Some events near UMBC include:

WALK MS: Towson 2014 at Goucher College on April 13

WALK MS: Baltimore 2014 at Power Plant Live! on April 27

WALK MS: Columbia 2014 at Howard Community College on April 26

Come together with friends, family, and coworkers to help raise over $1 million for MS research, programs, and services for the 6,500 Marylanders living with MS. Walk MS is approximately 3 miles, and registration opens at 9 a.m. with the walk beginning at 10 a.m.

The Institutional Review Board (IRB), the formally designated UMBC committee to approve, monitor, and review research involving humans, is actively seeking faculty to serve on the IRB as members. 

Members serve on the IRB for a three (3) year renewable appointment where they review research protocols, attend meetings, and discuss issues with the aim to protect the rights and welfare of the research subjects. Members have expertise in different areas to ensure that research protocols are evaluated fairly by knowledgeable individuals.

IRB member responsibilities

• Reviewing research study proposals and consent documents and evaluating them from the perspective of the federal human research regulatory criteria as well as other relevant ethical, scientific or compliance considerations.
  
• Evaluating the risk level (i.e., minimal or greater than minimal) of proposed research.
  
• Determining a protocol’s full approval, approval subject to modification(s), reconsideration, or disapproval of the human subject research.
  
• Reviewing and evaluating research studies subject to IRB continuation approval
  
• Participating in IRB deliberations concerning issues inherent to human research studies and recommending improvements to IRB procedures to enhance UMBC’s IRB review process and/or human subject protections.
  
• Attending IRB meetings
  

Time requirement

The board typically meets five (5) times during the academic year: October, December, February, April and June. Meetings are on Mondays from 10 am-12 pm.

Most of the protocols we receive are eligible for expedited review; members review on the average 15-20 new and/or continuing protocols each academic year.  Occasionally the IRB reviews a protocol in need of a full review.

Please contact Tim Sparklin, Office for Research Protections and Compliance (ORPC) or Susan Sonnenschein (IRB Chair) if you are interested in becoming a member by May 31, 2014. We are anticipating the member appointment beginning in July 2014. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to the OPRC at compliance@umbc.edu.

 Additional information about the IRB may be found at http://my.umbc.edu/groups/compliance/documents/165

In Maryland, an average of 55 young adults age out of the foster care system each year. Without a dependable adult in their lives, these individuals are at a greatly increased risk for experiencing homelessness, unemployment, illness and unplanned pregnancy. That’s why Maryland CASA programs statewide are recruiting responsible volunteers to help these foster youth make a successful transition to adulthood.

We know UMBC students, faculty and alumni have a strong commitment to community service. We would like to connect with this network to reach more qualified volunteers. Please let us know how best to go about doing this. Your help would be greatly appreciated as we work toward the goal of increasing the number of volunteers statewide who work with older foster youth by 20%.

Please see the attached flyer for more information and feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Many thanks,

Jami

Jami-Lin Williams

Intern, Maryland CASA Association

jami@marylandcasa.org

http://www.marylandcasa.org/

The following is a guest post by Bear Travis, a Web Standards Engineer at Adobe. I'm a fan of how Adobe is pushing the web forward with new design capabilities, and doing it in a responsible way. CSS filters is a good example. They knew they were desired because Photoshop paved the way. They brought them to the web with a sensible syntax and they helped with both the spec and browser implementation. Now we're seeing them in stable browsers, and they are advocating use through responsible progressive enhancement. Hallelujah. Here's Bear with a tutorial about just that.

While filters such as contrast, saturate, and blur have existed in image editors for some time, delivering them on the web has historically required serving images with those filters already applied. As browsers begin to incorporate filters as part of the web platform, we can begin breaking down complex visual effects into their component parts, and implementing them on the web. This article will examine one such effect, frosted glass, and how CSS filters provide a cleaner, more flexible solution than static images.

Old School: Frosted Glass with Images

The frosted glass effect has been kicking around the internet for a while; we even saw it here on CSS-Tricks back in 2008. The idea behind the effect is relatively simple: just blur and lighten the area behind overlaid content. The content gains higher contrast with its background, but you still maintain a rough idea of what's going on behind it. The CSS-Tricks article uses two images: a standard version and a frosted version (blurred with a white tint). In our example, a card slides up to reveal content, while frosting over the background.

Demo

See the Pen Frosted Glass Effect Using Multiple Images by Adobe Web Platform (@adobe) on CodePen.

