Kristin Waters, Assistant Registrar, was a presenter at the 82nd Annual Conference & Meeting for MSACROA held in Hershey, PA in late November. Waters presented on “Campus Scheduling: Creating Strategies on Building Collaboration.”

UMBC junior forward Pete Caringi III is among a group of thirty-four of the nation’s top men’s college soccer players who have been named finalists for the 2012 Soccer News Net College Boot award, recognizing the men’s college player of the year.

The editors of each of the sites in the Soccer News Net network nominated up to five local players for the award, each of which will be eligible for the regional player of the year award. The nominations included athletes playing at colleges within each site’s coverage area, as well as athletes from the area playing collegiately elsewhere in the country. Nine additional at-large selections rounded out the nominations.

Fans from across the country can be able to vote for the top collegiate player. Voting will continue until December 22, and will be conducted on DC Soccer News (www.dcsoccernews.com) which will officially launch later this year, but is conducting voting as an introduction to the site.

Online fan voting will account for 40% of the total toward the award. The remaining 60% of the vote will be cast by the Soccer News Net editorial staff.

The winner of the popular vote will receive the Soccer News Net Supporter’s Choice Award.

Caringi had a brilliant 2012 campaign, scoring 14 goals and amassing 32 total points for the America East Conference champion Retrievers (11-4-7), who reached the second round of the NCAA Men’s Soccer Championship. Entering the tournament, Caringi was eighth in the nation in goals scored.
The son of head coach Pete Caringi, Jr. was named America East Striker of the Year and was selected to the America East First Team. He was a two-time America East Player of the Week, an ECAC Division I Offensive Player of the Week and a multiple honoree on “Teams of the Week” for Soccer America and College Soccer News.

November 19 at 10:00 am, ITE 325B

Managing virtualized services efficiently over the cloud is an open challenge. Traditional models of software development are very time consuming and labor intensive for the cloud computing domain, where software (and other) services are acquired on demand. Virtualized services are often composed of pre-existing components that are assembled on an as-needed basis. We have developed a new framework to automate the acquisition, composition and consumption/monitoring of virtualized services delivered on the cloud. We have divided the service lifecycle into five phases of requirements, discovery, negotiation, composition, and consumption and have developed ontologies to represent the concepts and relationships for each phase. These are represented in Semantic Web languages. We have developed a protocol to automate the negotiation process when acquiring virtualized services. This protocol allows complex relaxation of constraints being negotiated based on user defined policies. W e have also developed detailed ontologies to define service level agreements for cloud services. To illustrate and validate how this framework can automate the acquisition of cloud services, we have built two applications from real world scenarios. The Smart cloud services application enables users to determine and procure the cloud storage application that matches most of their constraints and policies. We have also built a VCL broker application that allows users to automatically reserve the VCL Image that will best meet their requirements. We have developed a framework to measure and semi-automatically track quality of a virtualized service delivery system. The framework provides a mechanism to relate hard metrics typically measured at the backstage of the delivery process to quality related hard and soft metrics tracked at the front stage where the consumer interacts with the service. While this framework is general enough to be applied to any type of IT service, in this dissertation we have primarily concentratated on the Helpdesk service and include the performance rules we have created by mining Helpdesk data.

Thesis Committee:

Dr. Yelena Yesha (chair)
Dr. Tim Finin (co-chair)
Dr. Milton Halem
Dr. Yaacov Yesha
Dr. Aryya Gangopadhyay

Diane Lee, Jill Randles and Jarrett Kealey from the Office of Undergraduate Education, along with Sarah Jewett from the Office of the Provost, presented “UMBC Transfer Seminars: The Future of Transfer Student Success” at the 19th National Conference on Students in Transition in Philadelphia on October 15.

The annual conference provides the opportunity to share and learn from each other the latest trends, initiatives, best practices, ideas, research and assessment strategies focused on supporting student success.

The Cricket Hall of Fame in Hartford, Connecticut will hold its annual induction ceremony Saturday in Hartford, Connecticut. The Class of 2012 includes Jamie Harrison, president of the United States Youth Cricket Association (http://usyca.org), as well as West Indian fast bowler Courney Walsh and former USACA Exceutive Secretary John Aaron.

Harrison is a member of the UMBC Class of 2010 and a staffer with the Department of Information Technology.

http://www.crickethalloffame.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Youth_Cricket_Association

A new report from The Education Trust finds that UMBC is among the top colleges in the country for promoting Hispanic student success.

