How to Run Sustainable and Effective
Computing Summer Camps

Note: One of the workshops will be held at UMBC on December 6, 2015.

Summer camps are a great way to increase interest in computing. They can especially be helpful for girls and underrepresented minorities. The Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance is offering a webinar and two workshops this fall on how to run financially self-sustaining and effective computing summer camps. Attendees who are from ECEP partner and associate states can apply for up to $4,999.99 in funds for equipment for the camps if they attend one of the workshops (in-person or remotely).

The webinars and workshops are free and lunch will be provided at the workshops. Attendees who attend the workshops in-person and live more than 30 miles from the workshop location can apply for up to $100 reimbursement for expenses if they are from our partner or associate states. The workshops can also be attended remotely via webinar software that only requires a browser and internet connection.

Who can attend

College and University faculty and staff, high school computing teachers, and non-profit staff that offer summer camps at colleges and universities

When and where

• 1 hour webinar – Oct 28th from 8pm – 9pm EDT – We recommend that you attend this to find out how to get started, especially if you haven’t run computing camps before.
• 1st workshop – November 21 10am – 3pm CST – At the University of Texas at Austin
• 2nd workshop – Dec 6, 12pm – 5pm EST – At the University of Maryland Baltimore County

ECEP has $45,000 in seed funds that we can use to buy equipment for these camps thanks to a generous gift from Oracle as well as funds from the National Science Foundation. Qualifying institutions will have to apply for the funds. The webinar and workshops are to help you understand how to create a great application and run effective and financially self-sustaining camps.

What you will learn

• What to consider when starting or expanding camps for 4th – 12th grade students
• The equipment and tools that we recommend you use in the camps
• Details on how to plan, advertise, run, and evaluate the camps
• How to apply for up to $4,999.99 in funds for equipment for the camps
• How the applications for equipment funds are evaluated

See the ECEP flyer and apply for the webinar and workshops here.

Lyrics Augmented Multi-modal
Music Recommendation

Abhay Kashyap

1:00pm Friday 30 October, ITE 325b

In an increasingly mobile and connected world, digital music consumption has rapidly increased. More recently, faster and cheaper mobile bandwidth has given the average mobile user the potential to access large troves of music through streaming services like Spotify and Google Music that boast catalogs with tens of millions of songs. At this scale, effective music recommendation is critical for music discovery and personalized user experience.

Recommenders that rely on collaborative information suffer from two major problems: the long tail problem, which is induced by popularity bias, and the cold start problem caused by new items with no data. In such cases, they fall back on content to compute similarity. For music, content based features can be divided into acoustic and textual domains. Acoustic features are extracted from the audio signal while textual features come from song metadata, lyrical content, collaborative tags and associated web text.

Research in content based music similarity has largely been focused in the acoustic domain while text based features have been limited to metadata, tags and shallow methods for web text and lyrics. Song lyrics house information about the sentiment and topic of a song that cannot be easily extracted from the audio. Past work has shown that even shallow lyrical features improved audio-only features and in some tasks like mood classification, outperformed audio-only features. In addition, lyrics are also easily available which make them a valuable resource and warrant a deeper analysis.

The goal of this research is to fill the lyrical gap in existing music recommender systems. The first step is to build algorithms to extract and represent the meaning and emotion contained in the song’s lyrics. The next step is to effectively combine lyrical features with acoustic and collaborative information to build a multi-modal recommendation engine.

For this work, the genre is restricted to Rap because it is a lyrics-centric genre and techniques built for Rap can be generalized to other genres. It was also the highest streamed genre in 2014, accounting for 28.5% of all music streamed. Rap lyrics are scraped from dedicated lyrics websites like ohhla.com and genius.com while the semantic knowledge base comprising artists, albums and song metadata come from the MusicBrainz project. Acoustic features are directly used from EchoNest while collaborative information like tags, plays, co-plays etc. come from Last.fm.

Preliminary work involved extraction of compositional style features like rhyme patterns and density, vocabulary size, simile and profanity usage from over 10,000 songs by over 150 artists. These features are available for users to browse and explore through interactive visualizations on Rapalytics.com. Song semantics were represented using off-the-shelf neural language based vector models (doc2vec). Future work will involve building novel language models for lyrics and latent representations for attributes that is driven by collaborative information for multi-modal recommendation.

