A Reflection by Women’s Center Director, Jess Myers.

As our world transitions into the winter holiday spirit, I am less than eager to celebrate this year. I am sad, angry, and feeling hopeless in the wake of grand jury decisions that are rooted in deep injustices and a system that does not work for all. When I look back on 2014, I’m tempted to just call it a wrap. Nothing positive to reflect on this year, folks… let’s pack it up and move on. Yet, the top lists of 2014 (here, here, and here) keep circulating through my social media feeds and I keep coming back to this reflection, digging for ways to find hope. I found it in re-reading the story of our new Women’s Center logo. Loyal. Constant. Strong and Resilient. Season to Season. Survival. Growth. In the face of injustice, the Women’s Center continues to grow its roots and extend its branches to keep doing the important work of growing intersectional feminism and cultivating critical social justice.

With this as inspiration, my list is easier to write. Here’s some of my favorite Women’s Center moments of 2014. What are yours?

Introducing our new Women’s Center logo to the UMBC Community
In January 2014, we rolled out our new logo. We wanted and needed a logo that would speak to the depth of all the Women’s Center is and can be for our UMBC community. We found it in the Wye Oak tree. What’s just as exciting is that conversations and brainstorming for the logo inspired us to revisit the mission statement of the Women’s Center. After a good run of almost 20 years, it’s about time we update it! We’ve spent a great deal of 2014 reflecting deeply on who we are and who we want to be and we’re excited to do another introduction of our new mission statement in 2015.

It was the inaugural year of Critical Social Justice

With 17 events and 15 co-sponsors, Critical Social Justice was successfully launched despite the polar vortex and a campus snow day. The theme of Engaging in Difficult Dialogues was explored in various ways throughout the week and called us all to think about the meanings and challenges of social justice from many different angles and across different spaces. The keynote address was brilliantly delivered by Jay Smooth who provided important strategies for engaging in difficult dialogues (check out his How to Tell Someone They Sound Racist video) and the importance of using our privilege to help “carve out a space” for the underrepresented and people rendered invisible in our world (for more on that, check out this awesome video). Later in the year, Reina Gossett came to campus as part of the CSJ line up in the fall and highlighted the lives of trans activists, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson and challenged us to reconsider history knowing so many marginalized people’s experiences are “written outside the archives.”
Just as importantly, every time I talk about Critical Social Justice I feel called to name the fact that a student staff member was the person who first envisioned CSJ. Amelia Meman spent her first semester working in the Women’s Center crafting the idea with support and nuance from our Coordinator, Megan Tagle Adams, to get it to the important initiative it is today. Once again, I’m reminded that the work of social justice doesn’t have to be a waiting game. You don’t need to wait until you’re deemed a leader or figure head or have been cited as an expert. It’s everybody’s work and everybody’s job.

For more on CSJ 2014, explore #CSJ2014 on Twitter or check out the CSJ website. And, get excited for CSJ: Creating Brave Spaces coming to UMBC February 16-20, 2015!

The snow didn’t stop us from Taking Back the Night

One of my favorite song lyrics sings “this year April had a blizzard just to show she does not care” and that repeated over and over in my head as I watched huge chunks of snow begin to fall outside at this year’s Take Back the Night. Only on this cold night in April, UMBC community members did in fact care so very much. Over 250 community members packed themselves on to Main Street and listened for almost two hours to over 20 students who shared their experiences of sexual assault at the Speak Out. They then marched throughout the Commons to help take back the night and spread awareness that rape and sexual assault are not UMBC values and must stop. So take that snow!

The launch of our new roundtable series

This year we officially said good bye to our long standing film series and instead offered a new roundtable series. Our first three roundtables (in February, September, and November) explored the intersection of race and gender and provided thought-provoking conversations in addition to validation and supportive space for UMBC community members to share the personal ways race and gender influences their lived experiences. With our largest crowd edging over 60 participants, we’re looking forward to what the spring line-up of roundtables will bring!

Presenting at the National Women’s Studies Association’s annual conference

While this favorite memory of 2014 may not directly impact everyone in our community, attending and presenting at NWSA was pretty awesome. First of all… bell hooks and Angela Davis were there and did not disappoint in their speaking of important truths and calls to put intersectional feminist into action. Three Women’s Center staff members also presented at NWSA. Student staff member, Amelia Meman, and our coordinator, Megan Tagle Adams, led two roundtable sessions addressing women of color voices at women’s, gender equity, and sexuality centers. They created important space to recognize the work of women of color working in women’s centers and the barriers they face as they navigate and disrupt the historic and present white-centrism of women’s centers. And, after spending almost a year researching, interviewing, coding, and writing, my research team finally did our first presentations together exploring the activist strategies that students use in their sexual assault activism work. We were able to share the ways these activists are specifically using social media as a tool to create awareness about sexual assault on their campuses and advocate for institutional and legislative changes. Overall, tons of learning to be had by all of us and we hope we’re better staff folks for the Women’s Center and UMBC community because of our learning experiences at this year’s NWSA conference.

