The Digital Marketing Associate at Baltimore Center Stage has primary responsibility for the upkeep of the theater’s new website and the creation and execution of email communications. The ideal candidate will be a highly organized team player with skills in graphic design, a knowledge of digital marketing, and an interest in theater and nonprofit arts world. Join a dynamic marketing and communications team and enjoy the opportunity to promote one of Baltimore’s leading arts organizations.

When we read Exodus 32-34, the passage places compassion and mercy at the very heart of who God is—and therefore who we are called to be in our very identity as God’s people. Exodus 34.6 says “Then the LORD passed by in front of him [Moses] and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth.” This is a declaration that the Lord makes of Himself, as He reveals of His nature and character to a people who have just rebelled by worshipping a golden calf. Though we do see (and rightly so) the Lord’s anger and discipline, what the Israelites come to witness is that the Lord is compassionate and gracious, full of mercy and lovingkindness.  Mercy is God’s gracious hand of love, care and forgiveness being poured upon His people—in our times of crisis, in our brokenness, and in our darkness.  It is with this mercy that God has dealt, and continually deals with each of us, where the Lord has deep concern, care and compassion for us.

This is the very foundation of ministry—participating in the ministry of God’s compassion and mercy to a sin-broken world.

Today, spend time reading through Exodus 32-34, and may we once again hear loudly and clearly that the Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in loving kindness!

-GK

Dissertation Defense

Deep Representation of Lyrical Style and Semantics for Music Recommendation

Abhay L. Kashyap

11:00-1:00 Thursday, 20 July 2017, ITE 346

In the age of music streaming, the need for effective recommendations is important for music discovery and a personalized user experience. Collaborative filtering based recommenders suffer from popularity bias and cold-start which is commonly mitigated by content features. For music, research in content based methods have mainly been focused in the acoustic domain while lyrical content has received little attention. Lyrics contain information about a song’s topic and sentiment that cannot be easily extracted from the audio. This is especially important for lyrics-centric genres like Rap, which was the most streamed genre in 2016. The goal of this dissertation is to explore and evaluate different lyrical content features that could be useful for content, context and emotion based models for music recommendation systems.

With Rap as the primary use case, this dissertation focuses on featurizing two main aspects of lyrics; its artistic style of composition and its semantic content. For lyrical style, a suite of high level rhyme density features are extracted in addition to literary features like the use of figurative language, profanity and vocabulary strength. In contrast to these engineered features, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are used to automatically learn rhyme patterns and other relevant features. For semantics, lyrics are represented using both traditional IR techniques and the more recent neural embedding methods.

These lyrical features are evaluated for artist identification and compared with artist and song similarity measures from a real-world collaborative filtering based recommendation system from Last.fm. It is shown that both rhyme and literary features serve as strong indicators to characterize artists with feature learning methods like CNNs achieving comparable results. For artist and song similarity, a strong relationship was observed between these features and the way users consume music while neural embedding methods significantly outperformed LSA. Finally, this work is accompanied by a web-application, Rapalytics.com, that is dedicated to visualizing all these lyrical features and has been featured on a number of media outlets, most notably, Vox, attn: and Metro.

Committee: Drs. Tim Finin (chair), Anupam Joshi, Tim Oates, Cynthia Matuszek and Pranam Kolari (Walmart Labs)

http://www.lowrancetutoring.com

The Walters Art Museum seeks an individual for a part time Café Assistant to work in the Museum Café operations. Reporting to the Manager of Retail Operations, the individual will be responsible for providing a high level of customer service to the museum’s visitors.

Responsibilities:

The Walters Art Museum has an immediate need for a dynamic and energetic full time Lead Café Assistant to work in the Museum Café operations. Reporting to the Manager of Retail Operations, the individual will carry out routine food, staffing and customer services strategies as set out by the Manager, and providing daily feedback of issues, problems or restocking needs.

Responsibilities:

The Walters Art Museum is looking for an innovative, creative, goal-oriented Communications Manager to join a dynamic, growing Marketing & Communications department. As part of a new strategic plan we are re-envisioning the Walters and making big changes to how we engage audiences, build support, and increase awareness of the museum.

Each year, Maryland Incubator Company of the Year (ICOY) Awards recognize the achievements of current and past incubator companies in the state. In 2017, three bwtech@UMBCincubator companies at won their respective award categories, bringing bwtech@UMBC’s total ICOY winners to two twenty since the award program begin in 2002. The honorees, as well as several award nominees from bwtech@UMBC, were recognized at a special awards ceremony held at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

“We are thrilled that three of our bwtech@UMBC companies were recognized for their outstanding efforts by winning Incubator Company of the Year awards in their respective industry categories,” says Jennifer Reynolds, director of venture creation at bwtech@UMBC. “These awards represent the incredible effort and drive that our entrepreneurs have, and we are honored and humbled to play a part in their success.”

Fearless Solutions, a software company that primarily develops applications to presents content visually, won the award for best service/consulting company category. Delali Dzirasa ‘04, computer engineering, president and CEO of Fearless Solutions, headquartered in the Spark Coworking Space in Baltimore with additional office space in bwtech, reflected on how meaningful the award was for him, noting:

“We work hard to build software that has an impact on our community, partly because our community has helped so much in getting us to where we are today. It’s incredibly humbling to be recognized alongside so many other outstanding companies, and we’re really grateful for all of the support that we’ve received from both bwtech@UMBC and Spark—we wouldn’t be here without them!”

FZata, a company that develops therapeutic and preventive medicines using antibody technology, won the best life sciences company category. The company is currently developing a compound to fight against Clostridium difficile, a bacteria that disrupts normal, healthy colons and can be very challenging to treat, even in highly advanced medical care facilities. In the U.S., C. diff causes more than half a million infections, and nearly 30,000 deaths, each year.

Zhiyong Yang, co-founder and CEO of FZata, reflects, “Ever since the launch in bwtech@UMBC in November 2015, FZata has earned quite a few significant government grants, including a very recent $5.8M RO1 grant, which represents the recognition from our scientific peers. Now being selected as Best Life Sciences Company reflects the recognition from our business peers,” says Yang. “It is a great honor to us.”

Leverage, a software company that specializes in developing new technologies that can impact society, won the best software company category. Eric Conn ‘85, computer science, co-founder and CEO of Leverage, says that the support from bwtech@UMBC has played a large part in the success of the company, and he calls the ICOY award “validation of the hard work that our entire team has put in for nearly three years now.”

“Our Internet of Things (IoT) software platform and companion educational website ‘IoT For All’ are quickly becoming the preferred tools for IoT projects large and small,” says Conn. “Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are already having a large impact on people’s lives and we hope to strike the right balance between the efficiencies that technology can bring and the preservation of satisfying, high-paying jobs for future generations.”

Since 2002, more than a dozen incubator companies at bwtech@UMBC had won awards at the Maryland Incubator Company of the Year Awards.

In June, Mike Wagner ‘97, information systems management, ‘98, computer science, vice president of WaveStrike, was recently recognized by Ernst & Young at the annual Entrepreneur of the Year Maryland Awards. He was recognized as an entrepreneur in the technology services category for WaveStrike, a software engineering company that develops systems that protect national security.

Read “These startups won Maryland Incubator Company of the Year Awards” in Technical.ly Baltimore, and “EY honors Entrepreneur of the Year Maryland winners” in Baltimore Business Journal.