Watch the wages go up, up, up! 

But no thanks to the squabbling squealers in Washington.

The states have realized that if they want the minimum wage raised any time soon, they’re going to have to do it themselves.

Connecticut just endorsed President Obama’s proposal to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 last week. It will be phased in through 2017. 

A few other states are already scheduled for increases, and others are likely to see legislative proposals in the near future. The District of Columbia will be at $11.50 by July 1, 2016, a whole six months before Connecticut. 

Meanwhile, states like Alabama and Louisiana have no state minimum. While other localities want to go above and beyond.

In the state of Washington, the city of SeaTac has raised their minimum wage to an eye raising $15. Citizens are now fighting businesses that don’t want to comply, and a court ruled that the airport, one of the biggest employers of workers in the town, is exempt. 

Other cities have thought about following SeaTac. Neighboring Seattle is seriously considering the raise. After all, Australia has a minimum wage around $15, and their Big Macs are not all that more expensive than ours.

U.S Fast food workers have been putting up a fight for better wages since 2012. Some cities and states finally appear to be listening.

The wage race is under way. Who’s next and who will get left behind?

The Home Health IT Summit 2014 will be held on Thursday, May 1, 2014, 11:30 am - 4:00 pm, in ITE 456, which is on the fourth floor of the ITE (Information Technology and Engineering) building at UMBC. The summit brings together the movers and shakers of information technology in the home healthcare industry in Maryland. The attendees will discuss the current status and future of health IT in Home Health Agencies. Lunch, coffee, and pastries will be served.

Directions, maps, and parking information

Targeting Specific Devices in your Style Sheets set the stage for targeting different mobile devices using CSS3 Media Queries properties such as max-device-width and orientation. In today's follow-up, Rob Gravelle describes how to strategically apply CSS3 Media Queries to give us the very best chance at layout mastery.

Talking to Robots: Learning to Ground Human
Language in Robotic Perception

Cynthia Matuszek
University of Washington

1:00pm Monday, 7 April 2014, ITE325b, UMBC

Advances in computation, sensing, and hardware are enabling robots to perform an increasing variety of tasks in ever less constrained settings. It is now possible to imagine robots that can operate in traditionally human-centric settings. However, such robots need the flexibility to take instructions and learn about tasks from nonspecialists using language and other natural modalities. At the same time, learning to process natural language about the physical world is difficult without a robot’s sensors and actuators. Combining these areas to create useful robotic systems is a fundamentally multidisciplinary problem, requiring advances in natural language processing, machine learning, robotics, and human-robot interaction. In this talk, I describe my work on learning natural language from end users in a physical context; such language allows a person to communicate their needs in a natural, unscripted way. I demonstrate that this approach can enable a robot to follow directions, learn about novel objects in the world, and perform simple tasks such as navigating an unfamiliar map or putting away objects.

Cynthia Matuszek is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering department, where she is a member of both the Robotics and State Estimation lab and the Language, Interaction, and Learning group. She earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and M.Sc. from the University of Washington. She is published in the areas of artificial intelligence, robotics, ubiquitous computing, and human-robot interaction.

Talking to Robots: Learning to Ground Human
Language in Robotic Perception

Cynthia Matuszek
University of Washington

1:00pm Monday, 7 April 2014, ITE325b, UMBC

Advances in computation, sensing, and hardware are enabling robots to perform an increasing variety of tasks in ever less constrained settings. It is now possible to imagine robots that can operate in traditionally human-centric settings. However, such robots need the flexibility to take instructions and learn about tasks from nonspecialists using language and other natural modalities. At the same time, learning to process natural language about the physical world is difficult without a robot’s sensors and actuators. Combining these areas to create useful robotic systems is a fundamentally multidisciplinary problem, requiring advances in natural language processing, machine learning, robotics, and human-robot interaction. In this talk, I describe my work on learning natural language from end users in a physical context; such language allows a person to communicate their needs in a natural, unscripted way. I demonstrate that this approach can enable a robot to follow directions, learn about novel objects in the world, and perform simple tasks such as navigating an unfamiliar map or putting away objects.

Cynthia Matuszek is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering department, where she is a member of both the Robotics and State Estimation lab and the Language, Interaction, and Learning group. She earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and M.Sc. from the University of Washington. She is published in the areas of artificial intelligence, robotics, ubiquitous computing, and human-robot interaction.