The BMA is seeking a Manager of Image Services & Rights to broaden public access to images of the collection by developing a dynamic schedule of new photography, supporting the development of the BMA’s digital asset management system, and advising on issues surrounding copyright and intellectual property. The ideal candidate is strategically focused with demonstrated project management, communication, and client relation skills.

This position works collaboratively with the Digital Experience & Communications division and colleagues across the museum.

UMBC has announced four recipients in the inaugural round of the Jodi Crandall Fellowship for Research in Language, Literacy & Culture. Named for The LLC Doctoral Program’s founder and professor emerita Dr. Jodi Crandall, the prizes will promote collaborative interdisciplinary research by LLC doctoral students.

“The Jodi Crandall Fellowship will allow our doctoral students to pursue important interdisciplinary research in areas of increasingly pressing importance in our local Baltimore community and internationally; in very general terms, all of the Fellowships in 2015 will study issues involved in communicating across cultural borders,” said Dr. Craig Saper, Professor and Director of The Language, Literacy, and Culture Doctoral program.

The inaugural fellows are:

•  Jermaine Ellerbee for his research titled “Social Context of Education Lab,” in the Social Context of Education Lab Category, with mentor Dr. Susan M. Blunck, and collaborator Dr. Juanita Ashby-Bey
• Erin Berry for her research on “Online Sociolinguistic Practices Among Black Female Millennials at Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” in the Sociolinguistics Lab Category, with mentor and collaborator Dr. Christine Mallinson
• Landry Digeon and Ibrahim Er, for their research titled “Social Context of Education Lab,” in the Digital Publishing Lab Category,” with mentor and collaborator Dr. Edward Larkey

“The LLC Doctoral Program will benefit enormously from the Crandall Fellowships as it helps us establish research clusters and applied research laboratories in our program, and each of the Fellows will do research relevant in those areas,” said Dr. Saper.

The fellowship program was first announced at Dr. Crandall’s retirement celebration in 2012 to support students of the program; the LLC faculty decided it should be named to honor her. Crandall hopes to grow the endowment in the coming years with the help of the LLC community.

“Support for interdisciplinary research in the humanities and social sciences is quite limited. There are always fewer research assistantships for our students than are needed,” she said. “I specifically wanted to start a fellowship to support students and to encourage interdisciplinary, collaborative research between LLC students, LLC students and faculty, or LLC current and former students.”

In addition to acting as the founding director of The Language, Literacy & Culture Doctoral program at UMBC, Crandall is a professor emerita of the Department of Education, as well as a former co-director of UMBC’s TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) master’s program.

Click here to support the Jodi Crandall Fellowship.

In a year of tremendous success in national competition — with UMBC teams vying for titles in the "final four" of men's soccer and chess — another team of talented UMBC students is heading to a U.S. championship, this time in video game development. Microsoft is flying four Retrievers to San Francisco, where they will pitch their project to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in the software giant’s Imagine Cup worldwide technology competition.

UMBC’s students will compete against teams from the Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Houston and University of Southern California. The team that claims the national championship will compete internationally for the chance to bring its game to market and a prize of $50,000.

“Everybody is really excited about the game,” says Michael Leung '16, computer science, the team’s lead, who has received congratulatory notes and well wishes from leaders across Maryland. UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski recently highlighted the team’s work in an opinion piece for CNBC, where he wrote, “As the students vie for the honor of representing the U.S. internationally, they're also showing us the future of teaching, learning, and careers.”

The game, called HueBots, features vibrant, friendly robots of different colors designed by Erika Schumacher ’17, and animated by Jasmine Martin ’15. Both are visual arts students with an interactive media concentration. The concept, programming, and music are the work of Tad Cordle ’16, computer engineering, with assistance from Leung. The game asks players to solve a series of increasingly challenging puzzles that revolve around the bots’ affinity for color-matched objects in a maze.

“Even people who don’t like puzzle games like HueBots,” Leung shares. Martin reflects that the game is positive, friendly, fun, and engaging, in contrast to the other three games in the national finals, described with terms like “mortality,” “combat,” and “domination.”

The teammates met for the first time in Fall 2014 through UMBC’s Game Developer’s Club, mentored by computer science professor Marc Olano. Olano founded and oversees UMBC’s game development track in the computer science and electrical engineering department. He’s familiar with the Imagine Cup, having previously judged the competition’s game entries.

Leung first considered the Imagine Cup as a real possibility in September 2014, when he was blown away by the quality of Schumacher’s art. After Cordle presented HueBots as a potential project for the Game Developer’s Club, Leung asked the longtime games enthusiast to collaborate with him, as well as Schumacher and Martin, as animator, in developing the game as a four-person team.