The HTML

The markup is relatively simple. We only have a single article that contains content.

<article class="glass down">
      <h1>Pelican</h1>
      <p>additional content...</p>
    </article>

The CSS

We first size everything to the viewport. Then, we overlay a blurred version of the background on top of the original background. Finally, we add a white tint. The overflow is hidden to prevent scrolling and to clip the effect to the .glass element.

html, body, .glass {
        width: 100%;
        height: 100%;
        overflow: hidden;
    }
    body {
        background-image: url('pelican.jpg');
        background-size: cover;
    }
    .glass::before {
        display: block;
        width: 100%;
        height: 100%;
        background-image: url('pelican-blurry.jpg');
        background-size: cover;
        content: ' ';
        opacity: 0.4;
    }
    .glass {
        background-color: white;
    }

The above CSS will create our blurred and lightened overlay. We also need to shift the overlay down to the bottom of the page, leaving just enough space to view the header text. Since the blurred image is a child of the overlay, we also need to shift it back up by the opposite amount in order to keep it aligned with the body background. Because the demo uses transitions, I chose to use CSS transforms rather than the background-attachment property, as CSS transforms can be hardware accelerated.

.glass.down {
        transform: translateY(100%) translateY(-7rem);
    }
    .glass.down::before {
        transform: translateY(-100%) translateY(7rem);
    }
    .glass.up, .glass.up::before {
        transform: translateY(0);
    }

Notes

If you'd like a further breakdown, I built a deconstructed version of the effect.

The above technique is straightforward, and has solid browser support. Although I spruced up the demo a bit with transitions, the other required features – generated content, opacity, transforms and background-size – all have solid browser support ranging back to IE 9 (with the exception of Opera Mini).

New School: Frosted Glass with Filters

The duplicate image technique requires maintaining a blurred image along with the original, which can become a pain if you need to reuse the effect for multiple images. For example, responsive designs may require swapping in different images at different screen sizes. Or, template layouts may drop in images dynamically (eg, a different header image for every blog post). For these cases, it would be nice to generate the effect using only the source image. After all, we're just blurring it.

This is where CSS Filters come in handy. They allow us to apply the blur in the browser, using the CSS filter property.

The CSS

We can adjust the CSS for the frosted glass overlay to be the original image with a blur filter applied.

.glass::before {
        background-image: url('pelican-blurry.jpg');
    }

.glass::before {
        background-image: url('pelican.jpg');
        filter: blur(5px);
    }

Demo

See the Pen Frosted Glass Effect Using Filter Effects by Adobe Web Platform (@adobe) on CodePen.

Caveats

Easy peasy, right? Unfortunately, CSS Filters are somewhat new. That means they may be vendor prefixed, and that their browser support is not yet universal. However, filters have a longer history in SVG, and applying SVG filters to HTML content via CSS has wider browser support. You can easily add them as a fallback for when CSS filters are not supported. The above demo actually does just that.

To add an SVG filter, we include some inline SVG in our HTML markup, and reference the filter with a url(). Pro tip: An alternative is to encode the SVG filter and reference as a data url, but that format is a bit more difficult to read in an article.

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1">
      <defs>
        <filter id="blur">
          <feGaussianBlur stdDeviation="5" />
        </filter>
      </defs>
    </svg>

.glass::before {
        background-image: url('pelican.jpg');
        /* Fallback to SVG filters */
        filter: url('#blur');
        filter: blur(5px);
    }

There will still be cases where neither CSS nor SVG Filters are supported by a browser. In that case, the user will see text on a lightened (tinted but unblurred) background, which isn't too shabby.

Conclusion

Filters allow us to use effects in the browser that were previously only available in image editors. As an element's style, rather than a rendered image, they are easier to alter and reuse. You can use CSS Filters in current versions of Chrome, Safari, and Opera, and they are under active development in Firefox (no word yet on Internet Explorer). With a little care towards fallback behavior, you can start using them today.

Frosting Glass with CSS Filters is a post from CSS-Tricks

Google believes open hardware innovation could help it find industries and markets for its software and services.

In a two-story building in an industrial district of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ara Knaian shows off prototypes of what could be the industry’s first completely modular smartphone.

