Saturday, May 3, 2014: PROMISE AGEP Family and Friends Celebration of Graduates Cookout

You are invited to come, bring your friends, family, and anyone who supports your journey through graduate school. This event is free. Graduate students from all schools within the University System of Maryland (USM) are invited!

Here is a list, if your school is listed, you are invited! http://www.usmd.edu/institutions/

Alumni, faculty, and staff are invited.

Friends and family members of students who have participated in PROMISE are invited. 

If you are from another school, e.g., Howard, Hopkins, GW, and have come to a PROMISE event in the past such as SSI, you are also invited to participate.

Please register below.

Register for the PROMISE Friends and Family Cookout and Celebration of Graduates:

If you are graduating from a USM institution with an M.S. or Ph.D., please send an email to promisestaff@gmail.com by Wednesday, April 30, with your name, school, department, and degree, so that we can recognize you at the event.

LOCATION:

Centennial Park – Pavilion D

Main/South Entrance

10000 Route 108

Columbia, MD 21042

Directions:
Main/South
PDF | Google Maps

This event provides food, fun, connections, and networking. Please plan to attend.

Saturday, May 3, 2014: PROMISE AGEP Family and Friends Celebration of Graduates Cookout

You are invited to come, bring your friends, family, and anyone who supports your journey through graduate school. This event is free. Graduate students from all schools within the University System of Maryland (USM) are invited!

Here is a list, if your school is listed, you are invited! http://www.usmd.edu/institutions/

Alumni, faculty, and staff are invited.

Friends and family members of students who have participated in PROMISE are invited. 

If you are from another school, e.g., Howard, Hopkins, GW, and have come to a PROMISE event in the past such as SSI, you are also invited to participate.

Please register below.

Register for the PROMISE Friends and Family Cookout and Celebration of Graduates:

If you are graduating from a USM institution with an M.S. or Ph.D., please send an email to promisestaff@gmail.com by Wednesday, April 30, with your name, school, department, and degree, so that we can recognize you at the event.

LOCATION:

Centennial Park – Pavilion D

Main/South Entrance

10000 Route 108

Columbia, MD 21042

Directions:
Main/South
PDF | Google Maps

This event provides food, fun, connections, and networking. Please plan to attend.

The NIST National Cybersecurity Center for Excellence (NCCoE) is seeking full- and part-time paid interns from UMBC graduate students studying cybersecurity at the Universities at Shady Grove (USG). The program is part of NCCoE’s ongoing efforts to build and sustain academic partnerships in the Montgomery County region.

The NCCoE internship will identify and immerse students in practical cybersecurity experiences at the NCCoE in Rockville, MD. NCCoE’s Cybersecurity Graduate Researchers will work in a state-of-the-art facility with expert cybersecurity practitioners from government and academia, along with engineers from some of the largest and most influential IT and cybersecurity companies in the world, including Intel, Microsoft, Symantec, HP, Cisco, Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, and Hytrust.

During their internships, NCCoE’s Graduate Cybersecurity Researchers may assist NCCoE staff and contractors in areas such as:

the design and building of cybersecurity reference designs to demonstrate platform capabilities that address one or more challenges identified by industry.

mentoring undergraduate cybersecurity researchers and helping build teams to work on research projects.

working with NCCoE industry partners and collaborators to identify relevant commercially available technologies that can serve as a component of these reference designs.

supporting the NCCoE lab infrastructure, including the provisioning of hardware, creation and management of both virtual and physical equipment, and the installation and configuration of cybersecurity tools and components.

These NCCoE internships are open to UMBC cybersecurity students enrolled at the USG campus who are US citizens. The deadline for Summer 2014 consideration is Monday, May 5, however internships are available during the 2014-15 academic year as well.

For more information and/or to apply, please contact the USG Career & Internship Services Center at 301-738-6338 or Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

This is the second in a series of articles on the four focus areas that are part of UMBC’s strategic planning process.

The primary goal of the Collective Impact in Research, Scholarship, and Creative Achievement focus area is to elevate UMBC as a nationally recognized and regionally relevant research university. The key drivers in achieving this goal are: creating an inclusive environment for faculty and students, developing excellence in new intellectual frontiers, and fostering multidisciplinary and inter-institutional approaches that build research, scholarship and creative achievement across the campus.

Strategy group co-chairs Aryya Gangopadhyay, professor and chair of information systems, and John Schumacher, associate professor and graduate program director of sociology and anthropology, primarily envision their group as a means to reach out to the entire campus community and make sure all the voices across campus are heard. “It’s important to look at research, scholarship and creative achievement across the colleges and ask ourselves how we want to develop as a university – as UMBC,” says Schumacher.

Group members are charged with engaging the campus community to examine current strengths in research, scholarship and creative achievement; to identify areas that will elevate UMBC’s national prominence in the next five years; to articulate connections with local communities and regional assets; to consider multi- and inter- institutional initiatives; and to develop priorities and metrics to track progress and success.

“We need to create the right environment for people to succeed and grow,” says Gangopadhyay. “People come here because they see a top class research university with great potential and people. The will and expertise are here to go to the next level. We want to examine what needs to get done, what roadblocks exist, what changes need to be made in the infrastructure and how we actualize the creative ideas people have. We’ll be successful if 10 years from now we see a measurable impact in our research, scholarship and creative achievements.”

Both Gangopadhyay and Schumacher believe that promoting research, scholarship and creative achievement across colleges and exploring how interdisciplinarity contributes to addressing important issues are critical to the strategic planning process. “We’re tackling problems of interest to the entire world. In today’s world, we can’t just look to one area for solutions; no one person alone can solve these problems. It’s our intra- and interdisciplinary research that brings solutions,” says Gangopadhyay.

