to get it from an idea to something that we can achieve. That is very satisfying.

“What I draw from my physics background is what most people draw from their discipline. It’s analysis. And that’s not just a skill that physicists or mathematicians possess since rigorous analytical skills are required by all disciplines. Nevertheless, navigating the current environment  in higher education does require a high degree of analysis ­ a background that gives one the ability to take a look at and ask questions of the data.

That background also lets me ask myself, and other members of the UMBC community, to think about the reasons for what¹s going on and what we see in the data. It¹s also a valuable approach to continuous improvement through assessment. We need to ask if an approach really worked. And, if it did, can we explain it?

In your biography, you mention that during your time as a theoretical physicist, you liked to shift from question to question within the discipline. How does that curiosity play out in your role as an academic leader at UMBC?

The reason I did that, I suppose, was curiosity. The desire to learn new things. The greatest thing about being an academic is that you get to learn for the rest of your life.

I never particularly liked the idea of getting into one narrow field and doing that for the rest of my life, however. I like the idea of taking knowledge and applying it to new situations. And very often science works like this: by taking knowledge and expertise from one field and looking at a question in a different field from that perspective.

The other thing this sort of curiosity does is let you think about working on bigger and more complex problems, rather than simply having one particular expertise. Going out and finding bigger problems that you might be able to approach with your perspective.

For me this is one of the most exciting things about what I do. I’m rather attracted to this kind of work and I hope to use that approach to facilitate and enhance what we do together at UMBC. That is why I feel so honored and privileged to be UMBC’s new Provost.

– Richard Byrne ’86

UMBC Magazine welcomes your letters to the editor on any issue related to the content of the magazine. Readers can email comments to byrne@umbc.edu. Faxed comments are accepted at 410-455-1889. Readers can also send letters to “Letters to the Editor,” UMBC Magazine, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Administration Building, Baltimore, MD 21250.

THE NAKED TRUTH

Our article in the Winter 2012 issue (“Blow Up”) drew a number of terrific responses.

It is amazing that photographs of dancers taken 42 years ago are an issue to be examined again in 2012. It is likely that these photographs still might offend the Maryland Senate as the subject is a man and woman together and nude. Certain concepts of what is permissible in a university publication are slow to change.

It was not an issue at the time but the dancers were a couple, they did not react in a sexual manner, they were dancers expressing emotions, feelings, through movement. I tried to capture those feelings, their relationship with each other. It seems natural that they were unclothed. If anything, I look at these images now and see the intimate bond and the caring that existed between them.

Neither Peter Caruso nor I had any idea at the time that those images would be so explosive, or even be discussed.

On a side note, years later I met the faculty advisor to the magazine who told me that he had been fired because of the photographs and he thought that I was dead. He was not too happy to learn that I was alive and standing in front of him.

— Robert Stark
Susquehanna Studio

Editor Richard Byrne replies: Stark’s photographs from that era will be featured in an exhibition at Keystone College this October – and much of his work can be found online at susquehannastudio.blogspot.com/

I was a student at UMBC in 1968, and graduated from there. I knew the whole cast of characters, including “Glenn” Blanchard, and not “Gary”! He was a brilliant man. His talents included being a playwright, poet, and musician. It would be a tribute to him to publish his play in the UMBC Magazine.

— A. Virginia Wolff ’73, psychology

Editor Richard Byrne replies: Thanks for correcting the error. Readers can find
early UMBC literary magazines online by searching “Dialogue” in the digital
collections of the Albin O. Kuhn Library: contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/index.php

I was at UMBC as a student at the tail end of that Dialogue implosion, but it was great getting the back story on the journal’s slow slide into cancellation. Given the events of the time, it was more than a little surprising to read of Chancellor Albin O. Kuhn’s defense of the journal and what it finally took for him to pull his support. Had we truly realized the extent of his attempts to calm things down, I’m sure it wouldn’t have changed things much, given the spirit of the times, but the article certainly changed my memory of his tenure.

What I really wanted to see at the conclusion of the piece, though, was a “to be continued” that promised a look at the founding of Bartleby – the journal that replaced Dialogue.

At 40 years old, Bartleby is one of the longer running campus literary journals in the country. The demise of Dialogue didn’t bode well for us getting funding for yet another adventure in literature that would likely outrage the administration. That we got the money, saw the project through, and didn’t incur any significant backlash is still pretty amazing to me, but more amazing is the fact that Bartleby remains in existence all these years later.

As we’ve gotten a great history of the turmoil of literary publishing on campus in its earliest days, can the rest of the picture be far behind? Operators are standing by.

— James Taylor ’73
Co-founder, Bartleby