Dissertation Proposal

Understanding the Logical and Semantic
Structure of Large Documents 

Muhammad Mahbubur Rahman

11:00-1:00 Monday, 12 December 2016, ITE325b, UMBC

Up-to-the-minute language understanding approaches are mostly focused on small documents such as newswire articles, blog posts, product reviews and discussion forum entries. Understanding and extracting information from large documents such as legal documents, reports, business opportunities, proposals and technical manuals is still a challenging task. The reason behind this challenge is that the documents may be multi-themed, complex and cover diverse topics.

We aim to automatically identify and classify a document’s sections and subsections, infer their structure and annotate them with semantic labels to understand the semantic structure of a document. This document’s structure understanding will significantly benefit and inform a variety of applications such as information extraction and retrieval, document categorization and clustering, document summarization, fact and relation extraction, text analysis and question answering.

Committee: Drs. Tim Finin (Chair), Anupam Joshi, Tim Oates, Cynthia Matuszek, James Mayfield (JHU)

According to a 2012 study conducted by the Ethical Compliance Initiative, 45 percent of U.S. workers witnessed some sort of misconduct in their workplace – over half of those workers reported their observations. Shockingly, 22 percent of those who reported their observations, also experienced some sort of retaliation.

What constitutes misconduct in the workplace? What can we do about it? What should we do about it?

Investigate these tough questions through a moral perspective in PHIL 399B – Business Ethics.

Assess moral problems involving appropriate workplace conduct, the banking industry, and sustainable development using ethical theories. Course investigations will focus on the role of common sense ethical concepts such as happiness, duty and obligation, and virtuous character in evaluating business conduct and other related issues.

PHIL 399B is hybrid course meets twice a week in person (with a significant component completed online).

Register Now!

Matthew 22:37-38 (NIV) - “Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

At times we can separate the idea of love from our thought life, relegating love to the realm of emotion.  Or we can see ourselves loving God during moments of corporate worship, but have trouble seeing that same song of love rising from our lives when we are doing something “intellectual” like work or studies.  But our Lord never taught us in this way.  From the beginning, He has instructed His people to love Him with all of who they are - heart, soul, mind, and strength.  Our Lord Jesus showed us what it means to love God and to love others with all of our human being, and His work makes us possible for us to live in this way.

C.S. Lewis spoke the following during BBC radio broadcast: “Give me all of you!!! I don’t want so much of your time, so much of your talents and money, and so much of your work. I want YOU!!! … Hand it over to me, the whole outfit, all of your desires, all of your wants and wishes and dreams. Turn them ALL over to me, give yourself to me and I will make of you a new self—in my image. Give me yourself and in exchange I will give you Myself. My will, shall become your will. My heart, shall become your heart” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).

Let’s give ourselves to the Lord today.  Let’s not see our lives as separate parcels to be given or held back from God - but let’s give Him all and every part.  Let’s ask Him to fill us with love for Him in every part - heart, soul, mind, and strength.

-BR

Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts

Facilities Event/Guest Services Coordinator

Position Description

On December 3^rd, more than 100 humanities scholars, cultural organizers, educators, and students convened at UMBC to discuss their efforts over the past year to amplify the voices of Baltimore communities and to use narrative as a tool to promote change.

“Reflecting on Baltimore Stories” was the culmination of a year-long series of public programs examining how stories of and about Baltimore influence the lives of its people. UMBC’s Dresher Center for the Humanities hosted the day-long event that considered what is changing in stories of identity in the city and what these changes mean for the future of Baltimore.

Baltimore Stories, made possible by a $225,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, connected UMBC with partners University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP); Maryland Humanities; Enoch Pratt Free Library; and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. Sheri Parks, associate dean of UMCP’s Center for Synergy, and Phoebe Stein, executive director of Maryland Humanities, led the effort.

“We so often want to think that personal stories and storytelling are about simple themes, direct connections, and easy understanding of truths,” said Jessica Berman, director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities. But frequently, she suggested, “it’s about complexity. Stories should be complex, and they often are.”

This complexity was a central theme of the Baltimore Stories concluding event, which included panels and roundtable discussions on how public universities engage with their communities, the power of media and collective memory in telling stories about Baltimore, and Baltimore Stories in the context of national discussions.

Young people from UMBC’s CHOICE Program shared digital stories about their lives, and students from Midtown Academy in Baltimore spoke about the process of learning to write and publish their own creative work about Baltimore. Lee Boot, director of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center, presented Art of Transformation, a project that examines how Baltimoreans are telling their own stories to counteract misleading narratives about life in the city. Denise Meringolo, associate professor of history at UMBC, shared Preserve the Baltimore Uprising, which aims to ensure that the stories activists tell about their experiences are preserved for future historians.

Campus leaders from UMBC and UMCP approached the event as an opportunity for reflection. They discussed the genesis of Baltimore Stories and how such projects can help universities more effectively engage with their local communities. President Freeman Hrabowski‘s remarks offered a few examples from UMBC, including the BreakingGround initiative and the university’s leadership through last year’s Imagining America conference.

University collaborations with communities must start with understanding the needs and perspectives of people in those communities, President Hrabowski emphasized. “First, we must ask. Listen, and then act,” he said. “What we work to do here…is to struggle to understand what people are going through, and we often do it through stories.”

Bonnie Thornton Dill, dean of the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities, shared how the idea for Baltimore Stories emerged from critical conversations about more complex, nuanced, and interdisciplinary approaches to working with communities.

“We felt that the arts and humanities could bring a perspective and understanding of these issues that was often missing,” explained Dill. “Community engagement is not something that just happens…it’s the building of relationships over time.”

The Baltimore Stories project included 20 public events throughout the past year. During these events, local humanities scholars, cultural organizers, artists, educators and other Baltimore residents participated in dynamic discussions about building democracy, fostering social justice, and improving Baltimore’s future. Project participants are now developing a curriculum based on this work for K-12 educators nationwide.

WombWork Productions, Aaron Henkin’s Out of the Blocks, The Kids Safe Zone, New Lens, and Charm Literary Magazine are just a few of the many organizations that were involved in the Baltimore Stories project and participated at the culminating event, and partners intend to keep the collaboration and conversation going.

“Now more than ever, it is crucial to consider the role of coalitions, forged across boundaries, in practicing public humanities and supporting the work of active and engaged communities,” said Berman.

For additional coverage of the “Reflecting on Baltimore Stories” event, read “‘Baltimore Stories’ event aims to discuss race, narratives effect” in The Baltimore Sun. 

Header image: Baltimore Stories concluding event, December 3, 2016. All photos by Abnet Shiferaw ’11 for UMBC.

• will be closing at 4:30 pm December 22, 2016 and will reopen Tuesday, January 3, 2017
• will not be able to process and send ILL requests for UMBC patrons from December 22 to January 3 as most of the libraries we borrow from will be closed as well
• If you request a book after December 11 you may not receive it until sometime in January
• plan accordingly (on average it takes about two weeks to get a book through ILL)
• will continue to accept your requests and send them out when we return
• wishes you a happy holiday and new year!