Don't Miss URCAD: April 25th!

Over 250 Undergraduate Presenters in All Disciplines

UC 310: 1:15-1:30

The Role of Socioeconomic Status on the Relationship Between Number of Marginalized Identities and Mental Health

Iman Said

UC 310: 1:30-1:45

Environmental Imagination: The Natural World and its Human Connections through Marquez and Murakami

Morgan Zepp

UMBC will help illuminate the third annual Light City Baltimore festival with art, ideas, and entertainment. Running April 14 – 21 in and around the Inner Harbor, the evening celebration of light and the Labs@LightCity companion series of daytime innovation conferences prominently feature UMBC faculty, staff, students, and alumni as artists and thought leaders.

Launched by the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts in 2016, Light City Baltimore is the first large-scale international light festival in the United States, and it attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

Members of the UMBC community (alumni, faculty, staff, students, and friends) are invited to an Alumni Social on Saturday, April 21, 7 – 10 p.m. at the Baltimore Visitor Center on Light Street. The space, right on the path of the BGE Light Art Walk, offers a stunning view of Light City. Attendees to this free event will enjoy complimentary food and drink, and can pick up glow-in-the-dark swag (first come, first served).

Featured Artist
UMBC artist Kelley Bell, associate professor and associate chair of visual arts, will present her installation The Herd on the BGE Light Art Walk, open nightly from 7 to 11 p.m., with extended hours until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Sponsored by UMBC, The Herd will be visible between Piers 5 and 6.

“The Herd is a tribute to all the citizens of Baltimore City who continue to hope for a healthy city and healthy waterways,” says Bell. “It is a cluster of 400 luminous inflatable swim rings, similar in appearance to the floats used by swimmers at the seaside. The rings are laced together in a net to form a glowing multitude of creatures calmly bobbing in the shimmering ripples of the nighttime harbor. The empty ghostly rings of The Herd are a hope and a promise that someday they will be filled by happy bathers enjoying the Inner Harbor in a new, refreshing way.”

The Labs@LightCity
The daytime Labs@Light City, a series of innovation conferences dedicated to sparking social change, will explore topics such as education, health, and design. The Labs will be held at the University System of Maryland (USM) Columbus Center on Pratt Street. USM will be the supporting sponsor of MakerLab on Friday, April 20.

On Wednesday, April 18 at EduLab, Christine Mallinson, professor of language, literacy, and culture, and affiliate professor of gender and women studies, will take on code-switching in her talk, “Baltimore: An Incubator of Language Diversity.”

On Friday, April 20, at MakerLab, Foad Hamidi, a post-doctoral researcher and designer in Human Computer Interaction, will share his work in the talk “Transcending Invisible Lines.” Also at MakerLab, President Freeman Hrabowski will join Kathy O’Dell, associate professor of visual arts, special assistant to the dean for education and arts partnerships, College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; Richard Chisolm, ’82 interdisciplinary studies; and artist David Hess in the discussion “The Making of Gun Show.” Their conversation will reflect on the 2017 exhibition Gun Show at UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture. The show was created to foster dialogue about gun ownership and gun violence.

Spark II
Spark II, a pop-up gallery of engaging, projection-based artworks, will be open in the Harborplace’s Pratt Street Pavilion during Baltimore’s Light City Festival, April 14 – 21. Made possible through the support of PNC and curated by Ginevra Shay, the gallery features the work of UMBC faculty and graduate students, as well as artists from Towson University. Spark II also features a schedule of performances, events, and interactive activities.

Spark II will feature works by:

• Stephen Bradley, associate professor of visual arts, and Tagide deCarvalho, research assistant professor of biological sciences
• Lynn Cazabon, associate professor of visual arts
• Cathy C. Cook, associate professor of visual arts
• Eric Dyer, associate professor of visual arts
• Lisa Moren, professor of visual arts; Jaimes Mayhew ’10, IMDA MFA; Neja Tomšič, former UMBC artist in residence; and Martin Bricelj Baraga
• Timothy Nohe, professor of visual arts and director of the Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts
• Corrie Francis Parks, assistant professor of visual arts
• Sarah G. Sharp, assistant professor of visual arts

Special events at the Spark II gallery will include a Visual Arts Alumni Reception on Wednesday, April 18, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. to which all visual arts alumni are cordially invited. Additional events featuring UMBC faculty, students, and alumni include:

Sunday, April 15, 4:15 p.m. — Krisztina Dér ’12, music, presents Light/Flute, focused on the integration of flute music and lighting art

Monday, April 16, 8 p.m. — Lisa Cella, associate professor of music, and Stephen Bradley present SHINE. Lisa Cella performs the flute works of four contemporary composers — Christopher Adler, Adam Greene, Christopher Burns, and retired UMBC professor of music Stuart Saunders Smith — and provides a sonic framework for Stephen Bradley’s time-lapse video work that explores a meditative perspective of quotidian events.

