The Division of Information Technology (DoIT) is thrilled to announce that Bill Mehrz has been awarded the November DoIT Gritty Award! This recognition celebrates Bill's outstanding contributions to DoIT and the entire UMBC community, embodying the spirit of going above and beyond in his work.

Cybersecurity Awareness: Timely, Relevant, and Fun

Bill earned this well-deserved award through his truly exceptional planning and execution of this year's Cybersecurity Awareness activities. He designed an awareness campaign that was not only timely and relevant but also genuinely fun and engaging.

• He incorporated current, relevant threats into weekly awareness posts (available on the my3.my.umbc.edu/groups/itsecurity/posts group and the doit.umbc.edu/ homepage). Topics covered included Phishing scams, Duo Fraudulent Notifications, ClickFix scams, and banking scams.
• Bill made cyber awareness fun by organizing tabling events near the Commons to directly engage the student population. The in-person efforts included a catching fish game, Swedish fish treats, and cyber plastic cups.
• He also coordinated a Cybersecurity Trivia game for the monthly divisional all-staff meeting, co-hosted with Anna Plass, to test and reinforce the team's knowledge.

His efforts have dramatically increased cybersecurity awareness on campus, engaging his peers to become champions of awareness. A measurable result of this campaign is the dramatic increase in the reporting of phishing emails! DoIT staff will also remember his effective call to action to not enter passwords into Google Forms.

Professionalism Under Pressure

What makes Bill's achievement even more remarkable is that he accomplished all of this while simultaneously transitioning our semi-annual IT Cybersecurity control validations to OnSpring, a substantial effort in itself.

Furthermore, the extensive planning for the October campaign had to be meticulously detailed as Bill was anticipating the birth of his second child right before October began! His professionalism, detailed approach, and understanding of the importance of cybersecurity ensured seamless teamwork in selecting topics, gathering feedback, and coordinating the in-person activities despite the personal demands.

We are proud to present Bill Mehrz with the DoIT Gritty Award. Congratulations, Bill!

About the DoIT Gritty Award

The Gritty Award is in recognition of outstanding work within the Division and beyond. Full-time DoIT employees, DoIT student employees, and teams are eligible to be nominated for going above and beyond! Anyone in DoIT can nominate someone for the Gritty by completing this short Gritty Nomination Form. 

The DoIT Community & The DoIT Gritty Committee

Erica D'Eramo

Ada Crutchfield

Andrew Shebest

Anthony Finneran

Carlos McKinney

Daniel Loftus

Dave Souder

David Toothe

Debbie Michaels

Dondre Hatef

Josh Abrams

Khalil Alston

Matt Baker

Nick Beech

Peter Ariev

UMBC Professor Ramana Vinjamuri and his students used Bharatanatyam Mudras, Indian classical dance hand gestures, to help train and evaluate their system for recognizing and modeling human hand gestures. The work is described in the article, Reconstructing hand gestures with synergies extracted from dance movements, published in Nature Scientific Reports.

The gestures were successfully mapped onto Mitra, a humanoid robot with five-degree-of-freedom hands developed by a company led by Balaji Viswanathan, '23 Ph.D. Computer Science. This work demonstrates the potential of dance-inspired structured learning in enhancing dexterity, rehabilitation, and motor control, enabling more efficient gesture-based interaction models in robotics, prosthetics, and rehabilitation.

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