Kelley Bell, associate professor and associate chair of visual arts, will display a new work, Babel, from Friday, May 19 through Sunday, May 21 at the David M. Brown Planetarium in Arlington, Virginia. The commission of the work was supported by the Friends of the David M. Brown Planetarium.

Utilizing archival imagery and animation, Babel takes advantage of the planetarium’s concave ceiling to present a projected 5-minute tour of iconic domes from around the world. Visitors find themselves beneath the oculus of Rome’s Pantheon, gaze up at the rotunda of the United States Capitol, scan the gorgeous lattices of Tilla Kari Madrasa in Uzbekistan, and take in other historic locations.

Bell ’06 M.F.A., intermedia and digital arts, stacks the different rings of these domes like children’s toys, aspiring to build a towering edifice, one atop the other. As seen in the video excerpt below, the domes spin in consecutive circles, and each level erodes and supplants the next in a futile architectural battle royale spanning centuries, geography and ideologies.

“As the Tower of Babel presents an allegorical origin of cultural difference,” explains Bell, “Babel suggests that an ideal monument is one that brings together all ideals—faith, pleasure, beauty, industry—that the balance and tension of these paradigmatic forces allows them to coexist while supporting one another naturally, like tiers of stones stacked to form a domed ceiling.”

Admission to Babel is free, but tickets are required and can be obtained through Eventbrite here. Bell will discuss her artwork after the viewings on Friday, May 19 at 6:30 and 7:30 p.m., and on Saturday, May 20, at 7:00 p.m. She will also talk about Babel on WERA radio (96.7, Arlington, Virginia) on Thursday, May 18, at 8 a.m.

After the showing of Babel at the David M. Brown Planetarium, Bell will fly to Zagreb, Croatia, for Animafest Zagreb, which will feature her forthcoming work Carnival Love Wall.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Ting Zhu, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering, its prestigious CAREER Award for his work to significantly improve the existing sensing capabilities of common technologies, such as cell phones. The five-year grant will total nearly $500,000.

“We congratulate Dr. Zhu on his NSF CAREER Award, an important recognition of his inventive work and what it may mean for other fields,” said Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research. “Dr. Zhu’s recognition adds to our growing list of outstanding young faculty recognized by peers and national funding agencies for their potential to advance science and technology.”

Zhu’s research may have impacts on the daily lives of people who use their cell phones to track activities, like exercise and sleep. He finds that although many mobile phones have activity monitoring systems built in, these capabilities are often not used to their fullest potential.

“The purpose of my research is to enable Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to conduct accurate, efficient, and scalable N-way sensing,” explains Zhu. “This award will allow me to leverage sensing capabilities from different IoT devices to significantly improve people’s daily life for applications such as personal health monitoring, indoor localization, and smart home automation.”

To integrate research with education, Zhu will collaborate with his colleagues at UMBC to disseminate his research to local communities and recruit underrepresented groups. His work also has potential applications for enhancing the teaching of sensing technologies in classrooms, and his lab will provide opportunities for diverse UMBC students to complete hands-on research related to sensing technologies, as well as potentially exploring connections with virtual reality and 3D scanning.

In the last two decades, UMBC faculty have received 34 NSF CAREER awards. Additional UMBC faculty honored with CAREER awards so far in 2017 include Lee Blaney, assistant professor of chemical, biochemical and environmental engineering, for his work on water contamination, and Tinoosh Mohsenin, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering, for her work on energy efficient implementation of deep learning technologies and machine learning algorithms that are developed to function similarly to the brain.