Join us this Saturday, April 11th for the Digital Entertainment Conference (DEC) 2026! This year, we’re going bigger than ever with an expanded schedule, exciting industry speakers, and dedicated time for you to showcase your own creative projects.

Location: Engineering 027 & Atrium
Time: 12:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Featured Talks

We’ve got an incredible lineup of speakers from across the games industry:

• 12:00 PM - Rotem Ganel
  “When the Cake is a Lie, Sharpen your Razor and Cut to the Pie”
• 1:00 PM - Seth Davis
  “12 Games 12 Months”
• 2:00 PM - Lunch Break
• 3:00 PM - Diwa de Leon
  “I Abandoned a Successful Film Music Career for Beeps and Boops”
• 4:00 PM - Eric Jordan
  “The Art of Software Engineering”
• 5:00 PM - Wayne Kubiak
  “Getting your foot in the door in the gaming industry: Why your origin story matters”
• 6:00 PM - Networking & Project Showcase
  Meet the speakers, connect with other students, and explore creative projects from your peers!

The Event is More Than Just Talks

Alongside our speaker sessions, we’re extending the event to include time for student project showcases, so come check out what our club members and local students have been working on over the past year! We've got 10 different games looking for constructive feedback and playtesters.

Whether you're into game development, music, design, or interactive media, DEC 2026 is a great place to connect, learn, and get inspired.

I found a lot of good apartments in downtown area especially close to the UMBC shuttle stops and most of the affordable ones are 3 bedroom apartments which is great. That means average rent cost would come out to \~$400 

I do need male roommates tho so if you are interested, leave a comment or dm me. 

The Graduate Student Association (GSA) election voting for the academic year 2026–2027 closes 5pm today, and we invite you to participate.

Before casting your vote, please use your UMBC email account to access the candidate videos and take a few minutes to review them so you can make an informed decision:
Drive Link: Senator Nominee Speeches

How to Vote:

1. Visit the voting page: https://my3.my.umbc.edu/groups/officialgsaelections
2. Log in to your myUMBC account.
3. Under the Posts section (as shown in the screenshot), you will find:
   • A post for your respective college’s Senator election
   • A post for the Student Affairs Senator election
4. Accept the invite to vote (if you haven’t already) and open both posts and
5. Cast your votes as follows:
   • Select and rank your top 4 candidates for your college Senator position.
   • Select and rank your top 4 candidates for the Student Affairs Senator position.

Important Notes:

• Please ensure you vote in both posts (your respective college and Student Affairs).
• Follow all voting guidelines and respect the election process.

Voting is open now and will close on Sunday 5th April 2026 at 5:00 PM.

Your participation is important in shaping graduate student representation at UMBC. We encourage you to review the candidates and cast your vote.

Best Regards,

Reena Kale and Neil Kpamegan

Election Committee Co-Chairs.

Private room available in a townhouse for a male at Westland Gardens for a 3-month move-in, available from May to August. 

Fully furnished 2BHK townhouse: 

• Spacious Living Room with a sofa + TV. 

• Oven, Microwave, Fridge, Dishwasher.
• In-house Laundry(Washer + Dryer).
• Centralised Heater and Cooler.
• 1 min walk to the UMBC Bus stop.
• 10-minute walk to UMBC campus.
• Rent is 600$ + utilities.

DM for more information: +12029375716 or email me at IO95979@umbc.edu

To all chip users,

The DoIT Research Computing & Data (RCD) Team is continuing to work on the storage system performance issues that have been impacting the chip cluster since early February. For some users this is intermittent or not noticeable, for others the issue is persistent. When present, these issues are manifesting as unusually long file read/write/load times for operations as simple as "ls" or "cd" when navigating the filesystem or as complicated as long slurm job runtimes.

While the RCD Team continues to optimize the RRStor Ceph File Storage System to meet the needs of the diverse user base, certain research workflows have been identified as specifically vulnerable to low performance. These workflows are those which feature the reading and/or writing of many (more than one hundred thousand) small (10s of KB or less) files or their enclosing directory from the storage system.

In light of this, the RCD Team has identified a number of research groups whose job runtimes have been adversely affected and are beginning to reach out to group PIs and group members to assess cluster workflows. The RCD Team is continuing to work with our support vendor with multiple touch-points a week to test new ideas and potential solutions while minimizing the impact to users.

Other types of standard cluster operations (e.g., software loads) are still generating long wait times, and the RCD Team will continue to investigate and propose solutions to these and similar problems.

We will continue to give weekly updates and give substantive updates as they develop.

Roy Prouty
Assistant Director for Research Computing
UMBC DoIT

In an open forum session, Dr. Jessica Standbury, Dr. John Donahue, and Dr. Allison Papadakis will answer questions and discuss how AI is reshaping our inner lives and relationships, and its impact on our mental health. AI expert Jason Perry will guide the dynamic Live Q&A session.  Register here to get the link for this online event.

Video of the session

Hello everyone,

We will be having our next meeting on Monday, 4/6 from 12:00-1:00 in ITE 231. We will be discussing our club constitution among other things. If you have any questions or concerns please let someone from the club eboard know.

Kick off Graduate Student Appreciation Week by finding your competitive rhythm.

Join us and the Military and Veterans Office for a night of board games, video games, and community.

You deserve a break from the research—come hang out!.

HAPPENING NOW FROM 3-6PM

COMMONS GAMEROOM