Friday, April 20, 6:30 p.m. — The Umbilicus Percussion Ensemble will perform. Umbilicus was founded in 2012 in reaction to the generic contemporary percussion quartet, with the intention of promoting and performing a more experimental repertoire, much if it composed by its members. Umbilicus (containing the letters UMBC) consists of UMBC associate professor of music Tom Goldstein and three UMBC alumni: Paul Neidhardt, Michelle Purdy and Will Redman. Their performance will feature works by composers Will Redman, John Cage, Joseph Cello, and Brian Johnson.

Saturday, April 21, time to be announced — Puppet event by Colette Searls, associate professor and chair of theatre

Sunday, April 22, 5 p.m. — Shelly Purdy ’10, music, and Jason Charney ’20 IMDA MFA, perform improvised music for electronics and percussion.

On Demand
Videos by UMBC artists are featured in On Demand, a Light City curated program of time-based digital content displayed on a 12 by 20 foot LED screen. Featured are works by Vin Grabill, associate professor of visual arts; Timothy Nohe, also participating in Spark II; Jeffrey L. Gangwisch ’18, IMDA MFA; and Justyna Kurbiel ’18, visual arts.

For complete information on UMBC’s presence at the 2018 Light City Baltimore festival, visit UMBC’s Light City webpage. More information about the entire festival is available through Light City.

Header image: Visualization of Kelley Bell’s “The Herd,” courtesy of the artist.

UMBC ACM Student Chapter Talk

Where’s my Robot Butler?
Robotics, NLP and Robots in Human Environments

Professor Cynthia Matuszek, UMBC

1:00-2:00pm Friday, 13 April 2018, ITE 231, UMBC

As robots become more powerful, capable, and autonomous, they are moving from controlled industrial settings to human-centric spaces such as medical environments, workplaces, and homes. As physical agents, they will soon be able help with entirely new categories of tasks that require intelligence. Before that can happen, though, robots must be able to interact gracefully with people and the noisy, unpredictable world they occupy, an undertaking that requires insight from multiple areas of AI. Useful robots will need to be flexible in dynamic environments with evolving tasks, meaning they must learn from and communicate effectively with people. In this talk, I will describe current research in our lab on combining natural language learning and robotics to build robots people can use in the home.

Dr. Cynthia Matuszek is an assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research occurs at in the intersection of robotics, natural language processing, and machine learning, and their application to human-robot interaction. She works on building robotic systems that non-specialists can instruct, control, and interact with intuitively and naturally. She has published on AI, robotics, machine learning, and human-robot interaction. Matuszek received her Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington.

The post 🤖 talk: Where’s my Robot Butler? 1-2pm Friday 4/13, ITE 231 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

UMBC will help illuminate the third annual Light City Baltimore festival with art, ideas, and entertainment. Running April 14 – 21 in and around the Inner Harbor, the evening celebration of light and the Labs@LightCity companion series of daytime innovation conferences prominently feature UMBC faculty, staff, students, and alumni as artists and thought leaders.

Launched by the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts in 2016, Light City Baltimore is the first large-scale international light festival in the United States, and it attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

Members of the UMBC community (alumni, faculty, staff, students, and friends) are invited to an Alumni Social on Saturday, April 21, 7 – 10 p.m. at the Baltimore Visitor Center on Light Street. The space, right on the path of the BGE Light Art Walk, offers a stunning view of Light City. Attendees to this free event will enjoy complimentary food and drink, and can pick up glow-in-the-dark swag (first come, first served).

Featured Artist
UMBC artist Kelley Bell, associate professor and associate chair of visual arts, will present her installation The Herd on the BGE Light Art Walk, open nightly from 7 to 11 p.m., with extended hours until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Sponsored by UMBC, The Herd will be visible between Piers 5 and 6.

“The Herd is a tribute to all the citizens of Baltimore City who continue to hope for a healthy city and healthy waterways,” says Bell. “It is a cluster of 400 luminous inflatable swim rings, similar in appearance to the floats used by swimmers at the seaside. The rings are laced together in a net to form a glowing multitude of creatures calmly bobbing in the shimmering ripples of the nighttime harbor. The empty ghostly rings of The Herd are a hope and a promise that someday they will be filled by happy bathers enjoying the Inner Harbor in a new, refreshing way.”

