We’re excited to share our very first alumni post! The reflection below was written by Cassandra Morales (UMBC Class of 2013) who worked in the Women’s Center from 2012-2013.

Binge-watching Netflix is a favorite college past-time that I carried into my post-undergraduate life. There is nothing like the satisfaction of finishing all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or the excitement of the addition of a new season of Call the Midwife. When the third season of Scandal was added, I happily started it. However, out of all the twists and turns, there was one that stood out to me, and one that I continue to think on; when Mellie is raped by her father-in-law, it may not be the most shocking twist, but it is one I feel is worth critique.

For most, the actual experience of rape is not like a bad day at work, but it’s treated in the same light: many of the characters are impacted for a few days and then get over it quickly. The event happens in a vacuum, dealt with and dispensed in only a few episodes. To me, this seems like a highly unrealistic representation and indicative of the fact that it’s not about the victim, but for the story or other characters. The viewer does grasp how far Mellie is willing to go to further her husband’s political career (and therefore her own). What is not explained is how Mellie copes with the trauma, and, much like real-life cases, the focus is not the impact on the victim, but the impact on everyone else.

While writing this, I realized what might be the most frustrating part is that I can say this is not the most shocking twist in Scandal. Inadequate representations of rape are highly prevalent in TV shows nowadays (American Horror Story, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead to name a few). While I do think TV shows are a good platform to discuss rape and sexual assault, it does not seem right that it is only portrayed in one way. Sexual assault happens in so many different ways, impacts the victim in different ways*, and that should be reflected in what we watch. I begin to wonder if people who are most able to write about that experience, women specifically, are not well represented among the writers of these shows.

I will not stop watching Scandal, nor for that matter will I stop binge-watching TV on Netflix. However, what I will take away from this experience is the importance of being a conscious consumer. Critiquing a show that you love (or a store, or a sport) does not inherently mean that you must write it off. In fact, it means the opposite. I love watching TV and I am deeply invested in what I watch. As a woman, as well as a feminist, I must ask that my experiences, and the experiences of my peers, be valued in my TV shows because I value them. By critiquing them, I am more aware of what is lacking in my favorite shows. As a result, I am able to create what I want to see in the world. I encounter problematic issues in the places I shop, the music I listen to, and even the books that I read. It is impossible to be without a problematic aspect in your life. Ignoring these issues solves nothing. With my power as a consumer, I am obligated to reflect and critique and ask for more.

*If you know someone who has been sexually assaulted, here’s some important ways you can respond and support. UMBC community members can also receive support and resources through UMBC’s Voices Against Violence Program and offices like the Women’s Center. For more information on resources, visit the Women’s Center website. 

Critical Social Justice week is fast approaching (this February from the 16th to the 20th) and the theme this year is “Creating Brave Spaces”. To unpack and explore this idea, we had the Critical Social Justice Student Alliance tell us what the theme meant to them and how we can use it in our social justice work. Emily Eaglin, incoming president of this new student organization, created this helpful video that documents our conversation and expands upon what brave spaces can be. Check it out below!

We were inspired by Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens’ article, “From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces,” and for some highly recommended further reading, you can access it here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Critical Social Justice campaign, check out our WordPress, like our Facebook page, and/or follow us on Twitter!

The Women's Center is excited to announce that the Returning Women Students Scholarships Application for 2015-2016 is now available. The deadline for submission is Friday, April 3, 2015.

This common application enables eligible students to apply for more than one of the Returning Women Students Scholarships using the same application. The three available scholarships are:

• Charlotte W. Newcombe Scholarship & The UMBC Scholarship for Mature Students
• AEGON Scholarship
• The Richard & Roselyn Bryson Neville Memorial Fund for Returning Women Scholarship

All undergraduate students over the age of 25 and with at least 60 credits may be eligible. You must be completing your first undergraduate degree. 

Each scholarship has additional eligibility requirements which can be found on the common application instructions. 

The application is attached to this announcement. Please be sure to read over the eligibility requirements before applying. 

If you have any questions concerning the application process or the scholars program requirements, please contact Jess at womens.center@umbc.edu. 

We will also be hosting 2 informational sessions related to the application process and scholars program requirements. The information sessions will be held in the Women's Center on Wednesday, February 25th from 12-1pm or Wednesday, March 26th from 4-4:45pm.

Applications are due Friday, April 3rd at 4pm

The UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department seeks to fill two tenure-track faculty positions for its Computer Science program and is especially interested in candidates whose research areas include security and data analytics and related fields. Apply by January 15, 2015 for full consideration.

UMBC has a large and vibrant computing community with nearly 100 faculty and more than 3100 students enrolled in computing programs that include computer science, cybersecurity, computer engineering, electrical engineering, information systems, human-centered computing, intermedia and digital arts, and bioinformatics.

Our location in the Baltimore-DC corridor puts us in the center of one of the largest concentrations of federal agencies and research and development centers and many industrial research labs, including the new Cybersecurity Federally Funded R&D Center. We benefit from an excellent computing infrastructure that includes several high-performance computing clusters and participation in the National LambdaRail network.

The CSEE Department also has three new positions for full-time lecturers. The College of Engineering and Information Technology has a position for a full-time lecturer or Professor of the Practice to focus on the needs of incoming computing majors through teaching, advising, and helping develop programs in computing. This person will work closely with faculty in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department and Information Systems Department. UMBC’s Information Systems department is accepting applications for three tenure track faculty positions in data science, software engineering and human-centered computing.

The UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department seeks to fill two tenure-track faculty positions for its Computer Science program and is especially interested in candidates whose research areas include security and data analytics and related fields. Apply by January 15, 2015 for full consideration.

UMBC has a large and vibrant computing community with nearly 100 faculty and more than 3100 students enrolled in computing programs that include computer science, cybersecurity, computer engineering, electrical engineering, information systems, human-centered computing, intermedia and digital arts, and bioinformatics.

Our location in the Baltimore-DC corridor puts us in the center of one of the largest concentrations of federal agencies and research and development centers and many industrial research labs, including the new Cybersecurity Federally Funded R&D Center. We benefit from an excellent computing infrastructure that includes several high-performance computing clusters and participation in the National LambdaRail network.

The CSEE Department also has three new positions for full-time lecturers. The College of Engineering and Information Technology has a position for a full-time lecturer or Professor of the Practice to focus on the needs of incoming computing majors through teaching, advising, and helping develop programs in computing. This person will work closely with faculty in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department and Information Systems Department. UMBC’s Information Systems department is accepting applications for three tenure track faculty positions in data science, software engineering and human-centered computing.

Dissertation Defense

TABEL — A Domain Independent and Extensible
Framework for Inferring the Semantics of Tables

Varish Vyankatesh Mulwad

8:00am Thursday, 8 January 2015, ITE325b

Tables are an integral part of documents, reports and Web pages in many scientific and technical domains, compactly encoding important information that can be difficult to express in text. Table-like structures outside documents, such as spreadsheets, CSV files, log files and databases, are widely used to represent and share information. However, tables remain beyond the scope of regular text processing systems which often treat them like free text.

This dissertation presents TABEL — a domain independent and extensible framework to infer the semantics of tables and represent them as RDF Linked Data. TABEL captures the intended meaning of a table by mapping header cells to classes, data cell values to existing entities and pair of columns to relations from an given ontology and knowledge base. The core of the framework consists of a module that represents a table as a graphical model to jointly infer the semantics of headers, data cells and relation between headers. We also introduce a novel Semantic Message Passing scheme, which incorporates semantics into message passing, to perform joint inference over the probabilistic graphical model. We also develop and explore a “human-in-the-loop” paradigm, presenting plausible models of user interaction with our framework and its impact on the quality of inferred semantics.

We present techniques that are both extensible and domain agnostic. Our framework supports the addition of preprocessing modules without affecting existing ones, making TABEL extensible. It also allows background knowledge bases to be adapted and changed based on the domains of the tables, thus making it domain independent. We demonstrate the extensibility and domain independence of our techniques by developing an application of TABEL in the healthcare domain. We develop a proof of concept for an application to generate meta-analysis reports automatically, which is built on top of the semantics inferred from tables found in medical literature.

A thorough evaluation with experiments over dataset of tables from the Web and medical research reports presents promising results.

Committee: Drs. Tim Finin (chair), Tim Oates, Anupam Joshi, Yun Peng, Indrajit Bhattacharya (IBM Research) and L. V. Subramaniam (IBM Research)

UMBC GM Niclas “The Dark Knight” Huschenbeth plays GM Nadezhda Kosintseva from UT Dallas in the fifth round of the Pan-Am chess tournament.

Congratulations to the UMBC chess team for placing third in the 2014 Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship and qualifying to advance to the President’s Cup on April 5-6 at the New York Athletic Club.  This tournament, known as the Final Four of College Chess, will determine the 2015 U.S. college team chess champion.

The UMBC team in this year’s Pan-Am consists of GM Niclas Huschenbeth, IM Levan Bregadze, IM Tanguy Ringoir, GM Akshayraj Kore and WGM Nazi Paikidze (alternate).

The final standings were: Webster University A (5.5 points), the University of Texas at Dallas A (5 points), the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (5 points) and Texas Tech University A (4.5 points). UTD placed ahead of UMBC by virtue of winning their match.

You can view the final results on the tournament website and review selected games on Monroi.

Photo by Marlayna Demond. Sitting (left to right): Joel DeWyer, Business Manager; Dr. Alan T. Sherman, Director and GM Sam Palatnik, Coach. Standing (left to right): GM Akshayraj “The Indian Knight” Kore; IM Levan “The Georgian Gangster” Bregadze; GM Niclas “The Dark Knight” Huschenbeth, Captain; IM and WGM Nazi “The Black Widow” Paikidze and IM Tanguy “The Belgium Butcher” Ringoir.

The UMBC chess team won its match (4-0) against Lindenwood University in the first round of the 2014 Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship being held this week in South Padre Island, Texas. Five more rounds will be played over the next three days to determine winner and the top four USA schools, which will compete in the President’s Cup championship April 5-6 at the New York Athletic Club to determine the U.S. college team chess champion.

UMBC’s chess team has won or tied for first place a record ten times at the Pan-Am and a record six times at the President’s Cup. The UMBC team in this year’s Pan-Am consists of GM Niclas Huschenbeth, IM Levan Bregadze, IM Tanguy Ringoir, GM Akshayraj Kore and WGM Nazi Paikidze (alternate).

CSEE professor Alan Sherman, director of UMBC’s chess program, reports that the field is especially strong this year with 22 International Grandmasters (GM) or International Woman Grandmaster (WGM) and notes that “At least one strong school will not make the Final Four”.

You can view the latest results on the tournament website and watch selected games live on Monroi.