Name: Kabish Shah

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company - UMBC PAHB Phase II

Major(s)/Minor(s): Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics

Expected Graduation Year: May 2014

Briefly describe your internship, co-op, research, or service- learning opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

 I learned the infrastructure of construction sites and the construction process which exposed me to the general requirements of the career in construction industry and helped me to ensure that it is something I am interested in continuing to pursue in the future. During my internship I oversaw (with supervision) the installations of the MEP contractors for compliance with the documents and the needs of the project. I was involved with the LEED and Commissioning work of the MEP equipment. I conducted quality control inspections for all trades (not just MEP) for compliance with the specifications of the project. Report and follow up on all. I also developed an understanding of business communications and working with people from all phases of construction, from laborers to presidents of companies. Some projects I worked on are LEED, Duct Tracking, Quality Control, Tracking Hot Water and Chilled Water Pipe testing, MEP, Internal Auditing, Cost Tracking and many more. I liked doing quality control because I believe as an engineer; it’s my duty to make sure that the job is done as it’s supposed to be done. And, there is no compromise in quality and integrity of the work.

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?

I enjoyed being able to shadow engineers and use my skills in the real world. I learned a great deal from the engineers and I can see myself performing the same types of tasks in the coming future.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

My internship experience with Whiting-Turner is very valuable to me. I have learned a lot through this experience, from how to be professional to making friends with someone completely different than me. Some of the most valuable things I have learned are how to communicate professionally, work well with sub-contractors, manage time, and have fun.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

Get started as soon as possible. The earlier you put your feet in the door, the better off you will be. Internship experience is something that cannot be compared with anything else.

How do you see your experience as meaningful? This might involve skills you’ve gained, information you’ve learned, mentors you’ve connected with, or projects you’ve completed.

My experience is meaningful because I feel like I am giving something back to UMBC, which I am very proud of. I am surprised with the help I am getting from engineers from my group. My supervisor is always there to answer my questions related to construction and the company. Also, I am proud to use my engineering skills to complete the projects.

Please provide a short quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process.

 I believe in giving back and being a part of UMBC PAHB Phase II project is all I could ask for.

 Congratulations on graduating next week, Kabish!

 Ph.D.Dissertation Defense
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Schema Free Querying of Semantic Data

Lushan Han

10:00am Friday, 23 May 2014, ITE 325b

Developing interfaces to enable casual, non-expert users to query complex structured data has been the subject of much research over the past forty years. We refer to them as as schema-free query interfaces, since they allow users to freely query data without understanding its schema, knowing how to refer to objects, or mastering the appropriate formal query language. Schema-free query interfaces address fundamental problems in natural language processing, databases and AI to connect users’ conceptual models and machine representations.

However, schema-free query interface systems are faced with three hard problems. First, we still lack a practical interface. Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) are easy for users but hard for machines. Current NLP techniques are still unreliable in extracting the relational structure from natural language questions. Keyword query interfaces, on the other hand, have limited expressiveness and inherit ambiguity from the natural language terms used as keywords. Second, people express or model the same meaning in many different ways, which can result in the vocabulary and structure mismatches between users’ queries and the machines’ representation. We still rely on ad hoc and labor-intensive approaches to deal with this ‘semantic heterogeneity problem’. Third, the Web has seen increasing amounts of open domain semantic data with heterogeneous or unknown schemas, which challenges traditional NLI systems that require a well-defined schema. Some modern systems gave up the approach of translating the user query into a formal query at the schema level and chose to directly search into the entity network (ABox) for the matchings of the user query. This approach, however, is computationally expensive and has an ad hoc nature.

In this thesis, we develop a novel approach to address the three hard problems. We introduce a new schema-free query interface, SFQ interface, in which users explicitly specify the relational structure of the query as a graphical “skeleton” and annotate it with freely chosen words, phrases and entity names. This circumvents the unreliable step of extracting complete relations from natural language queries.

We describe a framework for interpreting these SFQ queries over open domain semantic data that automatically translates them to formal queries. First, we learn a schema statistically from the entity network and represent as a graph, which we call the schema network. Our mapping algorithms run on the schema network rather than the entity network, enhancing scalability. We define the probability of “observing” a path on the schema network. Following it, we create two statistical association models that will be used to carry out disambiguation. Novel mapping algorithms are developed that exploit semantic similarity measures and association measures to address the structure and vocabulary mismatch problems. Our approach is fully computational and requires no special lexicons, mapping rules, domain-specific syntactic or semantic grammars, thesauri or hard-coded semantics.

We evaluate our approach on two large datasets, DBLP+ and DBpedia. We developed DBLP+ by augmenting the DBLP dataset with additional data from CiteSeerX and ArnetMiner. We created 220 SFQ queries on the DBLP+ dataset. For DBpedia, we had three human subjects (who were unfamiliar with DBpedia) translate 33 natural language questions from the 2011 QALD workshop into SFQ queries. We carried out cross-validation on the 220 DBLP+ queries and cross-domain validation on the 99 DBpedia queries in which the parameters tuned for the DBLP+ queries are applied to the DBpedia queries. The evaluation results on the two datasets show that our system has very good efficacy and efficiency.

Committee: Drs. Li Ding (Memect), Tim Finin (chair), Anupam Joshi, Paul McNamee (JHU), Yelena Yesha

This is the last in a series of articles on the four focus areas that are part of UMBC’s strategic planning process.