Awesome Blog Posts and Staff Members

I don’t know about you, but I read every post on this little blog page of ours. We spend each staff meeting assigning writing deadlines to student staff members, and I’ll be honest, sometimes, I feel like writing is one of their least favorite assignments. Then, they post these amazing stories about their lives and important reflections about their experiences (I’m not kidding… read this and this and this  and this for starters). They allow themselves to become vulnerable and raw in their writings in a way that truly reflects the spirit and values of our Women’s Center community. Beyond their writing, our Women’s Center staff members show up to work each day with a fierce commitment to making the Women’s Center a better place. They challenge me to grow and push me to be brave. The Women’s Center wouldn’t be us without the important work our students do. I’m thankful for them.

Just as importantly, throughout 2014, our older (and newer) programs and groups continued to serve as cornerstones to the Women’s Center community. We now have a peer-to-peer mentoring program for returning women students and two of our Newcombe Scholars (Amy and Melissa) were featured on the Class of 2014 website. Rebuilding Manhood just wrapped up its 5th cohort experience. The Women of Color Coalition continued to gain momentum and participation. Between Women entered into its third year of providing important space for LGBTQ women’s voices. The Spectrum community met on a weekly basis to provide meaningful and revolutionary space for trans students to simply be them.

Perhaps our country is indeed on a brink of a movement of change. If that’s the case, this year’s reflection leads me to believe the Women’s Center community and its members are ready to rise up and be counted in the fight for justice.

CSEE’s Marie desJardins recently collaborated with a group of Howard County parents and teachers to create HowGirlsCode, an educational program that “educates and inspires young girls to pursue computer related activities, courses, and careers.”

The program–originally called Computer Mania Club–is based out of Fulton Elementary School. Over the course of ten weeks, students meet for weekly two-hour sessions, working on projects such as Lego Mindstorm robots and 3D printing. Students also work with programming tools such as MIT’s Scratch program. The curriculum for the program is largely based off of materials from the Code.org website.

UMBC alumna Katie Egan and her husband Kent Malwitz have been instrumental in getting the club off the ground. Malwitz, who is the President and Chief Learning Officer for UMBC Training Centers, originally recruited Marie desJardins to participate in a brainstorming session for the club back in 2013. Professor desJardins now serves as a member of the Advisory Board for HowGirlsCode.

Bethany Meyer, Senior Web Developer at MGH, Inc., was a recent guest speaker for HowGirlsCode. During her presentation, Meyer explained how she got into coding, citing as an example a website that she created when she was 13 years old. Meyer went on to present more recent projects, such as OldBay75.com and OCOcean.com. “I think a lot of people have negative stereotypes in mind when they think of programmers,” Meyer says. “My goal was to break down some of those stereotypes by showing…[students] that the work can be really exciting and that it involves creativity and interacting with others. I hope that I inspired some of them to teach themselves to make websites. ”

A recent Baltimore Sun article notes that there has been a marked increase in student signups for HowGirlsCode since last year. More courses will be offered in the spring, due to increasing demand. At some point, the coding club could possibly expand to other schools. Currently, Egan is trying to turn HowGirlsCode into a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, charitable organization. This would allow the club to have better access to resources such as facilities, grants and funding. Ideally, she hopes to turn the club into a nonprofit by September 2015.

The Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab has a similar program, called Girls Who Code. The Hopkins APL program, which is intended for middle and high school students, is based on a national nonprofit of the same name.

The Information Retrieval and Machine Learning group at Oracle Labs is looking for highly motivated interns for both Spring and Summer 2015. The candidate should be proficient in Machine Learning and/or Statistical NLP.

Their current focus is in the areas of search, information extraction, including entity extraction and linking, relationship extraction, sentiment analysis as well as topic models. Other focus areas include parallel and distributed inference algorithms, deep learning and word embeddings, graphical models and transfer learning.

Research experience in any of these areas is strongly preferred. The candidate should also have good implementation skills in Java, Scala or other common language of choice.

