Editor’s note: Here at UMBC, our students are the heartbeat of campus, and we are committed to providing them the best possible education. So, for the month of March, we will be highlighting our amazing academic departments, some of their recent achievements, and ways that you can help fund their continued excellence.
Your gift is extremely important and many of our students are depending on you. Please show your support and make an impact today. With you we can make a difference.
The Economics Department is proud to announce that professor Scott Farrow was named economics coordinator for the Department of Homeland Security’s National Center on the Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE). The department would also like to announce that professor Dennis Coates was chosen as editor of the Journal of Sports Economics, effective summer of 2015.
With your help, the Economics department can provide scholarships for economics and financial economics majors and supply new computers with the latest version of Stata, an econometric software.
Click here to donate.
The Media and Communication Studies Department is excited to share that last year the department awarded student scholarships and provided state-of-the-art equipment for classrooms.
With your help, the Media and Communication Studies Department can continue supporting these worthwhile initiatives and continue providing students a top-rate education.
To donate, click here.
The Political Science Department is thrilled to share that in the past year, the department funded student trips to national conferences and supported undergraduate and graduate research.
With your help, the Political Science department can continue supporting these worthwhile initiatives and providing students a top-rate education.
Click here to donate.
Ayasdi Inc., whose data analytics software is based on a branch of mathematics that is more than a century old, has raised another $55 million in a funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
The company also reported 400% growth in bookings for the fiscal year ended Jan. 30 and a long list of Fortune 1000 companies as customers, including Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Siemens, Lockheed Martin and several others in financial services, technology, health care, government and life sciences.
Ayasdi was started in 2008 by three mathematicians. They include two Stanford University Ph.D.s–Chief Executive Gurjeet Singh, whose degree is from the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, and Harlan Sexton, whose degree is in mathematics—and Gunnar Carlsson, a former chair of the Department of Mathematics at Stanford who recently joined Ayasdi full time.
Dr. Carlsson pioneered the use of a branch of mathematics called topology, which is the study of shapes, to solve real-world problems. In the 2000s, he received $10 million in research grants from the National Science Foundation and DARPA to study problems of interest to the U.S. government, and that work led to Ayasdi.
Ayasdi’s specialty is its ability to apply Topological Data Analysis–which includes statistical, machine learning and geometric algorithms–to complex sets of data and expose patterns that humans may miss.
The key here is data complexity, Dr. Singh said, not data size. One of the earliest uses of Ayasdi’s software was on a set of 12-year-old data on breast-cancer tumors. By representing the data visually, as a color-coded shape, it exposed correlations between the disease and patients’ outcomes that researchers had never noticed, giving clues to more effective treatments for breast cancer, Dr. Singh said.
Ayasdi has now branched into several more industries, and is adding what it calls “sandwiches”–apps on top of the Ayasdi platform–for use by customers in those industries. A health-care sandwich, for instance, has its own user interface and understands how to talk to data from electronic medical records.
Customers are reporting millions of dollars in savings, Dr. Singh said. Mercy Health System, for instance, is using Ayasdi to discover “care paths” for its patients–best practices in treatment based on their diseases and accepted medical procedures that staff can access on computers or iPads.
Lockheed, a government contractor, uses Ayasdi to monitor the status of projects to make sure they are on track.
None of these places could hire enough data scientists or analysts to do this type of work at this scale, Dr. Singh said, and they would also need luck to find some of the patterns in the data that Ayasdi is able to detect.
The new money will be invested in sales and marketing as well as the software. “Machine intelligence for the enterprise is still in its infancy,” he said. “There’s still a lot more to do.”
Kleiner Perkins Partner Ted Schlein, who becomes a board observer, said his firm invested in Ayasdi because it has shown that it is commercially able “to go from big data to important data, and in essence make companies smarter.”
Current investors Institutional Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Floodgate and Citi Ventures also participated in the round, along with two new investors, Centerview Capital and Draper Nexus Ventures.
Total funding in Ayasdi is now close to $100 million. Dr. Singh said he hopes that the current round will be the company’s last one. He added that he expects the company to be worth $1 billion or more by next year.
Write to Deborah Gage at deborah.gage@wsj.com. Follow her on Twitter at @deborahgage
By Staff
InstantLabs has expanded its SpeciesID product line by offering DNA-based tests for Atlantic and Coho salmon. InstantLabs SpeciesID tests provide accurate DNA verification in under 2 hours. The company already offers kits to identify Atlantic Blue Crab, pork and horse meat. InstantLabs’ system gives food wholesalers, processors and inspectors a fast and reliable option for product tests.
The two new products were created in partnership with the University of Guelph (Ontario). The InstantID test kits for Atlantic (Salmo salar) and Coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) are the first of four salmon assays planned for release in 2015. InstantLabs’ identification tests are designed for use on the Hunter®, a real-time PCR system developed by the company, and are also available for use with other PCR instruments.
“Producers, wholesalers and government entities need robust tools to combat seafood fraud,” says Steven Guterman, chief executive officer of InstantLabs. “InstantLabs’ real-time PCR testing systems and reagent kits can become an integral part in a testing program to verify labeling accuracy.”
InstantLabs will launch InstantID for Chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) and Sockeye (Oncorhynchus nerka) salmon later this year. InstantID kits for snapper, catfish, grouper and tilapia are also in the works.
InstantLabs | 855-800-7086 | InstantLabs.com
A wonderful reflection written by Returning Women Student Scholar and Newcombe Scholarship recipient, Carrie Cleveland.
Carrie Cleveland ’16, Social Work, is a member of UMBC’s Returning Women’s Mentoring Group.
Yesterday someone told me I was invisible.
My first thought was that the word invisible was the best adjective to describe me as a member of this campus community. My second thought was just how sad that would have made me feel a year ago, before I helped form a network of people like me.
So what makes me invisible? If you were to line me up with one hundred other students who were a representative sample of UMBC’s student population, I doubt I would stand out, because what makes me different is not especially apparent: my age. The beautiful thing about being surrounded by a wonderful group of traditional-aged students (18-25 years old) is that no one realizes just how old I am. Most students guess that I am older than they are, but not by much. When I say I am…
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