Are you interested in working in the government for the summer or after you graduate? If so, the Career Center would like to tell you about a great opportunity for UMBC students!

Workforce Recruitment Program
The Workforce Recruitment Program for College Students with Disabilities (WRP), coordinated by the Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) and the U.S. Department of Defense, is a recruitment and referral program that connects federal and private sector employers with highly motivated college students, graduate students, and recent graduates with disabilities who are eager to prove their abilities in the workplace through summer or permanent jobs.

Eligible students must:
- have a disability and be eligible under the Schedule A hiring authority
- be a United States citizen
- be enrolled in a degree program on a substantially full-time basis OR have graduated with a degree in April 2016 or more recently.

If you are interested in interviewing with a representative from WRP or learning more about the program, please contact: Caroline Bodnar, carolc@umbc.edu.

Please visit www.wrp.gov for more information regarding WRP and click on the student registration button to get started!  For more information watch this youtube video.

All application materials must be uploaded to the WRP site by October 17th by 12:00am PST. No late applications will be accepted. You will need time to get your registration approved by Caroline Bodnar, gather your resume and transcript, and complete your application, so please don’t delay!

We hope your fall semester is off to a great start!

Women of Color Conference along to your students. Let me know if you have any students who would be interested in attending. Transportation would be on their own. This year, we will not charter a bus to Detroit. 

Just to let you know that it is not too late to secure your school's participation at Career Communications' Group (CCG) upcoming Women of Color Conference to be held October 6-8, 2017 in Detroit, MI!

How robots could help bridge the elder-care gap

Cynthia Matuszek, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Despite innovations that make it easier for seniors to keep living on their own rather than moving into special facilities, most elderly people eventually need a hand with chores and other everyday activities.

Friends and relatives often can’t do all the work. Growing evidence indicates it’s neither sustainable nor healthy for seniors or their loved ones. Yet demand for professional caregivers already far outstrips supply, and experts say this workforce shortage will only get worse.

So how will our society bridge this elder-care gap? In a word, robots.

Just as automation has begun to do jobs previously seen as uniquely suited for humans, like retrieving goods from warehouses, robots will assist your elderly relatives. As a robotics researcher, I believe artificial intelligence has the potential not only to care for our elders but to do so in a way that increases their independence and reduces their social isolation.

Personal robots

Robots can hand medicine to patients. UMBC Interactive Robotics and Language Lab, CC BY-SA

In the 2004 movie “I, Robot,” the robot-hating protagonist Del Spooner (played by Will Smith) is shocked to discover a robot in his grandmother’s house, baking a pie. You may have similar mental images: When many people imagine robots in the home, they envision mechanized domestic workers doing tasks in human-like ways.

In reality, many of the robots that will provide support for older adults who “age in place” – staying at home when they might otherwise be forced to relocate to assisted living or nursing homes – won’t look like people.

Instead, they will be specialized systems, akin to the Roomba, iRobot’s robotic vacuum cleaner and the first commercially successful consumer robot. Small, specific devices are not only easier to design and deploy, they allow for incremental adoption as requirements evolve over time.

Seniors, like everyone else, need different things. Many need help with the mechanics of eating, bathing, dressing and standing up – tasks known as “activities of daily living.” Along with daily help with cooking and managing their medications, they can benefit from a robotic hand with more intermittent things such as doing the laundry and getting to the doctor’s office.

That may sound far-fetched, but in addition to vacuuming robots can already mop our floors and mow our lawns. Experimental robots help lift people into and out of chairs and beds, follow recipes, fold towels and dispense pills. Soon, autonomous (self-driving) cars will ferry people to appointments and gatherings.

The kinds of robots already available include models that drive, provide pet-like social companionship and greet customers. Some of these technologies are already in limited trials in nursing homes, and seniors of course can already rely on their own Roombas.

Pepper, a social companion robot, in a retail environment. Tokumeigakarinoaoshima

Meanwhile, robot companions may soon help relieve loneliness and nudge forgetful elders to eat on a regular schedule.

Scientists and other inventors are building robots that will do these jobs and many others.