The brief, “Advancing to Completion: Increasing degree attainment by improving graduation rates and closing gaps for Hispanic students,” examined the achievement gap between Hispanic and white students at public and private colleges nationwide, and whether those institutions were successfully working to narrow that gap.

The study found that UMBC ranked 12th among public colleges for improvements in Hispanic students’ graduation rates between 2004 and 2010. Hispanic students at UMBC saw a 21.8-percentage-point increase in their six-year graduation rates, compared to a 3.5 point increase nationally. And UMBC ranked 13th nationally for its progress in narrowing the achievement gap between white and Hispanic students, with the two groups graduating at essentially the same rate.

The full report is available online from The Education Trust.

Rick Bissell, emergency health services, was as an invited panel discussant at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC. The panel discussed public access to timely and valid science-based information in disasters and other emergencies. This topic has risen in importance in recent years following information inaccuracies or withholding in the following incidents: airborne particulates and contaminants secondary to the collapse of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, several “mad cow” incidents in the last decade in which information has been obfuscated, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and various “superbug” infections at the NIH hospital, in which information was not shared with the public, emergency management, or other clinical centers.

These incidents were discussed as examples of the problem, and are not exhaustive. Bissell was one of three panelists, among 16, with an emergency public health and emergency management background. Other panelists represented journalism, food safety, environmental science, public policy, library science, political science, consumer safety, government communications, physics and nuclear proliferation, civil liberties and government accountability.

The Union of Concerned Scientists expects to have a preliminary policy paper available within the next month.

_Music of the Mind: Cliche Verre Photographs and Digital Imagery of Jaromir Stephany_, with an essay by Tom Beck, UMBC chief curator, has been published by the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery. The life and work of Jaromir “Jerry” Stephany, an Associate Professor of Art from 1973 to 1999, are presented in a monograph for the first time. Stephany has the distinction of being one of only a few artists ever who devoted so much of his career to making cliché verre photographs. He learned the technique from his mentor Henry Holmes Smith (acolyte of Moholy-Nagy), and made such “cosmic” series as “Landscapes of Outer Space” and “Psychosis.” Later in his career, he scanned his negatives into a computer and added vibrant colors to the work, thereby achieving an emotional load much like the classical music that he enjoyed throughout his life. Stephany’s last body of work, “Dark Music,” captures the last movement of a life inspired by such music as Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor. The book will be distributed by D.A.P. (Distributed Art Publishers).

From Philip Rous, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

The President has approved a new UMBC policy on development and approval of written academic agreements. The new policy covers all written academic agreements to which UMBC or any of its departments will be a party, except agreements for sponsored or unsponsored research and those between two or more departments within UMBC.[1] The new policy, the related procedures for developing written academic agreements, and the required forms can be found at http://www.umbc.edu/provost/Policies/Development_and_Approval_of_Written_Academic_Agreements.html.

The new policy and procedures are intended to support the following objectives:

1. To give UMBC faculty and staff the tools to draft agreements with potential partners according to guidelines that have been pre-approved by the UMBC University Counsel, thereby reducing the time needed for legal review of written agreements

2. To support UMBC faculty and staff in the efficient preparation of draft agreements by clarifying and streamlining the process by which they are developed, reviewed, approved, and signed at UMBC

3. To identify the Office of the Provost as the administrative unit responsible for the implementation of the policy and procedures, to which faculty and staff may address all questions about development, review, approval, and signing of written academic agreements covered by the policy

Beth Wells is the point of contact in the Provost’s Office for questions or information about the new policy on written academic agreements or about development of particular agreements. You can reach her at bwells@umbc.edu. Thank you very much.

Robert Deluty, associate dean of the graduate school, has published a new book of poetry, “A Crowded Life.” In his review, Joseph DeVitis writes: “In our crowded lives, where countless pressures often damage and paralyze us, Robert Deluty’s poems open windows allowing fresh, crisp air to renew us. Each of his lines bespeaks an exquisite sensibility to life, exposing the common humanity of our losses and victories. Wherever we live, however alone or free we might feel, Deluty extends our subtle understanding of the human condition within ourselves.”

Copies of “A Crowded Life,” as well as of Deluty’s other books, are on sale at the UMBC Bookstore.