Marking the 25th anniversary of the start of the war in Bosnia, Brian Grodsky, associate professor of political science at UMBC, provided analysis of the post-war years and ongoing divisions among the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in The Conversation.

Despite the efforts of international bodies to help the BiH deal with human rights abuses and unify post-conflict, “The past two decades have repeatedly shown that divisions exacerbated by the war continue to permeate politics,” writes Grodsky. “In fact, according to a 2013 public opinion poll, just one in six residents of BiH feels that the three ethnic groups that live there – the Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats – have reached reconciliation.”

This results in a troubling situation, Grodsky notes. He writes, “The fallout is not just a lack of reconciliation, but also the constant threat of violence.” As he later describes, “The war may be long over, but wounds are still oozing.”

The reasons for these continued difficulties are tremendously complex, but Grodsky disentangles some of the major issues. “Lack of reconciliation in BiH comes despite – or perhaps because of – a major international effort to ensure justice in the region,” he argues, ultimately concluding “international justice may bear some blame for the predicament [Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats are] in today.”

Post-conflict, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) attempted to bring people to justice for human rights abuses, but their process of seeking justice “may have incited tensions” rather than improving relations as intended. Ultimately, writes Grodsky, “only 8 percent of those polled in BiH in 2013 felt the ICTY had done a good job facilitating reconciliation.”

So what would a more effective solution look like? Grodsky suggests:

The ICTY and subsequent tribunals demonstrated that international prosecutions can play an important role in ending impunity. But they must carefully balance the need of the international community to ensure accountability with the needs of a local populace to deal with past rights abuses on their own terms.

Brian Grodsky’s Conversation article “Bosnia’s 25-year struggle with transitional justice” also appeared in The Huffington Post.

Information Systems Eminent Scholar Talk

Big Microbiome Data

Xiaohua Hu, Drexel University

10:00am Tuesday, 2 May 2017, ITE 459, UMBC

We know little about the microbial world. Microbiome sequencing (i.e., metagenome, 16s rRNA) extracts DNA directly from a microbial environment without culturing any species. Recently, huge amount of data are generated from many micorbiome projects such as Human Microbiome Project (HMP), Metagenomics of the Human Intestinal Tract (MetaHIT), et al. Analyzing these data will help us to better understand the function and structure of microbial community of human body, earth and other environmental eco-systems. However, the huge data volume, the complexity of microbial community and the intricate data properties have created a lot of opportunities and challenges for data analysis and mining. For example, it is estimate that in the microbial eco- system of human gut, there are about 1000 kinds of bacteria with ten billion bacteria and more than four million genes in more than 6000 orthologous gene family. The challenges are due to the complex properties of microbiome: large-scale, complicated, diversity, correlation, composition, hierarchy, incompleteness etc.

Current microbiomes data analysis methods seldom consider these data properties and often make some assumptions such as linear, Euclidean space, metric-space, continue data type, which conflict with the true data properties. For example, some similarities are non-metric because the prevalent existence of some species; and the interactions among species and environment are complex in high order. Thus it is urgent to develop novel computational methods to overcome these assumptions and consider the microbiome data properties in the analysis procedure.  In this talk, we will discuss some computational methods to analyze and visualize microbiome big data. Our studies are focusing on 1) novel machine learning and computational technologies for dimension reduction and visualization of microbiome data based on non-Euclidean spaces (manifold learning) to discover nonlinear intrinsic features and patterns in these data to overcome the linear assumptions, 2) novel statistical methods for variable selection in microbiome data by integrating group information among variables.

Xiaohua Tony Hu is a full professor and the founding director of the data mining and bioinformatics lab at the College of Computing and Informatics. He is also serving as the founding Co-Director of the NSF Center on Visual and Decision Informatics, IEEE Computer Society Bioinformatics and Biomedicine Steering Committee Chair, and IEEE Computer Society Big Data Steering Committee Chair. He joined Drexel University in 2002. He founded the International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, the IEEE International Conference on Big Data and the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine. In 2001, he founded the DMW Software in Silicon Valley, California. He received many awards, including NSF CAREER Award and IEEE Data Mining Outstanding Service Award.  Tony’s current research interests are in data/text/web mining, big data, bioinformatics, information retrieval and information extraction, social network analysis, healthcare informatics, rough set theory and application. He has published more than 270 peer-reviewed research papers in various journals, conferences and books He has obtained more than US$8.5 million research grants in the past ten years as PI or Co-PI. He has graduated 19 Ph.D. students from 2006 to 2017 and is currently supervising nine Ph.D. students.

