Image by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC
UMBC students will demonstrate collaborative mobile computing projects developed in integrated classes offered by Computer Science and Fine Arts. The demonstrations will take place from 4:00 to 5:00pm on Tuesday, 15 May 2018 in the main 3rd floor hallway of the ITE building. Pizza and soft drinks will be served at the event.
The faculty behind the Designing and Developing Effective Mobile Applications class created the course specifically to prepare students for careers requiring interdisciplinary, team-based approaches to creative projects. Viviana Cordova, assistant professor of visual arts, and Nilanjan Banerjee, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering, jointly developed and taught the course with support from the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation.
Brief descriptions of the seven group projects that will be demonstrated are available on this poster.
The post Demos: Designing & developing effective mobile applications, 4-5pm Tue 5/15 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.
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UMBC CSEE Professor Cynthia Matuszek was named as one AI’s 10 to Watch by IEEE Intelligent Systems. The designation is given every two years to a group of “10 young stars who have demonstrated outstanding AI achievements”. IEEE Intelligent Systems accepts nominations from around the world, which are then evaluated by the the publication’s editorial and advisory boards based on reputation, impact, expert endorsement, and diversity. Dr. Matuszek was recognized for her research that “combined robotics, natural language processing, and machine learning to build systems that nonspecialists can instruct, control, and interact with intuitively and naturally”.
Professor Matuszek joined UMBC in 2014 after receiving her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington. At UMBC, she established and leads the Interactive Robotics and Language Lab that integrates research on robotics and natural language processing with the goal of “bringing the fields together: developing robots that everyday people can talk to, telling them to do tasks or about the world around them”.
Here is how she describes her research in the IEEE Intelligent Systems article.
As robots become more powerful, capable, and autonomous, they are moving from controlled industrial settings to human-centric spaces such as medical environments, workplaces, and homes. As physical agents, they will soon be able help with entirely new categories of tasks that require intelligence. Before that can happen, though, robots must be able to interact gracefully with people and the noisy, unpredictable world they occupy.
This undertaking requires insight from multiple areas of AI. Useful robots will need to be flexible in dynamic environments with evolving tasks, meaning they must learn and must also be able to communicate effectively with people. Building advanced intelligent agents that interact robustly with nonspecialists in various domains requires insights from robotics, machine learning, and natural language processing.
My research focuses on developing statistical learning approaches that let robots gain knowledge about the world from multimodal interactions with users, while simultaneously learning to understand the language surrounding novel objects and tasks. Rather than considering these problems separately, we can efficiently handle them concurrently by employing joint learning models that treat language, perception, and task understanding as strongly associated training inputs. This lets each of these channels provide mutually reinforcing inductive bias, constraining an otherwise unmanageable search space and allowing robots to learn from a reasonable number of ongoing interactions.
Combining natural language processing and robotic understanding of environments improves the efficiency and efficacy of both approaches. Intuitively, learning language is easier in the physical context of the world it describes. And robots are more useful and helpful if people can talk naturally to them and teach them about the world. We’ve used this insight to demonstrate that robots can learn unanticipated language that describes completely novel objects. They can also learn to follow instructions for performing tasks and interpret unscripted human gestures, all from interactions with nonspecialist users.
Bringing together these disparate research areas enables the creation of learning methods that let robots use language to learn, adapt, and follow instructions. Understanding humans’ needs and communications is a long-standing AI problem, which fits within the larger context of understanding how to interact gracefully in primarily human environments. Incorporating these capabilities will let us develop flexible, inexpensive robots that can integrate into real-world settings such as the workplace and home.
You can access a pdf version of the full IEEE AI’s 10 to Watch article here.
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]]>It is Theatre Night for Teens at Everyman Theatre, and the second floor lobby area has been transformed into an educational wonderland. Students grades 9-12 gather just outside the elevator, speaking in different languages with one another and hesitant to move into the space even as Brianna McCoy, Director of Education at Everyman, ushers them in.
Tonight, Everyman is hosting students from Patterson High School and Digital Harbor High School, who are also participants in out-of-school programming provided by the Baltimore City Community College Refugee Youth Project.
Everyman Theatre education and community engagement representatives visited these schools twice this semester, introducing theatre to young adults, many of whom have never experienced it before.
