Adrian Rosebrock ’14, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, was featured in a June 6th article for the online local news site Catonsville Patch. The article focused on Rosebrock’s development of a website and an application for iPhones called Chic Engine, which is supposed to help consumers locate clothing online and helps compare which colors and designs are available at which stores. Images can be uploaded to the site and compared with others available on Chic Engine, and features men’s and women’s shirts along with dresses, currently.

Speaking with Patch‘s Penny Riordan, Rosebrock described his motivation for starting the venture, saying, “I always hear people saying, ‘Where did you get that shirt?’ … This is the answer to that.”

Read the original article for the Catonsville Patch here for more details.

Should computer science be a required course for today’s college students? That’s the question posed by USA TODAY reporter Sonia Su.

UMBC’s Marie desJardins tell Su that, “Being a smart computer user is like being a smart consumer — the more you understand how it works, the more you can benefit from it,”

Su writes, “In her introductory computer science class for non-majors, desJardins said she emphasizes key concepts, one of which is that computational thinking is, as its core, about problem solving, which is useful for everyone.”

desJardins tells Su, “I find that my students often do not really know how to think clearly about a problem, identify the constraints and goals and analyze different alternative solutions,” said desJardins. “Computer science requires you to do all of these things, and to do them very clearly and precisely because computers only understand clear and precise instructions.”

But is computer science fun? Would students enjoy it?

Su writes, “UMBC Professor Penny Rheingans said she went to college expecting to major in something in the social sciences, but after taking a computer science course her first semester, she discovered something she loved.”

Rheingans told Su, “I found computing to be both incredibly frustrating and incredibly addicting,” Rheingans said in an email. “I love the challenge of building something to solve a problem and the satisfaction of figuring out why my creation isn’t working and fixing it.”

Marc Olano, associate professor of Computer Science and Electical Engineering and director of the Computer Science BS in Game Development Track, was quote in a Baltimore Sun story on the closing of the Timonium-based video game company Big Huge Games. The story, “Timonium video game maker closes, lays off 100,” appeared on May 25.

The 12-year-old company of 107 employees was shuttered last week as a result of its parent company, Providence, RI’s 38 Studios, closing down due to its own mounting debts. The loss of Big Huge Games to the Maryland video game industry is significant, as the company had been a “longtime major [player]” according to Olano. He also noted that the closing should not be a reflection on Big Huge Games’ own management and staff, but rather on the “financial problems of their parent [company] that had ultimately led to this.”

Last week the Center for Women in Information Technology (CWIT) held their second annual “Spring into Leadership,” event.

The event which is designed to provide networking opportunities to women majoring in engineering or information technology had 120 registrants up 23 registrants from last year. Registrants included students as well as 25 Industry professionals from Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Harris Corporation, NSA, BAE Systems, UserWorks, JHU/APL, CyberPoint International, General Electric’s Middle River Aircraft Systems, and AAI.

Wendy Martin, a vice president at Harris Corporation, gave the keynote address focusing on her story and the importance of diversity for organizational success. “The fact that you are different from your peers should not be something you shy away from or something that  you shield from others. It’s a gift, especially in the workplace,” she emphasized to the women majoring in engineering and IT at the event.

Following the keynote the participants were split into networking pairs and then groups.
“By all accounts the event this year was a tremendous success because of the teamwork of the student planning committee,” says Susan Martin, Associate Director of CWIT. “This event really contributes to the sense of community among women in the College of Engineering and Information Technology.”

Spring into Leadership was made possible with support from Lockheed Martin Corporation, the 2011-2012 sponsor of the CWIT Affiliates Program, the UMBC Student Government Association, and the UMBC Graduate Student Association. The program was implemented by student leaders from the CWIT Student Council, the Information Systems Council of Majors (ISCOM) the student chapters of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) graduate student organization. 

UMBC and Marie desJardins appeared in the New York Times. The article, “Computer Science for the Rest of Us,” describes the idea that all students should learn how to ‘think computationally’ and discusses the growing number of new efforts to teach non-majors how to do that, with or without learning how to program in conventional programming languages like Python or Java.

Marie desJardins, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, says her department uses Scratch in its “Introduction to Computers and Programming” course, in which students can try a few basic concepts. About 25 percent of the semester is spent on programming.

Explaining why Scratch is used at the college level, she says that all students arrive on campus having taken high school classes in English, math, biology and so on, but that many have not taken a computer science class.”