They are located in Burlington, MA, and the candidate would need to relocate to this area. They are open to both Masters and PhD candidates, but PhD candidates are preferred. Send your CV to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. <mailto:Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. > for applications or questions about the position. Oracle is an equal opportunity employer.

Ph.D. thesis defense

Paper Form Classification for Information
Systems Strengthening in Developing Countries

Huguens Jean

1:00pm Friday, 19 December 2015, ITE 325b

In developing countries, people are now more likely to have access to a mobile phone than clean water, making cellular based technology the only viable medium for collecting, aggregating, and communicating local data so that it can be turned into useful information. While mobile phones have found broad application in reporting health, financial and environmental data, many data collection methods still suffer from delays, inefficiency and difficulties maintaining quality. In environments with insufficient IT support and infrastructure, and among populations with limited education and experience with technology, paper forms rather than electronic methods remain the predominant means for data collection.

To meet the digitization needs of paper driven data collection practices in developing countries, SHREDDR proposes an end-to-end architecture that transforms paper form images into structured digital information on-demand. To facilitate the automatic extraction of input regions in form images, this thesis extends the SHREDDR architecture with the necessary capabilities to efficiently classify form images according to their template document. Specifically, it introduces a novel framework for visually identifying form templates by decomposing the template identification problem into three distinct tasks: retrieval, learning and matching (RLM).

Given a query form instance, the retrieval component finds and ranks the topmost h similar templates. If h>1, the matching component uses full image registration to conduct a more rigorous assessment of the visual similarity between the query form instance and the candidate templates. After matching, the retrieval’s preliminary ranking is adjusted, if necessary. The topmost candidate template with the highest registration score satisfying a global alignment threshold denotes the input form’s template. Based on the answer obtained from matching, the learning component updates the retrieval so that it can provide a better ranking in future searches. If h=1, the RLM bypasses matching and uses the retrieved template as the final classification.

Based on the proposed framework, the present thesis investigates form classification under the conditions of known and unknown template classes. A pilot study integrating the RLM into the SHREDDR system demonstrates its classification accuracy and its impact on digitization efficiency.

Committee: Drs. Timothy Oates (Chair), Fow-Sen Choa, Janet Rutledge, Jesus Caban, Nilanjan Banerjee

CSEE Professor Anupam Joshi has been named an IEEE Fellow, recognized for his for contributions to security, privacy and data management in mobile and pervasive systems. This designation is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors on individuals with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement. No more than 0.1% of the total IEEE voting membership can be selected in a year.

Dr. Joshi joined UMBC’s faculty in 1998 and currently is the Oros Family Professor of Technology and Director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity. He previously held faculty appointments at the University of Missouri, Columbia and Purdue University. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University and a B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. While at UMBC he has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in operating systems, mobile computing and security. He developed and teaches an Honors College seminar on “Privacy and Security in a Mobile Social World”. He has mentored nine Ph.D. graduates and a large number of M.S. students.

Joshi has made many contributions to the design, analysis and development of intelligent systems for mobile, social and secure computing. Twenty years ago he was one of a handful of researchers who recognized that mobility introduced new challenges for data management, security and privacy over and above those brought about by wireless connectivity. His key insight was to model mobile and pervasive systems as distributed systems that are both open, in that they do not pre-identify a set of known participants, and dynamic, in that the participants change regularly.

He observe that applications on mobile devices require greater degrees of decision making and autonomy as they become increasingly sophisticated and intelligent and can’t always assume connectivity to central servers. Entities in these pervasive computing systems must exchange information about the data and services offered and sought and their associated security and privacy policies, negotiate for information and resource sharing, be aware of their context, and monitor for and report on suspicious or anomalous behavior. Dr. Joshi has addressed these challenges across the stack, from network protocols to data management to policy controlled interactions between autonomous entities.

Much of his research has been done in collaboration with colleagues in industry such as IBM, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman and Qualcomm. It has been funded by not just them, but also NSF, DARPA, AFOSR, ARL, NIST and other federal agencies. Joshi has published prolifically with more than 200 publications in refereed journals and conferences, many of which are highly cited. He has served as the General or Program Chair of many key conferences including the IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics which will be held in Baltimore in May 2015.

The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. Through its 400,000 members in 160 countries, it is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics. Dedicated to the advancement of technology, the IEEE publishes 30 percent of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, and has developed more than 900 active industry standards.

