• Four-Week Introductory Institute
• Team Research Project
• Two-Week Concluding Institute

Interdisciplinary and open to all majors and years! Deadline Jan 20!

Learn more at their website

Interested in finding a great Mexican restaurant?

Siri, the iPhone app turned personal assistant, can help you with that.  How about making a plane reservation?  Got it.  She can schedule a meeting and make a phone call.

Siri’s also great for some non-traditional, personal assistant tasks – score some pot, pick up Viagra, even dump a dead body.  Siri’s got the answers.

Except if you ask about abortion.  Or birth control.  Or emergency contraceptives.  Or a mammogram.  Or for help after being raped.

Siri stirred up quite the controversy this week when users started reporting that Siri was less than helpful when trying to access any of these resources.  Check out some of these responses.

Jill: I need contraception.
Siri : I don’t understand ‘I need contraception.’”

Amaditalks: I was raped.
Siri: Is that so?

Q: I need birth control. Where can I go for birth control?
Siri: I didn’t find any birth control clinics.” [This was repeated every time I asked about birth control, all three times. This is also the answer given when I asked, “What is birth control?”]

When users asked Siri to help them find abortion providers, she responded back either with no results or with crisis pregnancy centers – pro-life organizations that disguise as reproductive health clinics in order to deter women from getting care.

In fact, pro-life groups have praised Siri for her oversights.

The controversy has elicited an apology from Apple, which attributed the problem to a tech glitch.

However, one writer put out another explanation:

I am not under the impression that Apple is anti-choice or that they’re out to screw over women. I think they’re just reliant on too many dude programmers.

With a paucity of female programmers, this explanation could be pretty likely.  Another commentator for Forbes further explains the problem.

The problem isn’t that anyone involved with this hates women. The problem is that they just don’t think about women very much. Siri’s programmers clearly imagined a straight male user as their ideal and neglected to remember the nearly half of iPhone users who are female.

What do you think?  Is Siri sexist?

Congratulations to the zombies, who won this past week’s full game!

Here are the plans for the rest of the semester:

Sunday, December 4 we’ll have an open officer meeting at 8 pm at the couches on the third floor of the Commons.  We’ll be primarily discussing Game 2.

Monday, December 5 and Thursday, December 8 will be our last one-nights of the semester.  We will meet in Lecture Hall 2 at 7 pm, as usual.

Saturday December 10 and 17 will be our last two games of the semester, so you can use the week to study for finals and such, and then spend some time relaxing on the weekend with HvZ.

Over the winter, we will be working hard on the Invitational that we’re hosting in the spring.  We’ll release the date soon.  If anyone wants to help us with any Invitational stuff, email us (umbchvzofficers@gmail.com).

Also, if there are a fair number of players on/around campus over the winter, we wouldn’t be opposed to having a game or practices every once in a while.  Let us know what your plans are!

As always, keep updated by checking the Facebook Page, Google+ Page, the Google Calendar, and emails from the mailing list.

A part-time, two person effort UMBC VP for Research Don Engel and his wife Marianne nearly won the DARPA Shredder Challenge. Their entry, Schroddon got a late start, but held the top leaderboard spot for quite a while before being bested by “All Your Shreds Are Belong To U.S.” at the end. The first prize was $50,000 and second was … well, priceless.

Just over a month ago, DARPA announced The Shredder Challenge competition to develop a system to solve puzzles by reassembling images of shredded documents with a $50,000 prize for the winning entry. Yesterday the prize was won by All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S., a San Francisco-based team that was the first to correctly reconstructed each of the five challenge documents.

UMBC Assistant VP for
Research Don Engel

It's unfortunate that there was no prize for second place, because that honor was won by Schroddon, a two-person effort including UMBC Assistant Vice President for Research Don Engel. While most of the top teams had a handful of software engineers and used commercial crowdsourcing services, Schroddon was a part-time effort by Dr. Engel and his wife, Dr. Marianne Engel.

Both Don and Marianne have Ph.D.s in Physics, but Don also has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, did graduate work in computational linguistics, and develops software in his spare time for fun. Two of his active software development projects are ShowMe3D, an application for Mac and iOS that can be used to take and view 3D photos, and When2meet, a free web-based tool for finding the best time for a group to meet.

The Shredder Challenge was the latest competition run by DARPA as a low cost way to spur research on new problems. The press release describes it this way.

"The Shredder Challenge represents a preliminary investigation into the area of information security to identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used by war fighters operating in war zones to more quickly obtain valuable information from confiscated, shredded documents and gain a quantitative understanding of potential vulnerabilities inherent to the shredding of sensitive U.S. National security documents."

"Lots of experts were skeptical that a solution could be produced at all let alone within the short time frame,” said Dan Kaufman, director, DARPA Information Innovation Office. “The most effective approaches were not purely computational or crowd-sourced, but used a combination blended with some clever detective work. We are impressed by the ingenuity this type of competition elicits."

Over 9,000 teams registered for the Shredder Challenge and it is quite an achievement for the Engles to have placed second, especially against many much larger teams. If you are interested in seeing what the data is like, you can download it from the DARPA site.

These challenge competitions are becoming more common and are a great way for students to get involved in independent research and maybe win fame and fortune.