Renaissance Fine Arts is seeking a success driven sales professional for our Baltimore gallery.

Sales Position:

by Lee Boot

This artistic indie game gives a whole new meaning to “world building”

It is not uncommon for video games to throw players into an unknown world and ask them to explore it for themselves. What is unusual is for a video game to open up a game with a completely white screen and ask the player to fill it using nothing but black paint. Giant Sparrow’s The Unfinished Swan does exactly this, and a whole lot more.

The game is reminiscent of a childhood bedtime story, opening with a woman’s voice telling the player a story of an orphan boy named Monroe whose mother’s death left him with an excess of unfinished paintings. He is only able to keep the unfinished painting of a swan, but awakes one morning to find that the swan is missing from the painting. He, and the player by extension, must enter the blank painting to find the swan and complete the painting.

The game is remarkably short, with a total runtime of around two hours. In terms of storytelling, this length is absolutely perfect. The game does not add any unnecessary subplots and maintains the simplicity of a children’s tale. It is the kind of game that demands to be played more than once in the same way that a story demands to be told more than once.

Throughout the course of the game, the player will traverse screens that range anywhere from entirely white to entirely black, using only their paint to discover what lies inside the painting. The beauty of the game lies in its unwavering simplicity. There is nothing flashy or attention-grabbing about this game, but it is captivating nonetheless.

The game begins slowly, as the player is exploring an entirely blank room with only their paint to show them where the walls and corridors are. The game allows the player just enough time to get the hang of stumbling about before throwing in furniture and obstacles, and eventually the player will find themselves in twisting labyrinths and giant cities.

Similar to the way that Portal made players solve puzzles to advance through the story, The Unfinished Swan uses a far less complex puzzle system that requires players to think before they launch paint all over the place. Before the game is over, players will need to master the use of black paint, white paint and water in order to advance.

Complete with a beautifully peaceful soundtrack and an undeniably storybook quality, this game is relaxing and fascinating. There are plenty of hidden features that can be found in subsequent playthroughs, which makes it well worth looking at.

Read more stories from: The Retriever Weekly

Information Extraction from Dirty Notes
for Clinical Decision Support

Clare Grasso

10:00am Tuesday, 12 May 2015, ITE346

The term clinical decision support refers broadly to providing clinicians or patients with computer-generated clinical knowledge and patient-related information, intelligently filtered or presented at appropriate times, to enhance patient care. It is estimated that at least 50% of the clinical information describing a patient’s current condition and stage of therapy resides in the free-form text portions of the Electronic Health Record (EHR). Both linguistic and statistical natural language processing (NLP) models assume the presence of a formal underlying grammar in the text. Yet, clinical notes are often times filled with overloaded and nonstandard abbreviations, sentence fragments, and creative punctuation that make it difficult for grammar-based NLP systems to work effectively. This research focuses on investigating scalable machine learning and semantic techniques that do not rely on an underlying grammar to extract medical concepts in the text in order to apply them in CDS on commodity hardware and software systems. Additionally, by packaging the extracted data within a semantic knowledge representation, the facts can be combined with other semantically encoded facts and reasoned over to help to inform clinicians in their decision making.

President Hrabowski visited Maryland Morning on May 11 to discuss his new book Holding Fast to Dreams with host Sheila Kast. Holding Fast to Dreams was published this month and recounts Dr. Hrabowksi’s involvement in the Civil Rights movement, his journey to UMBC, the inspiration and success of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, and the continued work at UMBC with redesigned courses to encourage “inclusive excellence” for all students.

In the interview, Dr. Hrabowski touched his childhood, the recent protests in Baltimore, and his passion for helping students succeed at UMBC. “What we do at UMBC, whether talking about what we got through Mr. Meyerhoff’s work through the Meyerhoff program for producing scientists or what we get through our artist programs, humanities programs, is the notion of pulling people together from different backgrounds and helping them prepare to become leaders who will help people other than themselves,” he said.

Dr. Hrabowski also spoke about the importance of supporting students to ensure retention in STEM fields, his love for math, and the need for quality education in the lives of Baltimore city youth.

Click here to listen to “How The Civil Rights Movement Inspired UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski” on WYPR.