CNMS Awards and Recognition Day is an annual event to acknowledge the achievements of current CNMS undergraduate, graduate students, and faculty. Each year the event is held in late spring, however due to UMBC campus closures as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 CNMS Awards and Recognition Day in-person ceremony was cancelled. We still felt it was important to recognize the outstanding achievements of our faculty and students, therefore we are honoring the awardees by publishing a digital version of the CNMS Awards and Recognition Day program (attached) and we will be sending certificates to the awardees once campus resources are open and available. Many departments under the college have also chosen to recognize their student honorees through a virtual ceremony. 

Congratulations to all our honorees and graduates!

Three UMBC-affiliated artists have each received 2020-2021 fellowship awards from the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund (SZIF) in Film and Media at Johns Hopkins University. SZIF cash awards are granted to nurture unique project ideas that have the potential for socio-political impact and that advance the art and craft of audiovisual media. 

In addition to receiving financial support for project development or production, selected fellows participate in ongoing mentorship and workshops with industry professionals.

Losing Winter

Lynn Cazabon is a professor in visual arts and CIRCA-IMET 2019-2020 artist-in-residence, and was recently named as the next director of UMBC’s Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA). She has received funding to develop Losing Winter.

Cazabon will work with Lee Boot, associate research professor and director of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center (IRC), to develop the Losing Winter mobile app. It centers on shared memories and emotions about the season of winter. The app will collect memories connected to the season of winter in the form of videos from participants all around the world. Cazabon will then incorporate them into an augmented reality audio-visual experience. 

Under the Bay

Lisa Moren, professor of visual arts and graduate program director of the intermedia and digital art MFA program, received an award to create Under the Bay. This augmented reality project will include collaborators Tsvetan Bachvaroff, a professor of biology at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and Marc Olano, associate professor of computer science at UMBC and director of the game development track.

Under the Bay will invite users to interact with the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, beneath the surface, delivering a story through augmented reality.

Moren was previously part of the first cohort of SZIF Fellows, receiving support to develop the app NONUMENT 01::The McKeldin Fountain.

Legacies

Angela N. Carroll ’06, visual arts, an adjunct professor at Stevenson University, received funding to develop a pilot episode for Legacies. She envisions this project as a 10-episode docuseries that chronicles a radical generation of artists active between 1960 and 1990. Each profiled artist will be someone known for substantial bodies of work that have critiqued, resisted, and engaged tumultuous and revelatory eras of political and social upheaval in the United States. 

Describing herself as an artist-archivist, research has been an integral part of Carroll’s art practice, traced to her time at UMBC and as a McNair Scholar.

Cazabon, Moren, and Carroll’s projects are among 19 funded for the 2020-2021 fellowship year. They were selected from among 27 artists chosen in January as 2020-2021 fellows in the SZIF mentorship program, which also includes Emma Ayala ’18, visual arts.

Johns Hopkins founded the fund in March 2016 through a $1 million grant from the Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation. Zaentz was an Oscar-winning producer who died in 2014. The incubator supports Baltimore artists by helping them to connect with each other to develop and realize their ideas in Baltimore.

Banner image: Lynn Cazabon with her installation version of Losing Winter at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest, Romania. Photo by Josef Polleross.

View the full FAQs Page HERE

If I am approved for an Incomplete (I) grade for a course taken in the Spring 2020 semester, will I still have the option to change the grading method to a Pass (P) or withdraw from the course once the final course grade is posted?
In accordance with the Incomplete grading policy, students will have the option to request an (I) grade for a Spring 2020 course if they have completed a majority of the work at a satisfactory level. Students approved for an incomplete grade will be given until the end of the Fall 2020 semester to resolve any remaining coursework. Once a final course grade is submitted, students will have until January 11th 2021 to change the grading method to the Pass (P) option or withdraw from the course.

What are my options if I have an Incomplete (I) grade from a previous semester and was trying to complete it over the Spring 2020 semester?
To ensure timely progress toward a degree, students are encouraged to complete any remaining coursework associated with an incomplete (I) grade. Likewise, course instructors are encouraged to provide flexibility where possible so that remaining coursework can be satisfied. When it is possible to do so, grade changes for outstanding incomplete grades should be submitted by course instructors by the May 27th submission deadline. Once a final course grade is posted to replace the (I) grade, students will have until June 10th to change the grading method to the Pass (P) option or withdraw from the course.

Undergraduate students may request to have their final course grade changed to the (P) option by submitting a request to Student Records. Undergraduate students may submit a request to withdraw from a course by submitting a request to Registration. When submitting a request to the Registrar’s Office, students must include the course number (i.e. PSYC 100) and the term in which they enrolled in the course and received an (I) grade (i.e. Fall 2019).

If a final course grade is not submitted by the May 27th grade submission deadline, an automatic one semester extension of the Incomplete will be granted to the end of Fall 2020. Students will have until the end of the Fall 2020 semester to resolve any remaining coursework. Once a final course grade is submitted by the course instructor, students will have until January 11th, 2021 to change the grading method to the Pass (P) option or withdraw from the course.

May 22, 2020

Next Week, Maryland will begin a state-wide effort to trace the spread of COVID-19.  The effort will involve health workers making phone calls to Maryland residents.  This is a very important step in identifying potential disease clusters and everyone’s help is needed.

At the same time, Maryland in general and UMBC in particular have been targets of a wide variety of scams taking advantage of people’s fears and uncertainties around this disease.  It is very possible that unscrupulous people will take advantage of Maryland’s effort as a cover for phone scams.  North Carolina, for instance, started a contact tracing effort last month and has gotten reports of scammers pretending to be health officials and gathering information from residents.

Phone Calls

When you get a call, your caller ID should read “MD COVID”.  You will be asked about your health and about your location and interactions within a period of time.  You will be asked for your birth date, contact information, and information about any COVID-19 test if you have had one.  You will get guidance about potential symptoms to watch for and about self-isolation.

You will NOT be asked for:

• ·        a Social Security number

• ·        financial or bank account information

• ·        personal details unrelated to COVID-19

• ·        photographs or videos

• ·        passwords

• ·        payment

If anyone asks you for this or other information having nothing to do with COVID-19, please do not give it to them. 

Text Messaging

So far, Maryland has not announced that text messaging will be part of the contact tracing effort.  If you receive a text message that asks you to click on a link for contact tracing, do not click it. At best, it will take you to a scam questionnaire requesting your personal information.  Worse, it could download malware to your phone and start harvesting personal information itself.

New Jersey has received reports of text messages pretending to be from contact tracers and telling people that they have already had contact with a potential COVID-19 carrier.  These messages also contain links which will lead to information theft and/or malware.  Contact tracers don’t work like this.

For More Information

Launch of Maryland’s contact tracing effort

• https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-maryland-contact-tracing-operation-coronavirus-reopening-20200521-jn4wfqgjcjdqbkbu454fhqngim-story.html

• https://www.wbaltv.com/article/maryland-contact-tracing-ramps-up/32631045#

FTC Warning about COVID-19 contact tracing text message scams

• https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2020/05/covid-19-contact-tracing-text-message-scams
  

Scam Warning from North Carolina Attorney General

• https://ncdoj.gov/watch-out-for-covid-19-contact-tracing-scams/

Warning from New Jersey state officials about text message scams

• https://www.nj.com/coronavirus/2020/05/beware-of-coronavirus-contact-tracing-scams-nj-officials-warn-thousands-of-fraud-cases-reported.html