For All the World to See – the award-winning exhibit created at UMBC on the role of visual culture in America’s Civil Rights movement – makes a triumphant return to campus.

Introduction by Richard Byrne ’86

Photo essay text by Maurice Berger, Research Professor and Chief Curator at UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture

One major victory in the preservation of American memory over the last 40 years is the prominence now enjoyed in that narrative by our nation’s long, bloody and (in many respects) still-unfinished Civil Rights struggle.

Indeed, the iconic images of that journey toward equality are now inescapable – so much so that they are perhaps in danger of becoming over familiar – and thus diminished in power and pathos.

The new challenge for historians and other scholars is to recount the battle for Civil Rights afresh, keeping its immediacy alive and deepening its hold on our shared memory.

For those seeking to meet that challenge, the unalloyed success of For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights – an exhibit created by UMBC professor Maurice Berger at the university’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) – is an exhilarating guide to the way forward.

The power of For All the World to See is its excavation of a rich trove of visual history around the Civil Rights movement to deepen and enrich the context in which the struggle’s classic images are viewed. The exhibit does not displace the epic photojournalism of the movement, but intensifies its resonances through juxtapositions – profound and provocative – with television, print and material culture of the 20th century.

For All the World to See already has found a home at some of the key cultural institutions in the United States – including the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., the International Center of Photography in New York City, and the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago – and received glowing reviews in the press – including major features in the New York Times and the Washington Post. And For All the World to See’s impact will spread even further as a traveling version of the exhibit visits at least 20 more museums across the nation between now and 2017 as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ NEH On the Road series.

The UMBC community has eagerly awaited a chance to welcome For All the World to See back to the university’s campus. And to mark the occasion of its arrival on November 15, 2012, UMBC Magazine asked curator Maurice Berger to select a few images from the exhibit as a preview to give readers a taste of what they can expect when they see the full show at CADVC.

PHOTO ESSAY:  With essays by Maurice Berger, Research Professor and Chief Curator at UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture

INTERVIEW: Read an interview with Maurice Berger by UMBC Magazine editor Richard Byrne ’86

This article appeared in UMBC Magazine’s Fall 2012 issue.

• Create and sustain a magazine and Web site that strengthens each UMBC graduate’s intellectual and emotional ties to the University.

• Maintain the highest journalistic and literary standards. Stimulate thinking and expand perspectives.

• Reflect UMBC’s strengths as a research and teaching university and as a diverse and global campus in the magazine’s content.

• Imbue the publication with a lively design, incorporating high-quality photography and illustrations.

• Paint a picture of the campus as it is now; establish a sense of place.

• Report on the institution with candor and impartiality.

• Create forums that provide alumni with opportunities for self-expression, personal reflection and re-connection with other alumni and the wider university community.

First Impressions

The first phase of UMBC’s new Performing Arts and Humanities Building is already teeming with students and faculty eager to study, teach, work and create in the brand-new space.

Yet the campus celebration of the new building – scheduled for Wednesday, September 19 – will be an occasion for the university and the general public to experience the Performing Arts and Humanities Building in an event-packed day of discussion, debate and entertainment.

The day kicks off at 2 p.m. when Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley joins UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, to officially cut the ribbon on building’s first phase and to break ground for the building’s second phase, set to open in 2014.

The ceremonies will be followed at 3 p.m. by an Arts and Humanities Festival held outside at the new building. The festival will feature music and readings by UMBC student groups and community artists, highlighted by a performance by UMBC alumnus Lafayette Gilchrist ’92, Africana studies. The festival will last until 6:30 p.m., with delicious and diverse cuisine provided by some of the area’s best food trucks.

And as the festival continues outside, the Performing Arts and Humanities Building’s 275-seat proscenium theatre will be the site of “New Space” – a dynamic panel discussion co-hosted by UMBC and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. (3:30 p.m.)

Moderated by WYPR’s Tom Hall, “New Space” will allow prominent UMBC scholars and local artists to reveal the physical, conceptual and virtual spaces that motivate their work and explore how new spaces inspire them to think, create and engage in expected and unexpected ways.

