Name: Aastha Jain

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START)

Major(s)/Minor(s): Interdisciplinary Studies: Criminology and Criminal Justice

Expected Graduation Year: May 2015

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

START triages (or "takes in") news media covering incidents of terrorism from around the world. Senior staff at START creates summaries of the terrorist incidents and makes them available on the Database Management System (DMS). The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is run on the DMS and includes variables such as the location, perpetrators, and targets of each terrorist event. My job is to identify who was targeted in any given terrorist attack around the world.

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

I enjoy that interns are allowed the responsibility of coding on such an important database. Senior-level staff members bring interns into their meetings to discuss coding progress. In that way, I feel like I am part of something truly unique and important.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

I have been able to bring an interdisciplinary perspective to this internship. This is not possible everywhere. START is made up of a team of researchers, programmers, media specialists, and IT personnel all working together. This is interdisciplinarity at its finest.

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

My advice to students seeking an internship is to make sure the internship fits you, not just that you fit the internship. As students we always want to look qualified but we need to make sure not to sacrifice our personal qualities.

How do you see your experience as meaningful? This might involve skills you’ve gained, information you’ve learned, mentors you’ve connected with, or projects you’ve completed.

My experience is meaningful because there is nothing like the Global Terrorism Database! There is no where else researchers and academic professionals can search for certain variables of all the terrorist incidents in one area. Where else can you look up the number of businesses that were targeted in Yemen during a specific span of time??

Please provide a short quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process.

Viewing terrorist incidents from all around the world provides me a global perspective on the nature of terrorist attacks.

More insight about Aastha’s internship experience.

I worked on the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) at The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). START has defined terrorism for its purposes so all incidents included are of a uniform standard. The GTD is an incident-level database that can be searched based on many variables. Want to know how many police personnel were killed by firearms in Kenya between 2000-2007? That is the kind of information provided by the GTD.

More specifically, I worked on the target classification distinction of the database. There were four interns populating this portion of the GTD for 2012-2013 terrorist attacks around the world. Currently, there are over 20 types of targets within the GTD. Some of these include civilians, transportation, military, and business targets amongst many. The type of target was determined after reading aggregated news media about each attack from many sources. Staff members worked on filtering through the articles and determining relevancy before interns began coding.

Based on my networking and interests, I asked Dr. Gary LaFree, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, to come serve as the INDS Council of Majors Annual Petrovich Lecturer. He came and spoke at UMBC on March 2nd to shed the myths of terrorism and share some of the exciting research coming out of START. I loved my experience at START and was very fortunate to foster that relationship past a semester.

MS Thesis Defense

Learning Hierarchical Workflows Using Community Detection

Akshay Peshave

1:00pm Friday, 18 April 2014, ITE 325b

Workflows identified from user event logs and click-stream data are useful as knowledge bases for behavioral analysis and recommendation systems. In this study we identify abstractions or summaries of event logs modeled as user activity flow networks. The abstractions are identified based on structural properties as well as user activity flow dynamics over the network using community detection methods. We apply a fast modularity optimization and multi-level resolution approach to detect hierarchical community structure in user activity flow networks. The detected communities are compared to those detected by the information-theoretic map equation minimization approach to weigh pros and cons of the fast modularity optimization approach in the workflows context. We further attempt to identify the most probable sources and sinks of user activity in individual communities and trim the network accordingly to reduce entropy of the workflow abstractions.

Committee: Drs. Tim Oates (chair), Matt Schmill and Tim Finin

MS Thesis Defense

Learning Hierarchical Workflows Using Community Detection

Akshay Peshave

1:00pm Friday, 18 April 2014, ITE 325b

Workflows identified from user event logs and click-stream data are useful as knowledge bases for behavioral analysis and recommendation systems. In this study we identify abstractions or summaries of event logs modeled as user activity flow networks. The abstractions are identified based on structural properties as well as user activity flow dynamics over the network using community detection methods. We apply a fast modularity optimization and multi-level resolution approach to detect hierarchical community structure in user activity flow networks. The detected communities are compared to those detected by the information-theoretic map equation minimization approach to weigh pros and cons of the fast modularity optimization approach in the workflows context. We further attempt to identify the most probable sources and sinks of user activity in individual communities and trim the network accordingly to reduce entropy of the workflow abstractions.

