Holi is a spring festival in India and Nepal, also known as the festival of colors or the festival of sharing love. It is also celebrated in Pakistan, Suriname, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, South Africa, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Mauritius, and Fiji. It is celebrated in the month of Phalgun on full moon day according to Hindu calendar. 

 This colorful festival also celebrates the eternal love of Radha and Krishna.It teaches humankind to transcend above the caste and creed. It is a festival to forget old grievances and meeting others with great warmth & high spirit. This festival begins with lightening of bonfire on Holi eve. Next day, people play Holi with different types of colors, abirs and gulals. They greet each other with "Shubh Holi" i.e. Happy Holi and send warm wishes of the festival. 

Click the following link for a brief video: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaysqwFoVOE

Make sure you look out for The Hindu Students Council’s Holi event, to celebrate the festival of colors! It is on April 15th at 4pm on the Quad and is free for everyone!

Urban Resources Initiative Internships in Baltimore

Summer 2016

For descriptions of the internship projects listed below visit their website.

Opportunities with the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks:

·         Conservation and Archiving of the Records of the Recreation Division

·         Park and Recreation Program Promotion

·         Park or Recreation Center User Survey

·         Outdoor Recreation Activities/Healthy Baltimore Initiative

·         Weed Warriors Program Tracking & Outreach

·         Recreation Center or Aquatics Program Assistant

·         Documenting Property Values and Community Perceptions Near  Major Parks

·         Assist Development of a Plan for a Major Park

Opportunities with the Parks & People Foundation:

·         Buried Hydrologic Resource Overlay Mapping

·         Vacant Lot Re-Use: Assessing Vacant Lot Maintenance and Stewardship

·         Growing Green Initiative: Resource Guide

·         Community Greening Resource Network (CGRN) Assistant

·         Urban Ecology Education (Baltimore Ecosystem Study)

Skill Set Required: 

See the web site listing for specific skills, background, and interests for each of the internships.

Preferred Areas of Study/Major(s):

Environmental Science/Studies and other liberal arts majors

Some Details:

In Baltimore, MD

Summer 2016 (June-August)

15-20 hours per week

Flexible Workdays

Application Requirements: 

Priority Application Deadline: April 15, 2016

Required Documentation:

Resume, Cover Letter, Other - Faculty contact for reference

To apply, go to www.parksandpeople.org/learn/urban-resources-initiative

URI has provided internships for Baltimore-area students with the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks and with the Parks & People Foundation for over 25 years.

Come check out Kayla Barrett's poster at URCAD!

In 2015, a TEDtalk-style documentary produced in China entitled “Under the Dome” went viral on the internet, alerting the entire world to the problem of air pollution and the lack of environmental safeguards in place in China. In a modern society, the protection of the environment is vital to the health of the people, not to mention the legitimacy of the government. This research addresses the question of how the government has managed environmental policy, the nature and scope of the health crisis facing Chinese society, and the strategies the Chinese people have taken to cope. To assess the impact of pollution on society, I analyzed government policies, popular media and scholarly reports, focused on air pollution in major cities, especially Beijing. The paper concludes that the Chinese state is continuing to put economic expansion above environmental health and leaving the people to defend themselves from the ever-growing problem.

Kayla Barrett
The Social Impact of Air Pollution in China
Mentor: Constantine Vaporis
UC Ballroom | 10:00 a.m. – Noon

A Probabilistic Approach to Modeling Socio-Behavioral Interactions

Arti Ramesh, University of Maryland, College Park

Noon Thursday, 24 March 2016, ITE325b

The vast growth and reach of the Internet and social media have led to a tremendous increase in socio-behavioral interaction content on the web. The ever-increasing number of online interactions has led to a growing interest to understand and interpret online communications to enhance user experience. My work focuses on building scalable computational methods and models for representing and reasoning about rich, heterogeneous, interlinked socio-behavioral data. In this talk, I focus on one such emerging online interaction platform—online courses (MOOCs). I develop a family of probabilistic models to represent and reason about complex socio-behavioral interactions in the following real-world problems: 1) modeling student engagement, 2) predicting student completion and dropouts, 3) modeling student sentiment in discussion forums toward various course aspects (e.g., academic content vs. logistics) and its effect on their course completion, and 4) designing an automatic system to predict fine-grained topics and sentiment in online course discussion forums. I demonstrate the efficacy of these models via extensive experimentation on data from twelve Coursera courses. These methods have the potential to improve learning and teaching experience of online education participants and focus limited instructor resources to increase student retention.

Arti Ramesh is a PhD candidate at University of Maryland, College Park. Her primary research interests are in the field of machine learning and data science, particularly on probabilistic graphical models. Her advisor is Prof. Lise Getoor. Her research focuses on building scalable models for reasoning about interconnectedness, structure, and heterogeneity in socio-behavioral networks. She has published papers in peer-reviewed conferences such as AAAI and ACL. She has served on the TPC for ACL workshop on Building Educational Applications and has served as a reviewer for notable conferences and journals such as NIPS, Social Networks and Mining, and Computer Networks. She has won multiple awards during her graduate study including the outstanding graduate student Dean’s fellowship 2016, Dean’s graduate fellowship (2012-2014), and yahoo scholarship for grace hopper. She has worked at IBM research and LinkedIn during her graduate study. She received her Masters in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

LEDO’S PIZZA FUNDRAISER

Grab some pizza for dinner and show support for UMBC's     Best Buddies CHAPTER on

THURSDAY, MARCH 24^TH 

4-8PM.

Address:

4636 Wilkens Avenue

Baltimore, MD 21229

(410) 242-8868

See reviews below: