Linda Dusman, Music, and Eric Smallwood, Visual Arts, in partnership with the School of Music at the University of Maryland, College Park, have received a $150,000 Maryland Innovation Initiative (MII) grant for their work on the tablet app, Symphony Interactive. MII was created as a partnership between the State of Maryland and five Maryland academic research institutions (Johns Hopkins University; Morgan State University; UMCP; University of Maryland Baltimore; and UMBC), and is managed by TEDCO, created by the Maryland State Legislature in 1998 to facilitate the transfer and commercialization of technology from Maryland’s research universities and federal labs into the marketplace. The MII program promotes the commercialization of academic research conducted in the partnership universities. Symphony Interactive is only the second project within the humanities ever to receive an award from MII, and the first to be funded in the arts and humanities at UMBC.

Symphony Interactive provides contemporary audiences a novel way to engage with live orchestral performances. Through both text and images presented through a unique interface at the exact moment the information is most pertinent to the music, SI enables an enriched experience for users by allowing them to learn about the music and its cultural history during its performance. Acting as an informed “friend,” the app subtly provides information to enhance engagement, keeping the experience of the live performance paramount. During the grant period, the SI team will create a library for thirty of the most performed orchestral works, producing unique textual and visual information for each piece. Over the next nine months, the grant funding also will enable developing a more fully featured proof of concept application, expanding the social media extensions of the app, and performing valuable market research to aid in the commercialization process.

The Symphony Interactive project has been in development since 2011, with support from the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and the Office of the Vice President for Research. Development has progressed through collaboration with many faculty, staff and students from Music, Visual Arts, the Imaging Research Center, Human Centered Computing, and the Department of Information Technology. Symphony Interactive has been tested in performances by the UMBC Symphony, and most recently at the National Orchestra Institute at the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts.

UMBC Parents ~

Do you have a student preparing to graduate from UMBC in December 2014 or May 2015?  If so, please encourage them to attend the annual Senior Success Seminar offered by the Career Services Center on Friday, September 26, Noon – 5:00 pm.

Many students do not realize that the heaviest recruitment season will begin in October.  We will prepare workshop participants to take advantage of the on-campus interview program (application deadlines start mid-September) and maximize UMBCworks (our web-based job posting system), career fairs, corporate visibility days and other networking events designed to move their job search forward.

This seminar will tell your son or daughter everything they need to know to find a job before graduation -- all in one place, all on this one Friday in September!  Space is limited so early registration is recommended.  Registration and additional information is available here:  

http://careers.umbc.edu/news_events/workshops/seniorseminar.php

Walk In Advising Hours August 18th-22nd
Got a question? Need registration clearance? Stop on by! 

Monday, August 18th
None due to Orientation

Tuesday, August 19th
10am-11:30am

Thursday, August 21st
1:30pm-3pm

Friday, August 22nd
None due to Orientation

Advisors are also available by appointment.

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

For many, working at NASA while in school is a dream. Damon Bradley, Ph.D. electrical engineering, worked as the lead computer engineer in the Instrument Electronics Development Branch at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

He also founded the National Society of Black Engineers (Greenbelt Space Chapter) and the Digital Signal Processing Technology Group at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Now, with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, he will continue his work as Lead Computer Engineer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

As an undergrad, Sebastian Snowberger, chemical engineering, earned two Undergraduate Research Dissemination Awards to talk about his findings at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and received an Undergraduate Research Award. A member of the honors college, Snowberger plans to pursue a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Notre Dame.

Before graduating with Ph.D. in statistics, Justin Jacobs earned the highest honor given to the intelligence community in the early stages of their career, the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE).

In addition to working for the Department of Defense as a research mathematician and the U.S. Census Bureau as a mathematical statistician, Jacobs received numerous awards recognizing his efforts. He now plans to continue his work as a research mathematician at the Department of Defense and would like to begin teaching.

Charlotte Keniston, M.F.A. imaging
and digital arts, already has plenty of experience in her field. A recipient of the Rockvilla F.E.A.S.T. Artist award and a visual arts instructor for the UMBC SUCCESS Program, she has hosted workshops with over 300 participants “to explore how personal food stories relate to the food system and social change.” Keniston is a finalist for the Fulbright National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship. If selected, she plans to spend the next year in Mexico City working with people with disabilities and using digital art tools to tell their story.

Meet more of the class of 2014!