Join the UMBC Computer Science Education Club and the Center for Women in Technology for a free screening of the award winning film, CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap. The documentary exposes the dearth of American female and minority software engineers and explores the reasons for this gender gap. CODE raises the question: what would society gain from having more women and minorities code?

CODE will be screened on Friday March 31 at 3:00-5:00pm in ITE 104.  A discussion about the film will immediately follow the screening. Snacks will be provided!  RSVP via myUMBC to let the organizers know you will be there on Friday 3/31!.

Here’s a trailer for the film:

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The Journey to Pluto: The New Horizons Mission

Wednesaday, March 29 from 6:30 - 8pm at Howard County Room, Building 1 APL (11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel MD 20723)

Join Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU-APL) for a SWE membership meeting and exciting space talk! The presentation will focus on the New Horizons Spacecraft and will describe the Spacecraft, Science Objections, and some of the challenges encountered in preparing for the flyby event. Some early science discovery highlights will also be presented. For more information and event registration, visit http://www.baltwashswe.org/event-2497026.

Meet Stephanie,

She is a double major student working on her degrees in Computer Science and Psychology. She is a member of the Honors College, the Vice President of the Computer Science Education club, a member of the Retriever Robotics Club, a CWIT affiliate, and the Curriculum Development Coordinator for the Creative Coders Program. She is also a Research Assistant for CS Matters in Maryland and a Research Assistant for the Multi-Agent Planning and Learning (MAPLE) lab. Previously, she was the Secretary of QUMBC. Her future ambitions are to continue researching Artificial Intelligence or a related field and to continue with outreach in computer science education.

Stephanie's research will explore a recently developed method of hierarchical planning: a hierarchy of abstract Markov decision processes (AMDPs). AMDPs seek to address the immensely challenging problems that decision-making agents face when operating in large environments to solve complex tasks. A hierarchy of AMDPs provides a framework for decomposing such problems into distinct, related subtasks. Her previous tasks for research in this area were to design an AMDP hierarchy for a house-building domain and to collaborate with her lab members to research and write a paper combining the R-MAX algorithm with AMDPs. Currently, she is working with her lab members to research and write a paper on constructing and reasoning over composite objects.

Read more about her research here…

UMBC CSEE Seminar Series

Phase synchrony in heart-brain interactions predicts personality and emotions

Ehsan Shokri Kojori
NIH, National Institute on Alcoloh Abuse and Alcoholism

1:00-2:00pm Friday, 17 March 2017, ITE 231

Despite the historical interest in the link between brain and heart, it is unknown whether brain and heart interactions provide meaningful information about emotions and personality. Here we studied the phase and amplitude of coherence between cardiac pulse and resting state fMRI signals in 203 subjects. We show low-frequency (LF, < 0.1 Hz) components of the resting-state networks (RSN) share significant content with corresponding components in physiological recordings. We found LF cardiovascular components precede those in RSNs, and LF respiratory components follow those in RSNs. Phase dispersion (in LF) between cardiac (but not respiratory) and RSN signals predicted a main positivity-negativity dimension of personality (r = 0.31, p < 0.0001) and emotions (r = 0.24, p = 0.001). Specifically, higher phase dispersion between cardiac and brain RSNs predicted higher tendency toward negative inclinations. In summary, these results provide evidence that brain-wide sensitivity to cardiovascular signaling predicts a main dimension of personality and emotions. Finally, our analysis of phase dispersion may have diagnostic value in specific neuropsychiatric disorders.

Dr. Ehsan Shokri Kojori joined the Laboratory of Neuroimaging at the NIH National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
 as a postdoctoral IRTA fellow in August 2014 and became a Research Fellow in May 2016. He earned a PhD degree in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Texas at Dallas in Spring 2014. Ehsan also has a background in electrical engineering and signal processing. His interests include combining brain imaging modalities (e.g., fMRI, DTI, and PET) and behavioral measurements to understand the neurocognitive underpinnings of goal directed behavior. His current work involves studying how addiction and alcohol abuse affect efficiency and energetic cost of the brain networks. He is also working on developing novel methodologies to better characterize anatomical and functional brain connectivity indices.

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