English Associate Professor Helen Burgess has been selected for a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) review panel for the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant Program.

The grant program is designed to encourage innovation in all aspects of the digital humanities.  The panel reviews proposals that involve approaches to new media, e-literature, innovative uses of technology, and new digital modes of publication.

The NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants have averaged 151 applications per competition over the last five years, and the program has issued an average of 26 awards each year.

You can find more information about the grant program here.

Hey Retrievers, just a friendly reminder to turn your clocks back this weekend. And you know what that means… an extra hour of sleep!

P.S. UMBC is full of helpful tips and tricks!

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Deriving Insights from Data:
Peek at Research Challenges for some Industry Verticals

Dr. Manish Gupta
Vice President and Director
Xerox Research Center India

3:00pm Monday, 4 November, 2013, ITE 325b, UMBC

We are entering an era that will usher dramatic changes in several industries via exploitation of data. With the proliferation of data from sensors that are becoming ubiquitous and increasing digitization of data that used to be in non-electronic form, there are opportunities to completely transform the way the world is run. We present examples of such opportunities in the Financial, Healthcare, Education and Infrastructure domains. We also describe unique challenges like scale and heterogeneity in growth markets like India, which often require different approaches to solving these problems. Diving deeper into the healthcare industry, we present preliminary work that shows the applicability of remote sensing and data analytics not only to measure body vitals such as temperature and heart rate, but also to diagnose diseases such as breast cancer and atrial fibrillation (a form of cardiac arrhythmia) in the future. As more of the patients’ medical history gets captured in electronic health record systems, there is a further promise of applying real-time predictive analytics (based on accurate models for diagnosis and treatment of various diseases, utilizing the latest medical literature) to assist doctors in practicing personalized, evidence-based medicine. We describe outstanding challenges, including data privacy, machine learning over heterogeneous forms of data, and financial incentives design, which we believe must be addressed to enable transformational impact.

Dr. Manish Gupta is Vice President at Xerox Corporation and Director of Xerox Research Centre in India. Previously, Manish has served as Managing Director, Technology Division at Goldman Sachs in India, and has held various leadership positions with IBM, including that of Director, IBM Research – India and Chief Technologist, IBM India/South Asia. From 2001 to 2006, he served as a Senior Manager at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he led the team developing system software for the Blue Gene/L supercomputer. IBM was awarded a National Medal of Technology and Innovation for the invention of Blue Gene by US President Barack Obama in 2009. Manish earned a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Delhi in 1987, an M.S. from the Ohio State University in 1988 and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 1992. He has co-authored over 75 papers, with more than 5,000 citations in Google Scholar (with an h-index of 41) in the areas of high-performance computing, compilers, and virtual machine optimizations, and has been granted more than 15 US patents. While at IBM, Manish received an Outstanding Innovation Award, two Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and the Lou Gerstner Team Award for Client Excellence. Manish is an ACM Fellow.

A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

The Snowden Leaks and the Public
Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, discusses what we have learned about surveillance from the Snowden leaks his newspaper has helped bring to light.
—Brian Bergstein, deputy editor