Hi everyone!

My name is Oyshi, and I'll be joining UMBC this fall as an incoming PhD student. I'm currently looking for a room or female-friendly housing starting around August 1 (my move-in date is flexible by a few days if needed).

Here's a little about me:

• Female PhD student
• Clean, quiet, and respectful of shared spaces
• Non-smoker
• No pets, but I'm comfortable living with cats or other friendly pets
• Looking for a peaceful and friendly living environment

My budget is around $500–$700/month, but I'm flexible depending on the location and what's included.

If you have a room available or are looking for a roommate, I'd love to connect. Please feel free to comment below or send me a direct message.

please contact me at(osarker1@umbc.edu)

Hi everyone! I’m a UMBC PhD student (28 y/o male) looking for a clean and relatively quiet permanent roommate to share a 2-bedroom townhouse. All genders are warmly welcome! 

📍 Location: Belwood Green, Halethorpe

• Peaceful neighborhood with a bunch of other UMBC students!

• 🚌 3-min walk to the UMBC shuttle stop

• 🚗 5-min drive to campus

• 🛒 Walking distance to Weis & Giant grocery stores

🏠 House Perks:

• Fully furnished with all necessary appliances

• 🧺 In-unit washer and dryer

• 🌡️ Central HVAC system

• 📦 Plenty of storage space in the basement

• 🌳 Personal backyard

• 🚗 Dedicated parking lot

💰 Financials & Lease:

• Rent: $572/month

• Utilities: ~$120/month (WiFi & BGE)

• Move-in Cost: First month's rent + $572 (refundable security deposit)

• Move-in Date: Flexible August Move-In (Mid to Late August)

• Note: The new tenant will need to sign a year-long lease.

If you’re looking for a great spot close to campus and want to team up, reach out!

📞 Contact me for photos and other details:

• WhatsApp: +91 8210060409

• Email: rajatj1@umbc.edu

2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Polar Data Science (PolDS 2026)

November 3, 2026 in Riverside, CA, USA
Half Day workshop at the 34th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems PolDS is announcing a Call for Papers for 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Polar Data Science (PolDS 2026).

PolDS 2026 aims to connect the polar science community with the spatial computing community to foster convergent approaches that will address significant questions in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Addressing phenomena such as dynamic modeling of the ice bed, tracking the internal layers of the ice sheet, and investigating causal relationships between ice sheets, sea ice, and atmosphere requires developing new techniques for spatial and spatio-temporal data analysis, spatial machine learning, and spatial datainfrastructure.
Papers are being accepted on a broad range of topics exploring geospatial AI/ML techniques to detect novel patterns within data and promote scientific discovery in the polar regions.

Themes may include (but are not limited to):

• Improving our ability to project the future ice sheet contribution to sea-level rise across varying spatial scales
• New insights into ice-dynamics
• Improved estimate and visualization of the ice sheet and subglacial topography at a global scale
• Lining satellite-based observations of the near-surface with both atmospheric drivers and effects on the ice sheet
• Ensuring FAIR reproducibility of these scientific discoveries
• Accelerating discoveries in the polar regions with geospatial AI
• Improving our understanding of global and local sea level rise.

Submission Deadline: August 15, 2026
Call for Papers Link: https://easychair.org/cfp/polds2026
Workshop Link: https://iharp.umbc.edu/polds26/

Additional Information: 
ACM SIGSPATIAL 2026 Conference website

Ready to fund your future? Enroll in ENTR 330: Entrepreneurial Finance this Fall!

Every great startup, side hustle, or passion project needs a financial backbone. In ENTR 330, you won't just look at numbers on a spreadsheet—you’ll learn how to actually fund a business, manage cash flow, pitch to investors, and make your ideas financially viable.

Whether you’re looking to start a company now, launch a company after college or want a high-value skill that sets you apart in any career path, understanding the money side of entrepreneurship is important.

Prerequisite Note & Special Permission

The typical prerequisite for this course is completion of both ENTR 200 and ENTR 201. However, if you have taken either ENTR 200 OR ENTR 201 (but not both) and want to take Entrepreneurial Finance this fall, you may still be eligible.

What to do: Contact Kevin Fulmer directly at kevinf@umbc.edu to express your interest.

Don't let a missing half of the intro sequence hold you back from mastering your financial future—reach out today and secure your spot for the fall semester!

