UHS and Counseling will be closed on June 23rd from 8:30-5:00 pm for Provider Training. The Offices will reopen on Monday 6/26/17 at 8:30 am.

If there is a medical or psychological emergency, please call UMBC police at 410-455-5555.

The topic of this month’s Data Science MD meetup is Getting Started with NLP, Sentiment Analysis and OpenNLP. The meeting will be 6:30-9:00pm, Monday, June 19 in Building 200 Room E100 at the JHU Applied Physics Laboratory. The meeting starts with networking and food and feature talks by two practitioners.

Brian Sacash (Deloitte & Touche): NLP and Sentiment Analysis

Natural Language Processing, the analysis of language, can be challenging if you don’t know where to start. Brian will walk through the Natural Language Tool Kit (NLTK), a Python library built for language analysis, and cover its core functionality. Through live coding he will demonstrate how to build a simple sentiment analysis engine from scratch.

Daniel Russ (NIH): It Takes a Village To Solve A Problem in Data Science

The talk will discuss a scientific case study in data science, computer-based occupational coding of free text job histories taken during epidemiological research studies. Beginning with a rationale for occupational coding, how the coding is performed, and how SOCcer is built on top of Apache OpenNLP. Throughout the talk, I will try to emphasize the importance of working as an interdisciplinary team.

See the meetup announcement to RSVP and get directions and more information.

The bwtech@UMBC research and technology park has formally received Regional Institution Strategic Enterprise (RISE) Zone designation from the Maryland Department of Commerce. This designation supports existing companies, new companies, and UMBC faculty interested in commercializing their work. The RISE Zone program provides tax credits for qualifying businesses in specific geographic areas with strong connections to institutions of higher education, non-profit organizations affiliated federal agencies, and regional higher education centers.

UMBC’s Greg Simmons, vice president of institutional advancement, told Technical.ly Baltimore that the program will enable the university to consider expanding the bwtech@UMBC research park, which could help grow the cyber and life sciences companies. “I think it’s really clear that the state is trying to provide resources to universities and entrepreneurs to really strengthen and grow the economy,” Simmons told reporter Stephen Babcock.

President Freeman Hrabowski explained, “a RISE Zone designation will allow us to continue to attract partners to assist with additional research park development.” He described the designation as “a critical asset in the university’s technology commercialization efforts.”

bwtech@UMBC will maintain the RISE Zone designation for five years, and at that time will be eligible to apply to renew the designation for an additional five years. Based on current legislation, each county and municipality in Maryland can have three RISE Zones at any given time.

Matthew 6:9-18 - “This, then, is how you should pray:
“‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come, your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.’
For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
“When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Our missional group has recently been asking, “Lord, teach us to pray.”  At first, it feels a little embarrassing - “I have been a Christian for x years and I don’t know how to pray?”  But, for those of us who are going there, it has been so freeing to admit that we don’t know.  It is then that we find ourselves able to truly hear and receive the clear teaching and help of our Lord.

He knows we don’t know what to do.  So he teaches us to pray.  By His words and by His Spirit, filling us to pray according to God’s heart.

He knows that we are so very prone to doing things for human recognition.  So he teaches us that our fasting is to be “in secret,” for our Father’s eyes and answer only.

Today, let’s pray with the Lord’s prayer to guide us.  Let’s choose to live our lives in the forgiveness that only Christians can experience.  And let’s determine that it is before the Father’s eyes that we seek to do all that He gives to us today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEXx0mfxe-E

-BR

The bwtech@UMBC research and technology park has formally received Regional Institution Strategic Enterprise (RISE) Zone designation from the Maryland Department of Commerce. This designation supports existing companies, new companies, and UMBC faculty interested in commercializing their work. The RISE Zone program provides tax credits for qualifying businesses in specific geographic areas with strong connections to institutions of higher education, non-profit organizations affiliated federal agencies, and regional higher education centers.

UMBC’s Greg Simmons, vice president of institutional advancement, told Technical.ly Baltimore that the program will enable the university to consider expanding the bwtech@UMBC research park, which could help grow the cyber and life sciences companies. “I think it’s really clear that the state is trying to provide resources to universities and entrepreneurs to really strengthen and grow the economy,” Simmons told reporter Stephen Babcock.

President Freeman Hrabowski explained, “a RISE Zone designation will allow us to continue to attract partners to assist with additional research park development.” He described the designation as “a critical asset in the university’s technology commercialization efforts.”

bwtech@UMBC will maintain the RISE Zone designation for five years, and at that time will be eligible to apply to renew the designation for an additional five years. Based on current legislation, each county and municipality in Maryland can have three RISE Zones at any given time.

Read more coverage of the RISE Zone designation in Technical.ly Baltimore, the Baltimore Business Journal, The Baltimore Sun, and The Daily Record.

Image: the entrance to bwtech@UMBC. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.