Name: Jessica Moreno

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: Art With a Heart | Title of Your Position: Social Media and Documentation Intern

Major(s)/Minor(s): Media and Communication Studies (MCS) / American Studies

Expected Graduation Year: May 2015

Briefly describe your internship, co-op, research, or service-learning opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

For this internship, I was assigned to travel to various sites and document the art classes that Art with a Heart offers during the summer through photography. Art with a Heart is a non-profit organization that works to enhance the lives of people in need through visual art. They bring their 7,500 visual art classes to abused, neglected and abandoned children; homeless people; battered women and their children; pregnant adolescents; mentally and physically disabled adults; low-income senior citizens; elementary, middle, and high school students; youth in after-school programs; and children receiving long-term health care. Not only did I have to travel to the art classes, I had to build relationships with the participants in order to gain their trust in order for me to photograph them and their artwork. I created numerous content such as photos and videos and managed their Instagram account.

Describe the process of obtaining your internship, research, or co-op opportunity.

I knew that I wanted to do an internship over the summer and since I am an intern at the Career Center, I knew that UMBCworks was the place to start my internship search. I searched for positions that I knew I was interested in and I applied online. Through UMBCworks, I landed my internship at Art with a Heart.

Which of the following resources did you use to find your current experience?

Career Center and UMBCworks.

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?

I enjoyed documenting the artwork that all the students worked on during the summer. I was able to communicate and talk to the participants and with the art teachers from Art with a Heart. I also enjoyed the editing process such as doing work on Photoshop and Sony Vegas to edit photos and create videos.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

I would say the relationships I made with the staff and the participants. The staff from Art with a Heart is doing life changing work for those in need and it was nice for me to spend time with them and learn more about the organization and its history.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

I strongly encourage students to meet with a career advisor at the Career Center if they are unsure on how to start the internship/job search process. I was worried that I would not be able to get an internship so for me, it was important to ask questions. After all, the Career Center is there to help us students succeed!

Please provide a short quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process.

Do not be discouraged if you do not land an internship the first time. Be persistent and apply for multiple positions because in the end, you will obtain one. It just takes time and perseverance!

MS Thesis Defense

SAX-BOP: Epileptic Seizure Detection using
Symbolic Aggregate Approximation and Bag of Patterns

Sidharth Allani

1:00pm Friday, 12 December 2014, ITE 325b

Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder that makes patients susceptible to experiencing recurrent seizures. A seizure occurs when abnormal activity in the brain leads to involuntary body moment, lack of awareness or behavior, short-term loss of memory or attention, short-term unconsciousness, or body convulsions. Epilepsy affects three million people in the United States and accounts for $15.5 billion in direct and indirect costs.

Epilepsy has many different causes, and often no definite cause can be found. Patients who suffer from intractable seizures experience unpredictable and frequent seizures that cannot be controlled using anti-seizure drugs. Such seizures leave the patient traumatized and, due to their uncertainty, the patient’s mobility and independence are restricted, resulting in social isolation and economic hardship.

The research in this thesis aims to detect epileptic seizures and to analyze the performance of Symbolic Aggregate approXimation and the Bag of Patterns representation for seizure event detection. We use Electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings as the data source for seizure detection, which is the recording of electrical activity along the scalp that measures ionic current flows within the neurons of the brain. These signals are a good source of information about abnormal activity in the brain and are helpful in the process of epileptic seizure detection. This problem becomes challenging because of the enormous size of the EEG data, making it difficult to effectively and efficiently analyze these signals and detect a seizure. We use Symbolic Aggregate approXimation (SAX) and the Bag of Patterns Representation (BOP) and analyze their performance with EEG time series data to detect seizures.

Committee: Drs. Tim Oates (chair), Tim Finin and Tinoosh Mohsenin

Please read-while not paid...this could be a tremendous opportunity --especially for freshmen and sophomores.

DHS has launchedthe 2015 Secretary’s Honors Program Cyber Student Volunteer Initiative through which approximately 75 undergraduate students will complete cybersecurity-focused assignments at more than 50 locations across the country. Selected student volunteers will learn about the DHS cybersecurity mission and engage in hands-on cybersecurity work related to digital forensics, network diagnostics, incident response and a variety of other specialties.

The department has extended the application deadline to January 9, 2015, and interested students may apply via USAJobs.gov. If you have not done so already, please share this opportunity with possible applicants at your institution. You can find more information about the Initiative in the attached description, and feel free to direct any questions to CMSI@hq.dhs.gov.

 http://www.dhs.gov/news/2014/11/24/dhs-announces-2015-cyber-student-volunteer-initiative