By Lisa Gray, Assistant Director of Student Life, Cultural and Spiritual Diversity. 

Earlier this year, Joakina Stone, then a Res Life colleague and collateral work staff with Student Life’s Mosaic Center, along with an amazing group of students, staff and faculty, helped us to co-create our new Mosaic Social Justice discussion series. We exchanged a bunch of ideas for a title – some basic and others long and academic. After ruminating far too long, I finally settled on “What’s the Tea?” Thankfully, Zach Kosinski and Jasmine Malhotra, our Graduate Coordinators, agreed and our series launched this year on October 1st.

Everything seemed to be going well with what we are calling our “pilot semester/year” for the series. It even had what we hope was an effective, context-setting description: “We all talk about how diverse UMBC is. But what does that mean in reality? How does it show up in how we communicate and interact with each other? When does celebrating diversity shift into inclusivity that creates positive social change in and outside our campus community? This new series hopes to help us grapple with these questions. Join us for a facilitated discussion of these topics. Voice your opinions and hear those of your fellow community members.”

This description, along with a co-facilitation model, guided questions, and a brief evaluation has helped us to move forward. Things were going really well, until our November 5th Cultural Appropriation discussion. During that discussion, our well-intentioned start had an unintentional stop. In my desire to get the discussion underway, I unintentionally culturally appropriated the name of the series—“What’s the Tea?”—while talking about cultural appropriation as it relates to native, indigenous peoples.

My blindness as the lead discussion facilitator set into motion what those in the social justice education and activism world would call a concrete example of “intent versus impact.” Thanks to some generous feedback and calling out by a couple of the discussion attendees, next came my PAN, “Pay Attention Now,” moment. PAN and PAN-ing is both an acronym and a practice I learned a couple of years ago during my time at the December 2012 Social Justice Training Institute.

This post is my apology to all the attendees of our November 5th Cultural Appropriation discussion and a thank you to those brave participants for their helpful feedback and “call out.” Through that experience, and all the hours I’ve spent since replaying and processing that discussion with supportive colleagues and students, I’ve learned that there are hills, valleys, starts, and stops in the often times messy yet rewarding work towards social justice. 

Now, for those of you who’ve been patiently waiting and wondering, here’s what’s up with “What’s the Tea?”: This phrase is an extended version of “What’s the T?” a phrase originating from Black Gay Ball culture. Urban Dictionary, Answers.com, and Wikipedia all offer solid definitions and/or historical information on the term and it’s origins.

“What’s the T? – It means like “Whats up?”, “Whats going on?” It’s commonly used in the LGBT Community and is commonly used for gossiping.”

“A term originated in Black Gay culture circa 1970-1989 that indicated some one was the “T”alk of the “T”own, hence the “T”. The term was often used by female impersonators to describe a fellow impersonator that did an exceptionally good job on stage in a live lip syncipated performance which was talked about in the gay circles for long periods of time. The term grew to define any memorable person whose actions were or would soon be largely talked about in the gay circles. Also a person who was popular in the gay community would be talked about may have been referred to as The “T”

It has lasted throughout the decades and can really refer to any person, place or thing.

Mary, did you see Miss thing’s Patty Labelle performance last night? She P’d on stage! She was the “T” last night!

Girlfriend, that party you threw was fabulous, the way you have your new apartment decorated is the deal and that new husband of yours is to die for! You are the T!

It mean what’s the deal! it basically mean what’s up!

It can also refer to one’s own personal business and daily dealings.

Ex: Q: Hey girl what’s T (what’s the T)?

A: No T, girl. I’m just at home answering a question on Wikianswers.”

By replacing “T” with “Tea,” we hope to reframe the definition to one that can apply to the social justice-based topics in the series. So, “Tea” represents the social justice awareness, knowledge, and cross-cultural communication skills that we’re “spilling” like tea into the community – one small group at a time. To help illuminate this more intentionally through imagery, we’re considering re-branding the series next semester.

Hopefully, this post has been helpful and informative. For more information on “What’s the Tea?” and other Mosaic Center programs, please visit our myUMBC page.

by Theophilus Aluko and Andrew Brow

Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal

Learning Representation and Modeling Time Series

 Zhiguang Wang

10:00-12:00 Friday, 12 December 2015, ITE 325B

Most real-world data has a temporal component, whether it is measurements of natural (weather, sound) or man-made (stock market, robotics) phenomena. Analysis of time-series data has been the subject of active research for decades and is still considered to be a challenge in machine learning and data mining due to the properties of temporal data.

Traditional approaches for modeling and representing time-series data fall into three categories. Non-data adaptive models, such as Discrete Fourier Transformation (DFT), Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT), and Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT), compute the transformation with an algorithm that is invariant with respect to the data. Data adaptive approaches such as Symbolic Aggregation approXimation (SAX), Piecewise Linear Aggregation (PLA), and shapelets compute transforms that are highly dependent on the data. In model-based approaches such as AutoRegressive Moving Average models (ARMA), Linear Dynamical Systems (LDS), and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), the underlying data is assumed to fit a specific type of model. The estimated parameters can then be used as features in, for example, a classifier.

