Name: Robert Ford

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: Coastal Resources Inc.

Position Title: Environmental Technician

Major(s)/Minor(s): Environmental Science

Expected Graduation Year: May 2016

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

At Coastal Resources, I have had the opportunity to work on a variety of different projects across many disciplines. From simple data entry to fish surveys, I am on my toes every single day, as there is something new to learn through each job/experience. As an intern, I assisted with tasks which included wetland delineation, field surveys, and the assessment of flora/fauna across the Mid-Atlantic Region. More specifically, these projects required me to become sufficient in a multitude of tasks including data entry, taking measurements of trees, and even being able to catch fish!

Describe the process of obtaining your internship, research, or co-op opportunity.

I had been searching for an internship within the environmental field for quite sometime and had a few interviews along the way, and even a few offers for intern positions, until I came upon this opportunity. My mother told me that one of her patients at the Anne Arundel Medical Center worked for an ecological consulting company (Coastal Resources). It just so happened that they had an intern position that they wanted to fill. Through a few email exchanges and an interview, I was able to obtain the position! 

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

I have had the chance to work with some of the brightest and passionate people in the environmental field. That being said, being able to assimilate myself among these individuals has been an eye-opening experience. Although I was one of the youngest and most inexperienced people that is working at CRI, I proved to myself that a confident attitude and the desire to learn will get you anywhere, both mentally and socially.

How do you believe you have made an impact through your work?

I believe this has impacted me greatly, as I mentioned above. Most of all, I believe that the work that I am doing currently is going to help me pursue my love of the environment, and this has the potential to lead to other things. Within this job field, there are tons of ways to innovate and improve other's way of living, and through this, I think that we can start to tackle some of our environmental woes. 

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

Stay social. I would have never found this opportunity or even be able to get through the interview process had I not developed my social skills. I believe that hard work and searching for that next job/internship are going to help, but you need to stay social to get that opportunity, succeed in the interview process, and excel in your interactions with co-workers. We live in a socially-driven world.

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Want to be the next Intern of the Week? Make sure to fill out this form and stay tuned. New interns are announced every Friday!

ENEE MS Thesis Defense

Blind source separation for detection of abandoned objects:
Exploiting different types of diversity

Suchita Bhinge

2:30pm Friday, 13 November 2015, ITE 325B

Due to the increase in security concerns, automated detection of abandoned objects has become an important application in video surveillance. Because of its increasing importance, a number of techniques have been proposed recently to automatically detect abandoned objects. The general procedure implemented for detection of abandoned objects includes background subtraction or foreground object extraction followed by post-processing steps in order to classify the foreground object as an abandoned or non-abandoned object. However, these techniques make use of a number of user-defined parameters such as track time, co-ordinates of the object/owner, the vicinity of the object, and properties of the object such as its shape, color, among others.

In this thesis, we present a new technique based on blind source separation (BSS) for detection of abandoned objects that does not keep track of the extracted objects or owners and does not require a dual background scheme for stationary object extraction. Order selection is an important step for our implementation of blind source separation based scheme since this step captures the signals with high energy and disregards signals that are not relevant to the detection of abandoned objects. In this thesis, we show that the performance of ICA improves when an algorithm that assumes a flexible source distribution along with multiple types of diversity, such as higher-order statistics and sample dependence is used for the estimation of the source components. ICA, however, can only model one dataset at a time, thus limiting its usage to monochrome frames. In order to address this issue, we also present another implementation of blind source separation called independent vector analysis (IVA), a recent extension of ICA to multiple data that takes the dependence across multiple datasets into account while retaining the model of independent components within each dataset. We show that the proposed blind source separation techniques performs successfully in complicated scenarios such as crowd, occlusion, and illumination changes.

Committee: Drs. Tulay Adali (chair), Joel Morris and Mohamed Younis

The UMBC IEEE Branch will hold an Arduino workshop on Saturday November 14th and next Saturday November 21st from 2:00-6:00pm in SHER 003 (Lecture Hall 4). It’s a great opportunity for people to learn about microcontrollers and circuit basics and how to use Arduino for building cyber-physical systems for home automation, robotics, games and more.

