Congratulations to UMBC Ebiquity alumna Cynthia Parr for being selected to present at the 2012 TED conference on the Encyclopedia of Life project. Cyndy was a research professor at UMBC and worked with us on the SPIRE project. She now works for the Smithsonian Institution and is director of the EOL Species Pages Group.She gave her three minute talk last night and we look forward to seeing it when it is available online. Here’s a note from the TED blog.

Cynthia Parr takes the stage to update us on a massive TED Prize project: The Encyclopedia of Life. Perhaps a quarter of TED talks feature living organisms. Whether it’s an urgent need for conservation or a creature that can teach us something, it’s obvious that you care deeply about biodiversity. And with your help we’ve made Ed Wilson’s grand vision a reality. To build the Encyclopedia of Life we started with databases from leading museums, libraries, and science projects. We’ve brought in content from Flickr and Wikipedia and invited everyone to add text directly to EOL.

Thanks to global partners we’ve now got information in Spanish and Arabic with more languages to come. because people should be able to learn about the species they care about in their own language. And because scientists describe 15,000 new species every year, we set it up so that if they publish in an open-access journal we automatically make a new page on EOL.

Everything on EOL, even the software itself, is free to use and to re-use. As of this week, we’ve got information on almost a million species. That’s an incredible number, nearly half the species in the tree of life and it has only been five years. But we are more than just a bunch of web pages.

Our next steps are to get even more eyeballs looking at EOL working with richer, more computable data. You helped us get off the ground, and we’re gaining momentum. The next five years are going to be even more exciting.

Key Features for Students

Students have the ability to search and apply for all types of NASA internship, fellowship, scholarship opportunities in one system. A single internship or fellowship application places students in the applicant pool for consideration by mentors for all NASA internships or fellowships.

Students may search other opportunities at the Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute here:  http://gphi.umbc.edu/

Meet Max, a Teaching Assistant who loves climbing mountains, swing dancing, and Artificial Intelligence.

“I’ve never been bored in my life,” says Maksym Morawski (call him Max), a Computer Science graduate student who spends most of his free time scaling mountains.

Originally from Silver Spring, Max moved to Baltimore in 2006 to study Computer Science as an undergraduate. In the 4th grade, while others kids were busy building volcanoes for their science projects, Max and his computer scientist dad were putting together a computer that compared different algorithms for computing prime numbers. So choosing his major in college, explains Max, was a no-brainer.

Now a second year graduate student pursuing a Master’s in Computer Science, Max is working on a thesis that looks at predicting connections in social networks, like Facebook. A computer scientist with a sociological streak, Max’s project uses computers to understand how people interact with one another based on e-mail data sets taken from corporations.

Max’s foray into teaching began in 2010 when he became a Teaching Assistant for CMSC 202. He says his favorite part about being a TA are the discussions—where he actually gets to get up and teach and get his students excited about Computer Science. His dose of teacherly advice is as follows: “Program for fun.” If you don’t practice and enjoy programming, he explains, you will never be as good as someone who lives and breathes it.

Throughout his years at UMBC, Max’s on-campus involvement has extended past teaching. An avid dancer (he frequents Mobtown Ballroom in Baltimore City), he founded UMBC’s Swing Dancing club. He also helped conceive Project X, the club that sponsored a campus-wide scavenger hunt in 2008 and 2009 that included tasks like jumping into the Inner Harbor and high-fiving Freeman Hrabowski (which prompted a not-so-enthusiastic e-mail from the UMBC president). The prize for the hunt was an amalgamation of candy that was procured from the “Spot” using late-night meals over a series of weeks, explains Max.

But, Max’s favorite thing to do is the hobby he took up in high school: exploring mountains. A frequenter of Earth Treks—a climbing center in Columbia–Max had plans to climb frozen waterfalls in New York State this winter. His dream job, he says half-jokingly, is to be a mountaineering guide. Though, he may also consider a job in academia: “I would love to be a teacher,” he says.