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Jeffrey Gardner, assistant professor of biological sciences, is prospecting for enzymes. The field of “bio-prospecting” has contributed to discoveries such as anti-cancer drugs and super-strong spider silk, Gardner explains in a new piece for The Conversation. He and his students are focused on finding enzymes that can break down long chains of sugars found in plants, called polysaccharides, with an eye on producing biofuels and other chemical products more efficiently.

“It takes unique microbes to produce the enzymes that will degrade plant polysaccharides,” Gardner writes, “…and they are found everywhere in nature, including the soil of your backyard.” Some of these enzymes have already proved useful for technologies like better detergents or biodegradable plastics.

The bacteria that produce the enzymes have specific methods for breaking down different polysaccharides. For example, a bacterium Gardner’s lab studies produces almost 200 distinct enzymes, which together can break down any polysaccharide found in plants. He explains, “We can adopt their methods to find solutions to real-world problems, such as creating better nutritional supplements, detergents, and fuels.”

Gardner has three main questions about the bacterium he’s studying and others like it: Why do they produce so many different enzymes? What does each enzyme do? And how does the bacterium use cues from the environment to regulate how much of each enzyme it produces at any given time?

So far, Gardner’s team has found that very few of the 200 enzymes the bacterium produces are actually required to break down cellulose, the primary component of plant cell walls. This smaller set of key enzymes may be very useful in industrial applications, such as next-generation biofuel production.

Although Gardner has a clear vision for the utility of his research, he is also adamant that bio-prospecting is worthwhile even if each study isn’t sure to produce the next big thing in biotech. “Many important discoveries, including the initial study of X-rays, green fluorescent protein and bacterial immunity to phages, started off as basic research,” he writes. “Over time, these fundamental studies developed, respectively, into the power to image broken bones, study cancer cells, and edit the genomes of many types of organisms.”

Still, Gardner is excited that his basic research is starting to turn up exciting applications. “As we continue to prospect for new enzymes,” he writes, “I expect that we will find solutions to many technical challenges by studying the fascinating ways microbes go about obtaining their next meal.”

Read Jeffrey Gardner’s full article and other articles by UMBC researchers at The Conversation. Gardner’s article is also available at Phys.org,  Idaho Press-Tribune, and Lincoln Journal-Star, among others.

Update (6/15/2017): Learn more about Gardner’s research through a new segment on The Academic Minute, a WAMC national production supported by the Association of American Colleges & Universities.

Image: Jeffrey Gardner (fourth from left) and members of his lab, fall 2016. Photo by Kartik Joshi.

It is that time of year again, when SGA elections take place. Some students describe the atmosphere as bustling and exciting, whereas others describe it as busy and at times overwhelming. There are candidates all over campus running their campaigns and trying to gain votes. This can include anything from handing out flyers to giving out homemade cupcakes with fresh icing.

There are candidates everywhere; from in front of Outtakes, in front of academic row, to even the stairs by the UC ballroom. Some students have also combined their campaigns with other runners and have started handing out shirts and other campaign gear to promote themselves.

Nitya Kumaran, a junior studying biology stated, ““There are many people in each campaign who are running because they actually want to serve the community. That makes this year’s elections valuable to me; even if I don’t get elected, I feel like we’ll have people in the SGA who actually care.”

She also emphasized how much she wanted to make a change regarding Muslim lives, black lives, immigrant lives, LGBTQ lives, disabled peoples’ lives, women and other minorities who may have particularly been impacted during this time. She is also one of the candidates running for senator, who is combining her campaign with others who are running.

Markya Reed and Josh Massey, students who successfully ran for positions of President and Executive Vice President, combined their campaigns together. They also initiated many efforts such as handing out pancakes and flyers in the breezeway to gain attention for their campaigns. They have emphasized many issues such as: addressing hate crimes that have happened and increasing accessibly for commuters on campus.

Markya, a junior studying psychology stated “I’m excited to work with everyone, regardless of the election results. Based on everyone’s ideas and passion, I think it will be a really productive year.” Many candidates gave similar responses, stating that even if they do not get elected, they are happy to be a part of the process.

Felix Faccine, a sophomore studying political science who run for senator explained, “For me, the best part of this election was the opportunity I had to meet students, make new friends, and better understand the issues of the UMBC community. I feel more deeply connected to our school, and that has been an invaluable experience for me. I am so excited for the future of student government at UMBC!” He has been working with Meghan Lynch, who ran for Vice President for Student Organizations against two others.

Although elections can be hectic and cause stress sometimes, there is a certain type of bustle during this time that transforms the atmosphere of campus. It is a unique time of unity that works to achieve the goal of bringing the community together all while still making a change.

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