The Arduino microcontroller is a great device for anyone who wants to learn more about technology. It is used in a variety of fields in research and academia and may even help you get an internship. Our instructors have used the Arduino for researching self-replicating robots and remote-controlled helicopters, hacking into a vehicle’s control system, and using radars to detect human activity in a room. Some of the hackathon projects by our IEEE members include developing a drink mixer that wirelessly connects with a Tesla Model S and a full-body haptic feedback suit for the Oculus Rift. The Arduino is a wonderful tool and is fairly easy to use. Everyone should learn how to use it!

UMBC’s Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is hosting two Level 1 workshops this semester. They are hosted this Saturday (Nov. 14th) and next Saturday (Nov. 21st). The workshop will be SHER 003 (Lecture Hall 4) from 2pm to 6pm. Please register online to sign up for either workshop. Contact Sekar Kulandaivel (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) if you have any questions.

The workshop is open to all majors (minimum coding experience recommended). You only need to bring your laptop and charger and download and install the Arduino IDE. We hope to see many of you this weekend! You REALLY don’t want to miss out on this opportunity.

Dr. Tyson King Meadows, Chair of the Department of Africana Studies, is looking for individuals to volunteer for one day to help out with his research. He needs volunteers to be the talent in foreground and background photos which will be used in ads. Volunteers will receive candy as compensation. Volunteers will sign release forms allowing the photos to be used in the ads.

Two groups are needed:

1.      6-7 Adult Males (ages 18 +), 6-7 Adult Females (ages 18+)

○      mix of Caucasian, African American, and Asian to portray professionals

○      Will need to provide own clothes (Neckties and suit jacket for men, business wear for women)

2.     7 - 10 young adults - men and women - Prefer first year college students

○      Mix of Caucasian and African American

○      Need to appear as high-school to college-student age range

No modeling experience required or necessary.

Must be available on Wednesday, 11/18, in the morning (likely starting at 9:00am) for two hours.

Candy will be provided for compensation. 

To be considered for this, e-mail right away ra4tkm@umbc.edu.  Attach at least 1 photo of yourself that is well lit and in focus against a plain background. This should not be a professional head shots or any other flattering photos that are out of date. Photos must be an exact representation of what you look like today.

SUBJECT LINE for the e-mail should be: Photoshoot Model

In the e-mail include:

Name:

Telephone Number:

Email:

Age:

Height:

Information Systems Department Distinguished Speaker

An Extension of Self: The Present
and Future of Wearable Computing

Professor Thad Starner
School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Noon Monday, 16 November 2015, ITE 459, UMBC

Google Glass captured the world’s imagination, perhaps more than any other head-up display. Yet, why would people want a wearable computer in their everyday lives? For over 20 years, Professor Thad Starner and his teams of researchers have been creating living laboratories to discover the most compelling reasons to integrate humans and computers. They have created “wearables” that augment human memory and the senses, focus attention, and assist communication. Is it possible that computers and wearable devices will transform humans for the better, enhancing key abilities and leaving more time and space for deeper connections? In this talk, Starner will discuss why wearables, more than any class of computing to date, have the potential to extend us beyond ourselves.

Thad Starner is a wearable computing pioneer; he has been wearing a head-up display based computer as part of his daily life since 1993 – perhaps the longest such experience known. Starner is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Technical Lead on Google’s Glass. In 1990 he coined the term “augmented reality” to describe the types of interfaces he envisioned at the time. He is a founder of the annual ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, now in its 19th year, and has produced over 450 papers and presentations on his work.

Starner is an inventor on over 80 United States patents awarded or in process. In addition to Google Glass, he has worked on a wireless glove that teaches the wearer to play piano melodies without active attention; a game for deaf children that helps them acquire language skills using sign language recognition; wearable computers that enable two-way communication experiments with wild dolphins; and wearable computers for working dogs to better communicate with their handlers.