Dr. Julia Ross has been appointed Dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Dr. Ross received her Ph.D. from Rice University and joined UMBC’s faculty in 1995. Dr. Ross is currently the Constellation Professor of Information Technology and Engineering and professor of chemical, biochemical and environmental engineering. From 2006 to 2013, Dr. Ross served as chair of her department and one of her many accomplishments was a successful merger of two academic programs to form the Department of Chemical, Biochemical and Environmental Engineering. Most recently, Dr. Ross served as Special Assistant to the Provost for Inter-Institutional Research Initiatives and has been instrumental in enhancing research relationships and collaborations between UMBC and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, including the development of the UMB-UMBC seed grant program.

Dr. Ross has a distinguished record of scholarship in the fields of bioengineering and engineering education, and is the co-author of the K-12 INSPIRES Curriculum. In 2008 Dr. Ross was elected as a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, and in 2013 she received the prestigious American Council on Education fellowship, the nation’s premier higher education leadership development program preparing senior leaders to serve American colleges and universities. Dr. Ross is known for her commitment to shared governance and for advancing opportunities for women and underrepresented minorities in engineering and information technology. As dean of COEIT and as a member of UMBC’s senior leadership team, Dr. Ross will advance the mission of the university and the college by building strategically upon its strengths in the research and scholarly achievement of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, while supporting continued success and excellence in the teaching and service missions of the college’s academic departments and programs.

UMBC Professors Nilanjan Banerjee and Ryan Robucci have been awarded an NSF grant from the NSF-NIH Smart and Connected Health program. The total sum is $650,000 over 3 years. It is a collaboration between UMBC, Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital and UA.

The collaborators include Dr. Susan Fager, a physical therapist from Madonna, and Dr. James Parkerson from UA, who is helping with the energy harvesting component of the project. The SCH program is very competitive, and last year the acceptance rate was close to 6%. The project deals with building wearable sensing systems for environmental control and therapy for paralysis patients, and cuts across electronics, sensor analytics, and usability.

According to Banerjee, “What we mean by environmental control is controlling appliances, and so on and so forth, and therapies basically helping…[patients] to improve their motion over time. So, we are building the sensors, we are building the software on the sensors, and also…the ensuing systems around it.”

Banerjee goes on to describe the project as “a marriage between electronics, software and usability.”

Robucci adds that “We’re working on this project to take into account the patient, and integrate them in as part of the system, rather than forcing them to use the system in a particular way. We want to make sure that the technology and interfaces that we’re building are adaptable to each person and their needs.”

The project is described in greater detail in this abstract from the NSF website:

An estimated 1.5 million individuals in the United States are hospitalized each year because of strokes, brain injuries and spinal cord injuries. Severe impairment such as paralysis, paresis, weakness and limited range of motion are common sequels resulting from these injuries, requiring extensive rehabilitation. This project is developing invisible sensing systems embedded into bed sheets, pillows, wheelchair pads, and clothing, for environmental control and physical therapy for such paralysis patients. The system detects gestures regardless of evolving environmental and patient conditions and provides explicit real-time feedback to the user. Through the use of low-cost and ultra-low power capacitive sensing, the system reduces hospital visits and therapy costs.

The proposed system addresses the limitations of existing assistive care sensors through three novel technical contributions: (1) The use of a self-sustainable hierarchy of sensors; textile-based capacitive sensor arrays (CSA) and inertial sensors on the human body; to improve the accuracy of gesture recognition while consuming minimal energy. The inertial sensors train the capacitive sensor arrays for different body positions; (2) A self-learning algorithm that determines gestures automatically regardless of the position of the patient’s body and conditions using templates of gestures and patient conditions over time; and (3) Seamless integration of the patient in the feedback loop using amplification and animation to provide explicit real-time feedback to the user on how she/he is performing on his/her physical therapy, and how the system is interpreting his/her gestures. Additionally, the PIs are developing a cross-disciplinary undergraduate and graduate course that focuses on developing sensing systems while being cognizant of the actual needs in a rehabilitation hospital. The PIs are also using local university initiatives to engage minority and women researchers in the project.

Banerjee notes that, “The project would not be possible without the efforts of very motivated and hard-working students in the Analog/Digital and MPSS labs: Rebecca Baldwin, Alexander Nelson, Stanislav Bobovych, and Gurashish Singh.”

In the next month or so, Microsoft Research will be developing a five minute video showcasing Robucci, Banerjee, and Dr. Sandy McCombe-Waller. Microsoft has expressed an interest in advertising the wearable sensing system, because the system utilizes the Lab of Things, Microsoft’s home automation tool. (This video is in addition to the live interview that Banerjee recently conducted with Microsoft Research.)

In related news, Robucci, Banerjee and fellow UMBC professor Chintan Patel have been given a TEDCO award of $150, 000 for the wearable sensing systems project. According to Banerjee, “The TEDCO grant deals with developing a prototype for environmental control for patients with paralysis. It will also help [us in] designing a product for the system. As part of the grant we will build the system, and evaluate it on real patients at University of Maryland, Baltimore.”

