Theo Gonzalves, associate professor of American studies, will moderate a conversation with Oscar-nominated director John Sayles on Thursday, October 20. The conversation will follow a screening of Sayles’ film, “Amigo,” which is presented by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program in honor of Filipino American History Month.

“Amigo” provides an optic on the easily forgotten history of the Philippine-American War, a short lived but brutal war that claimed the lives of about 4,000 Americans and between 200,000 to 600,000 Filipinos.

The screening and discussion will take place on Thursday, October 20, at 6 p.m., at the National Museum of the American Indian’s Rasmuson Theater. More information can be found here.

UMBC Alumni Association presents awards each year honoring alumni for their professional and personal achievements and service to the University. This year's Young Alumni Rising Star Award is being given to Delali Dzirasa (’04, Computer Engineering) who is the founder and president of Fearless Solutions, LLC.

While an undergraduate, Delali Dzirasa was a member of the inaugural entrepreneurship classes at UMBC, developing two companies before graduating. Today, he is founder and president of Fearless Solutions, a cybersecurity start-up housed at UMBC’s @bwtech cybersecurity research and technology park.

In addition to making waves in the Maryland cybersecurity community (Dzirasa recently met Maryland governor Martin O’Malley at UMBC’s Advantage Incubator launch), the two-year-old company employs a number of UMBC graduates and current students. In addition to serving as SGA speaker of the senate and helping to plan UMBC’s first Homecoming, Dzirasa also received the following honors as a student: Golden Key Honor Society (2001), Student Ambassador, Presidents Board of Visitors (2003), Most inspiring lead award (2003), USAA All American Scholar Award (2001), and NSBE Torchbearer Award for students possessing a GPA of 3.25 and above (2001). Following graduation, he worked at RABA technologies for fellow alumnus Rob Baruch.

Dzirasa is married to UMBC alumna Letitia Dzirasa ’03, biological sciences, and he has one son, Dominic Williams-Dzirasa. He follows in the footsteps of brothers Mawuli Dzirasa ’00, mechanical engineering, and Dr. Kafui Dzirasa ’01, chemical engineering, in graduating from UMBC. He enjoys giving back to the community within his church.

The 2011 awards will be presented on Thursday, October 14, 2011, at an awards ceremony in the Albin O. Kuhn Library on the UMBC campus. To attend, please RSVP online.

"What will your voice be and how will you cultivate the voices of those around you?" asked Mitchell Thomashow during the closing moments of his plenary session today. The former Unity College president and current Second Nature Presidential Fellow urged attendees get the word out about their campus' sustainability accomplishments as one of the most effective ways toward a sustainable future: "Every sustainability project should have an interactive, dynamic explanation."

Using his experiences at Unity College as a narrative, Thomashow shared his vision of a sustainable campus. "Everything you do on campus relates to everything else going on on campus," he said. "What you are doing impacts everyone all the time and that’s why you’re so darn busy." Thomashow began by emphasizing the need for a sustainable approach to economic decisions. Frugality, living within our means and protecting our futures will help curb energy and health care costs. "It's important that [campuses] are making the links to accessibility and affordability."

Broken into three main categories, Thomashow's nine elements of a sustainable campus include:

• Infrastructure (energy, food, materials)
• Community (governance, investment, wellness)
• Learning (interpretation, aesthetics, curriculum)

Infrastructure
Unity College earned national attention in 2008 with the Unity House, a net zero building that was the first college president’s house to earn LEED Platinum certification. "Structures like LEED buildings are metaphorically rich, institutional landmarks," said Thomashow. "If you see windmills on a campus, solar panels, you think something interesting is happening on that campus." He stressed the ability of energy landscape demonstrations to attract students and change the regional landscape.

The transformation of Unity's expansive lawns to food-producing edible landscaping during Thomashow's presidency allowed the campus community to think about where their food comes from and how much energy is used in its production and distribution. It also got students involved in the campus and took care of the community through harvests sent to the local food pantry. This is an inexpensive campus sustainability initiative, said Thomashow: "I know this because we did it and we don’t have any money."

Community
Thomashow was able to get Unity's board of trustees on board with sustainability initiatives with something he calls "real-time frugal sustainability." The money saved with efforts like the president's net zero house encouraged campus decisions toward a culture of sustainability. Today, said Thomashow, sustainability is now embedded within the campus culture.

Every college is a mini-investment of sorts and campus leaders can't be afraid to make a mistake, said Thomashow. "As long as you are aware of the possibility of being wrong, and able to self-correct. That’s why you have a convergences like [AASHE 2011], so people can share what they've learned." Self-correcting questions include:

• Is your college working with schools, communities and businesses to transform the region into a thriving sustainable community?
• Is the campus an incubator for new sustainability research and design initiatives?
• Is the endowment invested in ecologically and socially responsible businesses?
• Is the college considering sustainability workforce training?

