I’m pleased to announce that PRB is accepting applications for its prestigious International Programs Fellowship at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The Fellowship is a full-time position lasting for two years and will begin in summer 2024.

The Fellow will work within USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health located in Washington, D.C. (currently operating with scheduled in-person work of 3 days per week for all Washington, D.C.-based staff, with workplace flexibilities), which works to advance and support voluntary family planning and reproductive health programs worldwide. The Fellowship is intended for recent graduates with a B.A. or B.S. by June 2024; candidates with advanced degrees are ineligible and should not apply.

The responsibilities of the Fellow include:

• Support efforts of USAID/Washington, its overseas Missions, and implementing partners to strengthen capacity to monitor for compliance with U.S. family planning and global health requirements within USAID programs through training facilitation, document review, and ongoing technical assistance.
• Respond to external and internal requests for information on USAID family planning activities.
• Coordinate and liaise with colleagues in the Office of HIV/AIDS, Office of General Counsel, and regional bureaus.
• Support the coordination of donor partnerships and USG interagency collaboration at headquarters level.
• Support the Office of Population and Reproductive Health’s Senior Policy Advisor and members of office management with policy analysis and administrative duties.
• Other duties and activities will be determined by the interests of the selected Fellow and the needs of the Office of Population and Reproductive Health.
• Includes opportunities for international travel to support USAID Missions in Office of Population and Reproductive Health priority countries.

Interested individuals should upload a resume and a cover letter. The cover letter should describe the candidate’s professional goals, their interest in the field of family planning/reproductive health, and why they are suited for the Fellowship. In addition, the candidate must arrange for two letters of recommendation from employers or professors.

Applications are due through the application portal no later than 11:59PM EST on February 23, 2024.

Dear Retrievers & Valued Riders,

We're thrilled to share some exciting news with you today as we embark on a journey to enhance your commuting experience. After careful consideration and extensive research, we are proud to introduce our new real-time bus tracking system in partnership with Swiftly and the Transit App, designed to revolutionize how you connect with our transportation services and other regional transportation options.

Connect with Passengers: Real-Time Predictions and Service Information                             Our new system brings you real-time passenger predictions, offering instant information about changes to service. This means you can plan your journeys more effectively and stay informed about any updates affecting your travel experience.

Connect with Staff: Streamlined Operations and Long-Term Planning                                     This new system establishes a common data language, providing a seamless connection between passengers and staff. This ensures smooth daily operations while enabling future planning for a more dependable and efficient transportation system.

Connect with Vehicles: Cloud-Powered Onboard Ecosystem and Hardware Integrations   Experience the future of transit with Swiftly cloud-powered onboard ecosystem and integrated hardware. This cutting-edge technology ensures a more connected and synchronized journey, making your time on board more enjoyable and efficient.

Connect with Partners: 50+ Application and Consultant Partners via APIs                         With Swiftly, we are proud to collaborate with over 50 applications and consultant partners who use APIs to access Swiftly data. This expands your options and opens the door to a seamless connection with the Transit App, making life better without a car. These connections now allow our riders to see all of our regional partners in one app. (MTA, RTA, MARC, Shuttle-UM, and a host of ride-share programs)

Introducing the Transit App: Simple, Reliable, and Your Friendly Transit Companion

As part of this exciting partnership, we are delighted to present the Transit App ~ a user-friendly, reliable companion for your transit needs. Here's what you can expect:

• Upcoming Departure Times: Instantly view departure times for nearby lines when you open the app.
• Trip Planning: Explore the best options in an easy-to-navigate layout, with real-time data for enhanced accuracy.
• GO Feature: Your friendly transit companion, GO, thinks about your journey, so you don't have to. It's like having a helpful personal robot guiding you every step of the way.
• Share Your Way Across Town: Easily compare all your options, including bike-share, scooters, ride-hail, and more. Plan your route confidently, knowing you have the most comprehensive information.

These enhancements will make your commuting experience smoother, more enjoyable, and tailored to your needs. 

Thank you for being a valued part of our community, and we look forward to connecting you to a more seamless and efficient transportation future.

Happy travels!

Dr. Menyuk is the winner of the 2024 G. G. Stokes Award in Optical Polarization. This award is made annually by SPIE the International Society for Optics and Photonics, and it honors exceptional contributions to the field of optical polarization.

Professor Menyuk's award is focused on his nearly forty years of contributions to the understanding of the interplay of polarization effects, nonlinearity, and noise in optical systems. Dr. Menyuk has carried out work that spanned the optical fiber revolution that started in the 1980s and continued through the early 2000s. At the beginning of this time, internet connections were slow and unreliable; but in the end, internet traffic became fast enough to enable the video streaming applications that we now take for granted. Equations and algorithms that Dr. Menyuk developed played an important role in this development. For the past twenty years, his work has focused on frequency combs - a technology that has revolutionized time and frequency evolution and will likely lead to a redefinition of the second. It has long been known that light comes in two polarizations. These polarizations can be separated by polarized lenses. Road glare or glare from the hood of the car is preferentially in a horizontal direction, and a polarized lens that lets through vertically polarized light eliminates a large amount of this glare. In optical fibers, the light in two different polarizations will move at two different speeds, which can lead to signal distortion.