Tours of the new building will be given between 4:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., followed at 7 p.m. by an Inaugural Lecture presented by The Humanities Forum in the proscenium theatre.  Pauline Yu, President of the American Council of Learned Societies, will speak on the topic: “The Humanities, Without Apology.”

The first phase of Performing Arts and Humanities Building is the new home of UMBC’s theatre and English departments, along with the Dresher Center for the Humanities, the Linehan Artist Scholars Program and the Humanities Scholars Program.

The building was designed not only to be aesthetically pleasing, but to advance key elements in teaching, research and creative endeavor at UMBC. The Performing Arts and Humanities Building is also projected to incorporate enough sustainable design strategies to be designated as a LEED Silver project – including a white roof to reduce the structure’s “heat island” effect and a system that harvests rainwater for irrigation.

While the fences and cranes have moved from the front of the building, the work site at the north edge of campus won’t be closing down anytime soon. Construction has already begun on phase two of the building, which will open in fall 2014 and provide a new home for the departments of dance, music, philosophy and ancient studies, as well as a 350 seat concert hall and a 120 seat dance studio.

Go here to learn more about the Performing Arts and Humanities Building or to view the full details for the Grand Opening Celebration.

(9/12/12)

From Freeman Hrabowski, President, and Philip Rous, Provost and Senior Vice President

We are delighted to share the news that UMBC has been recognized again as a national leader in innovation and undergraduate teaching in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges guide.

For the fourth year in a row, UMBC tops the U.S. News ranking of “Up-and-Coming” national universities, a place we share this year with George Mason University.

U.S. News also ranks UMBC eighth on a list of the national universities that excel in undergraduate teaching, tied with Duke University, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame. As Americans consider the value of a college degree, this recognition is a reminder of what we all know firsthand – public universities can be exceptional.

When U.S. News says “Up-and-Coming” it is talking about universities that consistently find new ways to improve students’ educational experiences, that are entrepreneurial, and that are models for others. Specifically, the magazine asks presidents, provosts, and admissions deans all over the country to identify institutions that have “made the most promising and innovative changes in the areas of academics, faculty, student life, campus, or facilities.”

In short: They are looking for leaders. Congratulations to all our faculty, staff, and students who make UMBC just such a place.

UMBC is proud to be recognized again as a national leader in innovation and undergraduate teaching in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges guide.
For the fourth year in a row, UMBC tops the U.S. News ranking of “Up-and-Coming” national universities — a designation recognizing universities that consistently find innovative ways to improve students’ educational experiences. We share the top spot with George Mason University.
U.S. News also ranks UMBC eighth on a list of the top national universities “where the faculty has an unusual commitment to undergraduate teaching.” UMBC is tied with Duke University, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame.
“We are delighted to be recognized as one of America’s most innovative universities and a national leader in undergraduate education,” says President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III. “As Americans consider the costs and value of a college degree, this recognition is a reminder that public universities can be exceptional.”
This year, for example, UMBC is launching a competition that will encourage faculty to reimagine what it means to teach and learn; challenge students to take an active role in their educations; fuel creativity and entrepreneurship; and transform classrooms into laboratories of the mind. The work will be supported by grants from the new Hrabowski Fund for Innovation and will build on our longstanding commitment to combining the best of research and teaching.
UMBC offers the personal attention of a liberal arts college within the setting of a major research institution. Our 13,000 students come from more than 150 countries and take full advantage of the educational, business, cultural and recreational resources of Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
Congratulations to our faculty, staff, students, alumni and supporters who make UMBC a leading university!
This article originally appeared on UMBC’s website.

UMBC is proud to be recognized again as a national leader in innovation and undergraduate teaching in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges guide.

For the fourth year in a row, UMBC tops the U.S. News ranking of “Up-and-Coming” national universities — a designation recognizing universities that consistently find innovative ways to improve students’ educational experiences. We share the top spot with George Mason University.

U.S. News also ranks UMBC eighth on a list of the top national universities “where the faculty has an unusual commitment to undergraduate teaching.” UMBC is tied with Duke University, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame.

“We are delighted to be recognized as one of America’s most innovative universities and a national leader in undergraduate education,” says President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III. “As Americans consider the costs and value of a college degree, this recognition is a reminder that public universities can be exceptional.”