Course Info:  

Instructor:  Jonathan Sachs, Director of Workforce Development, Baltimore County

Meeting Time: Wednesdays, 4:30-7 pm, Bio-461

Hey Retrievers,

We want to give our campus community and valued riders a heads-up about a service impact to the Downtown Route this weekend.

The Baltimore City Department of Transportation (DOT) would like to advise motorists of the temporary road closures and traffic modifications for the following activities this weekend. Please download the Waze.com app for live detour navigation.  All activities are weather permitting and DOT is not responsible for providing status updates.

Traffic Modifications for the Morgan Wallen Concerts at M&T Bank Stadium

This Friday and Saturday, traffic modifications will be in effect for the Morgan Wallen concerts being held at M&T Bank Stadium.

In preparation for the events, the following road and lane closures will be in effect on Friday, July 17th and Saturday, July 18, 2026, starting at approximately 12:30 p.m. each day:

• The northbound Russell Street Service Drive alongside M&T Bank Stadium will be closed between West and Hamburg Streets prior to and during the events.
• The Hamburg Street Bridge will be temporarily closed between Leadenhall and Paca Streets for event ingress. Once the concerts begin, the closures will be removed until just before the end of the events.
• The Ostend Street Bridge will be temporarily closed between Sharp and Warner Streets for concert ingress. Once the concerts begin, the closures will be removed until just before the end of the events.
• A special traffic pattern will be temporarily installed along Warner Street between the Ostend Street Bridge and Stockholm Street for event ingress and railroad crossings.
• Special traffic patterns will be installed along Warner Street, Alluvion Street, Worcester Street, and Bayard Street for egress near the end of the concerts.
• Hamburg Street will be closed between Hanover and Charles Streets near the end of the concerts.
• No southbound travel will be permitted along Hanover Street between Henrietta and Hamburg Streets near the end of the concerts. All traffic will be diverted onto Henrietta Street for east or westbound travel. 

Special traffic pattern along Warner Street: Due to construction, Warner Street is closed between Worcester and W. Ostend Streets.  To assist with event traffic, a special traffic pattern will be implemented along Warner Street for fans entering and leaving the stadium.  Also, a one-way ingress (northbound) and egress (southbound) lane will be implemented on Warner Street, along with a pedestrian walkway.

If you have any questions or need further asisstance, please call the Transit office at 410.455.2454.

Safe Travels ~ Your Transit Team

Francis successfully defended on Thursday, July 16, 2026

Francis successfully defended his dissertation on Thursday, July 16, 2026. Francis's dedicated contributions have made him an important member of the iHARP and UMBC communities. This achievement is a true testament to his scholarly rigor and hard work.

Congratulations, Francis, on this incredible milestone! We have been honored to witness your growth and look forward to your future successes. The iHARP community wishes you the very best as you embark on the next chapter of your journey!

_____________________________

Dissertation Title: Accurate Clustering of High-Dimensional Multivariate Spatiotemporal Data

Committee

• Dr. Jianwu Wang, Chair/Advisor, UMBC
• Dr. Vandana P. Janeja, Co-Advisor, UMBC
• Dr. James Foulds, UMBC
• Dr. Yiqun Xie,  University of Maryland, College Park.
• Dr. Aneesh Subramanian, University of Colorado Boulder

Abstract

The rapid growth of multidimensional multivariate spatiotemporal data from Earth observation systems, sensor networks, climate reanalysis products, and large- scale monitoring platforms has created unprecedented opportunities for understanding complex natural and human-driven processes. These datasets simultaneously vary across space, time, and multiple variables, enabling the discovery of hidden patterns, climate regimes, anomalies, and evolving system behaviors. However, clustering such data remains challenging due to high dimensionality, nonlinear interactions, spatial autocorrelation, long-range temporal dependencies, noise, missing values, nonstationarity, and multiscale structures. Traditional clustering approaches
primarily rely on distance-based or correlation-based similarities and often fail to capture the complex spatial, temporal, and causal mechanisms underlying these systems.

To address these challenges, this dissertation develops three novel deep clustering frameworks for multivariate spatiotemporal data. First, Hybrid Ensemble Deep Graph Temporal Clustering (HEDGTC) integrates homogeneous and heterogeneous ensemble clustering with a dual-consensus strategy and a Deep Graph Attention Autoencoder to improve clustering robustness, stability, and accuracy. By combining object co-occurrence consensus and non-negative matrix factorization consensus, HEDGTC effectively reduces noise and misclassification while preserving temporal and relational structures. 