However, more complex, high-dimensional, and noisy real-world time-series data are often difficult to model because the dynamics are either too complex or unknown. Traditional shallow methods, which contain a small number of non-linear operations, might not have the capacity to accurately model such complex systems.

We develop and verify three different approaches to represent and model time-series. Time-Warping SAX and Pooling SAX are two extensions of the vanilla SAX approach that is used as a symbolic representation of time series. Time-Warping SAX extracts linear temporal dependencies by building a time-delay embedding vector to construct more informative SAX words. Pooling SAX applies a non-parametric weighting scheme to extract significant variables. These are data adaptive models that achieve state-of-the-art accuacy on time-series classification problems.

We also propose the Gramian Angular Field (GAF) and Markov Transition Field (MTF) as two novel approaches to encode a time-series as an image. These representations not only demonstrate potential for visual inspection by humans, but when they are combined with deep learning approaches (Convolutional Network and Denoised Auto-encoders) they achieve excellent performance compared to other modern algorithms on classification and regression/imputation problems. GAF and MTF are non-data adaptive approaches that allow us to learn models and extract the abstract representations supported by model-based approaches.

Finally, we propose to model time-series by learning the representation directly from the raw data with model-based approaches. We will develop recurrent auto-encoders, in which the global optimum is ensured by a new Adaptive Risk-Averting/Seeking Criterion, to model the real/complex time series (dynamical systems) by learning the implicit data generating distribution over time. This model will be applied to tasks such as classification, regression/imputation, and anomaly detection.

Committee: Drs. Timothy Oates (Chair), James Lo (Math), Yun Peng and Matt Schmill

The UMBC Men’s Soccer Team will travel to Cary, North Carolina, for a semifinal match in the NCAA Division I Men’s Soccer Championship against the University of Virginia on Friday, December 12, at 5 p.m. This marks the first time in UMBC history that one of our teams has advanced to the Final Four in a Division I tournament.

We’re all very excited here at UMBC and we want you to be involved in this historic occasion no matter where you are. Whether you watch the game decked out in black and gold at a local restaurant or travel to Cary to see the action firsthand, you can find all the information you need on our College Cup website.

Go Dawgs!

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded $40,000 in support of the exhibition Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television, curated by Maurice Berger, research professor and chief curator of the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC). The exhibition has been co-organized by the CADVC and The Jewish Museum in New York, which will administer the grant funds.

The exhibition, which will open May 1, 2015 at The Jewish Museum before embarking on a national tour, addresses the modernist aesthetic and conceptual principles that have influenced American television from its inception, and examines how early television introduced new trends in art, design, and avant-garde art. The exhibition will include photographs, paintings, sculptures, prints, conceptual art, excerpts of historic TV programs and film, memorabilia, posters, magazines, books, clothing, comic books, and toys by artists such as Herbert Ferber, Lee Friedlander, Allan Kaprow, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Ben Shahn, and Andy Warhol, as well as works by designers Lou Dorfsman and Saul Bass and architect Eero Saarinen. Also on view will be clips of TV interviews with John Cage, Salvador Dali, Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, and others.

The campus community is encouraged to participate in a survey at the exhibition’s website. Click here to share your culture interests and familiarity with television design.

Maryland is in the process of implementing a new all-payer model for hospital payment. Under this system, the federal government permits the statewide Health Services Cost Review Commission (HSCRC) to regulate hospital prices. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) approved the all-payer model effective January 1, 2014.

On Friday, December 5, the UMBC School of Public Policy hosted a forum at the Columbus Center in downtown Baltimore to examine how hospitals and health care providers are adapting to the new model and its effect the people it serves.

Robert Murray, President of Global Health Payment LLC, and Donna Kinzer, Executive Director of the HSCRC, provided detailed overviews of the history of hospital payments in Maryland and a description of the new system and how it shifts focus to patients with the goal of improving health outcomes and controlling costs. Kinzer discussed how the new model will increase efficiency and will align payment with new ways of organizing and providing care.

Following Murray and Kinzer’s presentations, Stephen Jencks, an independent consultant and member of the Maryland Health Services Cost Review Commission, shared how the new model can save costs by increasing care such as prevention, effective management of chronic disease, and care that responds to family and patient preferences.

Stuart Guterman, Vice President for Medicare and Cost Control, The Commonwealth Fund, examined trends in hospital spending nationally and discussed the relationships between hospital payments and costs to talk about the HSCRC’s impact in Maryland in a national context.

The forum, titled, “Controlling Hospital and Health Care Spending in Maryland in the Era of Budget Caps,” was sponsored by the UMBC School of Public Policy, the Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research (MIPAR), the Hilltop Institute, CareFirst, and LifeBridge Health. The event was organized by UMBC Public Policy Professor David Salkever. For more information, click here.