Gangopadhyay and Schumacher add that their university roles and committee participation keep them engaged in campus-wide processes where they hear diverse perspectives from faculty, staff and students, and learn about projects and programs on and off campus. These experiences inform their work as co-chairs. “People on campus want to know what other people are doing,” says Schumacher. “Part of this process is to develop bridges of communication, and to build on these connections to ensure future success. In addition, we want to highlight UMBC’s location in the Baltimore-Washington corridor that provides a rich environment attracting faculty and students, as well as emerging partnerships with government agencies and universities. These connections, and new ones, will help us provide unparalleled experiences for our students to gain practical experience and find fulfilling jobs.”

Following Provost Philip Rous’ lead, Gangopadhyay and Schumacher reiterate the importance of an open and engaged process to articulate UMBC’s collective voice in strategic planning. They are pleased at the overwhelming response to the call for strategy group members, and will use focus groups, town meetings, surveys and other activities to engage with the entire campus over the next year. “This is a very important process,” Gangopadhyay says, “We have an exceptional group of people from across campus working on this focus area, and we will be reaching out to see what everyone thinks.”

Schumacher adds, “We need the whole UMBC community to be involved. We need everyone at the table, everyone’s voice represented, for this to be successful.”

Comments and questions on the Research, Scholarship and Creative Achievement focus area can be sent to gangopad@umbc.edu and jschuma@umbc.edu.

Today the XML Query Working Group and the XSLT Working Group have published seven First Public Working Drafts, four of which are jointly developed and three are from the XQuery Working Group.

The joint documents are:

• XML Path Language (XPath) 3.1. XPath is a powerful expression language that allows the processing of values conforming to the data model defined in the XQuery and XPath Data Model. The main features of XPath 3.1 are maps and arrays.
• XPath and XQuery Functions and Operators 3.1. This specification defines a library of functions available for use in XPath, XQuery, XSLT and other languages.
• XQuery and XPath Data Model 3.1. This specification defines the data model on which all operations of XPath 3.1, XQuery 3.1, and XSLT 3.1 operate.
• XSLT and XQuery Serialization 3.1. This document defines serialization of an instance of the XQuery and XPath data model into a sequence of octets, such as into XML, text, HTML, JSON.

The three XML Query Working Group documents are:

• XQuery 3.1 Requirements and Use Cases, which describes the reasons for producing XQuery 3.1, and gives examples.
• XQuery 3.1: An XML Query Language. XQuery is a versatile query and application development language, capable of processing the information content of diverse data sources including structured and semi-structured documents, relational databases and tree-bases databases. The XQuery language is designed to support powerful optimizations and pre-compilation leading to very efficient searches over large amounts of data, including over so-called XML-native databases that read and write XML but have an efficient internal storage. The 3.1 version adds support for features such as arrays and maps primarily to facilitate processing of JSON and other structures.
• XQueryX 3.1, which defines an XML syntax for XQuery 3.1.

Learn more about the XML Activity.

It is a fact almost universally acknowledged, that 99% of fonts are unusable for 99% of projects. So when you find one of those magic 1% that fit almost everywhere, you grab it with both hands!

That’s the case with the Glober type family, and happily our sister-site, MightyDeals.com, has arranged an awesome deal on it.

Glober, is a grotesque sans-serif, with a warm and friendly personality. The generous counters and the rounded terminals dispel any sense of harshness, and replace the ordered and uptight feeling many sans-serifs give off with a sense of openness and flexibility.

There are nine weights, each with a matching italic font, and it’s the heavier weights that really exude the personality, whilst the lighter weights are ideal for body text.

Glober is a typeface you’ll return to again and again. It’s so flexible you can use it for anything, from an annual report for a corporate client, to an advert for a tech firm, even a brand face for a textiles company; the possibilities are endless.

The regular retail price of the Glober Font Family is $190 for the desktop version, but for a limited time you can get all 18 fonts for just $19; or, purchase the desktop and webfont versions for just $28 instead of the regular price of $285; that’s a fantastic 90% discount. Head over to MightyDeals.com today to take advantage of this offer while you can.

400+ Scalable Vectors from T-Shirt Factory – only $17!

Who had a blast celebrating Earth Day?

We did!

Wednesday’s EcoFest event on the quad drew crowds of students, faculty, and even visitors! All of us at SEA would like to thank our wonderful performers, MCs, and on campus and off campus groups for the energy and effort that made this such a memorable experience.

Let us know who you met at EcoFest, what you liked, and what you want to see next time!

If you want to know more, we are Students for Environmental Awareness. We strive to raise awareness about the environment and justice.

We also provide opportunities for students to work for change through service and activism. Join us for one of our general body meetings: Mondays from 12-1 pm in Commons 331. We'll be at Quadmania this Saturday!

Visit our facebook page for photos, videos, and more!

Thank you so much for celebrating the Earth with us. Have a great weekend and good luck on your exams!

Today W3C took a modest but fundamental step in strengthening online privacy protections with the publication of a Last Call Working Draft of Tracking Preference Expression (DNT). The specification plays a key role in addressing user demand for improved control of online privacy. It enables individuals to express their privacy preferences in a simple, stable, scalable, and flexible browser setting. The Tracking Protection Working Group seeks feedback on the TPE specification through 18 June.

Although Tracking Protection Expression is the foundation specification for users to express privacy preferences online, it is not a complete privacy solution. The group will now continue work on its second specification, Tracking Compliance and Scope, which help websites define and describe their responses to the DNT signal. The Tracking Protection Working Group includes browser vendors, content providers, advertisers, search engines, and international experts in policy, privacy, and consumer protection.

Learn more about W3C’s Privacy Activity.