Leung reflects that after previously seeing himself as a “lone wolf” in gaming, he now tremendously values and enjoys the collaborative team experience. He shares, “We have different talents that back each other up.”

In addition to the success that comes from harnessing their diverse skills and viewpoints, the team members say they’ve benefitted from the club and the UMBC spirit it embodies, including the passion UMBC students have for their work. The club’s orientation has grown more professional, they say, moving from a focus on gaming as a hobby to gaming as a $22 billion per year industry that is hungry for fresh talent and ideas.

Olano, who spent a recent sabbatical working on the Civilization series of strategy games in nearby Hunt Valley, praises the growth he has seen in HueBots since the team developed a prototype in the fall. “With this kind of a puzzle game, it’s hard to get it just right — not too easy and not too hard,” he says. “I think they did it.”

The team is preparing for San Francisco, where they will be judged not only on how much fun their game is to play, but also the polish of its execution and the quality of their presentation and marketing plan. The U.S. winner will receive $4,000 and national champion status for the international competition in July.

Team Huebotics is also looking further ahead toward what it will take to bring the game to market, with or without the national title. Cordle reflects that developing a business plan solidified his ambition and made his game design work more “real-world” — more focused on bringing games to players, rather than developing games as only a personal hobby. He shares, “This is a magical moment.”

Watch Team Huebotics’ Round 1 and Round 2 competition videos, and check out their game, HueBots. The national Imagine Cup competitions will be broadcast live on MSDN Channel 9 on April 23, 2015. Viewers are invited to vote for a Public Choice Award.

(04/16/2015)

One of the things that makes UMBC great is how wonderful our alumni, students, faculty, and staff are. Because of these amazing people, UMBC often finds itself “in the news,” so each week, we’ll be sharing with you a round-up of the most newsworthy achievements from our community.

• Jerilyn Johnson Receives AA Degree from CCBC
• Donald Norris (School of Public Policy) and Thomas Schaller (Political Science), Provide Analysis Ahead of Martin O’Malley’s May 30 Announcement
• John Rennie Short, School of Public Policy, in The Conversation
• UMBC Research Forum Tackles High-Performance Computing
• “The Mathematics of Being Human” Reviewed in Siam News

Read more at UMBC Insights!

Google I/O 2015 was a very important day for privacy researchers. For the first time Google acknowledged a need for better privacy control. Researchers and Developers working with Android for sometime probably know that their was a feature called AppOps. This feature was introduced in Android 4.3 and later removed in 4.4.2. The reasons stated for its inclusion and removal have been discussed extensively. However, the only conclusion we could clearly draw from all the discussion was that there was a demand for such a feature. Our friends from over at Apple have repeatedly mentioned how Apple has always cared for User Privacy more than Google. As a result of this, it was only a matter of time and a pleasant development for Android enthusiasts to see this new feature in Android.

We installed the new Android M OS on a Nexus 5. The first thing we wanted to see was the permissions feature. Listed below are our impressions of what we thought of this new feature from a Privacy researcher’s perspective.

The feature is not easy to find
We had to weed through the settings of our phone and we were not able to find it straightaway. There was no menu item for Privacy. How do you access it then? You will have to click on the phone’s setting and then click on “Apps” and then select a particular app whose permission access you wish to control. Following this you will have to click on “Permissions” for that app. At this point you get the menu which allows you to toggle the permissions.

The Permission control is essentially useless till your Apps upgrade
Now, Google stated yesterday that the behavior of apps which do not upgrade to the new API version will remain the same as before. Therefore, even with this feature present you cannot actually stop an app from accessing the restricted data. What you do see is a warning dialog stating the obvious.

Warning message for apps using pre Android M SDK

Not all permissions shows up in the list
The granularity of permissions that will be available in this new feature is still uncertain. If you check the Facebook permission list in the Google Play Store, you will see that it requests a lot of permissions.

Permissions description

Permissions description

Permissions description

Permissions description

But when you check out the permission control menu, you will see just a few of these permissions here.

App permissions list

We can assume that Google is grouping the permissions into logical groups. However, that means that the primary issue that a lot of researchers have raised about granular access control is still not being addressed by Google. We have been doing research with fine-grained permission control for sometime now. In our work, we have created a system that is capable of controlling the access to data on a mobile device based on the context of the user. Such an intelligent system would not only know what data to give access to but also when to do so. That goal still remains to be completely realized.

Obviously, we must not forget that Something is always better than nothing! Google is taking steps to improve the means by which it protects a user’s privacy and provides security. It is an iterative process and it’s still far from the goal. It is getting closer to that goal though.