This morning’s Dissertation House mini-lecture focuses on Overcoming Writer’s Block. This morning, Dr. Wendy Carter-Veale, Dissertation Coach, is discussing tips for moving past mere thoughts and blockages. The theme for the morning is to “start writing!” The founders of the PROMISE Dissertation House in Maryland have worked with many students over the years. It is important to note that thousands of lines of code, tons of great experiments, and hundreds of great ideas don’t mean anything to the dissertation completion process if you’re not writing. Remember that you will not graduate unless you complete the written document. Conference presentations, e.g. power point slides, are not enough! One alum told us that he used to transfer everything from his presentation power point slides to a word document. Other people go to a particular place to write where they know that they will be able to get right into their document without distractions. Find the process that works for you, but stop the excuses and just write.

This morning’s Dissertation House mini-lecture focuses on Overcoming Writer’s Block. This morning, Dr. Wendy Carter-Veale, Dissertation Coach, is discussing tips for moving past mere thoughts and blockages. The theme for the morning is to “start writing!” The founders of the PROMISE Dissertation House in Maryland have worked with many students over the years. It is important to note that thousands of lines of code, tons of great experiments, and hundreds of great ideas don’t mean anything to the dissertation completion process if you’re not writing. Remember that you will not graduate unless you complete the written document. Conference presentations, e.g. power point slides, are not enough! One alum told us that he used to transfer everything from his presentation power point slides to a word document. Other people go to a particular place to write where they know that they will be able to get right into their document without distractions. Find the process that works for you, but stop the excuses and just write.

Dan Ritschel, professor of history and director of the Center for History Education, was a guest on Maryland Morning during a July 11th segment on Maryland’s newly-added government assessment test for high school seniors.

The test, which will be first given in 2017, was part of a new law passed by the Maryland General Assembly this spring. Ritschel spoke of the importance of the test’s introduction, but noted also that other fields – including his own – remain somewhat neglected as the high school level.

“There used to be a Maryland performance assessment in history until 2002, and following the introduction of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, the Maryland Department of Education scrapped the testing of history,” he said. “So what we’re left with is the testing of U.S. government at the high school level – and I think it’s a wonderful thing that it’s been returned – but I think we shouldn’t forget the fact that history hasn’t been tested at the state level since 2002.”

Tired of playing Diablo III?

If you head to Gamescape next weekend, you'll have a chance to try your hand at over a dozen original video games dreamed up by local students and indie game developers. As part of Artscape–the country's largest free arts festival–the annual three-day video game celebration will take place in MICA's Bunting Center from July 20-22.

Among developers like Pure Bang Games (makers of Zombie Chess) and Crankshaft Games (Eternal Silence), representatives from UMBC's own Game Developers Club will be in attendance with three games of their own. The game concepts, explains club president Alex Grube (CS '13), were conceived during a 48-hour game jam last September, and the group has been hard at work developing the games since the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year. They are:

Black Fowl is a 3D hack and slash third person role playing adventure game. You play Max, a young orphan on a quest to discover his roots. Set in the Middle Ages, highlights of the game include the ability to use magical powers (like flying), and to engage in combat while riding a bull.

Cosmoknights is a 2D multiplayer that follows a capture-the-flag concept. Two combating astronauts are stranded in an asteroid field. Your mission is to collect spare parts for your out-of-commission spaceship and get home first. Oh, and try not to get hit by an asteroid.

X-Zip-It! boasts the tagline: "It's Skyrim with zippers, but without the Skyrim."  In this 2D mobile phone game, you must unzip the zipper while avoiding obstacles like buttons, Velcro, buckles, and necklaces.

UMBC's Game Development Club will discuss Black Fowl, Cosmoknights, and X-Zip-It on Sunday, July 22nd from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. To learn more about the event, check out the website.

Professor Marie desJardins (PI) along with co-principal investigators Professor Penny Rheingans and Dr. Susan Martin received a research award worth $200,000 from the National Science Foundation's program on Computing Education for 21st Century. Their 18 month research project, Building Community and Knowledge to Increase Statewide Support for Computing Education, will gather data about the status of Computer Science education in Maryland high schools and build relationships among high school teachers, community college and university faculty, and state education administrators to facilitate and increase state-level support for lasting improvements to computing education.

Despite the overall success of the K-12 education system in Maryland, opportunities to study computer science vary tremendously among the 24 school systems and approximately 200 high schools in the state. This disparity can be attributed to several factors, including the lack of a state-mandated computer science high school graduation requirement, the fact that there is no state-required teacher certification in the discipline, the absence of a standardized computer science curriculum, and barriers to entry for girls and underrepresented minorities.

The effort has two immediate objectives: (1) performing an assessment of the current state of high school computer science in each of the 24 Maryland school systems and (2) increasing knowledge about national issues associated with computer science education among high school and state administrators in Maryland through state-wide summit meetings for teachers, administrators, and higher education faculty. The long term goal is to develop curriculum and teacher development programs that will improve the quality, breadth, and student diversity of computer science education in Maryland.

MS Thesis Defense

Finding associations among SNPs for
prostate cancer using collaborative filtering

Rohit Kugaonkar

9:00am Wed. 18 July 2012, Room ITE 325b

Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer related deaths among men. Because of the slow growing nature of prostate cancer, sometimes surgical treatment is not required for less aggressive cancers. Recent debates over prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening have drawn new attention to prostate cancer. Due to the complicated nature of prostate cancer, studying the entire genome is essential to find genomic traits. Due to the high cost of studying all Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), it is essential to find tag SNPs which can represent other SNPs. Earlier methods to find tag SNPs using associations between SNPs either use SNP's location information or are based on data of very few SNP markers in each sample. Our study is based on 2300 samples with 550,000 SNPs each. We have not used SNP location information or any predefined standard cut-offs to find tag SNPs. Our approach is based on using collaborative filtering methods to find pair wise associations among SNPs and thus list top-N tag SNPs. We have found 25 tag SNPs which have highest similarities to other SNPs. In addition we found 16 more SNPs which have high correlation with the known high risk SNPs that are associated with prostate cancer. We used some of these newly found SNPs with 5 different classification algorithms and observed some improvement in prediction accuracy over using the original known high risk SNPs. The classifier can be used in a decision to perform further testing in case of a "yes" answer by the classifier.

Committee: Drs. Yelena Yesha (chair), Anupam Joshi, Aryya Gangopadhyay and Micheal Grasso.