Last week the Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) held their annual event Bits & Bytes program for high school junior girls. The Bits & Bytes program is open to high school junior girls interested in finding out more about technology majors in college. The purpose of the event is to engage local high school girls in a college atmosphere as well as expose them to the possibility of an engineering or IT major.

“The event was definitely a success,” says Katie Glasser, Assistant Director of CWIT. “This is the largest group of girls we’ve ever had.”

Students come from high schools across Maryland and Virginia. “They get to know each other during the two-day program through team-building activities and the team design competitions,” says Glasser. Glasser says they also have the chance to meet with representatives from the different IT and engineering departments at UMBC, attend a college class, receive a tour of the UMBC campus and speak with a diverse group of UMBC students.

“It’s a lot of fun to see them experience college,” says CWIT scholar Michael Barrett. “This is a gateway for most of them.”

Northrop Grumman sponsored the event and Seanna Garrett from Northrop Grumman Corporation was the Keynote speaker at the Welcome Reception on Sunday evening. The Keynote is the kick-off to the Bits & Bytes event, and is designed to energize the high school girls and inspire them to be the next leaders in technology. In addition to the Keynote, a group of engineers from GE’s Middle River Aircraft Systems — Judah Baumer (UMBC Alumnus ’08), Holly Reilman, Margaret Schreffler, Rani Spivy and Rachel Preston — came on Sunday night to talk with the girls about potential engineering applications and they did an aviation engineering activity with paper airplanes.

The highlight of the two-day event was the engineering competition and the information technology competition. For the engineering competition the goal was to design an efficient vehicle that rolled down an inclined surface and crashed into a wall without disturbing the payload, an egg. For the information technology competition the student teams had to use the software, Alice, a 3-D programming environment. The objective? Create an animation based on a well-known children’s book using the Alice software. “The competition,” says one participant, “made me more confident about aspects of the Engineering field and my future potential.”

Each competition was judged by a team of three — composed of one UMBC faculty member, one UMBC student, and one industry professional. For the IT competition, the judges were Shreya Mohan (Information Systems Junior and CWIT Scholar), Amy Everhart (Information Systems), and Yolanda Clinton (Harris Corporation). There were two sets of judging teams for the engineering competition. One team included Amy Chou (Chemical Engineering Senior), Dr. Joshua Enszer (Chemical Engineering), and Gwen Cadieux (BAE Systems). The other team included Jessica Izumi (Chemical Engineering Sophomore), Dr. Tinoosh Mohsenin (Electrical Engineering), and Bridget Beamon (Johns Hopkins APL).

Some of the high school students say that as far as an engineering major goes they’re still on the fence. But, they say the Bits & Bytes program, allowed them to talk with UMBC students in the engineering and information technology programs at UMBC. This, they say introduced them to the different opportunities available — an experience which may one day soon give rise to the some of the nation’s next generation of engineers and information technology professionals.

Marko H. Bulmer is the Director of the Geophysical Flow Observatory, JCET at UMBC.

On January 4, 2012, I traveled to Haiti to join the Brazilian Military Contingent contributing to the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) mission. The purpose of the trip was to identify lessons from the United Nations Mission relevant to humanitarian emergency response and the use of Military and Civil defense assets to support United Nations humanitarian activities in complex emergencies.

First, a little background, a series of major earthquakes struck Haiti on 12 January 2010 in the area around the capital, Port-au-Prince. The strongest of these was a magnitude 7 that occurred at around 1700 hrs local time. There were over 200,000 fatalities and more than 150,000 people had to be buried in mass graves. Some 105,000 homes were completely destroyed and more than 208,000 damaged. Over 1,300 educational establishments and over 50 hospitals and health centers collapsed or were designated as unusable. Part of the country’s main port was not operational, the President’s Palace, Parliament, the Law Courts, and most of the Ministry and public administration buildings were also all destroyed.

At the time, there was already a UN Mission in Haiti which had been there since 2004 that included 6,700 troops as well as 548 civilian staff, mandated to pacify the country, promote free elections and resume national governance. Ninety six UN peacekeepers died in the earthquake but that UN Mission formed the core around which the Earthquake response was organized. On 19 January 2010 the Security Council passed resolution 1908, which increased the military force to 8,950, with 4,391 police to support the immediate recovery, reconstruction and stability efforts in the country. By the 25 January 2010 the UN Food Cluster had reached over 500,000 of the 2 million in need, with some form of assistance. The UN Shelter Cluster estimated that 800,000 people were living in spontaneous settlements in Port-au-Prince.

