This annual conference is scheduled for Thursday, April 21 from 8AM-4PM at Martin’s West, 6821 Dogwood Road, Baltimore, MD  21244. Member registration is open.  To register, contact the MEEC Office at MEEC-Office@usmd.edu

MEEC thanks all of the Vendors participating in the annual Member Conference and Vendor Showcase.  Special thanks to Sponsorship Vendors;

• Platinum Sponsors;  Adobe Systems, Daly Computers, Inc., Data Networks, Bell Techlogix, Cambridge Computer, Microsoft. 
• Gold Sponsor,  Applied Technology Services.
• Silver Sponsors; Blackboard, Dell, Inc. ePlus Technology, Inc.  
• Bronze Sponsors CAS Severn, DSR Inc., Presidio, Skyline Technology Solutions, SLAIT Consulting. 

For a complete list of Vendors click here.

The Conference Keynote Address, Security Self Service: How To Do Your Own Compromise Assessment, will be delivered by Corey White, VP of Professional Services @ Cylance and is hosted by MEEC Vendor, Cambridge Computer.

This annual conference is scheduled for Thursday, April 21 from 8AM-4PM at Martin’s West, 6821 Dogwood Road, Baltimore, MD  21244. Member registration is open.  To register, contact the MEEC Office at MEEC-Office@usmd.edu

            Participating Vendors

            Keynote Speaker

            Concurrent Sessions

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.