Steve Bradley, associate professor and graduate program director, visual arts, and Mavis Sanders, professor, education, bring their passions for community partnerships and collaboration across disciplines to their work as co-chairs of the Community and Extended Connection strategy group.

Bradley, who joined the UMBC faculty in 1995, says he was attracted to the campus by its focus on collaboration within and across disciplines, and the very first course he taught at UMBC was community-based. He has continued to work on collaborative projects throughout his tenure, most recently an interdisciplinary digital mapping project in Baltimore City with Nicole King, assistant professor, American studies. He also is part of UMBC’s BreakingGround initiative, looking at civic agency from a broad perspective. “These types of collaborations are what keeps me here and it’s only getting better,” says Bradley.

Sanders came to UMBC just three years ago, but for over 20 years has conducted research on family, school and community partnerships. For the last decade, she has also focused on collaborative leadership. She recently began working with the Shriver Center to find ways to coordinate outreach to pre-K-12 institutions.

The Community and Extended Connection strategy group’s primary goals are to build, nurture and extend relationships among diverse internal and external communities and partners to enrich campus life, local neighborhoods, the State and the surrounding region, and to foster innovative problem-solving and responsible entrepreneurship through strategic partnerships with alumni, government agencies, businesses and community-based organizations to create a sustainable and prosperous future for all.

Bradley is leading the strategy group in developing a conceptual map that will help provide an illustrated inventory of the range of UMBC’s partnerships both on and off campus, uncovering what’s going on now that may be under the radar. Both Bradley and Sanders hope their strategy group can create a roadmap that will build, sustain and strengthen the university’s diverse connections, on and off campus, expanding the impact of the work happening now and in the future. They will research ways to build upon successful partnerships and to strengthen any weaknesses within those initiatives, as well as look at ways to create new ones.

In addition, the Community and Extended Connection strategy group is charged with finding ways to support and reward members of the UMBC community for their initiatives, search for ways UMBC can be a more effective partner with underserved communities; investigate how to effectively communicate contributions; establish best practices for partnerships on and off campus; and decide what personnel, technology and other resources are needed to create a campus-wide system to record, track and evaluate partnerships and engagement with the community.

Sanders says, “UMBC’s strategic planning process is a timely opportunity because there are many different conversations going on about how we ensure the work we all are doing is coordinated in such a way that we know the breadth of what’s happening. People don’t always know how engaged the campus is, but it’s pretty expansive. The university is stronger because of the wide range of community, business and agency partnerships, and the opportunities they give our students to realize a vision of civic engagement and to gain professional experiences.”

“Our research will allow us to present that work in a systematic way, and show we care enough about these relationships to evaluate them,” adds Sanders. “It’s about creating a model of continuous improvement that is supportive and healthy for everyone involved.”

Bradley agrees. “As Provost Rous has said, we don’t want this research to just sit on a shelf somewhere. We’re charged with implementing this in a way that will strengthen our alliances and guide us in the future.”

The Community and Extended Connection strategy group will reach out to the campus via focus groups and larger meetings to get input on ideas. Bradley and Sanders also welcome questions and comments at sbradley@umbc.edu and msanders@umbc.edu.

Donation Day:

Donation Day on Sunday, May 18th.

Donation Day is an event sponsored by the Residential Life Office and the National Residence Hall Honorary (NRHH) where current UMBC students may drop off unwanted items that are in good condition at two drop off locations on campus. All items donated items will go to the Goodwill.
This year the two drop off locations are:
1. Terrace Circle in Terrace Apartments
2. Between Chesapeake and Erickson Halls by University Health Services.
All students who donate items will get free pizza and will be entered to win one of two larger prizes. 

Click here to learn more about what you can donate, times, and who to contact!

Bulk Furniture:

For things you cannot donate: bulk item/furniture dumpsters are set up, and the items listed above can be placed there and Facilities will donate them to the loading dock for reuse. There will be 12 dumpsters , one or two at each community/ res hall. Bulk drop off will be located next to dumpsters where there is room.

Electronics Recycling:

Also, each residence hall lobby and the community center has a blue plastic bin labelled "electronics recycling'.

Food Donations:

One of the things that makes UMBC great is how wonderful our alumni, students, faculty, and staff are. Because of these amazing people, UMBC often finds itself “in the news,” so each week, we’ll be sharing with you a round-up of the most newsworthy achievements from our community.

• Students Share Stories: Navigating College with Mental Health Challenges Recap
• Kerry Kidwell-Slak, Career Services, in Policy Link
• Emily Eaglin ’17, Visual Arts, on NBC Washington
• Kimberly Moffitt, American Studies, on The Marc Steiner Show and in The Baltimore Sun

Check out all the other great campus news on Insights Weekly.

Two  Mechanical Engineering students who are currently in the Maryland Elite Researchers-in-Training (MERIT) Program under Dr. Carlos Romero-Talamás, won 1^st and 2^nd place in the Innovative STEM Conference 2014 held this year at Morgan State University. This is a young conference, and all the previous winners in this category have been from the host school, so home field advantage was alive and present before this year. 

More information about the Innovative STEM Symposium can be found here: http://www.istemfoundation.org/isc2014/about_iss.html

Dr. Romero-Talamás came to UMBC from Cal Tech just over a year ago and has been bringing dusty plasma and quality research to the Mechanical Engineering Department ever since.