Dedicated UMBC colleagues across departments, colleges, and disciplines having been digging deep into "applied learning experiences" and what means at UMBC. This includes identifying stakeholders, criteria, and a definition:

A UMBC applied learning experience engages students in reflectively developing knowledge, attitudes, skills, and values in the traditional classroom setting or in contexts beyond the classroom. Applied learning experiences promote career readiness and responsible citizenship. 

Recognized applied learning experiences include service-learning, which can be secured through The Shriver Center’s 096 Community Service & Learning Practicum. Dr. Thomas Penniston, Shriver Peaceworker Fellow Program alumnus, successfully completed his doctoral program in Language, Literacy and Culture on the benefits of service-learning through qualitative and quantitative research. To learn more, go to https://shrivercenter.umbc.edu/engaged-scholarships/

At the beginning of the 3^rd week of the spring semester, some sites have filled, but others have great needs. With close to 70 community partners (the majority being youth-based sites), we are seeking UMBC students to help partners build capacity and move their respective missions.

HIGHEST NEEDS:

College Gardens - Wednesdays and Thursdays

SUCCESS - there are a number of openings - see the attachment

Walden Circle Community Center – Thursdays are a top priority; other days are welcomed (Monday-Friday, one day)!

Paid Leadership Position with afterschool program for current UMBC students at Walden Circle - Fridays, 2:30-6:30 pm   https://shrivercenter.umbc.edu/news/?id=73420

More sites across different issue areas can be found at https://umbc.app.box.com/file/268416756339

To set up a time to meet with Service-Learning Staff, either call (410) 455-2493 or stop by (M-F, 8:30am-5pm, 1st floor of the Public Policy Building, just past the elevator). Extended Hours “Goodnight Sarge” are available for the next three weeks, every Tuesday, 5-8pm:  TONIGHT (2/13), 2/20, and 2/27. Spring registration concludes by March 1^st.

The Service-Learning Team is working on our social media presence. Want to share your talents? Contact Kasey Venn at kasven1@umbc.edu.

UMBC’s commitment to STEM education and increasing diversity in engineering and computing fields is a trademark of the university. Five mechanical engineering faculty are continuing to expand this work through a nearly $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) S-STEM program, which focuses on retaining and graduating STEM students via scholarships and activities.

Liang Zhu, PI on the grant and professor of mechanical engineering, explains that the grant will enable UMBC to continue boosting support for diverse students in the major, to propel them toward success in mechanical engineering careers. Zhu is collaborating on the grant with Deepa Madan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering; Ronghui Ma, associate professor of mechanical engineering; Chuck Eggleton, professor of mechanical engineering; and Tim Topoleski, interim chair and professor of mechanical engineering.

This is UMBC’s third round of S-STEM funding since 2010. After the initial grant in 2010, Zhu and her collaborators received a second grant in 2014 for over $500,000 to support student scholarships. The latest round of funding extends the program another five years, and includes collaborations with UMBC’s Meyerhoff Scholars Program, Career Center, student life, and financial services, to connect students with a broad range of resources and supports.

“Scholarships, mentoring, academic support services, internships, research, and professional development opportunities all play a role in this,” says Zhu. “We are excited to test and document how effective these different approaches are at increasing mechanical engineering students’ level of engagement and success.”

Since the program began in 2010, UMBC’s mechanical engineering department has seen an increase in diversity among students in the major. According to data from the NSF, among the 20,000 students who earned bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering nationally between 2002-2012, 12% were women, 3% identified as African American, and 8.2% identified as Hispanic. Before the program launched, UMBC’s numbers were similar to the national figures: about 12% of students in the major were women, 11% identified as African American, and 2% identified as Hispanic. Currently, about 19% of students in the major are women, 12% identify as African American, and 5.5% identify as Hispanic. Zhu recognizes there is still a long way to go and hopes to further improve representation in the major over the next five years. Zhu estimates that the new round of funding will be used to support approximately 45 students over the course of the grant, while they earn their undergraduate degrees in mechanical engineering at UMBC.

