Tired of playing Diablo III?

If you head to Gamescape next weekend, you'll have a chance to try your hand at over a dozen original video games dreamed up by local students and indie game developers. As part of Artscape–the country's largest free arts festival–the annual three-day video game celebration will take place in MICA's Bunting Center from July 20-22.

Among developers like Pure Bang Games (makers of Zombie Chess) and Crankshaft Games (Eternal Silence), representatives from UMBC's own Game Developers Club will be in attendance with three games of their own. The game concepts, explains club president Alex Grube (CS '13), were conceived during a 48-hour game jam last September, and the group has been hard at work developing the games since the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year. They are:

Black Fowl is a 3D hack and slash third person role playing adventure game. You play Max, a young orphan on a quest to discover his roots. Set in the Middle Ages, highlights of the game include the ability to use magical powers (like flying), and to engage in combat while riding a bull.

Cosmoknights is a 2D multiplayer that follows a capture-the-flag concept. Two combating astronauts are stranded in an asteroid field. Your mission is to collect spare parts for your out-of-commission spaceship and get home first. Oh, and try not to get hit by an asteroid.

X-Zip-It! boasts the tagline: "It's Skyrim with zippers, but without the Skyrim."  In this 2D mobile phone game, you must unzip the zipper while avoiding obstacles like buttons, Velcro, buckles, and necklaces.

UMBC's Game Development Club will discuss Black Fowl, Cosmoknights, and X-Zip-It on Sunday, July 22nd from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. To learn more about the event, check out the website.

Professor Marie desJardins (PI) along with co-principal investigators Professor Penny Rheingans and Dr. Susan Martin received a research award worth $200,000 from the National Science Foundation's program on Computing Education for 21st Century. Their 18 month research project, Building Community and Knowledge to Increase Statewide Support for Computing Education, will gather data about the status of Computer Science education in Maryland high schools and build relationships among high school teachers, community college and university faculty, and state education administrators to facilitate and increase state-level support for lasting improvements to computing education.

Despite the overall success of the K-12 education system in Maryland, opportunities to study computer science vary tremendously among the 24 school systems and approximately 200 high schools in the state. This disparity can be attributed to several factors, including the lack of a state-mandated computer science high school graduation requirement, the fact that there is no state-required teacher certification in the discipline, the absence of a standardized computer science curriculum, and barriers to entry for girls and underrepresented minorities.

The effort has two immediate objectives: (1) performing an assessment of the current state of high school computer science in each of the 24 Maryland school systems and (2) increasing knowledge about national issues associated with computer science education among high school and state administrators in Maryland through state-wide summit meetings for teachers, administrators, and higher education faculty. The long term goal is to develop curriculum and teacher development programs that will improve the quality, breadth, and student diversity of computer science education in Maryland.

MS Thesis Defense

Finding associations among SNPs for
prostate cancer using collaborative filtering

Rohit Kugaonkar

9:00am Wed. 18 July 2012, Room ITE 325b

Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer related deaths among men. Because of the slow growing nature of prostate cancer, sometimes surgical treatment is not required for less aggressive cancers. Recent debates over prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening have drawn new attention to prostate cancer. Due to the complicated nature of prostate cancer, studying the entire genome is essential to find genomic traits. Due to the high cost of studying all Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), it is essential to find tag SNPs which can represent other SNPs. Earlier methods to find tag SNPs using associations between SNPs either use SNP's location information or are based on data of very few SNP markers in each sample. Our study is based on 2300 samples with 550,000 SNPs each. We have not used SNP location information or any predefined standard cut-offs to find tag SNPs. Our approach is based on using collaborative filtering methods to find pair wise associations among SNPs and thus list top-N tag SNPs. We have found 25 tag SNPs which have highest similarities to other SNPs. In addition we found 16 more SNPs which have high correlation with the known high risk SNPs that are associated with prostate cancer. We used some of these newly found SNPs with 5 different classification algorithms and observed some improvement in prediction accuracy over using the original known high risk SNPs. The classifier can be used in a decision to perform further testing in case of a "yes" answer by the classifier.

Committee: Drs. Yelena Yesha (chair), Anupam Joshi, Aryya Gangopadhyay and Micheal Grasso.

The one-year, post-baccalaureate Music Entrepreneurship Certificate Program is modeled around an innovative collaboration between UMBC and The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO). This marks the first time that a major American orchestra has collaborated with a university in a new academic program. With the BSO’s public education music program, OrchKids, at the center of the Music Entrepreneurship program curriculum, students will obtain practical experiences in entrepreneurial and educational ventures to make them successful twenty-first century musicians. Applications for Fall 2012 will be accepted through Friday, August 10.

For more information, click here.

The Shriver Center is currently seeking students to serve as SUCCESS Peers for the SUCCESS initiative that will launch this Fall 2012 semester.  The UMBC SUCCESS initiative, formed in partnership with the Maryland Department of Disabilities, will serve young adults with intellectual disabilities in Maryland.  Through participation in courses and campus-based activities here at UMBC, a co-hort of 6-8 SUCCESS students will be connected to employment and prepared for independent living upon completion of the program.  

The Shriver Center is recruiting SUCCESS Peers to work alongside students in the SUCCESS initiative.  The volunteer role is multi-faceted, and SUCCESS Peers will serve as mentors, advisors, and tutors to students with intellectual disabilities who are enrolled in the SUCCESS initiative.  The SUCCESS Peers will lead activities from an established curriculum and will serve an integral role in this pilot year of the program.

Position Description:

The SUCCESS Peer will be expected to:

• Serve as a mentor, tutor, and support to students with intellectual disabilities that are enrolled in the SUCCESS initiative.  
• Be available to serve in this role on Mondays and Wednesdays from 11:00-11:50am.  Students will have the option of participating in additional service-learning activities on Friday afternoons from 1:15pm-4pm.
• Participate in guided activities for the SUCCESS students, based on the service-learning curriculum that has been created.
• Attend the Pre-Service Training before the start of service.
• Enroll in the 096 Practicum, a zero-credit course that is required for all Service-Learning participants through The Shriver Center.  Students will receive a transcript notation of "Service-Learning" that recognizes their participation in weekly, sustained service.
• Complete reflection activities as outlined by 096 Practicum requirements.

Qualifications:

The SUCCESS Peer is expected to:

• Have a desire to serve as a mentor and tutor to students enrolled in SUCCESS.
• Be flexible, patient, and comfortable providing one-one-one support to students with intellectual disabilities. 
• Demonstrate a strong desire to learn from new experiences and have fun building new relationships through service! 

Interested students must complete a Volunteer Application (attached to this post).  

Please email completed application by Friday, July 20th to: Clare Greene, Service-Learning Program Coordinator:  clare6@umbc.edu