Last month the Democratic National Committee announced the locations and times of the sanctioned Democratic Primary Debates. However, in an unprecedented move, the DNC will only allow six debates, a far cry from the 25 debates Democratic candidates participated in the 2008 election cycle.

That’s because this year the DNC has implemented an exclusivity clause, which would bar candidates from participating in sanctioned debates if they participated in unsanctioned debates. This would effectively ruin a candidate’s bid for President, because the debates will only be held by the major news channels.

Lesser known candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley are rightfully outraged over the lack of debates. O’Malley later claimed that the schedule “seemed geared toward limiting debate and facilitating a coronation.” The six debates would be the lowest for any election year without an incumbent since 1980, according to an article by FiveThirtyEight.

The DNC simply does not see the importance of increased debates, even when the effects of debates are right in front of them. Carly Fiorina, who is a candidate for the Republican Presidential ticket, benefited greatly from participation in a Republican debate. Although it wasn’t the main event, pundits noticed her and proclaimed her the winner.

Since then, she has surged from the bottom seven candidates to the top five in some polls, reaching 10 percent support in the Public Policy poll, one point behind Jeb Bush. According to another poll by Real Clear Politics, she has almost doubled her support in a month.

Not only are primary debates important for the candidates to be heard, but also for voters as well. In a 2013 study at the University of Missouri on voter preferences before and after primary debates, 35 percent of viewers changed their preference of candidate and 23 percent of viewers who were originally undecided supported a candidate after watching a primary debate, as compared to 86 percent of voters whose preferences didn’t change after a general election debate.

The effects primary debates have on elections are astounding. Not only can it boost a candidate from the bottom of the pack to the top, but it also can sway viewers’ preferences. Because of the immense power primary debates have on elections, there should be more scheduled debates in order for the public to make a clear decision on a candidate.

STEM. It’s practically the UMBC motto. On campus and beyond, there is a huge push to involve today’s young people in the sciences.

Despite these efforts, laboratories, offices and workshops are still filled in majority by men. To address this disparity, a new student-led initiative integrates STEM education with gender empowerment programs.

“The Reach Initiative is a mentorship research program for young high school women in Baltimore,” said Isabel Geisler, junior global studies major, and the mind behind the initiative. “[It] not only works to gain their interest in the STEM fields, but also sustain that interest.”

The program, in its pilot year, currently consists of ten high school students and ten graduate and undergraduate mentors. In its focus on older students, the program is different from many others.

“The way that most people describe STEM is a pipeline,” said Geisler. STEM education seeks to capture students in elementary school, and shuttle them down the pipe all the way to college and to a career.

However, Geisler recognized the need for increased focus on high school. “We can’t be putting all of our resources into middle school and elementary school,” she said, “We need to fill that gap in the pipeline.”

The Reach Initiative introduces young women to different STEM fields, and enables them to conduct original research under the supervision of their mentors. This research will be presented in a banquet at the end of the academic year.

What makes Geisler’s program unique, however, is its focus on feminism.

“We have a lot of gender empowerment programming that we do,” said Geisler. The program is designed to actively acknowledge the gender bias that exists in STEM careers. Geisler felt that while other programs focus on science education, they fall short of addressing these gender issues.

“So, this year we’re planning programs for micro-aggressions, for consent, and sexual harassment, for mental health and for communication skills,” said Geisler. In doing so, she hopes to address and combat real issues that face women in STEM fields.

After years of planning, the program is finally underway. Geisler hopes to double the participants next year, with aspirations for further growth. “At some point I’d like to see it be implemented at other colleges,” she said.

For now, her team of mentors is working to make a change in the local community, to bring about social change. “We don’t live in a post-sexist society,” said Geisler, and the Reach Initiative seeks to prepare young women for this reality.

The women’s soccer team earned their first win of the season despite an early lead by American University.

Sunday afternoon, the UMBC Retrievers women’s soccer team traveled to Washington D.C. to take on the American University Eagles. The game quickly started out rough for the Retrievers after the Eagles scored the first goal of the game only two minutes into it. However, the Retrievers managed to rally and defeat American University 2-1.

It only took two minutes and 12 seconds for American University to grab an early lead. With an assist from freshman forward Yari Bradfield, senior midfielder Kelly Donovan was able to hit the left side of the net from the right wing.

As the end of the first half approached, so did UMBC’s comeback. The Retrievers managed to overtake the lead with back-to-back goals at the end of the first half, and the beginning of the second half.

There were only 13 seconds left on the clock when sophomore midfielder Gabby Boehmer scored her fourth goal in four games to tie the game. Sophomore Rachel Lyon set the goal up for Boehmer by sending the ball ahead. An American defender stumbled while trying to deflect the ball, setting Boehmer up with the ball outside the box giving her the go ahead goal.

The Retrievers continued their momentum charge into the second half, scoring the game winning goal 45 seconds into the second half. Senior back Bria Bass scored the game, winning her first goal since her freshman year, after throwing the ball in to senior back Amira Walcott who passed the ball back to Bass. Bass then shot from across the front of the net to the far post.

Before the start of the season, Head Coach Leslie Wray said, “I am confident that we can rely on our backline to be solid again this year. They have all played at a high level and, so far, what we’ve see is that they’ve been able to come in and be consistent for us back there, and they’ve really minimized the mistakes.”

Earlier in the week, UMBC fell to George Mason University in double overtime. The Retrievers had a 2-1 lead in the second half, but could not hold onto it and allowed George Mason to tie.