I’m a NATO Expert in Civil Protection and specialize in Natural Hazards and Emergency Planning with experience in natural and human-induced disasters from around the world. I’m also trained in Stabilization, which is the process by which underlying tensions that might lead to resurgence in violence and a break-down in law and order are managed and reduced, while efforts are made to support preconditions for successful longer-term development. My work in Haiti encompassed the notion of political transformation and disaster recovery. It focused on construction or reconstruction of the social, administrative, and physical infrastructure in a country prone to hurricanes, floods, landslides and earthquakes.

Simon Peacock, an expert in logistics from the United Kingdom, and I gathered and analyzed civil / military coordination information interacting with Haitian organizations, IGO’s and NGO’s, the Civil functions within MINUSTAH, and at times with Ministers and Ambassadors. Security conditions vary across Haiti, especially in the capital, parts of which can be very volatile. Over 400,000 people still live in camps many of which struggle in meeting basic human needs. Orphanages number in the hundreds, many of which are not officially registered. Gangs continue to be active. Murder, rape and lynching are some of the challenges facing the Haitian National Police (HNP) who are being mentored by United Nations Police and the military. Regional elections are expected to be held later this year and these will require a large security and logistics operation. Medical hazards include malaria and cholera as well as HIV AIDS. In addition, there remains considerable vulnerability to the impacts of natural events.

Delivering appropriate and effective civil / military cooperation in this complex environment requires real commitment and dedication. I saw many outstanding activities and projects and learned a great deal to bring back to UMBC and introduce to the appropriate departments and across the wider academic community.

M. H. K. Bulmer PhD

Once upon a time, Omolola Eniola-Adefeso ’99, chemical engineering, was on track to attend medical school. But she became a chemical engineer instead – so she could better attack problems such as her number one target: heart disease.
Eniola-Adefeso, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, investigates radical ways of delivering medicine that could prove efficient and effective than current practice. And she may succeed because she is thinks like an engineer – and not a doctor. Eniola-Adefeso came to Maryland from her native Nigeria the age of 16. She began her studies at Catonsville Community College, before transferring to UMBC, where she met the late Janice Lumpkin, an African-American chemical engineering professor. Lumpkin not only guided her student into a field where her passion for technology and medicine could intersect, but also helped her become a member of the first class of UMBC students in the Minority Access to Research Careers program.
After graduating from UMBC, she took a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. Her scholarship for graduate studies there was actually named after Lumpkin – who also attended Penn and died tragically after childbirth in 1997.
In 2006, Eniola-Adefeso (pronounced ah-DAY-feso and known to everyone as “Lola”) joined the faculty at Michigan where her lab seeks ways to create and use miniscule synthetic pellets to mimic white blood cells and deliver medicine more efficiently.
So far, she is succeeding with laboratory mice specially bred to have cardiovascular disease. She is moving next to larger animals before she attempts experiments on humans.
Why white blood cells? When there is an infection or injury in the body, nearby cells send out a chemical alarm. On receiving that signal, white blood cells – especially those known as neutrophils – leap to action.
Normally, neutrophils are spherical, but they can change their shape as they charge to the scene of injury, producing a sticky surface protein to match proteins at the target site. As the neutrophils pass injured tissue, their protein grabs onto proteins on the tissue and the neutrophils hoist themselves out of the blood stream, infiltrate the cell walls and go about the work of healing.
The system is incredibly efficient and it’s the reason most of us recover from our illnesses by doing nothing but letting the immune system do its thing.
But sometimes the forces of healing need help (such as antibiotics) which come in the form of pills or injections. And that’s where Eniola-Adefeso’s research comes in.
Current methods of drug delivery lack efficiency. A pill goes through the digestive system and is absorbed into the blood stream. Injections take a more direct route into the blood stream. But in both cases, only some of the drug winds up at the target site. Plus, extra medicine can occasionally cause serious and even fatal side effects.
Eniola-Adefeso’s proposed technique solves both issues. And because her father died of a heart attack five years ago, she’s focused her attention on cardiovascular disease. She’s trying to produce pellets that mimic white blood cells and go straight to heart muscle or blood vessels to repair them. Injected into your body, Eniola-Adefeso’s pellets – loaded with the right proteins and medicine – would find their way directly to damaged heart muscles or arteries and deliver medicine contained within it. Ideally the pellets would be designed to release the medicine for weeks or months, possibly even years.
The complexities include identifying target proteins in the cardiovascular system and factoring in significant variations in blood flow in the body. When the heart pumps blood, the arteries proximate to it surge like a river. But by the time the blood gets to your big toe or the skin of your elbow, it has slowed to a mild stream without the surge.
To actually deliver the medicine, Eniola-Adefeso’s pellets must also be biodegradable, so she is also working on testing polymers and plastics, seeking substances which degrade at just the right rate for what she wants to accomplish.
Then there is size. Eniola-Adefeso needs pellets about the same size as the neutrophils, which measure about 100 nanometers to about three micrometers and require a microscope to be seen. “Shape and size matter,” she says.
Eniola-Adefeso also believes the system would work for other diseases as well, including cancer. And her work is already receiving recognition. In April, she was the 2011 recipient of the Lloyd N. Ferguson Young Scientist from the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE), an award that recognizes and honors scientific contributions and achievements and dedication to research.
— Joel N. Shurkin

