Come to URCAD on Wednesday, April 25, Information Systems major Yasmin Graham will present her research "Rethinking Telerehabilitation: It’s Not The Metrics".

Telerehabilitation is providing rehabilitation services outside of a formal rehabilitation center through information and communications technology (ICT). Currently, emphasis is placed on the computational work – recognizing movement and quantifying it for use in home-based rehabilitation systems. For this study we wanted to further understand what information a rehabilitation specialist (occupational therapists and physical therapists) currently use, and how they would use that information in a telerehabilitation context when providing care to stroke survivors living in low-resource communities. 

Read the rest of her abstract here... 

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 CBEE, 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 CBEE, 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.

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.

March for Our Lives will go down in history as one of the largest protests in the United States, organized by a generation of students that are still below the voting age. With approximately 800,000 attendants, it is the most populous protest to date, with the Women’s March of 2017 a close second with nearly 500,000 in attendance. Across the entire nation, and estimated 1.2 million marched at locally organized events.

Although the march was organized by students, for students, advocates from all walks of life flocked from all over the nation. Below are some of the people who volunteered, demonstrated, or made a profit:

Insecure, Small Penis White Guys for Trump

Jim Garden, the communications director of the satirical gun control group, National Small Penis Association, came to the march early that day at 8:30 a.m. to grab a spot in front of the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue before it became too crowded.

“We are a gun-rights advocacy group, that seeks to enhance the self-esteem of insecure small-penis white guys, through the possession of pointlessly powerful firearms,” he said.

Garden has been with the group for several years; their main goal is to criticize gun rights advocates. During the 2016 election, the association narrowed in on president Trump, as they found his rhetoric the most reprehensible.

Since the election, the association has gone to numerous Trump rallies to give their “support,” and the rallies of other politicians considered friends of the association, like Secretary of Energy and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, and Kentucky Senator and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Activist who memorializes the dead

Maureen Glover, a computer programmer from Asbury, New Jersey, first became involved in impact art after a cousin died in 9/11. Bothered by the repetition of statistics in the news cycle, Glover started her first project by sewing nearly 3,000 shirts together, to emphasize how many lives were lost.

“Numbers can just too easily roll off people’s tongues, so I started stringing shirts together to show what 3,000 people looked like,” said Glover.

Glover quickly became involved in protesting the Iraq War, where she created a mile-long sign with the names and faces of 4,000 fallen soldiers.

After the Pulse nightclub shooting, where Omar Mateen killed 49 and injured 58, Glover methodically went through the history of all gun shootings in the United States and began the month-long project of printing out the names and faces of victims. The rows of over 200 panels, zip-tied together, span the length of a football field.

“I want to put a name and face so people, instead of saying a number, they can look at the kids. We really need to make a change now,” said Glover.

The first victims in her display are from the 1966 University of Texas shooting, where Charles Whitman killed 16 and wounded 31 while firing from a tower, and ends with the Maryland Great Mills High School shooting, where two students including the shooter died and one was wounded.

On April 20, Glover plans to create luminaries for the victims of Columbine, and gave away one of the panels on her project to the friend of the mother of Ben Wheeler, a 6-year-old victim in the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting.

The same organization of March for Our Lives has started a new project, Town Hall for Our Lives, to continue the momentum of the gun control by lobbying local politicians. THFOL is specifically cites funding gun violence research; increasing power of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; national universal background checks; and limit circulation of firearms.

Come to URCAD on Wednesday, April 25 where Ancient Studies student, Julian Tash will present his creative research project "Bodies of Devotion: The Display of Buddhist Statues".

Statues of the Buddha are seldom created for museums. They are instead intended to be displayed in temples, where they might be distanced from viewers by partitions or obscured in darkness — a stark contrast to well-illuminated museum spaces in which visitors can closely approach displays. Despite this distance, however, the temple context is intimate. Before entering a temple, physical rituals, such as wafting incense smoke over one’s head, physically connect devotees to Buddhism.

Read the rest of his abstract here...

Nicole King, associate professor and chair of American studies, received the Presidential Teaching Faculty Award in recognition of her community-engaged pedagogy. King focuses on helping students develop a deeper understanding of Baltimore and its residents, whether studying gentrification or local environmental concerns. “It is especially wonderful to be honored for my work teaching at UMBC because UMBC has exceptional students,” she said.

King shared two core lessons from doing public humanities work, lessons she works to share with students: “showing up matters” and “listening is essential to learning.” To fulfill UMBC’s mission, she argued, “We must bring more voices into conversations at our public university today and we must better listen to one another because that is truly what teaching and learning are about.”