The Retrievers will next take on Appalachian State on Friday at 7:30 p.m., competing in the George Mason Tournament in Fairfax, Va.

Programming Robotic Agents: A Multi-tasking Teleo-Reactive Approach

Keith Clark, Imperial College London
University of Queensland, University New South Wales
joint work with Peter Robinson, University of Queensland

2:00pm Friday, 2 October 2015, ITE325b

We present a multi-threaded/multi-tasking message communicating robotic agent architecture in which the concurrently executing tasks are programmed in TeleoR, a major extension of Nilsson’s Teleo-Reactive Procedures (TR) guard ~> action rule language for robotic agents.

The rule guards query rapidly changing percept facts, and more slowly changing told and remembered facts, using fixed facts, relation and function rules (the agent’s knowledge) in the agent’s deductive BeliefStore. Its operational semantics makes the languages well suited to robot/robot or human/robot co-operative tasks.

TeleoR extends TR in:

• being typed and higher order,
• having a typed higher order LP/FP language, QuLog, for encoding BeliefStore knowledge,
• having extra forms of rules and actions, and o having task atomic procedures to control the deadlock and starvation free sharing of several robotic resources by concurrently executing tasks.

Its use is illustrated in the video at http://bit.ly/teleor. It is being used at UNSW to write the control program for a two armed Baxter robot working in co-operation with a person concurrently engaged in several assembly tasks.

Keith Clark is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Imperial College London, England and a Visiting Professor at the University of Queensland and the University New South Wales. He has lectured in both mathematics and computer science.

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Upcoming talks and directions

Please register here: 
http://ola.aacc.edu/mcapd/conference.html

The September 2, 2015 "Important" notice about the use of cloud services such as Box or Google may have led some to conclude both services are inherently and/or equally insecure under the University's data security classification below:

To clarify, Google is not approved for confidential data (levels 2 & 3 above). Since Google stores its data around the world and employs people around the world, ORPC and DoIT do not recommend that Google be used with export controlled data. By contrast, Box.com is approved for level 0, 1, and 2 data. This means that information such as SSNs and passport numbers can be stored in Box. While all Box.com data is currently stored in the USA, there is no guarantee that Box.com will always keep our data in the USA. There are also no guarantees that a foreign person will not be employed by Box.com and have an ability to access our data. Accordingly, Box.com is okay to use with data classified as level 0, 1, and 2, but we would would not recommend it for export controlled data. 

 

For more information, please consult UMBC’s policy for the protection of sensitive information as well as DoIT’s data use guidance for more information. You may also wish to consult with Mark Cather, UMBC's Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), who can be reached at 410.455.3783 or mark.cather@umbc.edu.

Used with permission by Nature Publishing Group

CSEE chair Anupam Joshi was interviewed and quoted in a news article What could derail the wearables revolution that appears in the current issue of Nature (v525n7567). The piece discusses on two issues caused by the rapid uptake of wearable technology: “finding improved ways to transmit data to and from wearables, and keeping all that information safe.”

The article described research on FaceBlock, a prototype application developed in UMBC’s Ebiquity Lab that can enhance personal privacy in environments with wearable devices like Google Glass.

“It’s a cliché that whenever there’s a new technology we start talking about Huxley and A Brave New World, but with wearables — and what’s loosely termed the Internet of Things — we truly are entering into a new era, and we have to start thinking of these issues,” says Anupam Joshi, head of the Center for Cybersecurity at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
…
In another high-profile incident, the introduction of Google Glass headsets two years ago triggered concerns that users would capture images of passers-by without their knowledge. Researchers at the Center for Cybersecurity took this opportunity to apply their work on computer codes that enforce privacy policies. They built the wryly named FaceBlock app, which blocks out the faces of people who have requested privacy from photographs taken by Google Glass. But for this to work, a Google Glass owner would have to opt in by installing the app. So the only way for such a system to reliably provide privacy would be for manufacturers to make it standard and implement it with dedicated hardware, says Joshi. “Let’s say that Google was to build in a feature like this into every Google Glass so that it would automatically obey these kinds of commands — then it would work.”

More information on the FaceBlock prototype and related UMBC research on privacy for wearable technology can be found in these papers.

• Roberto Yus, Primal Pappachan, Prajit Kumar Das, Eduardo Mena, Anupam Joshi and Tim Finin, FaceBlock: Privacy-Aware Pictures for Google Glass, 12th Int. Conf. on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, (demonstation paper), ACM, June 2014.
• Primal Pappachan, Roberto Yus, Prajit Kumar Das, Tim Finin, Eduardo Mena, and Anupam Joshi, A Semantic Context-Aware Privacy Model for FaceBlock, Workshop on Society, Privacy and the Semantic Web – Policy and Technology, held at Int. Semantic Web Conf., Oct. 2014.
• Roberto Yus, Primal Pappachan, Prajit Das, Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi and Eduardo Mena, Semantics for Privacy and Shared Context, Workshop on Society, Privacy and the Semantic Web-Policy and Technology, held at Int. Semantic Web Conf., Oct. 2014.
• Prajit Kumar Das, Tim Finin and Anupam Joshi, Energy efficient sensing for managing privacy on smartphones, Workshop on Society, Privacy and the Semantic Web – Policy and Technology, held at 2013 Int. Semantic Web Conf., Oct. 2013.
• Dibyajyoti Ghosh, Anupam Joshi, Tim Finin, and Pramod Jagtap, Privacy control in smart phones using semantically rich reasoning and context modeling, IEEE Workshop on Semantic Computing and Security, pp. 82-85, May 2012

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