The University of Florida’s Graduate School cordially invites prospective graduate students to apply for our Fall 2017 Campus Visitation Program (CVP) which will be held November 2-3, 2017.

During their trip to the campus, successful underrepresented minority applicants will have the opportunity to:

• Meet with faculty and staff from their prospective academic programs
• Receive information on admissions, financial aid, and housing
• Interact with current UF graduate students and student organizations

The University of Florida will provide lodging for two nights, most meals, and up to $500 in airfare or mileage. We will also reimburse the UF Graduate School Application fee, if accepted into the Campus Visitation Program.

To be eligible to participate in the Campus Visitation Program, applicants must meet the following eligibility requirements:

• Have applied to Graduate School at UF
• Have a preferred minimum cumulative GPA of 3.0 (on a 4.0 scale) in course work completed at a regionally accredited college or university

AND

• Have a U.S. Citizenship or hold permanent residency status

AND

• Be either (1) an racial/ethnic minority, or (2) a first-generation college student

For more information and to complete an online application, please visit our website: CVP 2017. While we are aware that the deadline to apply is this Friday, September 1^st – there is a strongly possibility that it will be extended for a couple of more weeks.

If you've landed a career-related experience of 120+ total hours, make sure you have it recognized on your UMBC transcript through the Intern Success Practicum!

The Benefits

What Is the Intern Success Practicum?

How to Register 

Position Summary:

The candidate will be responsible for assisting in performing life science testing for water, pharmaceutical, and the agriculture sectors. The candidate will be instructed by the Chemist on duty.

 Major Duties:

·         Assist any Chemist on duty.

·         Learning laboratory skills and techniques.

·         May collect and prepare samples.

·         Documentation and record keeping of scientific work into laboratory notebook.

·         May move about 30 pounds of items around.

·         Monitor laboratory supply levels, list low level items for management approval.

·         Document daily laboratory monitory readings.

·         Washing lab utensils, organization of the lab and keeping the lab clean.

·         Duties included above and are not limited to the list above.

AI system designs clothing for your personal fashion style

Everyone knows that more and more data is being collected about our everyday activities, like where we go online and in the physical world. Much of that data is being used for personalization. Recent UMBC CSEE Masters student Prutha Date explored a novel kind of personalization – creating clothing that matches your personal style.

Date developed a system that takes as input pictures of clothing in your closet, extracts a digitial representation of your style preferences, and then applies that style to new articles of clothing, like a picture pair of pants or a dress you find online. This work meshes well with recent efforts by Amazon to manufacture clothing on demand. Imagine being able to click on an article of clothing available online, personalize it to your style, and then have it made and shipped right to your door!

This innovative research was cited in a recent article in MIT Technology Review, Amazon Has Developed an AI Fashion Designer.

Tim Oates, a professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County, presented details of a system for transferring a particular style from one garment to another. He suggests that this approach might be used to conjure up new items of clothing from scratch. “You could train [an algorithm] on your closet, and then you could say here’s a jacket or a pair of pants, and I’d like to adapt it to my style,” Oates says.

Fashion designers probably shouldn’t fret just yet, though. Oates and other point out that it may be a long time before a machine can invent a fashion trend. “People innovate in areas like music, fashion, and cinema,” he says. “What we haven’t seen is a genuinely new music or fashion style that was generated by a computer and really resonated with people.”

You can read more about the work in a recent paper by Prutha Date, Ashwinkumar Ganesan and Tim Oates, Fashioning with Networks: Neural Style Transfer to Design Clothes. The paper describes how convolutional neural networks were used to personalize and generate new custom clothes based on a person’s preference and by learning their fashion choices from a limited set of clothes from their closet.

The post UMBC researchers develop AI system to design clothing for your personal fashion style appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

1. Show your Commuter Gold Card to a Commuter Assistant at the event. 
2. Bring a ticket (or other form of physical evidence) to the OCSS office.
3. Publish a social media post on one of our pages (Facebook, Instagram, and/or Twitter)

• Gold: 6000 CP
• Silver: 4000 CP
• Bronze: 2000 CP

Are you interested in working in the government for the summer or after you graduate? If so, the Career Center would like to tell you about a great opportunity for UMBC students!

Workforce Recruitment Program
The Workforce Recruitment Program for College Students with Disabilities (WRP), coordinated by the Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) and the U.S. Department of Defense, is a recruitment and referral program that connects federal and private sector employers with highly motivated college students, graduate students, and recent graduates with disabilities who are eager to prove their abilities in the workplace through summer or permanent jobs.

Eligible students must:
- have a disability and be eligible under the Schedule A hiring authority
- be a United States citizen
- be enrolled in a degree program on a substantially full-time basis OR have graduated with a degree in April 2016 or more recently.

If you are interested in interviewing with a representative from WRP or learning more about the program, please contact: Caroline Bodnar, carolc@umbc.edu.

Please visit www.wrp.gov for more information regarding WRP and click on the student registration button to get started!  For more information watch this youtube video.