This year, for example, UMBC is launching a competition that will encourage faculty to reimagine what it means to teach and learn; challenge students to take an active role in their educations; fuel creativity and entrepreneurship; and transform classrooms into laboratories of the mind. The work will be supported by grants from the new Hrabowski Fund for Innovation and will build on our longstanding commitment to combining the best of research and teaching.

UMBC offers the personal attention of a liberal arts college within the setting of a major research institution. Our 13,000 students come from more than 150 countries and take full advantage of the educational, business, cultural and recreational resources of Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

Congratulations to our faculty, staff, students, alumni and supporters who make UMBC a leading university!

This article originally appeared on UMBC’s website.

UMBC alumnus Nelson Emokpae ’03, psychology, will make his television debut tonight on NBC’s singing competition “The Voice.” Emokpae immigrated to the U.S. as a political refugee from Nigeria and received his B.A. from UMBC before picking up a guitar for the first time while in graduate school. He decided to pursue a full-time music career as Nelly’s Echo just last year, and has been touring at college campuses around the country.

In a recent interview, the Baltimore-based Emokpae remarked, “I love touring. I love meeting different people. I love seeing different locations, trying out different cultures. Because even in America, the variety of cultures within one country is so vast, and being able to travel from California to Maine to Seattle to Florida and every [place] in between affords me that opportunity to meet a lot of people and amass a lot of great experiences.”

To watch Emokpae’s audition on “The Voice,” tune into NBC at 8:00 p.m. EST on September 11th and 12th (Note: his exact air date has not been announced and it could be either day), and check out this video performance of the song “If I Were the King.”

This article originally appeared on UMBC Insights.

At his San Francisco museum, UMBC alumnus Jerry Cimino ’76 makes sure the world is still hep to one of America’s greatest literary movements.

By Jenny O’Grady
Photos by Mirissa Neff and Brittany Powell

The Beat Generation was a uniquely American movement – producing pockets of poetry and art across the land. You could find them in 1950s New York City in their early days clustered around Columbia University – or down in the cafes and jazz clubs of Greenwich Village. Some of them found refuge at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. And they drank and declaimed in juke joints across the Midwest and the Southwest.

That restless urge to explore great spaces is at the heart of Beat verse and prose. But if you had to pick an epicenter of the movement, you’d likely choose San Francisco’s North Beach – and specifically the crossroads of Broadway and Columbus Avenue.

That’s where you’ll find one of America’s great literary meccas: the checkerboard-floored City Lights Books, which was founded by poet/ publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953. Right next to it is the Vesuvio Café, a popular watering hole of poets like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. And just up the street, at 1562 Grant Avenue, young writers spent hours smoking dope on a crooked stairwell called “Poet’s Corner” – and then headed to the press next door to check galleys of the latest chapbook.

North Beach is also where you’ll find Jerry Cimino ’76, history. From the book-lined open air porch of the Beat Museum, which he founded in 2003 at 540 Broadway to pay homage to a generation of writers and artists who continue to inspire him, he takes in the rich history of this historic section of the city. He savors it. And he can’t help but share it with anyone who will listen.

“What we like to say is: ‘Welcome to the center of the universe,’” enthuses Cimino, with the flair of a modern day P.T. Barnum. “Because you’re at Broadway and Columbus right now – and everything that happened with the Beat Generation happened right here at this intersection.”

The museum’s walls reflect this, exploding with colorful posters, books, author photographs, drawings and videos covering every surface. One wall is devoted completely to editions of Kerouac’s On the Road from around the world. Another shows an early version of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” complete with scrawling edits by the author – enough to make even the biggest bookworm giddy.

More than 60 years after the Beats’ heyday, the culture has found a true evangelist in Cimino, a determined man driven by respect for the inclusive, nonconformist ideals the Beat authors represented. With a little elbow grease – and some recent attention from Hollywood – he’s on the road to making a lasting tribute to his heroes.

“IT KNOCKED ME OUT”

Cimino grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore, the son of a WWII vet-turned-postal clerk. His first encounter with the music and movement of the Beat writers came when a teacher read poems from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s classic collection A Coney Island of the Mind to his eighth-grade class.