Building on the foundation established by HEDGTC, we introduce the Bi-directional Temporal Graph Attention Transformer (B-TGAT), an end-to-end deep clustering framework for multivariate spatiotemporal data. The proposed architecture combines a ConvLSTM-based U-Net autoencoder for learning rich spatiotemporal representations, graph attention mechanisms for modeling spatial relationships, and a bi-directional transformer for capturing long-range temporal dependencies in both forward and backward directions. This integrated design enables B-TGAT to effectively learn complex spatial and temporal patterns from climate data. By jointly modeling local spatial interactions and long-term temporal dynamics, B-TGAT un- covers meaningful climate regimes, large-scale teleconnections, abrupt climate transitions, and extreme weather events. The learned latent representations improve cluster compactness, stability, and separation, leading to more accurate, robust, and interpretable clustering of multivariate spatiotemporal climate datasets. This unified framework provides a powerful solution for discovering hidden climate patterns that are difficult to identify using conventional clustering approaches. 

Recognizing that correlation-based representations alone may not reveal the true drivers of system evolution, this dissertation further proposes Causal Adversarial Subspace Clustering (CASC), a causality-aided deep clustering framework that transforms spatiotemporal regime discovery from a correlation-driven process into a causal-temporal learning paradigm. CASC integrates a U-Net-inspired adversarial autoencoder, stacked FAConvLSTM layers, graph attention-based self-expressive learning, and two novel objectives: Causal Subspace Preservation (CSP) Loss and Dynamic Temporal Subspace Evolution (DTSE) Loss. These mechanisms enable the model to discover clusters that are not only geometrically compact but also causally meaningful and temporally coherent. A Subspace-Aware Energy-Based TemporalDiscriminator further enhances clustering stability, interpretability, and robustness by evaluating latent representations according to cluster-specific subspace structures.
Extensive experiments on multiple real-world climate and environmental datasets demonstrate  that the proposed frameworks consistently outperform state-of-the-art traditional and deep clustering approaches across clustering quality, robustness, stability, and interpretability metrics. Collectively, the proposed methods establish a unified framework for learning hierarchical spatial, temporal, and causal representations from complex spatiotemporal data. The resulting models provide powerful tools for climate regime discovery, environmental monitoring, anomaly detection, and scientific understanding of dynamic Earth systems, while advancing the state of the art in deep unsupervised spatiotemporal clustering.

The Summer Undergraduate Research Festival (SURF) 2026 abstracts are due on Wednesday, July 22, 2026.  Please direct your student researchers to the SURF website at surf.umbc.edu for information on submitting their abstracts.  All students applying for oral Lightning Round talks must be available to attend two mandatory practices.

UMBC will host an IEEE Baltimore Technical and Professional Development Colloquium on Nov. 7, 2026 on Creativity in an Era of AI. Abstract submissions are due by August 31 for presentations, posters, and demonstrations in one of four tracks:

 • AI Applications in Biology and the (Bio)medical Field
 • AI Software Systems: Design, Engineering, and Deployment
 • AI Meeting Physical Reality
 • AI and the Future of Work: Skills, Talent, and Workforce Transformation

Get more information and register here.

Looking for housing or a roommate near UMBC? 🏠

SphereHub helps students connect with housing opportunities, sublets, available rooms, and potential roommates in one trusted place—completely free for students.

Whether you are searching for a place to live or have a room or sublet to share, SphereHub makes it easier to connect with the UMBC community.

Visit: https://www.sphere-hub.com

Scan. Match. Move in.

All interviews have been conducted; candidates who did not hear from us will be considered for other open positions.

The Graduate Student Association is seeking graduate student representatives to serve on the Grants Review Panel (GRP) for the 2026–2027 academic year.

The GRP is responsible for reviewing Professional Development grant and Research grant applications, helping ensure a fair, transparent, and timely allocation of GSA funding.

We are looking for:

• 2 representatives from CAHSS

• 2 representatives from CNMS

• 2 representatives from COEIT

📅 Position Start Date: July 27, 2026

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, and interviews will begin immediately. Positions will be filled on a first-qualified, first-served basis, so we encourage interested students to apply as soon as possible.

This is a great opportunity to:

• Gain leadership and service experience

• Contribute to graduate student funding decisions

• Work closely with the GSA to support your graduate student community

• Earn a stipend for your time.

If you're interested in serving on the Grants Review Panel, submit your application today!

We look forward to welcoming our new GRP members!