With Kevin Omland, professor of biological sciences

UMBC is teeming with wildlife—the infamous frenzied squirrels, the occasional wandering deer, a curious woodchuck or two, and lots and lots of birds. Melodic chirping can be heard from the wee hours of the morning all the way until the last night classes let out. And not just any birds; the areas surrounding UMBC and campus alike are home to a special species, one that is widely revered around the entire state—the Baltimore Oriole.  

Having researched orioles and ravens for decades, it’s not surprising that Kevin Omland, a biological sciences professor, calls himself the mascot biologist for the state of Maryland. Since joining UMBC in 2000, Omland’s work has almost exclusively centered on orioles. Along with members of his lab, the Presidential Research Professor studies a range of topics in avian evolution, behavior, and conservation. We asked the life-long ornithophilehow to spot the Baltimore Oriole, our state bird, in its natural habitat.

Tools of the Trade

• A good pair of binoculars
• A smartphone or tablet to access the website “All About Birds”
• A device to play an imitation of the Oriole’s song
• Patience—and lots of it!

Step One – Pick a Park

Baltimore Orioles can be found all around suburban parks in Baltimore County and City. Omland estimates that there are at least 100 oriole territories between the Inner Harbor and the Pennsylvania/Maryland border. 

“The Baltimore Oriole loves hanging out in local suburban parks,” he notes. “I’ve even seen them in the trees near the entrance to the Maryland Zoo in Druid Park. You have a good chance of seeing them in Patapsco State Park, too.”

To find a Baltimore Oriole on UMBC’s campus Omland suggests scoping out Pig Pen Pond and the Conservation Environmental Research Area (CERA) located south of bwtech, UMBC’s business park. Omland notes that it may be harder to spot Baltimore Orioles on campus due to an increase of construction here in the past twenty years, but it is still possible to find the occasional oriole flying near the green spaces on campus.

Step Two: Look (and Listen!) High in the Sky

After you’ve picked your park, it’s important to know how to find the elusive bird. According to Omland, the state bird may be harder to spot than you think. He recommends looking and listening up toward the treeline. 

“You’ll never see a Baltimore Oriole on the ground to save your life,” he joked, noting that he is also known to be the worst exaggerator in the world. “But in all seriousness, it is very rare to see [them] on the ground. Some particularly adventurous orioles may forage for food on the ground, but it’s rare.”

Omland says that your best bet is to grab a pair of binoculars and look in the tops of tall trees near rivers, ponds, and even golf courses. 

As for the signature colors, Omland says that there’s no other bird around that boasts the bright orange coloring complemented by the jet black feathers—it’s unmistakable. He notes that adult males will have vibrant, discernible colors, while females and adolescents will be a bit more muted, but still identifiable.

“You’re sure to recognize the colors. It’s the same ones on the baseball caps for the O’s team,” Omland says. “Historically speaking, it’s called Lord Baltimore’s Orange, and there’s no other bird that carries that indisputable color. If you know that color, you’re on the right track!”

Step Three: Work on Your Whistle

No less important than the distinct colorings of the Baltimore Oriole is the sound that it makes—a low, loud, clear whistle that can often be heard from far distances.

“It is difficult for humans to imitate the sounds of many other birds,” says Omland, “but for the Baltimore Oriole, it can be fairly easy to imitate if you practice. If you get really good at their whistle, there’s a chance that they will answer back!”

Step Four: Take Your Skills Farther Afield

The Baltimore Oriole is just one of more than 30 different species of orioles found all over the world, and Omland doesn’t limit himself to studying just one kind. 

Omland’s research also includes the Bahama Oriole, a critically endangered species native only to Andros Island. Thanks to an International Research Experience for Students grant funded by the National Science Foundation, Omland has been taking students to the remote island in the Bahamas since 2016 to study how climate change is impacting weather patterns and creating natural disasters that have nearly decimated the species. 

“It gives students the chance to be on the front lines of climate change,” Omland says. “This is where climate change is killing people, destroying homes, and eliminating ecosystems…the students care about what happens to these islands and want to make a difference.”