“That whole book of poetry literally changed my life…it knocked me out,” says Cimino, who to this day can recite the book’s fifth poem, “Sometimes During Eternity,” from memory.

“You know, 1968 is when it all happened,” Cimino recalls. “Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed. Martin Luther King was shot and killed. The Vietnam War was raging, and all of us kids were looking at each other and saying, ‘What in the hell are we inheriting?’”

When Cimino arrived at UMBC in 1972, he was among the few students actually living on campus at the time, splitting time between what were then called “Dorms 1, 2, and 3.” He says that many of the bonds that he formed in that era at UMBC – including friendships with older students freshly scarred from serving in Vietnam, and with closeted gays who trusted him with their secret – would forever change his own way of thinking. He also enjoyed some time on stage with the theatre club, sharing the bill (but, sadly, never the stage) with one-time UMBC student Kathleen Turner in a 1975 campus production of Antigone.

“For the first time in my life, I was interacting with a lot of people who weren’t like me,” says Cimino. “And that’s what the Beats were all about – coming together and really celebrating your differences… they were about tolerance and compassion and having the courage to live the most authentic life you can.”

Jonathan M. Cooperman, who roomed with Cimino at UMBC before finishing a degree in physical therapy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, recalls a thoughtful, passionate friend who also had more hair back then.

“He is very much the same guy to me now as he was then,” says Cooperman, who is now a member of the Beat Museum’s board. “If you walked into his room at three in the morning, the door would be cracked open with light pouring out into the hall. If you walked inside, Jer would be sipping tea and reading a book – usually Kerouac.”

Although he loved history and other subjects he’d studied at UMBC, Cimino graduated without a clear career path to follow. So he went with the flow in which he found himself, relocating to California and forging a successful career in sales for both IBM and American Express.

VOICES THAT SPAN GENERATIONS

Over the years, however, Cimino and his wife, Estelle, started craving something more than a career in business. His continuing affection for the Beat literature he had read as a young man led him to befriend John Cassady – the son of Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady, who is immortalized in the character of “Dean Moriarty” in On the Road.

Cimino also began building a collection of Beat generation memorabilia which eventually became “The Beat Museum on Wheels” in 2003. And just as Dean Moriarty took off across the country with Sal Paradise (the character representing Kerouac himself in On the Road), Cimino and Cassady drove “the mighty beatmobile” across America’s highways in October 2005 – even parking it overnight in Commons Circle at UMBC.

Cimino says he reveled in the chance to share his growing collection with UMBC students and see his old campus. And faculty members were happy to have a bit of the Beats in Catonsville.

“The students enjoyed visiting the museum on wheels, with all kinds of interesting, hard-to-get publications and memorabilia, and just hanging out with Jerry and John,” says UMBC associate professor of English Piotr Gwiazda, who helped organize the appearance.

The Beats cast a spell over today’s students now just as much as ever, Gwiazda says.

“Whenever I teach ‘Howl,’ students respond with interest,” he says. “There still seems to be something magnetic about the work of Beat Generation writers: the idea of community it embodied, its counter-cultural aspects, its philosophical dimensions, and of course its sheer verbal power and vitality.”

STAR POWER

Of course, interest in the Beats has never been limited to college students reading in circles on the grass. A new Hollywood treatment of Kerouac’s On the Road – which features Kristen Stewart of Twilight fame and Viggo Mortensen from the Lord of the Rings films – is traveling the festival circuit now and scheduled for general release later this year.

Cimino couldn’t be happier about what the new film means for the legacy of the Beats – and for the future of his own museum.

“It’s just great, have you seen it?” he says, cueing up the movie trailer on a screen above the museum’s entrance. Since filming began in 2010 under director Walter Salles, Cimino says members of the film’s cast have visited the museum and asked questions about their characters.

The cast and crew even dropped off a surprise prop from the film at the museum. Just to the right of the museum’s check-in desk sits a dusty maroon 1949 Hudson Hornet used during filming and driven to its resting spot in North Beach by none other than the movie’s star Garrett Hedlund (“a really delightful young man,” says Cimino), who portrays the ever-restless Dean Moriarty.