The Labs@LightCity
The daytime Labs@Light City, a series of innovation conferences dedicated to sparking social change, are organized in seven half day, topical labs: EduLab, SocialLab, GreenLab, HealthLab, ArtLab, MakerLab and FoodLab. The Labs will be held at the University System of Maryland (USM) Columbus Center on Pratt Street starting on Wednesday April 18. UMBC will be the supporting sponsor of MakerLab on Friday, April 20.

On Wednesday, April 18 at EduLab, Christine Mallinson, professor of language, literacy, and culture, and affiliate professor of gender and women studies, will take on code-switching in her talk, “Baltimore: An Incubator of Language Diversity.”

On Friday, April 20, at MakerLab, Foad Hamidi, a post-doctoral researcher and designer in Human Computer Interaction, will share his work in the talk “Transcending Invisible Lines.” Also at MakerLab, President Freeman Hrabowski will join Kathy O’Dell, associate professor of visual arts, special assistant to the dean for education and arts partnerships, College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; Richard Chisolm, ’82 interdisciplinary studies; and artist David Hess in the discussion “The Making of Gun Show.” Their conversation will reflect on the 2017 exhibition Gun Show at UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture. The show was created to foster dialogue about gun ownership and gun violence.

Members of the UMBC community (students, faculty, staff and alumni) are encouraged to register for the Labs@LightCity at no cost here.

Spark II
Spark II, a pop-up gallery of engaging, projection-based artworks, will be open in the Harborplace’s Pratt Street Pavilion during Baltimore’s Light City Festival, April 14 – 21. Made possible through the support of PNC and curated by Ginevra Shay, the gallery features the work of UMBC faculty and graduate students, as well as artists from Towson University. Spark II also features a schedule of performances, events, and interactive activities.

Spark II will feature works by:

• Stephen Bradley, associate professor of visual arts, and Tagide deCarvalho, research assistant professor of biological sciences
• Lynn Cazabon, associate professor of visual arts
• Cathy C. Cook, associate professor of visual arts
• Eric Dyer, associate professor of visual arts
• Lisa Moren, professor of visual arts; Jaimes Mayhew ’10, IMDA MFA; Neja Tomšič, former UMBC artist in residence; and Martin Bricelj Baraga
• Timothy Nohe, professor of visual arts and director of the Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts
• Corrie Francis Parks, assistant professor of visual arts
• Sarah G. Sharp, assistant professor of visual arts

Special events at the Spark II gallery will include a Visual Arts Alumni Reception on Wednesday, April 18, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. to which all visual arts alumni are cordially invited. Additional events featuring UMBC faculty, students, and alumni include:

Sunday, April 15, 4:15 p.m. — Krisztina Dér ’12, music, presents Light/Flute, focused on the integration of flute music and lighting art

Monday, April 16, 8 p.m. — Lisa Cella, associate professor of music, and Stephen Bradley present SHINE. Lisa Cella performs the flute works of four contemporary composers — Christopher Adler, Adam Greene, Christopher Burns, and retired UMBC professor of music Stuart Saunders Smith — and provides a sonic framework for Stephen Bradley’s time-lapse video work that explores a meditative perspective of quotidian events.

Thursday, April 19, 7 p.m. — Shelly Purdy ’10, music, and Jason Charney ’20 IMDA MFA, perform improvised music for electronics and percussion, in an event featuring selections from Timothy Nohe‘s When People Become Verbs composed for a dance by Renée Brozic, ’99 dance.

Friday, April 20, 6:30 p.m. — The Umbilicus Percussion Ensemble will perform. Umbilicus was founded in 2012 in reaction to the generic contemporary percussion quartet, with the intention of promoting and performing a more experimental repertoire, much if it composed by its members. Umbilicus (containing the letters UMBC) consists of UMBC associate professor of music Tom Goldstein and three UMBC alumni: Paul Neidhardt, Michelle Purdy and Will Redman. Their performance will feature works by composers Will Redman, John Cage, Joseph Cello, and Brian Johnson.

Saturday, April 21, time to be announced — Puppet event by Colette Searls, associate professor and chair of theatre

On Demand
Videos by UMBC artists are featured in On Demand, a Light City curated program of time-based digital content displayed on a 12 by 20 foot LED screen. Featured are works by Vin Grabill, associate professor of visual arts; Timothy Nohe, also participating in Spark II; Jeffrey L. Gangwisch ’18, IMDA MFA; and Justyna Kurbiel ’18, visual arts.

For complete information on UMBC’s presence at the 2018 Light City Baltimore festival, visit UMBC’s Light City webpage. More information about the entire festival is available through Light City.

Header image: Visualization of Kelley Bell’s “The Herd,” courtesy of the artist.

