Hello Student Organization Advisors!!!

You’re all invited to nominate individuals, organizations, and events for the annual Black and Gold Awards. It only takes a few minutes to recognize all of the amazing accomplishments from this past year!

http://www.umbc.edu/studentlife/becomealeader/awards/blackandgold.php

All of you are invited to join us for the celebration on Monday May 2^nd at 6pm in the U.C. Ballroom. Dinner will be provided!

Lastly, there is one new/separate portion to the awards this year! There will be 3 additional award categories called the “Community Choice Awards” (leader, organization, and event of the year). Each member of the community will be able to cast their vote through a MyUMBC group!

Look out for an invite to join the MyUMBC group to cast your vote in the next week!

Feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns!

Sara

Diversity, Identity, and Inclusion

Dr. Manuel A. Perez-Quinones

Associate Professor of Computer Science
Virginia Tech

11:00am – 12:00pm Friday 15 April 2011, ITE 229

In this talk, Dr. Pérez-Quiñones presents basic definitions of these terms and briefly discusses some of the research literature on them.  He presents evidence that supports diversity and inclusion beyond the typical social justice argument. With this as a framing context, Dr.  Pérez-Quiñones describes his experiences over the last few years working in this domain in the context of university administration, professional service activities, and researcher. Anecdotally, the stories show incidents of biases, misconceptions, misunderstandings, and resistance to change.  Based on these experiences, Dr.  Pérez-Quiñones draws conclusions and provides advice for working in diverse groups, recruiting a diverse graduate student population, and fostering an inclusive work environment.

Dr. Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones is Associate Professor of Computer Science, and a member of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech. Pérez-Quiñones holds a DSc in CS from The George Washington University, Washington, DC. His research interests include human-computer interaction, personal information management, user interface software, digital government, and educational/cultural issues in computing. He is the author of over 80 peer-reviewed journal and conference proceeding publications, as well as co-author of 10 book chapters. He is Chair of the Coalition to Diversify Computing (2010-2011), a committee of the CRA, ACM, and IEEE-CS. Dr. Pérez-Quiñones is Director of the Personal Information Management Research lab. The PIM lab studies how individuals use technology to organize and use their information to satisfy their day to day needs. Lately the group has been studying how we make sense of the multiple devices used to manage our personal information. Outside of HCI, he has collaborated with researchers in the areas of Digital Government, Software Engineering, Computing Education, Digital Libraries, and Data Mining. Dr. Pérez-Quiñones was born and raised in Puerto Rico.

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

Sponsors: Dr. Pérez-Quiñones's visit to UMBC is sponsored by Women in Science and Engineering, the PROMISE program, the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and the Department of Information Systems.

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He’s winning! Charlie Sheen makes fun of himself in the latest viral video, behold.

Who said space geeks can’t party? They just save it for special occasions like the 50th anniversary of humanity’s 1st flight in space.

9/11 families rejoice.  The 9/11 mastermind is to be tried in Gitmo instead of NY.

“It’s EVIL” says a woman charged for attacking a painting at the National Museum of Arts. Her reasoning, it has nudity, it depicts homosexuality, and is not good for children.

DARPA is developing a new component to track “quiet submarines” to be part of the Navy’s Anti Submarine Warfare toolkit and is using a software game to collect effective strategies for its use.

“Before autonomous software is developed for ACTUV’s computers, DARPA needs to determine what approaches and methods are most effective. To gather information from a broad spectrum of users, ACTUV has been integrated into the Dangerous Waters™ game. DARPA is offering this new ACTUV Tactics Simulator for free public download.

This software has been written to simulate actual evasion techniques used by submarines, challenging each player to track them successfully. Your tracking vessel is not the only ship at sea, so you’ll need to safely navigate among commercial shipping traffic as you attempt to track the submarine, whose driver has some tricks up his sleeve. You will earn points as you complete mission objectives, and will have the opportunity to see how you rank against the competition on DARPA’s leaderboard page. You can also share your experiences and insights from playing the simulator with others.”

This is a kind of crowdsourcing — leveraging the experiences of a large number of people playing a game. Applying various kinds of machine learning algorithms to the simulator data could be an effective way to train an autonomous tool for this task.

Today’s events. For a full list of this weeks events, click here.

Thanks to msnbc

In a rare show of democracy in Haiti, Sweet Micky Martelly won the presidential runoff with 67.57 percent of the votes.

From a Western point of view, he would not stand a chance, considering he has no political experience and is a carnival singer.  Yes, a carnival singer, a popular one at that.  He is know for blending African and Latin rhythms.

His win over experienced law professor and former senate Manigat clearly shows the power of the young generation in Haiti.  Martelly appealed to over 50% of the Haitian population who is under 25.