Beside it stands a sign: “Walter’s only request of us was that the dust and grime – accumulated on the car during the 5,000 miles he and Garrett spent traveling the country making the film – remain undisturbed. Walter considers this ‘the Holy Dirt of America.’”

“You know, every fingerprint has a story,” says Cimino. “It’s important to keep that history intact.”

That’s a major part of Cimino’s job as curator: making the story of the Beats accessible and fun for anyone who might wander in. He loves every second of his evangelism for the movement and its great writers.

“The museum is successful because it represents a significant part of American culture and American literary history,” says Cooperman. “The opening of the movie On the Road demonstrates how this literature is still relevant.

“Of course, the fact that Jerry is probably as knowledgeable of the Beats as any academic doesn’t hurt either,” he adds. “He’ll ultimately be successful because he has a passion for what he does.”

NOW AND LATER

Passion is one thing. But, if you’re wondering how a start-up museum makes it in such difficult economic times, here’s your answer: It ain’t easy.

But the Beat Museum now survives and thrives thanks to Cimino’s magnetic business sense and a lot of hard work.

Just above Cimino’s desk hangs a complicated organizational chart showing a collage of boxes representing duties spanning everything from marketing to merchandising to fixing the guest toilet. One line connects them all.

“And every one of those boxes has my damn name on it,” he jokes. “That’s just how it is.”

The museum’s collection has grown as fans discover it. Cimino admits that “most people who love the Beats don’t have a lot of money,” but as fans of certain writers have discovered his museum, the memorabilia contributions have flowed in steadily. There’s a plaid jacket once worn by Kerouac, and a creaky pipe organ owned by Allen Ginsberg. There’s even an original “Can YOU pass the acid test?” card from the days when Neal Cassady drove Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters across the country in a psychedelic bus – a trip immortalized by author Tom Wolfe in his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. (There’s also a film version of that book in works, to be directed by Gus Van Sant.)

Over the years, Cimino also found mentors to advise him as his plans for the museum have grown. He singles out the late Kim Greer, who was president of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, until his death in 2006.

“I have people come in every day telling me what I should be doing,” he says. “But I only take advice from people who have successfully done what they’re telling me I ought to do. It’s easy to guess…but that’s not going to get you anywhere.”

Right now, the Beat Museum is just as Cimino would like it to be: full, eclectic, engaging. Not too smooth, or too uniform: that wouldn’t fit well with the artists that it celebrates. Mismatched shelves offer hand-assembled chapbooks by local poets. A claw-footed bathtub filled with dime store novels invites visitors to try something new. There’s a definite flavor to the place – a sort of San Francisco sourdough bite.

Cimino would enjoy having someone else fix the toilet from time to time. More important, however, is growing the Beat Museum so that it can stand strong for generations to come. That’s his next step.

“I started this place the only way I know how. I built it from nothing,” he says. “Now we’ve built a track record, we’ve made it succeed with the blood and sweat of a lot of people. If this thing’s going to outlive me…I’m going to have to think big.”

• VIDEO: Interview with Jerry Cimino ’76, founder of The Beat Museum
• Read Jerry’s blog from his 2005 visit to UMBC
• Read Jerry’s review of Walter Salles’s new movie, On the Road

British writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

And for many of us, that’s exactly how the beeps and pings and connecting dings that keep our schedules, steer our cars to the right destination, and even maintain our bonds with family and friends over great distances seem to work. Like magic.

But to the humans behind the technologies – including Silicon Valley-based UMBC alumni at Apple and Google – it’s anything but abracadabra. It’s a combination of hard work, entrepreneurial drive and visionary imagination at its geekish best.

Let’s meet some of the minds behind the magic of our technologies.

by Jenny O’Grady
Photos by Gabriela Hasbun

Stroll down the yellow brick walkway that leads to Building 43, and a trio of girls on colorful bikes rides by, dinging their handlebar bells and singing “Hello!”