Round-the-clock care

While some tasks remain out of reach of today’s robots, such as inserting IVs or trimming toenails, mechanical caregivers can offer clear advantages over their human counterparts.

The most obvious one is their capacity to work around the clock. Machines, unlike people, are available 24/7. When used in the home, they can support aging in place.

Another plus: Relying on technology to meet day-to-day needs like mopping the floor can improve the quality of time elders spend with family and friends. Delegating mundane chores to robots also leaves more time for seniors to socialize with the people who care about them, and not just for them.

And since using devices isn’t the same as asking someone for help, relying on caregiving robots may lead seniors to perceive less lost autonomy than when they depend on human helpers.

Interacting with robots

This brave new world of robot caregivers won’t take shape unless we make them user-friendly and intuitive, and that means interaction styles matter. In my lab, we work on how robots can interact with people by talking with them. Fortunately, recent research by the Pew Research Center shows that older adults are embracing technology more and more, just like everyone else.

Now that we are beginning to see robots that can competently perform some tasks, researchers like Jenay Beer, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina, are trying to figure out which activities seniors need the most help with and what kinds of robots they might be most willing to use in the near term.

To that end, researchers are asking questions like:

• Do robots need to understand and convey emotion to be accepted?
• How can robots provide social support?
• Is it best when machines simulate eye contact with us?
• Does it help if they can converse?

But the fact is we don’t need all the answers before robots begin to help elders age in place.

Looking ahead

After all, there’s no time to lose.

The Census Bureau estimated that 15 percent of Americans – nearly one in six of us – were aged 65 or older in 2016, up from 12 percent in 2000. Demographers anticipate that by 2060 almost one in four will be in that age group. That means there will be some 48 million more elderly people in the U.S. than there are now.

I believe robots will perform many elder-care tasks within a decade. Some activities will still require human caregivers, and there are people for whom robotic assistance will never be the answer. But you can bet that robots will help seniors age in place, even if they won’t look like butlers or pastry chefs.

Cynthia Matuszek, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, UMBC, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post Prof. Cynthia Matuszek on how robots could help bridge the elder-care gap appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Romans 7:4-6 (NLT) - “So, my dear brothers and sisters, this is the point: You died to the power of the law when you died with Christ. And now you are united with the one who was raised from the dead. As a result, we can produce a harvest of good deeds for God. When we were controlled by our old nature, sinful desires were at work within us, and the law aroused these evil desires that produced a harvest of sinful deeds, resulting in death. But now we have been released from the law, for we died to it and are no longer captive to its power. Now we can serve God, not in the old way of obeying the letter of the law, but in the new way of living in the Spirit.”

“At issue for us… is Paul’s own view of the conflict between the Spirit and the flesh, between living kata sarka (’according to the flesh’) and kata pneuma (’according to the Spirit’). Every occurrence of these terms in Paul has to do with our present eschatological existence-what it means for believers to live together as a people, defined by the already/not yet fulfillment of God’s promises, in contrast to a former life defined and determined by the world. My point: Nowhere does Paul describe Christian life, life in the Spirit, as one of constant struggle with the flesh. He simply does not speak to that question. His point rather is the sufficiency of the Spirit for God’s new end-time people.

“Basic to Paul’s view is that, as with Torah observance, the time of the flesh is over for followers of Christ. According to Romans 7:4-6, Christ and the Spirit have, with the new covenant, brought an end to the time of the law and the flesh, which belong to our existence before and outside Christ. Continuing to live this way is incompatible with life “according to the Spirit” (Rom 8:5-8). But Paul’s view does not represent triumphalism, as though people who lived by the Spirit were never tempted by the old life in the flesh or that they never succumbed to such. They have, and they do; and there is forgiveness for such, and gracious restoration” (Gordon Fee, Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God).

Prayer: Lord, thank you that we live now in the life of the Spirit, by your grace!  Thank you for the victory! In Jesus’ name, Amen.

-JK

Handel Choir of Baltimore is a highly respected 40+-member auditioned community-based oratorio ensemble which presents baroque, classical and early romantic works with period instrument orchestras, as well as modern repertoire and newly commissioned works. Handel Choir has an 82-year history in the Baltimore cultural landscape.

by David Hoffman and Craig Berger