UMBC ACM Student Chapter

Tech Talk: What can a Humanoid Robot Learn?

Professor Tim Oates, UMBC

10:00am-11:00am Friday, 4 April 2014, ITE346

We hope everyone had a fun spring break! We are back with another talk in our UMBC ACM techTalk series. Professor Tim Oates, who is also one of the faculty advisers of the ACM student chapter, will talk about “What can a Humanoid Robot Learn?”. Dr. Oates will split the talk into two sessions. In the first half, he will introduce the topic and talk about current research being pursued in the area of humanoid robots. Whereas, the second half of the talk will be an interactive session focusing on ideating challenges and future research directions. To make the discussion interactive, Dr. Oates encourages you to spend a few minutes beforehand to think about what you would do if you had access to a humanoid robot for research purposes.

Abstract: Robots and AI have a long history together, both in the popular culture and in research.  In this talk I will review some of my past work at the juncture of robotics, AI, and machine learning, as well as ongoing work with collaborators at UMCP along the same lines.  With those collaborators, I wrote a proposal to buy a few humanoid robots that was funded, so I’ll next describe the robots that we’ve bought.  Finally, I’d like to have an open discussion about my ideas for research using these robots, and ideas that those in the audience might have as well.  My goal is to get as many people as is practical involved with the robots, which are relatively expensive and thus not a common resource.  If you’re coming to the talk, spend a few minutes beforehand thinking about what you would do if you had access to a humanoid robot for research purposes.

Dr. Tim Oates is an Oros Familty Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He received B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University in 1989, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1997 and 2000, respectively. Prior to coming to UMBC in the Fall of 2001, he spent a year as a postdoc in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 Dr. Oates won a prestigious NSF CAREER award. He is an author or co-author of more than 100 peer reviewed papers and is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. His research interests include pattern discovery in time series, grammatical inference, graph mining, statistical natural language processing, robotics, and language acquisition.

RSVP for the talk at http://my.umbc.edu/events/23881

Volunteers needed for research study.

The Role of Skin Color & Hair Politics

in Black Women’s College Experiences

Latasha Eley is a graduate student in the UMBC Language, Literacy, & Culture doctoral program conducting research to explore the ways in which Black, female, undergraduate students’ experiences are impacted by hair and skin hue politics within campus culture.  Please contact her (leley1@umbc.edu) for more information if you meet the following eligibility criteria and are interested in participating:

•       Black/African American

•       Female

•       18-25

•       Enrolled at UMBC full-time

You will be asked to share your on and off campus experiences, as they relate to hair and skin color, individually or in a small group setting of no more than twelve students for participation in a focus group.  Focus Group participants will receive a free pizza dinner.  Individual Interview participants will receive $20 cash.

Image courtesy of Talking Points Memo

Have you been worrying lately about the NSA listening in on your calls?

A recent push to reform NSA surveillance might ease your mind… maybe? Just a little bit?

After promising to review intelligence-gathering practices in January, President Obama offered a plan to reign in the NSA by abandoning the practice of bulk phone data collection.

The reforms would require congressional approval. That is because these reforms basically modify sections of the USA Patriot Act, which was hastily passed in the wake of 9/11. This controversial law laid the groundwork for the NSA’s bulk data collection programs.

Passage of the administration’s plan would mean that caller data — who you called and when you called them — would remain with the phone companies instead of with the NSA.

The NSA would have to make inquiries for specific phone numbers and obtain permission from a judge. Meanwhile, phone companies would not be required to hold onto records longer than the 18 months already required by federal regulations.

In general, the White House proposal was received by civil liberties advocates with cautious optimism. The plan is silent on the issue of internet communications, arguably more important than phones in the digital era.

Feel better yet? No? Yeah, figures.

We didn’t even tell you about all of the [REDACTED].

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot

Goat Simulator Official Launch Trailer, as funny as the first one http://ow.ly/v7Glx

R.I.P Retweet? Twitter Experiment Features “Share” Button Instead of “Retweet” http://ow.ly/v7EyI  via @marketingland

The Rising Trend of Dynamic Expandable Search Fields http://depot.ly/v29z6

What successful leaders’ to-do lists look like http://depot.ly/uZJF4

Want to attend #FILive? Use code WEBDESIGNERDEPOT before March 31 & save 10% on an early bird ticket! http://futureinsightslive.com/las-vegas-2014/

A Modern Designer’s Canvas http://depot.ly/uZJq4  via @smashingmag

Anti-social network helps you avoid people you don’t want to see http://depot.ly/uZITP  via @FastCoDesign

Half of America Now Recognizes Google Glass http://depot.ly/uZIvR

8 in 10 say the ads they see on Twitter are irrelevant http://depot.ly/uZHvS

Trends in ecommerce volume change across global webstores http://depot.ly/uW63X

Looking for color inspiration? Check out Wes Anderson Palettes http://depot.ly/uW5PR  via @BrushLovers

Artist breathes new life into old Disney scenes by painting over them http://depot.ly/uW5xF

A New App That Lets You Take Apart Websites and Rebuild Them At Will http://depot.ly/uW2ZN  via @FastCoDesign

Adobe Photoshop Recreated Using Lego http://depot.ly/uTs4b  via @speckyboy

A Quick Introduction to Agile #UX Design http://depot.ly/uTrWv

Good read: Why don’t designers take Android seriously? http://depot.ly/uTrQ7

How To Code an HTML5/CSS3 Shopping Cart Webpage Layout http://depot.ly/uOR7x

Want more? No problem! Keep track of all our tweets by following us @DesignerDepot

Blockies: 140 Super Stylish Retro Illustrations – only $10!