Take a right, and you’re in a garden of busts that depict everyone from Lloyd Bridges to Jacques Cousteau. Beyond that, a T-Rex skeleton feasts on helpless plastic pink flamingos. There’s a delicious savory breeze – does it come from one of the free cafeterias or the employee-run herb garden? – and a burst of laughter from a group of young engineers playing beach volleyball nearby.

Oh, right: and today’s free haircut day. That’s life in the Googleplex for you.

Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, is often depicted as a Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory of high-tech geekdom. It’s frequently listed on Top 10 lists of amazing workplaces. But what’s it really like to work at a company with a product so popular that it’s become a verb?

“It is very good to foster a culture where people are engaged, want to be at work, and that allows you to concentrate your time on what you’re trying to do in the day,” says Jeffrey Burgan ’83, computer science, director of network engineering for Google Access, which delivers high speed internet. “People work very hard here, so if the place can take the burden off in other areas – like get an oil change or a haircut, or to have washers and driers so people can do their laundry – it definitely helps.”

Google is known as much for the sheer difficulty of its confounding job interviews as it is for the replica of SpaceShipOne in its lobby. The secret to the company’s success seems to lie in its careful balance of work and play, and other UMBC alumni at Google agree that its unique culture pushes them to be more creative and constructive.

Jeetendra M. Soneja M.S. ’04, computer science, is the tech lead for Google Analytics API. He works in an outlying office, but finds the company culture persists across Google’s many campuses.

“One thing that is common across all the Google offices all over the world is the friendly and helpful nature of the fellow Googlers,” he says. “This leads to a very healthy working environment and is one of the best things why I love working here. The work environment is also fun and relaxing, and yet focused and one that promotes and rewards innovation.”

Robert Banz ’95, computer science, has worked as a site reliability engineer at Google for four years. (“We make sure Google is ‘always on,’” he says.) Before that, he worked at UMBC, which gives him a bit of special perspective about what’s extra cool about working at the Mountain View campus.

“Everyone says it’s the free food options, so I’ll go with something else. I’d say I was surprised how much it felt like a university campus,” he said.

Banz also believes the atmosphere of Silicon Valley is a significant influence on the famed Google culture. “Silicon Valley and San Francisco, but really the entire Bay Area, has this amazing critical mass of passionate creative, scientific, and engineering talent,” he says. “These groups mix socially; mutual curiosity leads to unique ideas. I think that’s the secret to the creative engine, and the source of very engaging and entertaining conversation.”

Sandor Dornbush M.S. ’06, computer science, sometimes runs to work with his black lab, Coltrane. Other times, he takes the free Google shuttle. Today, he wheels his bike into a meeting room playfully covered in a soft padded material. Photos of the Burning Man festival hang nearby.

“Despite all the games, and the food and everything, I honestly don’t think I’ve played a single game of pool in my six years here,” says Dornbush, an engineer for Google Play, who knows his work ultimately comes first.

“People talk about the Google 15 (because of the free food), but I’ve actually found the opposite,” Dornbush says. “For the first time, many people have access to really good food, and they have access to the gym, and they see people around them taking care of themselves, and they start to drop pounds. So despite the fact that there’s all this free stuff, people work really hard. And it’s a culture that encourages that.”

British writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

And for many of us, that’s exactly how the beeps and pings and connecting dings that keep our schedules, steer our cars to the right destination, and even maintain our bonds with family and friends over great distances seem to work. Like magic.

But to the humans behind the technologies – including Silicon Valley-based UMBC alumni at Apple and Google – it’s anything but abracadabra. It’s a combination of hard work, entrepreneurial drive and visionary imagination at its geekish best.

Let’s meet some of the minds behind the magic of our technologies.

by Jenny O’Grady

Photos by Timothy Archibald. Illustrations by Meredith Nelson.

* * * *

How a UMBC alumnus found more than (voice) recognition for his work on the iPhone’s enigmatic Siri technology.

Sometimes, Harry Chen needs to get away. Far away.

When he’s surrounded by the sands of Death Valley, California, even the GPS can’t find him. He can’t check his email, or video chat with his parents in Hong Kong, or stream music from his favorite Pandora station. And he likes that solitude.

“Sometimes you’ve got to go to the desert,” says Chen, a UMBC computer science alumnus (B.A. ’98, M.S. ’00, Ph.D. ’04) who helped develop Siri, the voiceresponsive “personal assistant” found inside the latest Apple iPhones.

