Dear Participants, Alumni, and Friends of PROMISE,

Today, I celebrate 10 years as the Director of PROMISE: Maryland’s AGEP. For those of you who remember my first day at UMBC, I started out in an office on the 5th floor of the Administration Building. I am so happy that so many of you who were students then, have gone on to finish your master’s and doctoral degrees. You are leaders, professors, directors of programs, you have built families, garnered hosts of friends, and you have your own mentees. As I move into the 10th year as your director, I hope to be able to continue to serve you well and help you to reach your dreams.

Please mark Saturday, August 17, 2013 on your calendars. We will be celebrating our PROMISE growth at the 2013 Summer Success Institute (SSI) on UMB’s campus. We invite all students, alumni, and friends to join us for the celebration! Please plan to join us! I would love to see you there!

The pictures below from that first year include two former peer mentors who are no longer with us, the late Jessica Soto Perez (pink sweater), and in the second picture, the late Dr. Angela Grant (center). Jessica was a Peer Mentor (Chemical Engineering) at UMBC, and Angela was a Peer Mentor (Math)  at UMCP. Current students: remember that you are here and alive, so you can finish, you can continue toward that goal! It remains my honor to serve you.

Very sincerely,

Renetta Tull

First PROMISE Peer Mentors at UMBC

First PROMISE website, 2003

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Machine learning techniques for predicting chronic diseases

Vladimir Korolev

1:00pm Friday, 5 April 2013, ITE 227, UMBC

In recent years we saw an explosion of cheap genetic tests, which lead to the emergence of personalized medicine. Personalized medicine is defined as practice of medicine that is tailored to specifics of individual patient. My work addresses the problem predicting an individual’s predisposition towards certain chronic diseases based on the their genetic makeup. The benefits of such work allow for more selective administration of invasive tests such as biopsies, which are known to cause health problems themselves.

Recently NIH has done a number of Gene Wide Association Studies q that resulted in massive datasets containing subjects’ generic makeup and labeled with clinical data including occurrence of chronic diseases. Unfortunately, given the relatively small number of patients in such studies and the vast number of genes possessed by human beings, these datasets cannot be analyzed with traditional statistical predictive models, which require a large number of samples (patients) with a very few features per sample.

My work attempts to solve this problem by employing state of the art machine learning techniques. In the past year I have built a software system that is capable of crunching of multi-terabyte scale datasets to refactor the NIH data into the form that is palatable by modern big data systems. I have run initial stages of feature selection. I will present the current state of the work and future plans. Another goal of this work is to ensure the repeatability of the experiments and flexibility to run with any similar dataset from current and future studies

Vlad Korolev is a PhD student in the UMBC Computer Science program. His research interests are in the are of personalized medicine, machine learning and large scale data processing. Vlad has considerable experience in the industry specializing in IT security, large scale data processing and the organization of software development processes.

In this article we will take a look at three popular Javascript physics libraries and one that is currently in development: box2dweb, Ammo.js, JigLibJS, and Cannon.js. For each one, a quick introduction will be given and then the library will be rated based on ease of use, performance, and feature set.

Rob Gravelle shows how to develop a simple Eclipse plugin that extends the New menu to let you open a basic skeleton of a customized class in the editor.

Chorus.im has created a free HTML5 Messenger App that works across every modern mobile device as well as any PC platform.

Students kicked off Career Week 2013 a bit more “dressed to impress” than normal this year thanks to alumni, staff and faculty donations to “Clothes The Deal,” a program through which students improved their career wardrobes (for free!) and better prepared themselves for future job searches.

See the full Career Week schedule here.

Several dozen students waited in line outside UMBC’s Women’s Center Thursday morning for the first crack at hundreds of pieces of donated business attire: skirts, blazers, ties, and suits. By the end of the event Friday afternoon, 362 students had taken at least one piece of clothing, much of which was supplied by staff and faculty, but also UMBC alumni working at T. Rowe Price — the main sponsor of this year’s Career Week — who organized a clothing drive at their offices.

“I think I’m in love,” cooed senior psychology major Comfort Oke, who had her friend, junior Regine Charlot, take a photo with her smartphone as she tried on a navy blue blazer with shiny brass buttons. “This was a fabulous idea. I think it’s an amazing thing for students, and it’s exciting that alumni helped make this possible.”

Senior theatre major Amalia Mark left “Clothes The Deal” with a cute little number she plans to wear on interviews for jobs in student engagement. “I got the best dress ever!” she exclaimed, showing off her new frock.

Special thanks to the Pikesville ZIPS for donating the cleaning of 300 items for “Clothes The Deal.” Other event sponsors were the Career Services Center, the Student Alumni Association, the Office for Academic and Pre-Professional Advising, UMBC Athletics, Chartwells, the Shriver Center, and the Division of Student Affairs.

Students kicked off Career Week 2013 a bit more “dressed to impress” than normal this year thanks to alumni, staff and faculty donations to “Clothes The Deal,” a program through which students improved their career wardrobes (for free!) and better prepared themselves for future job searches.

See the full Career Week schedule here.

Several dozen students waited in line outside UMBC’s Women’s Center Thursday morning for the first crack at hundreds of pieces of donated business attire: skirts, blazers, ties, and suits. By the end of the event Friday afternoon, 362 students had taken at least one piece of clothing, much of which was supplied by staff and faculty, but also UMBC alumni working at T. Rowe Price — the main sponsor of this year’s Career Week — who organized a clothing drive at their offices.

“I think I’m  in love,” cooed senior psychology major Comfort Oke, who had her friend, junior Regine Charlot, take a photo with her smartphone as she tried on a navy blue blazer with shiny brass buttons. “This was a fabulous idea. I think it’s an amazing thing for students, and it’s exciting that alumni helped make this possible.”

Senior theatre major Amalia Mark left “Clothes The Deal” with a cute little number she plans to wear on interviews for jobs in student engagement. “I got the best dress ever!” she exclaimed, showing off her new frock.

Special thanks to the Pikesville ZIPS for donating the cleaning of 300 items for “Clothes The Deal.” Other event sponsors were the Career Services Center, the Student Alumni Association, the Office for Academic and Pre-Professional Advising, UMBC Athletics, Chartwells, the Shriver Center, and the Division of Student Affairs.

The Center for Urban Families will honor Diane Bell-McKoy ’73, sociology, CEO of Associated Black Charities, at its 2nd annual Urban Visionary Award (UVA) ceremony later this month, the group announced. Read more about Bell-McKoy in UMBC Magazine.

CFUF, which was founded in Baltimore by fellow UMBC alumnus Joseph T. Jones, Jr. ’06, social work,  focuses on taking an integrated approach to connecting men and women to career paths and strong family models. Read more about Jones in UMBC Magazine.

Besides Bell-McKoy, who will receive CFUF’s local award, the organization will also honor Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, and her husband, Peter Edelman, Georgetown Law Professor, that night. Of the awards, CFUF states:

“Out of desire to continue our integrated approach to connecting men and women to career paths and strengthening the bonds between fathers and their children, the UVA was created to honor local and national leaders who have blazed trails in service to their communities.”