A new survey reveals why citizen scientists take part in crowdsourced science projects

A picture can say more than a thousand words.

Congress is currently debating gun control measures that were initiated after the massacre of young school children in Newtown, Ct 3 months ago. However, the initial momentum for change has ebbed as the lobbying power of the NRA has flexed its muscles in Washington DC. 

The ban on assault weapons seems to be going nowhere (do people really need to own these things?) and even background checks are running into resistance.

Fortunately states like Connecticut and Maryland are leading the way in the gun control effort.

Where do you stand on this controversial issue?

Diff Displays reduces distraction by visually highlighting what’s changed on your screen since you last looked.

Most computer interfaces are designed to capture your attention—whether you like it or not. A new system for computers with multiple screens, called Diff Displays, responds to inattention by making the information on the screen a user isn’t focused on less distracting.

Dear Participants, Alumni, and Friends of PROMISE,

Today, I celebrate 10 years as the Director of PROMISE: Maryland’s AGEP. For those of you who remember my first day at UMBC, I started out in an office on the 5th floor of the Administration Building. I am so happy that so many of you who were students then, have gone on to finish your master’s and doctoral degrees. You are leaders, professors, directors of programs, you have built families, garnered hosts of friends, and you have your own mentees. As I move into the 10th year as your director, I hope to be able to continue to serve you well and help you to reach your dreams.

Please mark Saturday, August 17, 2013 on your calendars. We will be celebrating our PROMISE growth at the 2013 Summer Success Institute (SSI) on UMB’s campus. We invite all students, alumni, and friends to join us for the celebration! Please plan to join us! I would love to see you there!

The pictures below from that first year include two former peer mentors who are no longer with us, the late Jessica Soto Perez (pink sweater), and in the second picture, the late Dr. Angela Grant (center). Jessica was a Peer Mentor (Chemical Engineering) at UMBC, and Angela was a Peer Mentor (Math)  at UMCP. Current students: remember that you are here and alive, so you can finish, you can continue toward that goal! It remains my honor to serve you.

Very sincerely,

Renetta Tull

First PROMISE Peer Mentors at UMBC

First PROMISE website, 2003

Dear Participants, Alumni, and Friends of PROMISE,

Today, I celebrate 10 years as the Director of PROMISE: Maryland’s AGEP. For those of you who remember my first day at UMBC, I started out in an office on the 5th floor of the Administration Building. I am so happy that so many of you who were students then, have gone on to finish your master’s and doctoral degrees. You are leaders, professors, directors of programs, you have built families, garnered hosts of friends, and you have your own mentees. As I move into the 10th year as your director, I hope to be able to continue to serve you well and help you to reach your dreams.

Please mark Saturday, August 17, 2013 on your calendars. We will be celebrating our PROMISE growth at the 2013 Summer Success Institute (SSI) on UMB’s campus. We invite all students, alumni, and friends to join us for the celebration! Please plan to join us! I would love to see you there!

The pictures below from that first year include two former peer mentors who are no longer with us, the late Jessica Soto Perez (pink sweater), and in the second picture, the late Dr. Angela Grant (center). Jessica was a Peer Mentor (Chemical Engineering) at UMBC, and Angela was a Peer Mentor (Math)  at UMCP. Current students: remember that you are here and alive, so you can finish, you can continue toward that goal! It remains my honor to serve you.

Very sincerely,

Renetta Tull

First PROMISE Peer Mentors at UMBC

First PROMISE website, 2003

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Machine learning techniques for predicting chronic diseases

Vladimir Korolev

1:00pm Friday, 5 April 2013, ITE 227, UMBC

In recent years we saw an explosion of cheap genetic tests, which lead to the emergence of personalized medicine. Personalized medicine is defined as practice of medicine that is tailored to specifics of individual patient. My work addresses the problem predicting an individual’s predisposition towards certain chronic diseases based on the their genetic makeup. The benefits of such work allow for more selective administration of invasive tests such as biopsies, which are known to cause health problems themselves.

Recently NIH has done a number of Gene Wide Association Studies q that resulted in massive datasets containing subjects’ generic makeup and labeled with clinical data including occurrence of chronic diseases. Unfortunately, given the relatively small number of patients in such studies and the vast number of genes possessed by human beings, these datasets cannot be analyzed with traditional statistical predictive models, which require a large number of samples (patients) with a very few features per sample.

My work attempts to solve this problem by employing state of the art machine learning techniques. In the past year I have built a software system that is capable of crunching of multi-terabyte scale datasets to refactor the NIH data into the form that is palatable by modern big data systems. I have run initial stages of feature selection. I will present the current state of the work and future plans. Another goal of this work is to ensure the repeatability of the experiments and flexibility to run with any similar dataset from current and future studies

Vlad Korolev is a PhD student in the UMBC Computer Science program. His research interests are in the are of personalized medicine, machine learning and large scale data processing. Vlad has considerable experience in the industry specializing in IT security, large scale data processing and the organization of software development processes.

In this article we will take a look at three popular Javascript physics libraries and one that is currently in development: box2dweb, Ammo.js, JigLibJS, and Cannon.js. For each one, a quick introduction will be given and then the library will be rated based on ease of use, performance, and feature set.

Rob Gravelle shows how to develop a simple Eclipse plugin that extends the New menu to let you open a basic skeleton of a customized class in the editor.