The S-STEM program is open to incoming freshmen, transfer students, and current students who are pursuing mechanical engineering degrees, provided they maintain a specific GPA and have financial need. Students selected for the program will participate in a variety of activities to enhance their education, including research experiences, faculty and peer mentoring, community-building activities, lectures and other events, and professional development activities.

Zhu has been most energized, recently, by her collaboration with local community colleges, where she and the co-PIs travel to speak about opportunities within UMBC’s mechanical engineering program. There, she highlights unique research opportunities and internship possibilities available for UMBC’s mechanical engineering students, which are major draws for prospective students.

Ongoing support from NSF motivates Zhu to continue in her outreach work with prospective students and mentorship of current undergraduates. “Attracting community college students to our mechanical engineering program and improving the retention and graduation rates of our scholars are two key approaches to supporting the diversity of tomorrow’s engineering workforce,” says Zhu. “Receiving this grant for the third time is an indication of the high quality of our program and affirmation that we’re on the right track.”

UMBC ME S-STEM website: me-stem.umbc.edu

UMBC news link: https://news.umbc.edu/nsf-grants-umbc-nearly-1-million-to-expand-supports-for-mechanical-engineering-students/

Did you know?
Dr. Nicolas Papanicolaou innovated what we today call the Pap smear (named for him) at his medical practice in Greece, but it was tested and brought into common practice through testing done at Cornell in the 1930s. The Pap test is a method of cervical screening used to detect potentially pre-cancerous and cancerous processes caused by HPV, in the cervix.  The Pap test, when combined with a regular program of screening and appropriate follow-up, can reduce cervical cancer deaths by up to 80%.

Apply for a URA and get up to $1500 to support your research or creative work!
Deadline: Feb. 16
ur.umbc.edu/ura

CHMPR Distinguished Lecture Series

Nonnegative Binary Matrix Factorization
with a D-Wave Quantum Annealer

Dr. Daniel O’Malley
Los Alamos National Laboratory

1:30 15 February 2018, ITE325, UMBC

D-Wave quantum annealers represent a novel computational architecture and have attracted significant interest. Much of this interest has focused on the quantum behavior of D-Wave machines, and there have been few practical algorithms that use the D-Wave. Machine learning has been identified as an area where quantum annealing may be useful. Here, we show that the D-Wave 2X can be effectively used as part of an unsupervised machine learning method. This method takes a matrix as input and produces two low-rank matrices as output — one containing latent features in the data and another matrix describing how the features can be combined to approximately reproduce the input matrix. Despite the limited number of bits in the D-Wave hardware, this method is capable of handling a large input matrix. The D-Wave only limits the rank of the two output matrices. We apply this method to learn the features from a set of facial images and compare the performance of the D-Wave to two classical tools. This method is able to learn facial features and accurately reproduce the set of facial images. The performance of the D-Wave is mixed. It outperforms the two classical codes in a benchmark when only a short amount of computational time is allowed (200-20,000 microseconds), but these results suggest heuristics that would likely outperform the D-Wave in this benchmark.

Daniel O’Malley is a scientist in the Computational Earth Science group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Prior to that, he held postdoctoral positions at LANL and in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University. He studied at Purdue University, receiving a B.S. degree in computer science and mathematics (2004), an M.S. in mathematics (2006) and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics (2011). His research interests include computational science (with an emphasis on subsurface flow and transport), quantum computing, uncertainty quantification, and machine learning. He has won numerous awards including a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellowship from LANL (2014), the InterPore-Fraunhofer Award for Young Researchers from the International Society for Porous Media (2012), a Charles C. Chappelle Fellowship from Purdue University (2004), and the Meyer E. Jerison Memorial Award in Analysis from the Department of Mathematics at Purdue University (2004).

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