The Creative Alliance is Baltimore’s premier multi-arts venue with a mission to present and promote artists, performers and filmmakers; engage diverse audiences; and improve the quality of life in Baltimore City through community based arts and education programs.

The Creative Alliance seeks an Education Coordinator to join our team.

Position begins: August 10, 2015

Professors Alan Sherman (CSEE), Dhananjay Phatak (CSEE), and Linda Oliva (Education) have been awarded a research grant from the Department of Defense to create two educational cybersecurity assessment tools, to help improve the way cybersecurity is taught.  The $294,016 one-year project is joint with Geoffrey Herman at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (UMBC portion $146,917). The research is being carried out at the UMBC Cyber Defense Lab at the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance and will fund a 12-month GRA in 2015-2016.

This project is creating infrastructure for a rigorous evidence-based improvement of cybersecurity education by developing the first Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATs) targeted at measuring the quality of instruction. The first CAT will be a Cybersecurity Concept Inventory (CCI) that measures how well students understand basic concepts in cybersecurity after a first course in the field. The second CAT will be a Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment (CCA) that measures how well curricula prepared students graduating from college on fundamentals needed for careers in cybersecurity. Each CAT will be a multiple-choice test with approximately thirty questions.

Inspired by the highly influential Force Concept Inventory from physics, the investigators are following a three-step process:  In fall 2015, with MS student Geet Parekh, they carried out two Delphi processes to identify important and difficult concepts in cybersecurity.  Next, they will interview students to uncover their misconceptions about these concepts.  Finally, they will draft and psychometrically evaluate questions whose incorrect answers are driven by the uncovered misconceptions.  For more information, see cisa.umbc.edu/cats.

CSEE professor Jian Chen recently received an award from Department of Defense to to develop new techniques to visualize health informatics data. The award will support two UMBC research students for two years and be done in collaboration with Jesus Caban, Gerard Reidy and Joseph Bleiberg from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center's National Intrepid Center of Excellence.

The research will the support temporal exploration and analysis of traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder from patient cohorts. The group will design interactive visualization to move beyond using a small subset of data from the wealth and breadth of clinical information to improve diagnostic accuracy.

The project will help clinicians obtain new insights about the underlying conditions of patients, analyze complex hidden clinical patterns, and visually explore the correlations between many assessment techniques and imaging modalities including neuroimaging, neuropsychiatric measures, patient history, demographic information, and clinical tests).

Arts Education in Maryland Schools (AEMS) Alliance seeks a new Executive Director. The Executive Director is charged with responsibility for implementation of Board policies and decisions. Provide responsible leadership and execute all AEMS operations in accordance with the Board’s strategic plan, including advocacy, programming, fundraising and communications priorities. Manage the staff of the organization, including student interns and volunteers as appropriate, and make recommendations for effectively using human and fiscal resources.

Looks like good things happen in pairs for Retrievers! Four members of our community have been recognized in the media for their hard work. Rachel Hirsch and Miguel Palmeiro were featured on The Daily Record’s list of successful professionals under 40, and alum Jim Bailey and current student Seamus Ertel have been featured in two Baltimore Sun articles recognizing their dedication to Baltimore’s historic Fort McHenry.

Rachel Hirsch ’03, political science, and Miguel Palmeiro ’06, biological sciences, are on The Daily Record’s 2015 VIP Successful Before 40 list. Hirsch is currently a senior attorney at Ifrah Law, and Palmeiro also works as an attorney in private practice.

To see the full list of winners, click here.

Jim Bailey ’03, history, M.A. ’08 history, and current student Seamus Ertel ’17, describe their work at Fort McHenry. Bailey works as the coordinator of volunteers and oversees between 400-600 volunteers each summer as they work together to provide re-enactments for those visiting the fort.

Ertel’s involvement with Fort McHenry started at a very early age, when his father began working as a volunteer and then an employee. Seamus has followed in his footsteps, and currently works as a park ranger and in the fife and drum corps.

Find out more about Bailey and Ertel.

Have a story of your own to share? Tell us about it in a class note.

Sunil Dasgupta, director of UMBC’s political science program at the Universities of Shady Grove, recently published an article in International Relations and Security Network (ISN) News on the establishment of world powers through norms and institutions instead of superior capabilities over others.

Using the example of Britain, Dasgupta noted that despite its decline, its membership in international institutions ensures the country staying power on the world stage: “Britain remains a veto-carrying, permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, one of a handful of nuclear weapons states, a rich country, and one of the closest allies of the United States. Despite Prime Minister Cameron’s focus on domestic politics, there is no expectation that the British government will concede any of these positions in the future. To the contrary, Security Council membership can be seen as ensuring that Britain remains a ‘world power’ no matter what other circumstances change. Indeed, has Britain really resigned as a world power?”

Dasgupta wrote that in modern times there is more than one way to become a world power than merely having advanced economies and militaries: “Since the end of World War II, however, international norms have reduced the importance of both 1) conventional economic and military capabilities and 2) a country’s position relative to others in this regard. While the intense rivalry between the United States and the former Soviet Union overshadowed serious discussion of norms and beliefs during the Cold War, it became clear thereafter, with the rise of Japan and Germany as economic heavyweights with limited military capacity, that there were other pathways to great power status.”

Read “What Makes a Great Power?” in ISN.

In the wake of the visit of 65 mayors to the Vatican to discuss climate change, School of Public Policy Professor John Rennie Short wrote an article for The Conversation reflecting on the central role of cities in climate change discussions.

“Cities house more than half the world’s population, consume 75% of its energy and emit 80% of all greenhouse gasses. But cities are not just sources of problems; they are innovative sites for policy solutions,” wrote Short, who is an expert on urban issues and environmental concerns.

In his article, he wrote that many cities are on the front lines of climate change impacts, which has spurred action to address environmental concerns and form urban networks to learn which policies are working.

“The brute facts of climate change vulnerability in cities are prompting a new and more pronounced urban environmental sensitivity. Cities are responding with both climate change mitigation and adaption. Mitigation focuses on reducing the concentrations of greenhouse gases by using alternative energy sources, encouraging greater energy efficiency and conservation, and through the promotion of carbon sinks by planting trees.

Separately, cities are adapting to the effects of climate change. Chicago has developed policies anticipating a hotter and wetter climate by repaving its roads with permeable materials, planting more trees and offering tax incentive to encourage green office roofs,” Short wrote.

Read “Why cities are a rare good news story in climate change” in The Conversation.