This Friday, August 31, new and returning students are invited to the Office of Undergraduate Education's Open House.

Held from Noon to 2 p.m. in the Academic IV Building (Room 114), the event is a chance to talk about First Year Seminars, The New Student Book Experience, Undergraduate Research, and an Introduction to an Honors University.

MS Thesis Defense

Predicting the Activities of Mobile Phone Users
with Hidden Markov Models

Amey Sane

9:00am Tuesday, 28 August 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

Mobile phones are ubiquitous and increasingly capable, with sophisticated sensors, network access, significant storage and processing power and access to a wide range of application data. They can improve the range and quality of their services by acquiring and using models of their context, including the activities in which their users are engaged. This thesis explores the use of supervised machine learning techniques for predicting a smartphone user's activities from available sensor data. We have specifically concentrated on applying classifiers and ensembles using hidden markov models for activity recognition. Our classifiers predict a user's current activity from among a set of conceptual activity classes such as sleeping, traveling, playing, working, and chatting/watching TV. We have experimented with and evaluated the effectiveness of different approaches on data collected on Android smartphones by university faculty and students.

Committee: Drs. Tim Finin (chair), Anupam Joshi and Yelena Yesha

• Lead generation campaign
• Re-marketing campaign
• E-Card Designs for Health Coaches to use as their Client Relationship Management tool
• Other marketing supportive tasks

To apply to these positions, search for keyword "Medifast" in UMBCworks.

The following research positions have been posted recently to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings!

• 9252441 Web Programmer Internship
• 9252440 Assistant Proposal Coordinator
• 9252379 Math Modeling Internship
• 9252478 Parent-Child Interaction Video Coder
• 9245845 RC Helicopter Pilot
• 9241636 Organic Program Internship
• 9253267 Protocol Development and Implementation Internship
• 9251693 Research and Special Projects
• 9253219 Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Congressional Fellows Program on Energy

If, in getting to this post, you navigated straight to myUMBC and bypassed UMBC's home page, you probably haven't seen its new look.

The update is part of a long term project to improve UMBC's web presence. "Our marketing and recruitment efforts demand a cutting edge homepage, and the innovation and expertise of our faculty in the computer science, information technology and visual design fields further raise the bar," said a UMBC press release. "In the constantly evolving environment of the web, we simply can’t stand still."

The goal is to make the site more user friendly. To that effect, the update includes tabs targeted toward different members of the UMBC community (current students, prospective students, faculty and staff, etc.) that provide the most relevant information for their audience.

Plus, the new page is designed to work well with mobile devices like smartphones, and tablets.

You can send feedback about the new design to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. What do you think makes a website user friendly? Does UMBC's new homepage meet your criteria?