Committee: Drs. Tim Oates (chair), Matt Schmill and Tim Finin

Translational Bioinformatics Approaches to Evaluate
and Implement Genomic Medicine Programs

Dr. Casey Overby, Assistant Professor

Program for Personalized and Genomic Medicine
University of Maryland – Baltimore

1:00pm Friday, 25 April 2014, ITE 325b, UMBC

There is a growing evidence base to support the use of many genomic applications in healthcare. There are, however, several barriers to healthcare providers making use of genomic data and information on a routine basis. In this talk, I will describe some of our challenges and successes with implementing genomic medicine programs within the Program for Personalized and Genomic Medicine at UMB, introduce one way to conceptualize translational research and translational bioinformatics in this context, describe a proposed model for evaluating and implementing genomic medicine programs, and describe some of my current and planned research in translational bioinformatics.

Casey L. Overby is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Program for Personalized and Genomic Medicine and the Center for Health-related Informatics and Bio-Imaging at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. She received her Masters of Biotechnology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, her PhD in Biomedical and Health Informatics and a Graduate Certificate in Public Health Genetics from the University of Washington in 2011. In 2013, she completed her post-doctoral training in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University and started her position at University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Host: Marie desJardins, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Translational Bioinformatics Approaches to Evaluate
and Implement Genomic Medicine Programs

Dr. Casey Overby, Assistant Professor

Program for Personalized and Genomic Medicine
University of Maryland – Baltimore

1:00pm Friday, 25 April 2014, ITE 325b, UMBC

There is a growing evidence base to support the use of many genomic applications in healthcare. There are, however, several barriers to healthcare providers making use of genomic data and information on a routine basis. In this talk, I will describe some of our challenges and successes with implementing genomic medicine programs within the Program for Personalized and Genomic Medicine at UMB, introduce one way to conceptualize translational research and translational bioinformatics in this context, describe a proposed model for evaluating and implementing genomic medicine programs, and describe some of my current and planned research in translational bioinformatics.

Casey L. Overby is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Program for Personalized and Genomic Medicine and the Center for Health-related Informatics and Bio-Imaging at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. She received her Masters of Biotechnology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, her PhD in Biomedical and Health Informatics and a Graduate Certificate in Public Health Genetics from the University of Washington in 2011. In 2013, she completed her post-doctoral training in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University and started her position at University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Host: Marie desJardins, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Steve Storck (Doctoral Student) and Chris Paymon (Masters Student) from the MicroMaterials Characterization Lab, directed by Professor Marc Zupan, UMBC Department of Mechanical Engineering, won their divisions in the annual Baltimore/Washington Society for the Advancement of Materials and Process Engineering (SAMPE) student research night.  The event was held on February 26, 2014 at UM College Park this year, and brings student researchers from UMBC, University of Maryland College Park, University of Delaware and University of West Virginia together annually to showcase their research and for friendly competition judged by academics and engineering professionals. 

For the 2014 event both UMBC students won their divisions: Steve Storck participating in the oral presentation with his talk ‘Multi-Length Scale Characterization of Additively Manufactured Hybrid Nickel-Copper-Fused Deposition Model Sandwich Cores’ and Chris Paymon in the poster presentation with his submission ‘Local Mechanical Behavior Measurements of Friction Stir Welded Titanium’. 

These achievements came with an award, as well.  Steve and Chris will both go, expenses paid, to the national competition, where further success would move them on to the international competition hosted by SAMPE Europe.

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and there are many controversial topics that come from the discussion of sexual assault. This includes sexual assault being gender blind, hypermasculinity and victim blaming.  The article below discusses cultural differences as an explanation for why, what Americans consider to be obviously unacceptable, some may consider to be dismissible. 

Article link:  http://www.stopvaw.org/sexual_assault_and_cultural_norms