Wondering why and what people in different Baltimore neighborhoods are protesting?

Confused about what caused the peaceful protests as well as violent riots?  

Unclear about the various perspectives on what led to Freddie Gray's death?

Puzzled by the reactions and responses of your classmates and colleagues - particularly those of African descent?  

To begin to explore some answers to these questions and more, we invite you to read a few articles recently shared with us by one of our campus faculty partners Dr. Joby Taylor, Director of UMBC's Shriver Peaceworker Program.  Feel free to share widely.  This is by no means a complete list of what's being written about past and recent events in Baltimore city, so feel free to email us at mosaic@umbc.edu with suggested article links that we can add to this list.  

Link to Marc Steiner Show with a couple of produced videos on Freddie Gray, and Monday's 2 hour radio show (podcast), which gave some solid and important community perspectives that go below the sensational surface of most news reports.

Link to Dan Rodrick's column yesterday on the "Other Baltimore" connected back to '68 scene.

Editorial on Why Freddie Gray Ran in Baltimore Sun published a couple days before Monday's unrest.

Link to Open Society Institute's Statement in Response to the Killing of Freddie Gray posted yesterday on their Audacious Ideas website. 

Link to a short open letter from Viva House, located in West Baltimore, sent out yesterday morning.

Spring 2015 IS Distinguished Lecture 
Department of Information Systems

Opinion Mining, Machine Learning and Big Data

Dr. Philip Bourne
Associate Director for Data Science
The National Institutes of Health

10:00am Tuesday, 5 May 2015, ITE 456, UMBC

Philip E. Bourne is the Associate Director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health. Formally he was Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Industry Alliances, a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank and an Adjunct Professor at the Sanford Burnham Institute.

Bourne's professional interests focus on service and research. He serves the national biomedical community through contributing ways to maximize the value (and hence accessibility) of scientific data. His research focuses on relevant biological and educational outcomes derived from computation and scholarly communication. This implies algorithms, text mining, machine learning, metalanguages, biological databases, and visualization applied to problems in systems pharmacology, evolution, cell signaling, apoptosis, immunology and scientific dissemination. He has published over 300 papers and five books, one of which sold over 150,000 copies.

Bourne is a Past President of the International Society for Computational Biology, an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Society for Computational Biology and the American Medical Informatics Association.  His awards include: the Jim Gray eScience Award (2010), the Benjamin Franklin Award (2009), the Flinders University Convocation Medal for Outstanding Achievement (2004), the Sun Microsystems Convergence Award (2002) and the CONNECT Award for new inventions (1996 and 1997).