They use a combination of icebreakers and theatre games to engage with the students and to get them to talk about themselves – basic subjects, like where they are from or what it is like to be a teen in Baltimore.
Asia McCullom, an Urban Arts Leadership Program fellow with Everyman, has been to both sets of workshops and has seen students really respond to what she calls the ‘Beach Ball Activity’.
“We bought a large beach ball and wrote questions on it, like ‘How many languages do you speak?’ or ‘What’s your favorite meal?’” she explains. “As they pass it around the circle, they answer the questions. The students really listen to each other … They open up more and more.”
The theatre work RYP students are exposed to occurs around a circle, resulting in a highly participatory environment. “The democratic experience [of the circle] might be different than what they know,” Brian Francoise, Director of Community Engagement at Everyman, says.
Francoise, who began the partnership with RYP, says he tries to create programming that ties the theatre season to a long-term community partner. He has been interested in working with young people outside of the context of school, and once he learned that RYP has not yet offered a theatre program to their students, he knew they were the right fit.
“I’ve been admiring [their work] for about ten years,” he says.
Brittany DeNovellis, RYP’s program coordinator, was equally as excited at the opportunity to partner with Everyman Theatre. “I loved participating in the theatre program at my own high school and thought this collaboration could be a special opportunity for the young adults that we serve. It has been a joy to see students take part in theatre games and connect with each other in unexpected ways.”
TNT allows students to experience live theatre at a fraction of the cost of a typically-priced ticket. Ten dollars gets a high school student dinner (sponsored by Noodles and Company), an artist meet-and-greet (with Caite Hevner, projection designer), the show (“The Book of Joseph”), dessert and a post-show discussion.
Everyman specifically connected with RYP because “The Book of Joseph” is centered around one man’s experience as a refugee. Based on the true story of Richard Hollander, who discovered a box of World War II-era letters stamped with swastikas in his attic from his father, the play focuses on the “courage to face difficult stories,” explains Francoise. “It closely parallels with the immigrant experience in Baltimore.”
As the students eat their dinner and wait for the event to begin, it is difficult to see them as anything other than young people. They break out into cliques, tease each other and flirt. Their youthful wonder is evident, and they are incredibly eager to explore the space, which hosts a plethora of pre-show activities.
Set and costume design displays are pinned up on the wall, showcasing designs from “The Book of Joseph.” A mini photo booth is set up with a box of props and costumes, and once the students find themselves more comfortable in the space, they try everything. One girl tries to zip a friend into a dress, but it seems like it does not quite fit.
Lisa Langston, the Education Program Manager, guides the students through two activities that will help them begin to connect to the themes of the show. The first is a suitcase, mirroring the suitcase Richard Hollander found in his attic, where students can place their answers to two questions: ‘What would you want to find in your attic?’ and, conversely, ‘What would you never want to find in your attic?’
This activity is, unfortunately, not as populated as the ‘CENSOR’ activity, where students are given a life story and then asked to write a letter about their life that would pass a censor (the most popular story chosen is one of forbidden love). One student writes in her native Arabic and passes the censor. Another copies what is written on the card with his pretend life story and is denied.
Soon, enough, however, it is time to meet Caite Hevner, projection designer, and then see the show. The students listen with rapt attention, some of them dissolving into giggles or whispers as the Q&A commences. McCoy makes sure to allow everyone to introduce themselves before beginning the talk – no one is allowed to feel unimportant.
Hevner discusses her role in the production, pulling up pictures of her previous work to further explain what she does. “When I’m approached with a project, I think ‘If no one hired me to work on this show, what would be missing?’” she says. “And then I add that in.”
After the talk, the students are ushered to their seats, grabbing their ticket from Langston as they run to the elevator and stairs.
“I’ve never seen a play before,” says Marita*, before she shyly enters the theatre to grab her seat. She is a student at Digital Harbor and RYP participant, and her statement echoes among her peers. She settles into her seat, and the lights come up to reveal a new world.
*name has been changed
]]>Managing Director
Handel Choir is seeking a Managing Director who is committed to supporting local arts, enjoys working in a collaborative team environment, and is comfortable in a dynamic, multi-tasking environment. Passion, commitment and creativity are highly valued and can, in the right candidate, serve as alternatives for direct experience in some areas of responsibility.
Reports to: Handel Choir of Baltimore Board President.
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