Dance faculty and students are making their marks in Baltimore and Metro DC!

Coming up in March

Brian Jones, Technical Director, talks about lighting for dance as an invited panel speaker at the USITT Association for Performing Arts and Entertainment Professionals conference in St. Louis, Missouri, March 8 - 11.  

Students Sarah Schmitz, Kelly Detweiler and Maia Schechter present their choreography at the American College Dance Association's Mid-Atlantic Regional Festival, March 8 - 11.

Erica Rebollar, Visiting Lecturer, performs with her company Rebollar Dance at Baltimore Theater Project on March 17 and 18 on the final leg of a tri-city tour with companies Deep Vision Dance and RealLivePeople.

February Faculty News

Sandra Lacy performed her solo Lost on February 4 in the Maryland Choreographers Showcase at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. Her dance was one of six selected from submissions by Maryland's best choreographers.

Dance faculty presented their choreography in Baltimore Dance Project performances at UMBC on February 9 - 11. Carol Hess premiered her new work LightForest, featuring five dancers amidst colorful projections, wearing portable speakers and sound designed by Timothy Nohe, funded in part by a CAHSS Summer Faculty Research Fellowship. Doug Hamby presented his riveting piece Square Breath to a new score composed and performed live by music students Eliza Triolo and Christian Hartman. Desiree Koont-Nachtrieb premiered a contemporary ballet duet In a Sea of Memory, and Sandra Lacy performed her solo Lost.

Doug Hamby is on sabbatical during Spring '17, editing archival video of the choreography of veteran Martha Graham dancer Helen McGeeHee. The project is funded in part by a CAHSS Faculty Fellowship.

Churches in southern California have begun in recent months to build a modern day underground railroad – rallying members of their congregations for the possibility that one day soon they might need to shelter or escort members of that congregation out of the country, likely over the Canadian border. While this move might seem dramatic, it serves as an appropriate statement in response to the chaos today’s politics have caused for the United States’ vast and varied immigrant populations.

While we live in inarguably and treacherously divided times, many college students can take solace and find haven on their respective campuses – shelter that is unique in nature and not found in communities that house much diversity of age. UMBC is one of the inclusive and consequently welcoming communities of this kind.

In 2016, nine colleges across the United States, both public and private, declared themselves sanctuary campuses. Similar to the idea of a sanctuary city, the self-declared campus sanctuaries do not work with immigration officials to remove students and do not give information to these officials that could put the student’s legal status in danger.

In an email sent out to all UMBC faculty and staff in November of last year, President Hrabowski danced around the idea. He addressed a letter signed by UMBC faculty, students, alumni and staff asking for the administration to make UMBC a sanctuary campus, but declared instead that UMBC was looking to “better understand options available to [it].”

It is now March of 2017 and the world has since changed in dramatic and merciless ways. The travel ban that Steve Bannon’s proxy, Emperor Trump, has instituted has imperiled the lives of millions of Americans and threatens to destroy what makes America great.

Sitting in a plastic-cast wooden booth in UMBC’s commuter lounge, Amy Skariah, a first generation American and a sophomore social work major, held her gaze steady. She said, “I think the ban is absolutely ridiculous! I automatically identify with someone from one of the countries, you automatically root for them.”

She held the palms of her hands to face the ceiling with the tips of her fingers extended outward, obviously of Caucasian decent and said, “Your family was in the same situation not too long ago too!”

The point Skariah makes is salient. Trump’s travel ban is based on the innately racist and prejudiced views of the previously hidden side of America that got him elected to the office of President. The ban was not instituted for reasons of national security, nor for the safety of American citizens.

In truth, the travel ban was not enacted to keep danger out of the United States. It is a social declaration, one of hate and exclusion. If the United States government regularly enacts policy meant to send a message of exclusion, UMBC should do what is right and enact policy that sends a message of inclusion.