Thomashow closed this portion by reminding attendees to take care of themselves. "How many sustainability coordinators are burnt out all the time?" he asked. "It doesn’t make sense. We forget the whole purpose of this. It’s about human life and well-being. So you gotta live a good life and we have to find ways to do this together."

Learning
The best sustainability curriculum is one that provides hands-on experience of living in, implementing and designing a sustainable campus, said Thomashow. He urged campuses to get students mobilized to help with workforce issues and provide the kind of hands-on learning that creates future sustainability coordinators including service learning opportunities and campus-wide sustainability master plan collaboration.

"By catalyzing the emotional responses to the planetary challenge," said Thomashow, art is also an essential element of sustainability teaching. Through imaginative and evocative campus exhibits, art projects and installation, campuses have the opportunity to serve as exploratory canvases of environmental art, recycled material sculptures, soundscape designs and native plant arrangements.

Calling campus sustainability "a phenomenal case study," Thomashow thanked attendees for being the agents of [sustainability] change: "We didn’t have these jobs five years ago, so you are figuring it out for the first time."

Marie desJardins, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, has been selected by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to participate in NAE’s Frontiers of Engineering Education (FOEE) symposium. desJardins was one of sixty-five faculty members selected from all over the country to participate in the symposium.

“I am very excited about having been selected to attend NAE’s symposium on Frontiers of Engineering Education,” says desJardins. At the symposium desJardins will be presenting the interdisciplinary approach that she uses for teaching students about complex systems and computational modeling in her Honors seminar on “Computation, Complexity, and Emergence.”

desJardins says her goal for the symposium is to engage in conversation with committed educators from across the country about the under representation of women and minorities in computer science and engineering.

The symposium will be held November 13-16 in Irvine, California.

Each year, the UMBC Alumni Association presents awards to honor alumni for their professional and personal achievements and service to the University. The 2011 awards will be presented on Thursday, October 14, 2011, at an awards ceremony in the Albin O. Kuhn Library on the UMBC campus. To attend, please RSVP online.

This year's Alumnus of the Year for Engineering and Information Technology is Ralph Semmel (’92 Ph.D., Computer Science) who is currently the Director of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. As Director, Dr. Semmel leads the nation’s largest University Affiliated Research Center, which performs research and development on behalf of the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other Federal agencies. The Laboratory has more than 5,000 staff members, of whom more than two-thirds are engineers and scientists.

Prior to becoming Director, Dr. Semmel served as the founding Head of APL’s Applied Information Sciences Department and Infocentric Operations Business Area. Dr. Semmel also served in a variety of other executive and senior leadership positions at the Laboratory including Business Area Executive for Infocentric Operations, Assistant Head of the Power Projection Systems Department, Business Area Executive for Science and Technology, Deputy Director of the Research and Technology Development Center, and Supervisor of the System and Information Sciences Group. In addition to his APL responsibilities, Dr. Semmel served from 1997 through 2010 as Chair of the graduate programs in Computer Science, Information Assurance, and Information Systems Engineering for Johns Hopkins University’s Engineering for Professionals program. In 2011, he was appointed Professor of Computer Science at the University. Dr. Semmel also has been program co-chair and on the program committees for several major international conferences, and served on the editorial board of the International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering. He has published more than 40 papers in the areas of artificial intelligence, database systems, and software engineering.

Dr. Semmel also has led and continues to serve on a variety of Government science and technology boards, panels, and committees. Before joining the Laboratory in 1986, Dr. Semmel held leadership and technical positions with Wang Laboratories, MITRE Corporation, and the U.S. Army. Dr. Semmel received a B.S. in Engineering from the United States Military Academy, an M.S. in Systems Management from the University of Southern California, an M.S. in Computer Science from The Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMBC.

Dr. Semmel was the eleventh person to receive a Ph.D. in Computer Science for his dissertation entitled A knowledge-based approach to automated query formulation. His dissertation research, which was supervised by Professor James Mayfield, tackled the difficult problem of enabling people to access and query a large, complex databases without having to master the details of their internal structure and naming conventions. His approach combined a strong theoretical foundation with a collection of novel heuristics to produce a system that solved the problem and also supported effective and practical applications. He evaluated his work on a real database in use at the Space Telescope Science Institute that comprised nearly one hundred interconnected relational tables. This research was forward looking and one of the first to address problems that are just now becoming critical as the scale and availability of data has reached a tipping point. Companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM are now urgently tackling the same problems that Dr. Semmel first define and framed more than twenty years ago.