Once upon a time, Omolola Eniola-Adefeso ’99, chemical engineering, was on track to attend medical school. But she became a chemical engineer instead – so she could better attack problems such as her number one target: heart disease.

Eniola-Adefeso, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, investigates radical ways of delivering medicine that could prove efficient and effective than current practice. And she may succeed because she is thinks like an engineer – and not a doctor. Eniola-Adefeso came to Maryland from her native Nigeria the age of 16. She began her studies at Catonsville Community College, before transferring to UMBC, where she met the late Janice Lumpkin, an African-American chemical engineering professor. Lumpkin not only guided her student into a field where her passion for technology and medicine could intersect, but also helped her become a member of the first class of UMBC students in the Minority Access to Research Careers program.

After graduating from UMBC, she took a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. Her scholarship for graduate studies there was actually named after Lumpkin – who also attended Penn and died tragically after childbirth in 1997.

In 2006, Eniola-Adefeso (pronounced ah-DAY-feso and known to everyone as “Lola”) joined the faculty at Michigan where her lab seeks ways to create and use miniscule synthetic pellets to mimic white blood cells and deliver medicine more efficiently.

So far, she is succeeding with laboratory mice specially bred to have cardiovascular disease. She is moving next to larger animals before she attempts experiments on humans.

Why white blood cells? When there is an infection or injury in the body, nearby cells send out a chemical alarm. On receiving that signal, white blood cells – especially those known as neutrophils – leap to action.

Normally, neutrophils are spherical, but they can change their shape as they charge to the scene of injury, producing a sticky surface protein to match proteins at the target site. As the neutrophils pass injured tissue, their protein grabs onto proteins on the tissue and the neutrophils hoist themselves out of the blood stream, infiltrate the cell walls and go about the work of healing.

The system is incredibly efficient and it’s the reason most of us recover from our illnesses by doing nothing but letting the immune system do its thing.

But sometimes the forces of healing need help (such as antibiotics) which come in the form of pills or injections. And that’s where Eniola-Adefeso’s research comes in.

Current methods of drug delivery lack efficiency. A pill goes through the digestive system and is absorbed into the blood stream. Injections take a more direct route into the blood stream. But in both cases, only some of the drug winds up at the target site. Plus, extra medicine can occasionally cause serious and even fatal side effects.

Eniola-Adefeso’s proposed technique solves both issues. And because her father died of a heart attack five years ago, she’s focused her attention on cardiovascular disease. She’s trying to produce pellets that mimic white blood cells and go straight to heart muscle or blood vessels to repair them. Injected into your body, Eniola-Adefeso’s pellets – loaded with the right proteins and medicine – would find their way directly to damaged heart muscles or arteries and deliver medicine contained within it. Ideally the pellets would be designed to release the medicine for weeks or months, possibly even years.

The complexities include identifying target proteins in the cardiovascular system and factoring in significant variations in blood flow in the body. When the heart pumps blood, the arteries proximate to it surge like a river. But by the time the blood gets to your big toe or the skin of your elbow, it has slowed to a mild stream without the surge.

To actually deliver the medicine, Eniola-Adefeso’s pellets must also be biodegradable, so she is also working on testing polymers and plastics, seeking substances which degrade at just the right rate for what she wants to accomplish.

Then there is size. Eniola-Adefeso needs pellets about the same size as the neutrophils, which measure about 100 nanometers to about three micrometers and require a microscope to be seen. “Shape and size matter,” she says.

Eniola-Adefeso also believes the system would work for other diseases as well, including cancer. And her work is already receiving recognition. In April, she was the 2011 recipient of the Lloyd N. Ferguson Young Scientist from the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE), an award that recognizes and honors scientific contributions and achievements and dedication to research.

— Joel N. Shurkin