BIO Innovation Zone Company Snapshots: GlycoMira Therapeutics, TheraSource, and Biomedica Management

Later this month in Philadelphia at the BIO International Convention, BIO will be partnering with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to host the 2nd annual, newly-expanded BIO Innovation Zone. The Zone will feature Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funded early-stage biotech companies.

The SBIR/STTR program provides U.S. federal funding to small businesses engaged in research with the potential for commercialization. Each of the companies has been rigorously vetted through the SBIR/STTR review process prior to receiving the non-dilutive funding to engage in R&D that has the potential for commercialization. The NIH and NSF invest a combined $940 million annually in the programs.

Today, we spoke with Justin Savage, the Director of Operations atGlycoMira Therapeutics based in Salt Lake City, Utah, Weng-Lang Yang, the Chief Scientific Officer of TheraSource LLC in Manhasset, New York and George Falus, CEO of Biomedica Management. These three biotechnology companies have been supported by the NIH’s SBIR program.

Read more at http://www.biotech-now.org/business-and-investments/business-of-biotech/2015/06/bio-innovation-zone-company-snapshots-glycomira-therapeutics-therasource-and-biomedica-management?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bio-innovation-zone-company-snapsh

The NSF-sponsored Platys project explored the idea that places are more than just GPS coordinates. They are concepts rich with semantic information, including people, activities, roles, functions, time and purpose. Our mobile phones can learn to recognize the places we are in and use information about them to provide better services.

Laura Zavala, Pradeep K. Murukannaiah, Nithyananthan Poosamani, Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi, Injong Rhee and Munindar P. Singh, Platys: From Position to Place-Oriented Mobile Computing, AI Magazine, v36, n2, 2015.

The Platys project focuses on developing a high-level, semantic notion of location called place. A place, unlike a geospatial position, derives its meaning from a user’s actions and interactions in addition to the physical location where it occurs. Our aim is to enable the construction of a large variety of applications that take advantage of place to render relevant content and functionality and, thus, improve user experience. We consider elements of context that are particularly related to mobile computing. The main problems we have addressed to realize our place-oriented mobile computing vision are representing places, recognizing places, and engineering place-aware applications. We describe the approaches we have developed for addressing these problems and related subproblems. A key element of our work is the use of collaborative information sharing where users’ devices share and integrate knowledge about places. Our place ontology facilitates such collaboration. Declarative privacy policies allow users to specify contextual features under which they prefer to share or not share their information.

Innovations in Cybersecurity Education Workshop

University of Maryland, Baltimore County
BWtech South Campus
9:30 – 4:30 Friday, 12 June 2015

Innovations in Cybersecurity Education is a free regional workshop on cybersecurity education from high school through post-graduate. It is intended primarily for educators who are teaching cybersecurity at high schools, colleges, and community colleges. Anyone is welcome to attend, including teachers, students, administrators, researchers, and government officials. It will highlight master teachers and ongoing educational projects, including an effort at the US Naval Academy to teach cybersecurity to all midshipmen. The workshop will include discussions about cyber competitions, hands-on exercises, educational games, and integrating cybersecurity throughout the curriculum. There will be an opportunity to experience hands-on cyber defense exercises and to play new computer security education games, including SecurityEmpire developed at UMBC.

The workshop is free and open to the public — all are welcome to attend. This workshop will to be of interest to educators, school administrators, undergraduate and graduate students, and government officials. Lunch will be provided. Parking is free.

Please see the links above for the schedule and location and register to help us plan for the number of participants.

The workshop is organized by Dr. Alan T. Sherman with support provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant 1241576.