While the declaration of a sanctuary campus would mean certain changes for the way UMBC operates, it would have a larger effect on UMBC’s campus by way of validation and support for its community. By declaring itself a sanctuary campus, UMBC would be waving the flag of rebellion and in turn punch up to morale among its socially-inclusive and diverse population.

The post Sanctuary campus: rooting for ourselves appeared first on The Retriever.

A weekly round-up curated by Women’s Center staff member, Michael Jalloh Jamboria

In the spirit of my friend, who gave us the glorious name ‘Slaying on the Weekly’, every week I will be bringing you some interesting, funny or thought-provoking content from the internet! Be sure to join us next week for more and continue to slay!

Happy Women’s History Month! Join us in celebrating women, their lives, their stories and their resistance.

• Be sure to check out the Women’s Center’s Women’s History Calendar. There are great events and opportunities this month! Hope to see you some of the events!
• In case you needed it, this is your weekly reminder to stay on top of politics, question everything and resist. It’s difficult but your work helps us create a better future. Take a break from the TV and check out What the F*** Just Happened Today?, a chronicle of policy and decisions being made through the current presidency.
• This week, Trump Signs New Order Blocking Arrivals From 6 Majority-Muslim Countries. Be sure to stay up to date on the issues revolving around this order going into effect March 16th. You can read about UMBC’s response here. (as an FYI, archived messages from the President and Provost of UMBC related to diversity and inclusion can be found on this page)
• Need some light feminist reading? Check out “11 Offensive Phrases You Didn’t Realize Are Fat Shaming.” Learn about fat shaming and how we can combat fat shaming in our words.

The Women’s Center staff members, Loretta Ross and friends on International Women’s Day.

See you here, next week! Same place, same time! Stay safe and continue to slay! Happy Women’s History Month!

The Semantics Toolkit

Paul Cuddihy and Justin McHugh
GE Global Research Center, Niskayuna, NY

10:30-11:30 Tuesday, 14 March 2017, ITE 346, UMBC

SemTk (Semantics Toolkit) is an open source technology stack built by GE Scientists on top of W3C Semantic Web standards.  It was originally conceived for data exploration and simplified query generation, and later expanded to a more general semantics abstraction platform. SemTk is made up of a Java API and microservices along with Javascript front ends that cover drag-and-drop query generation, path finding, data ingestion and the beginnings of stored procedure support.   In this talk we will give a tour of SemTk, discussing its architecture and direction, and demonstrate it’s features using the SPARQLGraph front-end hosted at http://semtk.research.ge.com.

Paul Cuddihy is a senior computer scientist and software systems architect in AI and Learning Systems at the GE Global Research Center in Niskayuna, NY. He earned an M.S. in Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology. The focus of his twenty-year career at GE Research has ranged from machine learning for medical imaging equipment diagnostics, monitoring and diagnostic techniques for commercial aircraft engines, modeling techniques for monitoring seniors living independently in their own homes, to parallel execution of simulation and prediction tasks, and big data ontologies.  He is one of the creators of the open source software “Semantics Toolkit” (SemTk) which provides a simplified interface to the semantic tech stack, opening its use to a broader set of users by providing features such as drag-and-drop query generation and data ingestion.  Paul has holds over twenty U.S. patents.

Justin McHugh is computer scientist and software systems architect working in the AI and Learning Systems group at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY. Justin attended the State University of New York at Albany where he earned an M.S in computer science. He has worked as a systems architect and programmer for large scale reporting, before moving into the research sector. In the six years since, he has worked on complex system integration, Big Data systems and knowledge representation/querying systems. Justin is one of the architects and creators of SemTK (the Semantics Toolkit), a toolkit aimed at making the power of the semantic web stack available to programmers, automation and subject matter experts without their having to be deeply invested in the workings of the Semantic Web.

Advising Hours March 13th - March 17th

Our advising offices are located in ITE 202-206. Email and telephone contact information is available here.