Hey Retrievers, just a friendly reminder to turn your clocks back this weekend. And you know what that means… an extra hour of sleep!

P.S. UMBC is full of helpful tips and tricks!

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Deriving Insights from Data:
Peek at Research Challenges for some Industry Verticals

Dr. Manish Gupta
Vice President and Director
Xerox Research Center India

3:00pm Monday, 4 November, 2013, ITE 325b, UMBC

We are entering an era that will usher dramatic changes in several industries via exploitation of data. With the proliferation of data from sensors that are becoming ubiquitous and increasing digitization of data that used to be in non-electronic form, there are opportunities to completely transform the way the world is run. We present examples of such opportunities in the Financial, Healthcare, Education and Infrastructure domains. We also describe unique challenges like scale and heterogeneity in growth markets like India, which often require different approaches to solving these problems. Diving deeper into the healthcare industry, we present preliminary work that shows the applicability of remote sensing and data analytics not only to measure body vitals such as temperature and heart rate, but also to diagnose diseases such as breast cancer and atrial fibrillation (a form of cardiac arrhythmia) in the future. As more of the patients’ medical history gets captured in electronic health record systems, there is a further promise of applying real-time predictive analytics (based on accurate models for diagnosis and treatment of various diseases, utilizing the latest medical literature) to assist doctors in practicing personalized, evidence-based medicine. We describe outstanding challenges, including data privacy, machine learning over heterogeneous forms of data, and financial incentives design, which we believe must be addressed to enable transformational impact.

Dr. Manish Gupta is Vice President at Xerox Corporation and Director of Xerox Research Centre in India. Previously, Manish has served as Managing Director, Technology Division at Goldman Sachs in India, and has held various leadership positions with IBM, including that of Director, IBM Research – India and Chief Technologist, IBM India/South Asia. From 2001 to 2006, he served as a Senior Manager at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he led the team developing system software for the Blue Gene/L supercomputer. IBM was awarded a National Medal of Technology and Innovation for the invention of Blue Gene by US President Barack Obama in 2009. Manish earned a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Delhi in 1987, an M.S. from the Ohio State University in 1988 and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 1992. He has co-authored over 75 papers, with more than 5,000 citations in Google Scholar (with an h-index of 41) in the areas of high-performance computing, compilers, and virtual machine optimizations, and has been granted more than 15 US patents. While at IBM, Manish received an Outstanding Innovation Award, two Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and the Lou Gerstner Team Award for Client Excellence. Manish is an ACM Fellow.

A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

The Snowden Leaks and the Public
Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, discusses what we have learned about surveillance from the Snowden leaks his newspaper has helped bring to light.
—Brian Bergstein, deputy editor

The Department of Biological Sciences seeks to recruit two permanent, full-time lecturers.

General Biology: The successful candidate will teach introductory biology for majors, covering topics in basic cellular and molecular biology, genetics, physiology, ecology and evolution.  The candidate will also teach a core laboratory course for biology majors that provides skills needed for upper division laboratory courses.

Physiology: The successful candidate will teach an upper division course and its companion upper level laboratory course in Animal Physiology. The candidate will also teach a required introductory course in general biology for allied health majors.

Successful candidates will have a Ph. D. in a relevant area (or areas) of biological sciences and experience in college-level teaching that includes both regular and laboratory courses. In addition, both candidates must have experience with current methods for encouraging student engagement and for the assessment of student learning outcomes.

UMBC is a medium-sized research university in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. area, whose combined excellence in research and outstanding educational programs have earned recognition by US News and World Report as the "#1 Up-and-Coming National University”.  The university has also been recognized for its strong commitment towards the inclusion of women and students from diverse ethnic backgrounds. For information about the Department of Biological Sciences and its education programs, visit http://biology.umbc.edu.

Applicants should submit a cover letter indicating the position of interest, curriculum vitae, summary of current teaching philosophy and future teaching interests and at least three letters of reference.  All materials should be sent, preferably in PDF format, to biosearch@umbc.edu. Review of applications will begin on November 15, 2013 and continue until the position is filled, with an expected start date of Aug. 1, 2014. 

One of the lesser-known HTML attributes is contenteditable. This attribute allows you to turn a standard read-only HTML element into an interactive, rich-text editor.