“You stay out there, and when you come back, you see such a big contrast of civilization,” he continues. “And it makes you appreciate life a lot more. Everything we created – one way or another – is kind of superficial, but also kind of essential.”

In a world where computing has left the desktop and lives in the clouds, Chen is a bit of a tech superstar. The work that he and his colleagues have done makes it easy for everyone from tweeners to grandfolks to whisper wishes into the palms of their hands to find the closest pizza, send an email or solve a math problem.

Reflecting on his short-yet-impressive career, the energetic 35-year-old software engineer is quick to note the importance of the nearly ten years he spent at UMBC. He says that the people and the environment of discovery at the university helped shaped him into the kind of thinker capable of seeing models and years ahead to the next cool thing.

Building The Basics

Like many blossoming tech geeks in the early 1990s, Chen first contemplated the inner workings of computers as a teenager, sitting at home in Hong Kong, his thumbs occupied by the bright red buttons of that era’s ubiquitous Nintendo controller.

“While I was playing, I’d get so curious. How did all those characters come about? I started thinking about how some games would make very predictable moves, and why some are not predictable at all,” he says. “Later on, my dad bought me a computer…and the games on that were sort of like the ones with a snake going in different directions. It made me very interested in understanding more about computer instructions.”

When Chen left home for Towson University in 1994, the world of web-based computing was just beginning to blossom. At the urging of his parents, he began a course of study in pharmacy, but a job opening at the campus library allowed Chen to help customers with computers. He started building simple websites with his friends. After taking a few classes, Chen discovered he had an aptitude for programming.

Suddenly, the future – including a transfer to UMBC – seemed obvious to him. It didn’t take Chen long to make himself at home in the university’s computer science department, where he turned artificial intelligence algorithms into Java code for computer science research projects, won highly-sought internships at Hewlett-Packard, and generally wowed his peers.

“One thing we always liked so much about Harry is that he liked to charge into things,” says Dr. Tim Finin, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering who specializes in artificial intelligence and who served as Chen’s Ph.D. advisor. “He was not afraid to just drop in and start working on something.”

At the time, many of UMBC’s computer science researchers focused on pervasive computing – which aims to unobtrusively connect and share data between the many devices in our lives. Chen took to it like a teen to texting, and reveled in collaborating with fellow students to test new ideas.

“Harry was, and probably still is, very good at that level. He could very effortlessly turn ideas into working prototypes,” says Finin. “It’s a really significant skill to be able to have an idea and then very quickly test it out…to be able to implement enough of it to get some feedback to know whether it’s a brilliant idea, whether it’s something that will pan out.”

The Smartest Room in the Building

Many computer science students at UMBC take jobs right after they finish undergraduate studies. But an iffy job market in the late 1990s and then the dot.com bubble’s burst a few years later kept Chen in school.

Chen’s decision to wait to test the market turned out to be a good one. He used that time to develop a concept that helped shape his future research.

Imagine a room that answers your questions, or anticipates your needs and then fulfills them. Chen imagined that room – and then figured out how it might be brought to life.

“The graduate student’s life is really about exploration and to be free to identify your interests,” he says. “It’s almost like an accident when you find something you really like to work on and you just know it.”

Chen had spent some time interning at the Hewlett-Packard Labs, which were – at the time – at the forefront of mobile computing research and development. So when Chen returned to UMBC, he figured out what he wanted to design: a conference room broker. This system would retrieve and translate data from the devices within the room itself to solve problems for occupants while also considering user-privacy issues.

“So you walk into a meeting room,” Chen explains, “and the room understands how many people are in that room, what those people do…so the room says, ‘Oh, there’s a projector,’ and the projector would say, ‘I want to show a PowerPoint presentation. I can do that.’”

The smart room would also locate the presentation on Chen’s phone, download it, and show it – after automatically darkening the room. It might know that one of the meeting attendees wants a copy of the PowerPoint, and then simply download it to their phone. The room might even detect that an attendee’s hotel room is several miles away – and offer to call them a taxi.

