In 2018, The Office of the Provost at UMBC established a faculty award program to recognize excellence among tenured faculty in all three colleges. Awardees were selected based on the promise and strength of their scholarship and teaching at UMBC.

This year’s faculty awards include two CSEE faculty members- Cynthia Matuszek, who has received the Early Career Faculty Excellence Award, and William Smith who has received the Adjunct Faculty Excellence Award.

These awards will be recognized at COEIT’s Spring Celebration event on Sunday, May 1, 2022 in the RAC at 2PM.

"The goal of this project is to allow robots to learn to understand spoken instructions and information about the world directly from speech with end users. Modern robots are small and capable, but not adaptable enough to perform the variety of tasks people may require. Meanwhile, too many machine learning systems work poorly for people from under-represented groups. The research will use physical, real-world context to enable learning directly from speech, including constructing a data set that is large, realistic, and inclusive of speakers from diverse backgrounds.

As robots become more capable and ubiquitous, they are increasingly moving into traditionally human-centric environments such as health care, education, and eldercare. As robots engage in tasks as diverse as helping with household work, deploying medication, and tutoring students, it becomes increasingly critical for them to interact naturally with the people around them. Key to this progress is the development of robots that acquire an understanding of goals and objects from natural communications with a diverse set of end-users. One way to address this is using language to build systems that learn from people they are interacting with. Algorithms and systems developed in this project will allow robots to learn about the world around them from linguistic interactions. This research will focus on understanding spoken language about the physical world from diverse groups of people, resulting in systems that are more able to robustly handle a wide variety of real-world interactions. Ultimately, the project will increase the usability and fairness of robots deployed in human spaces.

This CAREER project will study how robots can learn about noisy, unpredictable human environments from spoken language combined with perception, using context derived from sensors to constrain the learning problem. Grounded language refers to language that occurs in and refers to the physical world in which robots operate. Human interactions are fundamentally contextual: when learning about the world, we focus on learning by considering not only direct communication but also the context of that interaction. This work will focus on learning semantics directly from perceptual inputs combined with speech from diverse sources. The goal is to develop learning infrastructure, algorithms, and approaches to enable robots to learn to understand task instructions and object descriptions from spoken communication with end users. The project will develop new methods of efficiently learning from multi-modal data inputs, with the ultimate goal of enabling robots to efficiently and naturally learn about their world and the tasks they should perform."

The Army Research Lab (ARL) is offering approximately 12 paid summer team intern projects for UMBC and University of Maryland students. You will work on-site at ARL in teams of 3-5 interns with a mentor for 10 weeks over the summer of 2022, tentatively from June 6 thru August 12, 2022.

Internship opportunities are offered in the six topics that are described below. ARL will create specific projects within each topic that leverage the skills and experience of the students that are selected for the topic. Multiple teams may be selected for a single topic and some topics may not be supported if there is insufficient interest from applicants.

Both undergraduate and graduate engineering and science students are encouraged to apply, including Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior, Masters Candidates, and Ph.D. Candidates. Interns will be paid a fixed stipend for the 10-week internships of $9,000 for undergraduate students and $12,000 for graduate students. No additional funding for travel or lodging is available.  Interns will work on Army sites and hence are limited to U.S. citizens and will be required to comply with Army COVID-19 requirements and provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination.

APPLY via UMBCworks RIGHT AWAY, position 9336592

If you don’t have an approved resume on UMBCworks, upload one and send Christine Routzahn (routzahn@umbc.edu) an email message. She will approve it so you can apply ASAP.

Applicants should submit a one-page resume and 1-2 page cover letter that describe relevant education, projects, and work experience. Include your GPA in your resume or cover letter, a statement of your goals for the internship, and identify up to three topics that are of interest to you. ARL prefers candidates with a GPA of 3.0 or better.

Applications will be sent to the Army Research Lab every Friday. Each week selected applicants will be contacted to schedule a short virtual interview and conditional offers will be made to successful applicants on a rolling basis.  We will stop accepting applications when we reach 36 so it is to your advantage to apply early. Applicants with conditional offers will need to successfully complete a background check prior to obtaining their final offer.

Topics   

• 2022A – Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology
• 2022B – Ground & Air Robotics & Autonomy
• 2022C – Image Understanding for UAVs
• 2022D – Novel New Energy Sources
• 2022E – Quantum Information and Sensing
• 2022F – Co-design of Structural Materials and Components 

For more information on the topics, see this post on the CSEE website.

COEIT’s 30th Anniversary Celebration and
Engineering & Computing Week

February 21-25, 2022