When Tim Berners-Lee built the first web browser in 1990, he created modes for both browsing and editing HTML documents. However as the web grew, browsers transitioned to a more read-only state. The contenteditable attribute and associated element properties bring native content editing back to the browser.

Tim Berners-Lee’s Original Web Browser (Source: http://info.cern.ch/NextBrowser.html)

In this blog post you are going to learn how to use the contenteditable attribute to allow users to edit page content directly within their browser. You’ll also be taking a look at the properties that allow you to manipulate an element’s editable state using JavaScript.

The contenteditable Attribute

You can make an element editable by adding the contenteditable attribute in your markup. This attribute has three possible values: true, false, and inherit. Specifying inherit will make the element editable if it’s immediate parent is editable.

<div id="editor" contenteditable="true">
      ...
    </div>
    

See the Demo View on CodePen

Note: Editable elements are included in the tab order and can therefore be focussed using the tab key. This makes them accessible to users that might not be able to use a mouse. The tabindex attribute can be used to specify where in the tab order the editable element should fall.

Making Elements Editable in JavaScript

As well as the contenteditable HTML attribute it is also possible to make an element editable using JavaScript. This involves two element properties:

• isContentEditable – This property will return true if the element is editable and false if it is not.
• contentEditable – This property can be used to set the editable status of an element. Supported values are the same as those used for the contenteditable attribute: true, false, and inherit.

var editor = document.getElementById('editor');
    editor.isContentEditable;
    editor.contentEditable = true;
    

Lets take a look at an example of how you could use a button to toggle an element’s editable state.

<button id="editorBtn" type="button">Enable Editing</button>
    <div id="editor">
      ...
    </div>
    

Here you’ve created simple <button> and <div> elements. Notice that the <div> doesn’t have a contenteditable attribute.

var editorBtn = document.getElementById('editorBtn');
    var element = document.getElementById('editor');
    
    editorBtn.addEventListener('click', function(e) {
      e.preventDefault();
    
      if (element.isContentEditable) {
        // Disable Editing
        element.contentEditable = 'false';
        editorBtn.innerHTML = 'Enable Editing';
    
        // You could save any changes here.
      } else {
        element.contentEditable = 'true';
        editorBtn.innerHTML = 'Disable Editing';
      }
    });
    

In this JavaScript code you start by creating two variables that represent the <button> and <div> elements on the page. You then attach an event listener to the editorBtn that will be fired when the user clicks the button. Inside the callback function of this event listener you examine the <div> element’s isContentEditable property to determine whether the element is currently editable. If it is, you disable editing by setting the element’s contentEditable property to false, and update the button text to Enable Editing. If the element is not editable you first enable editing and then change the button text to Disable Editing.

See the Demo View on CodePen

Making an Entire Page Editable

If you’d like to make an entire web page editable you can use the designMode property of the document object. Setting this property to 'on' will enable editing. This also works on documents within iframes.

document.designMode = 'on';
    

Try turning on designMode for this page using your browser’s dev tools. Once enabled you should be able to edit all of the page content.

If you’re not familiar with using your browser’s dev tools, here’s some steps to get you going.

• Open up your browser’s dev tools. (Right-click anywhere on the page and select ‘Inspect Element’)
• Switch to the Console tab.
• Type the following into the console and press enter: document.designMode = 'on';

Browser Support for contenteditable

Support for contenteditable is very good. Internet Explorer was the first browser to implement this technology, way back in IE 5.5 (circa 2000). Since then, contenteditable has been standardized by the WHATWG.

Source: http://caniuse.com/#feat=contenteditable

Final Thoughts

Enabling the ability to simply click an element and make an update enables a really enjoyable editing experience for the user. The contenteditable attribute makes implementing this interaction effortless.

You could enable this same behaviour by cleverly swapping in an <input> or <textarea> when an element is clicked. This is in fact the way that a number of websites still handle inline editing. The problem with this approach is that it involves writing a load of JavaScript to switch in the new <input> or <textarea>, and CSS to match it’s styling to the original element. Using contenteditable solves both of these issues.

How do you see yourself using contenteditable in your projects? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Useful Links

• WHATWG Standard
• Can I use… contenteditable
• WorldWideWeb, the first web client

The post Native Rich-Text Editing with the contenteditable Attribute appeared first on Treehouse Blog.