From Diane Lee, Dean of Undergraduate Education

Thank you for your outpouring of compassion and support for the Meyerhoff Scholars Program since I shared the sad news about the passing of our colleague LaMont Toliver, who served as the program’s Director and Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Education.

I want to share details with you about the services for LaMont.

On Wednesday, March 7, a viewing will be held with the Toliver family from 5 to 7 p.m. at March Funeral Home West, located at 4300 Wabash Avenue, Baltimore, 21215. (The funeral home will also be open for viewing hours from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., and you can view directions here.)

On Thursday, March 8, a “Family Hour” and viewing will be held from 10 to 11 a.m. at The People’s Community Baptist Church at 31 Norwood Road, Silver Spring, 20905 (view directions here). A service will be held immediately following the viewing.

Members of the UMBC community are welcome to attend these events. Flowers may be sent to the church.

Students also are planning an on-campus memorial service, and I will let you know the details when they are available. Additionally, information will be posted to the Meyerhoff website, where you can also share your memories of LaMont.

UMBC earned an Honorable Mention on the Princeton Review’s list, “Top Undergraduate Schools to Study Video Game Design for 2012.”

The list salutes 32 undergraduate schools and 18 graduate schools for their outstanding game design education programs.

The Princeton Review chose the schools based on a survey it conducted in 2011-12 academic year of administrators at 150 institutions offering video game design coursework and/or degrees in the United States and Canada. The survey which included more than 50 questions, covered a wide range of topics from academics, curriculum, and faculty credentials to graduates’ employment and career achievements. School selections were based on a comprehensive analysis of data that analyzed the quality of the curriculum, faculty, facilities, and infrastructure, plus the school’s scholarships, financial aid and career services.

AP’s latest coverage of Maryland’s same-sex marriage bill focuses on both Gov. O’Malley’s message in signing the legislation and the referendum effort now underway to repeal it.

Donald Norris, professor and chair of public policy at UMBC, suggests that liberal voters who come out to support Obama’s re-election could offset those who turn out in support of the referendum. He further argues that a weak GOP presidential candidate could fail to inspire conservative voters to show up at the polls, decreasing votes for the referendum. Read the full article via USA Today, The Washington Post, NPR or ABC News.

“As Maryland and Washington join six other states in approving same-sex marriage, it’s clear that the era of politicians exploiting the issue for political game appears over,” argues UMBC political science professor Thomas Schaller in his latest Salon column.

Schaller traces shifting positions on same-sex marriage over the last 16 years — among both voters and politicians — focusing particularly on conservative Ken Mehlman. A former Republican strategist who managed Bush’s 2004 campaign, Mehlman now argues in favor of same-sex marriage rights, which he sees as consistent with conservative beliefs in the economic freedom, personal responsibility and family values.

Schaller concludes that “despite Santorum’s earnest attempts to reinvigorate culture war politics,” same-sex marriage no longer functions as a wedge issue in national elections.

Here is one of our talented designers, Faryal! 

1. If you could describe your design style in a few words, what would they be?

My deign style is clean but also merges some illustrative properties to create visual dynamism. 

2. Where do you get inspiration from?

From everyday life! I am the biggest design geek ever. I love looking at layout of magazines, compositions on graphic tees, packaging in super markets, movie posters. I also love interior design and I love going to furniture outlet stores and malls during christmas time. Besides that I love using design studio websites, logo designers blogs and blogs like pinterest and tumblr. 

3. What is your favorite font?

My favorite font is Baskerville. I have a special liking for the serifs and that texture that they create and Baskerville is forceful yet elegant.

4. When did you know you wanted to be a designer?

I took my first design class just for fun and I knew within the first few days! It is rather surprising when you realize the power of design. 

5. Do you work in any other mediums?

I love combining photography, collage and layering of the two with my design. Photo montages are my favorite.

6. What is your favorite color combination?

Many! I love a whole array of colors. But I will say that it might be a cliche but my tried and true favorite would be black, white and red. Classics for a reason.

7. What’s one tool you could never live without? (can be any design program)

command Z! Its my life :)

8. What’s your biggest design pet peeve?

Kerning. It causes me deep pain and torture to see messed up kerning. The space between the ‘it all ends’ on the last Harry Potter movie poster continues to bother me to this day.

9. If you could be a designer for any company, which would it be? Pentagram design firm. It my dream!

More to follow soon!

When he retired this week from Howard County’s fire service, as the department’s deputy chief for operations, Charles Sharpe told the Baltimore Sun that his favorite part of the job was training new emergency responders on special-operations work, which he first studied at UMBC 20 years ago.

Sharpe says his training in water and rope rescues “truly proved to be of tremendous value” during his work as a search manager responding to Hurricane Katrina. He still returns to UMBC’s Emergency Health Services department annually to instruct students in a three-day search and rescue training program, a tradition which he plans to continue this year.

Interactive visual computing for knowledge discovery
in science, engineering and training

Dr. Jian Chen
University of Southern Mississippi

1:00pm Wednesday 7 March 2012, ITE 325b UMBC

Advances in simulations and lab experiments are producing huge datasets at unprecedented rates, and deriving meanings from these data will have far-reaching impacts on our lives in many areas of science, engineering, and medicine. Visualization and interactive computing provide great tools for exploiting these data in scientific discovery and engineering innovations. A limiting factor in the scientific use of visualization tools is the lack of guiding principles to identify and assess visualization methods that are helpful in scientific tasks. In this talk, I present research designed to advance knowledge discovery through the design and evaluation of interactive visualizations. Experiments on image illumination and density are described that successfully address this limitation in brain imaging for medical diagnoses. I also present the theoretical foundations that have led to the various choices in visualization design. In the second part of the talk, I argue that most existing tools designed for scientific discovery fail to address the dynamic nature of the discovery workflow. I present a new visualization tool, VisBubbles, that integrates programming, visualization, and interaction in one environment to create fluid workflows in which new hypotheses can be tested efficiently. VisBubbles augments interactive computing and analysis of time-varying motion data of bat flights by enabling dynamic displays, thus facilitating scientists' quest for new knowledge. I present the design methods we have followed in our long-term collaboration with biologists and engineering scientists on motion analysis. Finally, I present future work I envision in interactive visualization that will be critical in developing future visualization tools for science, engineering, and training.

Jian Chen is an assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Southern Mississippi. She is the founder and director of Interactive Visual Computing Lab. Her research is in the broad area of interaction and visualization, with current focuses on the emerging field of scientific visualization theory and workflow analysis. She has published numerous articles in top journals and international conferences. Her panel on combining human-centered computing and scientific visualization received honorable mention at the 2007 IEEE Visualization Conference. She was a postdoc at Brown University with Drs. David H. Laidlaw (CS) and Sharon Swartz (BioMed) from 2006 to 2009. She has a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and Master’s degrees in both Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering. Her research has been funded by DHS and NSF.

Host: Penny Rheingans

See here for more information