Ephesians 1:3-14 (NIV)
3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. 4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. 7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace 8 that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and understanding, 9 he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, 10 to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.
11 In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, 12 in order that we, who were the first to put our hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. 13 And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, 14 who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.
Reflection
When we receive a gift, the gift itself is only half of the joy. What’s the other half? It’s in knowing the identity of the giver. If we don’t know, we’re still happy but we’re left wondering who could be so generous to give us a gift. But if we know the identity, we’re even more overjoyed because we know that it came from someone who thought of us and cared enough to give.
We have received every spiritual blessing in Christ! They are so precious to us because we know that they all come from God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Adoption, calling, anointing, salvation, holiness, forgiveness and freedom – all of these come from the One who is rich in love and grace. Out of the incredible working of His wisdom and understanding, He revealed the mystery of His will to us so that we can know Him and be in relationship with Him. Out of this relationship, we give genuine praise and thanksgiving to Him from whom all blessings flow.
Response
Each phrase in this passage reveals how incredibly blessed we are. Read the passage again and focus on a couple of phrases. As you spend time meditating on God’s Word, let’s ask the Giver of all spiritual blessings to let His Words become more real in our lives.
Mr. Ali Azari received the winner award with his poster presentation on Length of stay Prediction for the Hospitalized Patients in the Poster day organized by the Information Systems Department at UMBC. This is from an independent study research conducted in the Spring 2012.
Congratulations to Mr. Azari!!
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Mr. Katukuri received a runner up award with his poster presentation in the Poster day organized by the Information Systems Department at UMBC. Mr. Katukuri presented a methodology designed by Güneş Koru for one of the upcoming projects. Congratulations to Mr. Katukuri!
]]>Results will be announced at 4:30 pm on Thursday, April 26th in the Student Org Space. Join us!
MS Thesis Defense
Towards Implementation of a Pattern Recognition System based on
a Working Theory of the Learning Rule for Dendritic Integration
Shamit Patel
4:00pm Monday 23 April 2012, ITE 346, UMBC
My goal is to develop a working theory of the learning rule for dendritic integration, and to then implement a pattern recognition system based on that learning algorithm so that the algorithm can be evaluated for its generalization ability. In this regard, this thesis presents an implementation of Jeff Hawkins and Dileep George's Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) pattern recognition system that's based on an existing theory of the learning rule for dendritic integration – spike-timing-dependent synaptic plasticity (STDP). The integration of this learning rule is the novel contribution of this thesis. I found that the STDP HTM system achieved much higher probabilistic classification accuracy and better generalization ability than the non-STDP HTM system. Probabilistic classification accuracy is a way of measuring classification accuracy in which a testing pattern is classified correctly if its label appears in the group of labels output by the top-level node of the HTM network.
Committee: Professors Tim Oates (Chair), Yun Peng and Tim Finin
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]]>Some pics from Quadmania 2012. Had some amazing weather this afternoon and had a good turnout of students on the quad. The greeks had the right idea with their dunk tank - kinda hot out there in the sun.