UMBC welcomed 50 IBM executives and research leaders to campus on Friday, April 6, for a day-long event designed to broaden the robust research relationship between the two organizations and introduce students to emerging career opportunities at IBM. Nearly 250 faculty, staff, students, and partners participated in IBM-UMBC Day.

UMBC’s work with IBM began nearly 25 years ago and has branched across a wide range of topics. The university’s most recent research collaboration with IBM connects artificial intelligence with cybersecurity, explained Keith J. Bowman, dean of UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology. Two new areas of likely future collaboration include quantum computing and blockchain.

Dave McQueeney, vice president of Corporate Technology and Community and Global University Programs at IBM (and UMBC’s executive champion), gave welcoming remarks for the company. Bowman introduced Anupam Joshi, chair and professor of computer science and electrical engineering (CSEE) at UMBC, who has completed two sabbaticals at IBM. He also welcomed Yelena Yesha, distinguished professor of CSEE, and Andy Rindos, head of IBM’s RTP Center for Advanced Studies, who were instrumental in organizing IBM-UMBC Day. The welcoming speakers set the tone for the event, highlighting a shared commitment to combining diverse perspectives to explore cutting edge research areas in new and exciting ways.

Michelle Browdy, IBM’s senior vice president for legal and regulatory affairs, and general counsel, delivered the keynote talk about the intersection of law, technology, and public policy. “It takes a village,” she said, noting that this phrase is especially important in the science and technology space, where collaboration is crucial.

Browdy emphasized that her legal team regularly works with business teams and engineers, particularly when technologies are being moved from the lab to the public. She shared how she sees engineers as developing products for people to use and enjoy, and her legal team as an essential complement, managing everything from patents to ensuring compliance with regulations.

Following the keynote, technical experts from UMBC and IBM gave brief talks on areas such as quantum computing, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, the internet of things, and blockchain. UMBC professors Todd Pittman, physics, and Sam Lomonaco, CSEE, joined Andrew Wack, Q platform architect at IBM, in the first technical talk of the day, discussing recent developments in quantum computing and how the field is impacting other industries.

Next, Jeff Crume, distinguished engineer at IBM, and Joshi explored how institutions are making strides in addressing the kinds of cybersecurity concerns that are now making headlines worldwide. Joshi discussed his lab’s work connecting artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, and he also described how combining the expertise of people from different fields is essential to creating effective and lasting solutions to cybersecurity challenges. Speaking in the realm of cyber attack prevention and response, he commented, “We have economists on our faculty who are looking at what the attack costs…and we have public policy colleagues who look at the barriers of adoption of cybersecurity.”

Also highlighted in Crume and Joshi’s talk was the Accelerated Cognitive Cybersecurity Lab, which opened in 2016 as a collaboration between UMBC and IBM. The lab is one of many ways in which UMBC and IBM are continuing to grow their partnership, breaking ground in new research areas by combining the creativity and expertise of UMBC faculty and students with the extraordinary technical capabilities of IBM, and together preparing the next generation of computing professionals.

After a lunch break featuring technical demos, networking opportunities, and student research presentations, participants regrouped for a discussion about the Watson computer system and cloud computing. Presenters included Mac Devine, vice president of IBM Watson and Cloud Platform; Tim Finin, professor of CSEE, an expert on cloud computing; and Yesha, who has worked with IBM on computing research since the 1990s. Yesha is director of the new Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics, a $3 million NSF partnership. She described how the center will deploy next-generation computing hardware to solve significant infrastructure challenges, such as protecting massive data sets in the cloud.

Nilanjan Banerjee, associate professor of CSEE, next discussed the internet of things and cyber-physical systems, specifically his lab’s work on small sensors. His team’s sensors can be used to monitor whether people operating vehicles are drowsy, and can be used by people with mobility challenges to control devices in their environment. Tim Hahn, distinguished engineer and chief architect of internet of things security at IBM, shared how his team is addressing security issues associated with now-ubiquitous cyber-physical technologies.

Roman Vaculin, IBM research, concluded the technical talks with a discussion of how IBM is developing blockchain solutions that can be used across industries.

Throughout the day, speakers returned time and again to a core idea emphasized at the start of the day: that bringing together different perspectives is key to success in creating new technologies with the potential to change people’s lives. “We need lawyers and we need engineers,” said Browdy, in her keynote address. “We are shaped and we get opportunities to grow by being exposed to people in a lot of different areas.”

Video recordings from IBM-UMBC Day can be found on the UMBC YouTube channel.

Featured image: A student poses with Pepper, a humanoid robot, at IBM-UMBC Day. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.