All application materials must be uploaded to the WRP site by October 17th by 12:00am PST. No late applications will be accepted. You will need time to get your registration approved by Caroline Bodnar, gather your resume and transcript, and complete your application, so please don’t delay!

We hope your fall semester is off to a great start!

How robots could help bridge the elder-care gap

Cynthia Matuszek, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Despite innovations that make it easier for seniors to keep living on their own rather than moving into special facilities, most elderly people eventually need a hand with chores and other everyday activities.

Friends and relatives often can’t do all the work. Growing evidence indicates it’s neither sustainable nor healthy for seniors or their loved ones. Yet demand for professional caregivers already far outstrips supply, and experts say this workforce shortage will only get worse.

So how will our society bridge this elder-care gap? In a word, robots.

Just as automation has begun to do jobs previously seen as uniquely suited for humans, like retrieving goods from warehouses, robots will assist your elderly relatives. As a robotics researcher, I believe artificial intelligence has the potential not only to care for our elders but to do so in a way that increases their independence and reduces their social isolation.

Personal robots

Robots can hand medicine to patients. UMBC Interactive Robotics and Language Lab, CC BY-SA

In the 2004 movie “I, Robot,” the robot-hating protagonist Del Spooner (played by Will Smith) is shocked to discover a robot in his grandmother’s house, baking a pie. You may have similar mental images: When many people imagine robots in the home, they envision mechanized domestic workers doing tasks in human-like ways.

In reality, many of the robots that will provide support for older adults who “age in place” – staying at home when they might otherwise be forced to relocate to assisted living or nursing homes – won’t look like people.

Instead, they will be specialized systems, akin to the Roomba, iRobot’s robotic vacuum cleaner and the first commercially successful consumer robot. Small, specific devices are not only easier to design and deploy, they allow for incremental adoption as requirements evolve over time.

Seniors, like everyone else, need different things. Many need help with the mechanics of eating, bathing, dressing and standing up – tasks known as “activities of daily living.” Along with daily help with cooking and managing their medications, they can benefit from a robotic hand with more intermittent things such as doing the laundry and getting to the doctor’s office.

That may sound far-fetched, but in addition to vacuuming robots can already mop our floors and mow our lawns. Experimental robots help lift people into and out of chairs and beds, follow recipes, fold towels and dispense pills. Soon, autonomous (self-driving) cars will ferry people to appointments and gatherings.

The kinds of robots already available include models that drive, provide pet-like social companionship and greet customers. Some of these technologies are already in limited trials in nursing homes, and seniors of course can already rely on their own Roombas.

Pepper, a social companion robot, in a retail environment. Tokumeigakarinoaoshima

Meanwhile, robot companions may soon help relieve loneliness and nudge forgetful elders to eat on a regular schedule.

Scientists and other inventors are building robots that will do these jobs and many others.

Round-the-clock care

While some tasks remain out of reach of today’s robots, such as inserting IVs or trimming toenails, mechanical caregivers can offer clear advantages over their human counterparts.

The most obvious one is their capacity to work around the clock. Machines, unlike people, are available 24/7. When used in the home, they can support aging in place.

Another plus: Relying on technology to meet day-to-day needs like mopping the floor can improve the quality of time elders spend with family and friends. Delegating mundane chores to robots also leaves more time for seniors to socialize with the people who care about them, and not just for them.

And since using devices isn’t the same as asking someone for help, relying on caregiving robots may lead seniors to perceive less lost autonomy than when they depend on human helpers.

Interacting with robots

This brave new world of robot caregivers won’t take shape unless we make them user-friendly and intuitive, and that means interaction styles matter. In my lab, we work on how robots can interact with people by talking with them. Fortunately, recent research by the Pew Research Center shows that older adults are embracing technology more and more, just like everyone else.

Now that we are beginning to see robots that can competently perform some tasks, researchers like Jenay Beer, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina, are trying to figure out which activities seniors need the most help with and what kinds of robots they might be most willing to use in the near term.

To that end, researchers are asking questions like:

• Do robots need to understand and convey emotion to be accepted?
• How can robots provide social support?
• Is it best when machines simulate eye contact with us?
• Does it help if they can converse?

But the fact is we don’t need all the answers before robots begin to help elders age in place.

Looking ahead

After all, there’s no time to lose.

The Census Bureau estimated that 15 percent of Americans – nearly one in six of us – were aged 65 or older in 2016, up from 12 percent in 2000. Demographers anticipate that by 2060 almost one in four will be in that age group. That means there will be some 48 million more elderly people in the U.S. than there are now.

I believe robots will perform many elder-care tasks within a decade. Some activities will still require human caregivers, and there are people for whom robotic assistance will never be the answer. But you can bet that robots will help seniors age in place, even if they won’t look like butlers or pastry chefs.

Cynthia Matuszek, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, UMBC, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post Prof. Cynthia Matuszek on how robots could help bridge the elder-care gap appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.