Related Links:

NSF Grant Award Details and Brief

Brief on TEDCO Grant

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has released its annual list of the top 500 universities in the world, including UMBC as one of 146 American universities recognized. The list features prominent universities from around the globe, including many in Great Britain, Germany and China.

The ARWU is produced by the Center for World-Class Universities (CWCU) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. It is based on six indicators, including prestigious scholarships (number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals); influence and citations (number of highly cited researchers and number of articles indexed in Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Sciences Citation Index); and research publications (number of articles published in Nature and Science).

UMBC is one of three University System of Maryland institutions included in the rankings, in addition to the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Click here to see the full rankings.

This announcement follows UMBC’s recognition by the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) in July.

Mary Volkman ’92, English, is a Baltimore native who writes fiction under the pen name “Margo Christie.” Her first novel, These Days: A Tale of Nostalgia on Baltimore’s Block, relies not only on the author’s time working in show bars on the city’s most notorious stretch of real estate (right under the shadow of City Hall, hon) in the 1970s and ’80s, but also in her careful attention to the reminiscences of those who’d been there during the heyday of burlesque just after World War II.

But Margo Christie wrote the book. So let her tell it:

It’s often said first novels are autobiographical, inspired by the author’s coming-of-age and family of origin. Just as often, it’s said the best literature rises out of adversity. When I sat down to write a first novel, I was a step ahead of the game, having lived a tough life, and having not one, but two, families upon which to build my colorful characters. The first was, naturally, my family of origin – which included an alcoholic, disabled dad, nostalgic for his finer days; and a jazz musician grandfather, rumored to have played trumpet in “houses of ill repute.”

I fell into my second “family” when, at age 16, my first family broke up and (of necessity) I became a stripper on “the Block” – Baltimore’s once-stylish but by then seedy burlesque strip. My adopted Block family included burlesque-era strippers working as barmaids, and a strip-joint manager rumored to have consorted with the mob.

Milton Carter had been on the Block since the 1930s. During the heyday of burlesque, the 1940s and 1950s, Milton had been a “straw man” club owner, holding the liquor and cabaret licenses for the actual owners, mobbed-up guys who, owing to their criminal records, couldn’t get such licenses in their own names.

I met Milton when he was in his 70s and managing the Stage Door, a side-street joint housed within the rearmost portion of the historic Gayety Theater on Baltimore Street. Milton liked to tell the tale of the Stage Door in the old days, when it was “regular” bar where Gayety performers would relax between shows, drinking and carousing with their wealthy admirers, known as “Stage Door Johnnies.” Yet he was quick to also point out that no customer, regardless of how much he spent, had the right to assume anything about his Stage Door girls.

On my first day there, I was drinking with a guy who, having spent a considerable sum on champagne, thought that earned him the right to bully me into the back room. Milton intervened, pulling me aside to tell me I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do. If I didn’t like how things were going with any customer, he said, I should tell the barmaid and she’d remedy the situation. This was important to know, as most Block clubs were fronts for prostitution in those days, and I was too green – just a month past 16 years old – to yet have a clear idea of what going in the back room really meant!

In this and other ways, Milton was like the father that my real father wasn’t, guiding me away from compromise and toward self-preservation. He regularly got on me about smoking cigarettes and advised me to stay away from certain dancers, those with drug habits and pimps for boyfriends. A health-conscious diabetic, he neither smoked nor drank. For his birthday and for Christmas, myself, the barmaid, and one or two other reliable day-shift girls, would chip in and buy him a big box of diabetic cookies.

Birthdays and Christmases were always celebrated at the Stage Door. The owner’s wife, a busty stripper who worked a “circuit,” like the burlesque queens of yesteryear, knew everyone’s birthday and never failed to provide a card and store-bought, personalized cake. On Christmas, the club was closed, but those of us without families showed up anyway. A cold-cut platter was spread across the bar, courtesy of the boss, and a gift exchange was organized by his wife. An overweight bartender who worked nights donned a Santa suit. A chair was placed onstage, names were drawn out of a hat, and every girl in attendance took her turn on Santa’s lap to receive a gift. Lacking in familial closeness as I was, rituals like this one kept me grounded, out of the path of drugs and pimps, as Milton often advised me to stay.

It’s unfortunate that in this modern age, American writers know so little of struggle. Not only have many of us never known it firsthand, but we live in a glib, image-obsessed world where sadness gets stuffed in favor of social media trends and “Likes.”

Studying English at UMBC in the early 1990s, I was fortunate to learn writing from Tom Nugent, a retired newspaperman who knew that to write about life one needed to immerse oneself in it. In the 1970s, he lived at Baltimore’s flea-bag Congress Hotel while writing an exposé about its welfare-roll inhabitants.

My advice for writers today? Live life on the edge, but with a safety net of “family,” real or adopted, to keep you on track when you drift into harm’s way.

Read the full issue of the Summer 2014 UMBC Magazine.

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