A multi-scale approach to analyze large clinical datasets:
Towards the understanding of the complex effects of concussions

Dr. Jesus Caban
National Intrepid Center of Excellence
Walter Reed, Bethesda, MD

Noon Thursday, 10 April 2014, ITE325b

Mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBIs) or concussions are invisible injuries that are poorly understood and their sequelae can be difficult to diagnose. Individuals who have had concussions are at an increased risk of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), headaches, concentration difficulties, and other problems. During the last decade, a significant amount of attention has been given to the acquisition of clinical data from patients suffering from mTBI. Unfortunately, most of the data collection and analysis have focused on individual aspects of the injury, not necessarily on comprehensive and multi-modal analytical techniques to capture the complex biological state of mTBI patients.

This talk will discuss a large-scale informatics database that has been developed to enable interdisciplinary research on mTBI and will introduce a multi-scale approach to mine complex clinical datasets. The millions of multi-modal elements originated from different clinical disciplines are treated as weak features and modeled independently to generate stronger features. Three cases of going from weak to stronger features will be discussed including (a) an inductive/transductive model to extract stable image features from multi-modal MRI scans, (b) a rule-based model used to infer knowledge from blood measurements, and (c) a sentiment analysis-based model to extract behavioral signals from writing samples. Once stronger features are obtained, a relational model is used to integrate the data and extract new knowledge from such a complex dataset.

Dr. Caban is the Acting Chief of Clinical & Research Informatics at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE) at Walter Reed Bethesda. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMBC (2009), his M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky (2005), and his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Puerto Rico (2002). Over the last eight years Dr. Caban’s research has focused on the design and development of techniques to analyze clinical and imaging data. His research and experience has given him the opportunity to work at top research and healthcare organizations including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), John Hopkins University, the University of Maryland Medical Center, and IBM Research. Dr. Caban is presently an adjunct faculty member at John Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab and a part-time instructor at the Department of Computer Science at UMBC. Recently, he received the 2013-14 JHU/APL Junior faculty award for his commitment to teaching. Currently, he is serving as the Associate Editor of the JAMIA special issue on Visual Analytics in Healthcare and as the contracting officer representative (COR) for the DoD program on “Watson-Like Technologies for TBI/PTSD Clinical Decision Support and Predictive Analytics”.

A multi-scale approach to analyze large clinical datasets:
Towards the understanding of the complex effects of concussions

Dr. Jesus Caban
National Intrepid Center of Excellence
Walter Reed, Bethesda, MD

Noon Thursday, 10 April 2014, ITE325b

Mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBIs) or concussions are invisible injuries that are poorly understood and their sequelae can be difficult to diagnose. Individuals who have had concussions are at an increased risk of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), headaches, concentration difficulties, and other problems. During the last decade, a significant amount of attention has been given to the acquisition of clinical data from patients suffering from mTBI. Unfortunately, most of the data collection and analysis have focused on individual aspects of the injury, not necessarily on comprehensive and multi-modal analytical techniques to capture the complex biological state of mTBI patients.

This talk will discuss a large-scale informatics database that has been developed to enable interdisciplinary research on mTBI and will introduce a multi-scale approach to mine complex clinical datasets. The millions of multi-modal elements originated from different clinical disciplines are treated as weak features and modeled independently to generate stronger features. Three cases of going from weak to stronger features will be discussed including (a) an inductive/transductive model to extract stable image features from multi-modal MRI scans, (b) a rule-based model used to infer knowledge from blood measurements, and (c) a sentiment analysis-based model to extract behavioral signals from writing samples. Once stronger features are obtained, a relational model is used to integrate the data and extract new knowledge from such a complex dataset.

Dr. Caban is the Acting Chief of Clinical & Research Informatics at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE) at Walter Reed Bethesda. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMBC (2009), his M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky (2005), and his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Puerto Rico (2002). Over the last eight years Dr. Caban’s research has focused on the design and development of techniques to analyze clinical and imaging data. His research and experience has given him the opportunity to work at top research and healthcare organizations including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), John Hopkins University, the University of Maryland Medical Center, and IBM Research. Dr. Caban is presently an adjunct faculty member at John Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab and a part-time instructor at the Department of Computer Science at UMBC. Recently, he received the 2013-14 JHU/APL Junior faculty award for his commitment to teaching. Currently, he is serving as the Associate Editor of the JAMIA special issue on Visual Analytics in Healthcare and as the contracting officer representative (COR) for the DoD program on “Watson-Like Technologies for TBI/PTSD Clinical Decision Support and Predictive Analytics”.