“The idea is that people will use technology without thinking about it, which is just like you pick up chopsticks or a utensil and you just use it, you don’t think about it,” he says. “So that’s an idea, to try to encourage people to build technology for everyday people, to solve everyday problems.”

Imagining this room would help Chen shape his later work.

Taking Chances – and Detours

Following graduation from UMBC, both Chen and his wife Gigi Yim, who earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in information systems from UMBC in 2004 and 2007, pursued jobs in the Baltimore area. They even bought a house.

But the lure of Silicon Valley – and the fast-paced, creative life it offered – called to Chen.

“At one point, I thought: life is too short. I woke up one morning and I wrote my wife an essay and I said these are the reasons why we should just move to the West Coast,” he says, smiling. “Kind of like writing a paper: these are my reasons. I sent the email in the morning, and in the evening, I come home, and she says, ‘OK. Let’s do it.’”

Within days, they were looking for new jobs and making plans to move west. Yim took a job at Netflix, and Chen wound up at a vaguely-named startup working on a secret project involving voice recognition. (This startup – Siri – would later be bought by Apple.)

Right away, Chen felt confident they had made the right choice.“There’s a mentality here among a lot of people…a sort of hunger drive to make something” in Silicon Valley. “I always feel like you capture people’s smartness in thin air here,” he adds. “Somehow, you just breathe in people’s knowledge.”

“Harry, from day one, was pretty clear. Silicon Valley was where he wanted to end up,” says Dr. Anupam Joshi, a professor of computer science and another of Chen’s graduate school advisors. He observes that some students simply crave the risk and reward of the Silicon Valley environment.

“Some of it could be – for all we know – genetic hard wiring,” Joshi says. “That is why some people become race car drivers and others, like me, drive five miles below the posted speed limit.”

Valley Life: 101

Drive down Route 101 from San Francisco, and you see signs of our burgeoning tech civilization everywhere.

Billboards touting the latest cloud software. Silver-sided buildings in seemingly endless business parks that are home to startup upon startup. Even the street names themselves – like Apple’s famous Infinite Loop, or the punningly named Disk Drive in San Jose – conjure images of innovation and dreams.

Strolling around the manicured Apple campus in Cupertino, California, Chen speaks quickly. Excitedly. He says Silicon Valley is a place where ideas can be imagined without fear, where innovation is rewarded.

“People here have a passion for technology and innovation,” he says. “They want to change the world. They take risks. Most of the time they fail, but sometimes they succeed. So they step out, dream up some crazy idea and say ‘If I fail, fine. I’ll dream another one.’”

Even so, Chen acknowledges that nothing happens overnight. If you think about the gadgets that have occupied your pockets over the last 10 years, the technology required to power them crawled more than it leapt. The palm-held organizers of the mid-’90s, for example, were little more than tiny personal computers; today’s equivalent relies on web networking and interaction with other devices. Who knows what tomorrow’s devices will look like?

“Especially in the [artificial intelligence] research field, you can’t just jump to the dream right away,” Chen says. “You kind of have to think about yourself climbing a mountain. You have to do the work to get up there…you can’t just shoot straight up because that’s impossible. And once in a while you will have to make a detour, and because certain technology or culture has changed, you have to adapt to that.”

Back at UMBC, Joshi acknowledges that Chen’s metaphor is rooted in the reality of how creativity works. “That’s part of the fascination of this field, I think, going back to the creative process,” he says. “So much is yet not done. So much power is available through the computational process…we just have to channel it. We’ve barely scratched the surface.”

For Chen, it’s often enough just to see these products in use by the people he loves. When he was an undergraduate student, he communicated with his parents in Hong Kong by hand-written letter; today, he uses FaceTime to video chat with them whenever he wants.

Chen isn’t able to discuss what he’s working on now at Apple – a company known for keeping a tight leash on its ideas and products until they are introduced. But when you ask Siri a question on your new iPhone and get an answer, consider yourself at the doorway of Chen’s smart room, engaging with his work.

“It feels surreal,” Chen concludes, “because the things I talked about four or five years ago seem like a dream, and today, it doesn’t seem like a dream anymore.”

Read about UMBC alumni working at Google here.