Omland extends the invitation to his students and beyond to participate in what he calls “adventure biology”—getting outdoors and sharing intimate opportunities with the surrounding wildlife, especially in readily accessible areas. “The Baltimore Orioles are one of the many spectacular birds that are here in our forests,” he said. “If people stop, look up, and start paying attention, Maryland has a lot of wonderful diversity to offer us.”

*****
Photos of Omland and his class by Marlayna Demond ’11. Oriole image courtesy of Kevin Omland.

By Michele Wojciechowski

In 1980, while spending the summer with family in South Carolina, 13-year-old Karsonya “Dr. Kaye” Wise Whitehead noticed that the corner grocery store owner had kept up the “Whites Only” and “Colored Only” signs. She was offended and wanted him to take them down. The teen decided to stage her first protest. She told her grandmother that she was going to march every day in front of his store until he took the signs down.

The proprietor took them down from the counter. But he later had them framed and put on the wall to make them “art.”

“My grandmother gave me a similar framed ‘Colored Seating Only’ sign so that I would always remember that moment in my life,” says Whitehead, Ph.D. ’09, language, literacy, and culture. 

While she didn’t get the exact result that she wanted, Whitehead did see that her actions could make a direct change in her community. This lesson would guide Whitehead as she found ways to amplify her voice.

“It changed my life,” Whitehead says of the language, literacy, and culture program. “I knew that I wanted to be in a field where I could research, write about, and teach Black women’s history.”

After living in New York City—working first at MTV and then at a PBS affiliate making documentary films—Whitehead, along with her husband Johnnie and their sons, Kofi and Amir, moved to Baltimore 16 years ago. She taught in Baltimore City middle schools for four years and was named Maryland History Teacher of the Year before she left to pursue her Ph.D. in language, literacy, and culture in 2006 at UMBC.

From teacher to student

In 2005, Whitehead was still working as a teacher when a friend sent her copies of the 1863–1865 diaries of Emilie Davis. “I started reading the diaries at night, and when I realized that I was reading the diaries of a free black woman, I knew that I wanted to transcribe and publish them,” recalls Whitehead. Because she didn’t know how to do this kind of work, she started looking into Ph.D. programs that could guide her. 

Whitehead settled on UMBC, remembering the impression President Freeman Hrabowski had made on her years before after hearing him speak at an event. “Like most people, I was amazed by the depth of his passion, his ability to take complicated issues and make them understandable, his desire to get [people] motivated to push beyond their comfort zone, and his dedication to helping Black students—and all students of color—receive their doctoral degrees,” she says. “When I decided to apply to a doctoral program, the only place I wanted to attend was UMBC.”

“Dr. Wise Whitehead’s commitment to both local and national social justice issues exhibits the best of UMBC,” says Kimberly Moffitt, associate professor and LLC program director, “and how we work to support our graduate students in their desires to excel and thrive beyond a classroom setting.” 

“It changed my life,” Whitehead says of the language, literacy, and culture program. “I knew that I wanted to be in a field where I could research, write about, and teach Black women’s history.”

And that writing Whitehead wanted to do about Emilie Davis? It became her dissertation as well as her first book, Notes from a Colored Girl: the Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis.

Taking it to the airwaves

In 2015, Whitehead was approached by Beverly Burke, then-news director of WEAA, 88.9, out of Morgan State University, about coming on to do one- or two-minute African American history spots on the station. At first, she appeared monthly, but then Whitehead began getting requests to come on other hosts’ shows and progressed to being a guest host. Three years ago, the station’s general manager Malarie Pinkard Pierre approached Whitehead with the idea of giving her an afternoon slot for her own talk show. 

Whitehead was thrilled.

Her show, “Today with Dr. Kaye” runs on WEAA, Monday through Friday from 3 to 5 p.m. “It’s unbelievable! That’s prime drive time, when you’ve got three generations in the car listening,” says Whitehead. “To be in that time slot is really exciting. The reception has been phenomenal.”

Whitehead is one of only a handful of black women in the country who have afternoon drive time radio talk shows. Building on the blocks of her early activist efforts and her continued education at UMBC, Whitehead knows that her voice has power. At the start of every show, she begins with, “We have conversations that matter.”  

