Ephesians 1:3-6

³ Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. ⁴ For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love ⁵ hepredestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— ⁶ to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.

Reflection

What’s so glorious about “grace”?  Is it because we occasionally get a freebie here and there?  Maybe a complimentary dessert “gratis” at a restaurant, free shipping on an on-line purchase,or a “grace period” on an overdue bill makes us happy.  But true grace – God’s grace - is glorious because even though we didn’t earn or deserve it, God freely gave us all spiritual blessings, favors and privileges through Christ.  We have it all.  There is nothing more that we need.  Already deeming us washed by the blood of His Son, God chose us before creation to be holy and blameless.  He determined that we would be rescued from sin and death and we would be adopted as His very own.  Everything was all done in love, all designed out of His pleasure and will, and all given out freely to the praise of His glorious grace.

Responding to the Transmitted Message:

Let’s praise the Lord for the glorious grace he so freely gives us, his children, through His Son.  Let’s thank God for choosing and adopting us.  Let’s worship out of the true freedom we have in Christ.

Scott Rifkin ’81, biological sciences, a physician and long-term care executive, was interviewed by the Baltimore Sun about his company’s acquisition of a retirement community in Pikesville.

The move, says Rifkin, managing partner of Mid-Atlantic Healthcare, is personal: he and his parents still live in the neighborhood surrounding North Oaks retirement community.

See the full story here.

Rifkin was named a UMBC Outstanding Alumnus of the Year in 1995.

Scott Rifkin ’81, biological sciences, a physician and long-term care executive, was interviewed by the Baltimore Sun about his company’s acquisition of a retirement community in Pikesville.

The move, says Rifkin, managing partner of Mid-Atlantic Healthcare, is personal: he and his parents still live in the neighborhood surrounding North Oaks retirement community.

See the full story here.

Rifkin was named a UMBC Outstanding Alumnus of the Year in 1995.

MS Thesis Defense

Semantic Light: Building Blocks

Charles Lohr

2:15pm Thursday, 12 May 2011, ITE 346

The concept of Semantic Light is simply that lighting systems can be aware of what they are lighting. This offers a number of potential advantages over conventional lighting in quality and efficiency. Semantic Light requires fine grained control of the output of many lights and requires sensors to take in information about what is being lit. It uses this information to control the output lighting in great detail. By running various algorithms, Semantic Light can provide information to the user and has a number of applications including augmented reality.

Traditional lighting that is currently in wide use has limited control of quality and quantity of the light produced. Few lights for large-scale use are intended to control their output in any kind of detailed manner. Most area lighting only has a switch that must be manually turned on or off. While there are many commercial systems that allow for more fine grained control, they are typically limited to remote control, motion control and extra manual controls. These systems can be wasteful, or they may provide inappropriate amounts of light, or they may be on when no one is using them.

While other Semantic Lighting systems may focus on "green" or powern saving aspects, we concentrate instead on innovative roles Semantic Light could play as well as on the technology to make it possible to fill those roles. By emphasizing new utility and maximizing our speed to prototype, we have made several tradeoffs that will cause our system to be less efficient than it could be, even less efficient than traditional lighting systems. The ideas and concepts covered, however, could be adapted to different underlying technologies to produce a product that could provide considerable power saving over conventional lighting.

It is important to think of the many concepts covered as primary building blocks, rather than a complete commercial system. A number of refinements and extensions will be needed to produce a commercial viable product. We demonstrate all of the needed building blocks in a concise, prototyped system.

Committee:

• Mark Olano
• Yelena Yesha
• Zary Segall (advisor)