I <3 HUNGER GAMES. Free in the Skylight Lounge. 4/12, 7pm! We’ll have district themed food/challenges. Trivia, costume contest, and prizes.

THEN, we’ll have a private screening at the Hollywood Theater. $5 tickets go on sale at the CIC on March 28th!

Walter Sondheim chillin’ at the end of Spring Break.

UMBC Computer Science Ph.D. student Adrian Rosebrock and the company he founded and heads, ShiftyBits LLC, were recently awarded a competitive research contract from the National Cancer Institutes (NCI/NIH) to conduct research and development in the use of image processing and machine learning techniques to automatically analyze histology images of the breast.

Through the awarded research contract, Adrian will be helping NCI researchers with the design and development of automatic identification techniques for terminal duct lobular units (TDLUs) of the breast, the structures from which most breast cancers arise. This work will also create standard metrics for TDLUs that will aide researchers working within cancer research.

Data suggests that the morphology of TLDUs is related to several breast cancer risk factors, including mammographic density. In addition, TDLU morphology may represent an independent risk factor for breast cancer among women with a biopsy for benign breast disease. For this research project, Shiftybits will be given access to a large NIH dataset of breast biopsies as well as the Komen histology datasets.

Adrian received a B.S. in Computer Science in 2010 from UMBC and founded Shiftbits, LLC in 2011. He is continuing his studies as a Computer Science Ph.D. student at UMBC student, focusing on the combination of text and image retrieval systems.  One research project he  at UMBC involves the automatic identification of pills in images.  At UMBC, Adrian is and working with Professor Tim Oates and Dr. Jesus Caban  who is a researcher at Naval Medical Center and NIH and also teaches at UMBC.

Still looking for a summer internship? The 2012 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) starts accepting application from students on Monday March 26.

GSoC is a global program funded by Google that pays undergraduate or graduate students a $5000 stipend to write code for open source projects. GSoC has worked with the open source community to identify and fund exciting projects for the upcoming summer. Last year over 1,100 students were funded by the program. The FAQ is a good place to find out more.

A set of open source projects (aka mentoring organizations) has been selected. Students apply to work on one of more of these and each mentoring organization ranks the students interested in working with them. Google facilitates the final selection and pairing. The mentoring organization works closely with the student to define tasks, check progress, help solve problems, etc. Typically the student works remotely, interacting with his or her mentor via email, chat, skype, etc.

Students can submit applications via the Google Summer of Code 2012 site from March 26 to April 6. Google says that that the best applications they receive are from students who took the time to interact with one of the participating mentoring organizations and discuss their ideas before submitting an application. So your first step should be to look at the list of 2012 GSoC Mentoring Organizations and contact some that have projects that interest you and for which you have the right skills and background.

See the GSoC 2012 Program Timeline for a complete schedule. You might also check out the information on the Advice for GSoC Students Page and the GSoC forum.