“[We have] conversations that are designed to challenge us, to make us think, to make us laugh, and sometimes to make us cry,” explains Whitehead, who wants her radio show to help make changes in Baltimore. “When I got into doing this show, I made a commitment to speak to, with, and for the people of Baltimore City.”

Whitehead says that her listeners range in age from young children to 85-year-olds, and because the show is on Facebook Live, she has listeners from all over, including callers from Alaska, Canada, and Jamaica. “I tell people that we have a two-hour window where they can come and wrestle with some questions with us and join us at the kitchen table,” says Whitehead.

In addition to her radio show, Whitehead writes a bi-monthly column for the AFRO, op-eds for The Baltimore Sun, and works full-time as an associate professor of communications and African American studies at Loyola University. 

While she loves her activist work, Whitehead admits that her greatest joy is being a wife and mom. “Before I had the show, I was a black mommy activist. I was involved in a lot to help my sons…to help carve out a world where they can get home safe,” she recalls. 

“Baltimore is a city that’s in a lot of pain, and people are searching for someone who’s going to tell them the truth, listen to them, and fight for and with them. I’ve made a lot of good friends and colleagues who are willing to do battle with me,” says Whitehead. “I’ve fallen in love with this city, and I’m willing to fight to bring about changes.”

*****

All photos courtesy of Karsonya Wise Whitehead Ph.D. ’09.

UMBC researchers develop better techniques to
render video game characters with realistic skin

Researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) have developed a new solution to render an essential detail in many video games: human skin. The research is published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques [1]. Marc Olano, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at UMBC, led this research alongside Tiantian Xie, Ph.D. ’22, computer science. Xie, under the guidance of Olano, has worked with researchers Brian Karis and Krzysztof Narkowicz at the gaming company Epic Games, developing a keen understanding of gamers’ user experience, including the precise level of realism and detail that players are looking for in human characters.

Game developers seek to create visuals that are as realistic as possible without stepping into the “uncanny valley.” This term describes when the graphics in a game attempt to portray a human as closely as possible, and gets close to mimicking real life, but not quite close enough, in a way users find disturbing. This creates an unpleasant feeling in users that might distract from their enjoyment of the game.

In many games, human skin is rendered in such a way that it looks like a plastic object. This plastic look can occur because animators aren’t accounting for subsurface scattering – a key element of how light interacts with a textured 3D surface. Subsurface scattering is animators’ main priority when it comes to transforming skin from looking like plastic to looking truly real.

Olano’s method builds upon research developed by large gaming companies to create realistic depictions of human skin that will also load quickly within a gaming interface. “Our method adds an ability to adaptively estimate how many samples you actually need to get the look that you want without having to do a lot of additional computation to get a smooth image,” explains Olano.

The method minimizes the amount of computation needed to create photo-realistic images. Previous techniques were either not realistic enough, or ran too slowly for use in games, negatively affecting the gaming experience. The new method is based on techniques developed for offline film production rendering. Xie, the first author of the paper, states, “Offline rendering techniques are not suitable for real-time rendering because adding the technique itself in real-time introduces a large overhead. Our technique eliminates this overhead.”

Olano and his team created an algorithm to determine the pixels that would need to be rendered differently than the others due to light gradient change. Their sampling method uses temporal variance to lower the overall number of changes within each frame while still maintaining a realistic depiction of subsurface scattering. Since fewer changes are needed per frame, the method creates an efficient way of rendering realistic skin within the capabilities of today’s computing power.

The algorithm used by Olano’s team is built upon a foundation of research that is known and accessible to game developers. This offers a promising path for the gaming industry to pursue realism while maintaining an awareness of the computational ability of an average gaming system. Developers may be able to begin using this technique soon to create more realistic human figures in games, growing the gaming market even more.

[1] Tiantian Xie, Marc Olano, Brian Karis, and Krzysztof Narkowicz. 2020. Real-time subsurface scattering with single pass variance-guided adaptive importance sampling. Proc. ACM Comput. Graph. Interact. Tech. 3, 1, Article 3 (Apr 2020), 21 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3384536

Adapted from a press release written by Morgan Zepp that appeared in EurikAlert.

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