In 1981, a team of scientists at AT&T Bell Labs found that nonlinear effects in optical fibers will lead to the creation of solitons. In an optical fiber, light at different frequencies will move with different speeds. Any optical signal is made up of multiple frequencies, which will spread and distort the signal. This effect is called dispersion. However, in an optical pulse with sufficient energy, the frequencies begin to interact, which is referred to as a nonlinear interaction, and can become bound to each other. With the right energy, dispersion and nonlinearity exactly compensate, and the pulse travels without distortion. This pulse is called a soliton. Dr. Menyuk showed that the same nonlinearity that compensates for dispersion can compensate for the difference in speed between the two polarizations, referred to as birefringence, if this difference is not too large. In most practical cases, this difference is too large, and Dr. Menyuk working with many collaborators showed that randomly varying the birefringence in the fiber, which can be done by spinning the fiber, will then eliminate the distortion.

In more recent work, Dr. Menyuk has focused on micro resonators (tiny optical resonators) where, once again, solitons can be created and minimizing the interaction between different polarizations is important. This work is ongoing and has already led to important results that has been accomplished in collaboration with researchers at NIST and will be published in part in a forthcoming Nature article, 'Kerr-Induced Synchronization of a Cavity Soliton to an Optical Reference'. Most recently, Dr. Menyuk has been named the director of a new research center at UMBC, The Center for Navigation, Timing, and Frequency Research (CeNTaVR).

Read more about Curtis R. Menyuk and the 2024 SPIE G.G. Stokes Award in Optical Polarization: https://spie.org/news/curtis-r-menyuk-the-2024-spie-gg-stokes-award-in-optical-polarization

Dr. Vicino is currently serving in an Associate Dean role at Boston's Northeastern University, and is a professor in their Department of Political Science and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs.

When pursuing his Masters and Ph.D. in Public Policy at UMBC, he focused on urban policy and worked closely with Emeritus Professors Don Norris and John Rennie Short.

Read more about his new appointment here. 

Get ready for taxes in April!

International scholars are required to report their taxes every year in April. Our office will send out a very thorough email in late February with information about a free tax filing service for nonresidents, called Sprintax. Prepare your documents in advance and make sure you have everything you need to file your taxes. For more information, please visit our tax resources page.

Do I need to file taxes?

If you worked last year and earned any money, then you must file a tax return. If you did not earn any money last year, then you only need to file form 8843. Depending on your situation, you may need to file both a federal and state tax return. Filing your tax return can be completed using the Sprintax software we provide in the spring.

More questions?

The ISSS office cannot provide tax advice since we are not tax professionals. However, please review some of the resources we provide. If you have specific questions, please reach out to a tax professional.

UMBC’s Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA) team will advance its work in investigating data analytics using next-generation computing hardware with the launch of the next phase of the multi-institutional research collaboration. 

UMBC is partnering with Rutgers University, the University of Miami, and Arizona State University to deploy CARTA Phase II, a five-year initiative that explores data analytics research to develop new accelerated and real-time approaches to address advanced technology integration in industries such as health care, finance, and security. 

CARTA initially launched in 2018 with funding provided by the National Science Foundation’s Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC) program to develop next-generation computing hardware to address data-intensive infrastructure challenges. The IUCRC grant has been extended to fund new and existing CARTA sites with an additional $100,000 per year (for the next five years) to build on the centers’ work in data analytics research. 

“CARTA’s focus has been on real-time analytics of large datasets on next generation technologies, or accelerated technologies, like high-performance computing, cloud computing, and quantum computing. This work will continue in Phase II,” says Karuna Joshi, associate professor of information systems and director of UMBC’s CARTA site. 

Advancing industry collaborations

Since its launch, UMBC-CARTA faculty and student researchers have conducted more than 40 projects examining data analytics in Blockchain technology, malware analysis, medical data sharing, and evaluating bias in artificial intelligence in medical imaging. UMBC-CARTA collaborator Milton Halem, research professor of computer science and electrical engineering, will continue his work in weather and wildfire prediction research in the next phase of the initiative. 

CARTA Phase II projects will largely focus on medical analytics (medical images and dataset sharing) and scientific and environmental datasets that can inform weather and wildfire predictions, Joshi explains, adding that “security is going to be the overlying paradigm across all of those various areas of research.”

The CARTA sites are also aiming to expand their number of industry partner collaborations. In CARTA Phase I, UMBC worked with a range of industry partners that included NASA, IBM, the National Security Agency, Laboratory for Physical Sciences, the Department of Homeland Security, Morgan Stanley, RAD-AID, and Carestream. 

“In Phase II, we are focusing more on collaborative projects with our university partners and building on those collaborations and making them stronger,” says Joshi. “We’re also looking at new avenues that our industry partners might be interested in such as smart cities, next-generation airports, and how to build secure image analytics and algorithms.”

As Phase II evolves, UMBC-CARTA research will also focus on large language models that are rising in popularity, such as ChatGPT, and digital twinning technologies, which is the process of creating a virtual model of a physical object. 

Student collaboration at every level

Undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students will continue to work on research projects at UMBC-CARTA. Since its inception, UMBC-CARTA has supported more than 15 graduate students and has provided opportunities for undergraduate students to strengthen their research skills through the NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. 

Kelvin Echenim, a second-year information systems Ph.D. student at UMBC, has worked on the CARTA team developing a scoring system to assess the comprehensiveness and user-friendliness of internet of things privacy policies.

“The scoring system aims to improve user comprehension and involvement in privacy matters by finding a balance between strict legal compliance and end-user practical accessibility,” says Echenim. 

He adds that current and future research in CARTA Phase II will help expand his knowledge in solving complex problems in data-driven AI systems. 

Read more about UMBC’s Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics