Did you know?

Technology research at universities has led to some developments that we all recognize.  The first graphical computer game, called OXO, was developed by A.S. Douglas at Cambridge University in 1952 for the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) computer, which simulates the game, noughts and crosses. It was one of the first games developed in the early history of video games. The player entered their input using a rotary telephone controller, selecting which of the nine squares on the board they wished to move next. Douglas programmed the game as part of a thesis on human-computer interaction at Cambridge. 

Want to conduct research and create something innovative? 

Become a URA Scholar!
Undergraduate Research Awards provide up to $1,500 to undergraduate students to support their research or creative work with a UMBC faculty mentor on an original project. UMBC students of all years and disciplines are invited to apply, as long as they will remain enrolled at UMBC long enough to complete the proposed work. 

Apply by Feb. 16: https://ur.umbc.edu/ura/

Contact Dr. April Householder at aprilh@umbc.edu for more information.

Free Screenings of the AlphaGo movie at UMBC

UMBC will hold two free, public screenings of the award-winning documentary film AlphaGo, one 7:00-9:00pm Tuesday evening, February 13 and another 2:00-4:00pm Friday, February 16. Both will be held in lecture hall 5 (EMGR 027) in the UMBC Engineering Building (maps: campus, google).  Each screening will be followed by comments and discussion by several faculty members.

AlphaGo is the first computer program to defeat a Go world champion, and arguably the strongest Go player in history. It was developed by DeepMind, a London-based company that specializes in AI and machine learning that was acquired by Google in 2014.

“On March 9, 2016, the worlds of Go and artificial intelligence collided in South Korea for an extraordinary best-of-five-game competition, coined The DeepMind Challenge Match. Hundreds of millions of people around the world watched as a legendary Go master took on an unproven AI challenger for the first time in history…Directed by Greg Kohs with an original score by Academy Award nominee, Hauschka, AlphaGo chronicles a journey from the halls of Oxford, through the backstreets of Bordeaux, past the coding terminals of Google DeepMind in London, and ultimately, to the seven-day tournament in Seoul. As the drama unfolds, more questions emerge: What can artificial intelligence reveal about a 3000-year-old game? What can it teach us about humanity?”

Go has been considered to be one of the most challenging games for AI systems to master because of its enormous search space and the difficulty of evaluating board positions and moves. AlphaGo’s success is especially significant in that it is an example of the powerful new deep learning approaches based on neural networks.

Please join us at one  of the screenings this exciting film and take part in the discussions that follow.

The post Free Screenings of the AlphaGo movie at UMBC, 7-9pm Tue 2/13 and 2-4pm Fri 2/16 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.