Committee: Drs. Tim Finin (Chair), Anupam Joshi, Pranam Kolari (WalmartLabs), Cynthia Matuszek and Tim Oates

“I’m pretty much just a corpse at this point.”

I cannot fully express how many times I’ve said those words in the past few weeks, or how many times the response has been:

“Same.”

Every time someone says “How’s it goin?” the collective response has been:

“Terrible. Everything is awful. Midterms suck. This is the worst.” (Or at least something to that effect.)

It seems like as a student body we’ve officially gone past the “I’m fine. Just tired.” lie and have moved into complete honesty. A large percentage of us are stressed out, malnourished, sleep deprived, and drowning in homework.

But never fear! Shia LaBeouf is here!

With midterms season coming to a close we’re bringing you the Women’s Center Motivational Roundup to help get you back into the swing of things between now and finals. Here is a collection of pictures, videos, and memes that motivate us for a variety of reasons. These might not motivate you as much as they motivate us, but it’s worth a try.

-MJ Jalloh-Jamboria

“He makes me feel like I can do absolutely anything. I’m never more motivated to push through a project than I am after watching this video.”

-Kayla Smith

Parks and Rec gifset!

-Megan Tagle Adams

“They make me feel warm and fuzzy inside and remind me that I am a round, fuzzy ball of cute and I can TOTALLY DO THIS.” – Dan Willey

“Growing up, I didn’t have many role models, other than my mother. I would find myself constantly comparing myself to the girls in my classes. I always wanted to be as smart, as pretty, etc. as some other girl. Needless to say, this ruined my self-confidence and resulted in me being very unhappy because all of my actions were based on being as ________ as someone else. I was too wrapped up in impressing others and failed to acknowledge my own negative perception of myself. While scrolling through Tumblr one day, I came across this quote and it has resonated with me ever since. Not only did it incorporate my love of flowers, but it made me realize that comparing myself to others was pointless and a recipe for unhappiness. I am capable of experiencing growth and doing great things, regardless of anyone else.” – Meage Clements 

“Biblical motivation (if you’re into that kind of thing) This is my favorite piece of scripture and it immediately calms me down.” – Kayla Smith

“I was afraid to go back to school. I thought that if I tired again and had similar results to last time, it would just prove that I was not smart, or capable. I had to get over my fear and here I am! Almost finished!!!” – Carrie Cleveland

“It calms me down and reminds me that I’m okay where I am and I don’t need to freak out. It helps me breathe and stay calm so I can get more work done.” Julia Gottlieb

“Oh Leslie. She just looks like she’s really goin at it – and it looks like something I would do and totally have done!” – Jess Myers

“I have been in school for 10 years and I need to remember that I am SO close to the end and SO far away from the beginning.” – Carrie Cleveland

If you’re looking for some more tangible ways to deal with stress UMBC is definitely a good place to find resources. The Counseling Center on campus located across from Erickson Hall has individual counseling and workshops on stress management. They also have The Mind Spa which offers aroma therapy, biofeedback video games, and light therapy, among other services.

As always, self-care should be high on your list of priorities and the Women’s Center can serve as a place to kick back and relax or just take a break from the library. We also have a meditation room and a quiet study space outside of the lounge.

Take care of yourself this semester. We know it’s hard right now, but just do your best.

As a wise man once said:

“Sometimes in life you’re gonna start slow. That’s okay.” – Apollos Hester

But a wiser woman also said:

“If you think taking care of yourself is selfish, change your mind. If you don’t, you’re simply ducking your responsibilities.” – Ann Richards

Researcher of the Week:
Valerie Lewton

Meet Val,
She is an Anthropology major and Summer Researcher.

Her research explores the differences in the quality of life between humans and zombies. Most humans perceptions of zombies and zombie culture are usually cast in a negative light. Zombies, in fact can be a part of a productive society if given the chance, but the break/lunch rooms will have to remain separate. Valerie hopes her research will clarify the disparaging fears that have malign the zombie identity. “Undead is not a dirty word!”

Val plans to pursue a Ph.D. in the medical field and to establish a medical interpretation company to improve translation and interpretation of zombie services in inpatient and outpatient unhealthcare facilities.

She is the current local titleholder in the Miss Zombie Organization! She frequently rambles through out the state looking for places to eat.