Posted February 25, 2016 by Megan Hanks

The UMBC’s Cyberdawgs have emerged victorious from the finals of the 2015 Maryland Cyber Challenge (MCC), winning the top prize for a student team with a total of 18,979 points and outscoring the professional division’s winning team by more than 5,500 points.

Posted February 24, 2016 by Megan Hanks

UMBC’s Helena Mentis, assistant professor of information systems, has received the distinguished CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to advance her research on surgical telemedicine. Beginning in June 2016, the $518,121, five-year award will enable her to examine the benefits of collaborative image interaction through gesture-based tools for remote surgeons to share expert knowledge in the operating room.

Mentis’ work focuses on “touchless interaction” interfaces and how physicians, specifically surgeons, can utilize technologies while remaining sterile during surgery. The technologies that she uses in her lab are commercially available, she explains, and surgeons can wear the devices under their scrubs. Mentis began her research with the Xbox Kinect and eventually began working with the Leap Motion. Most recently she has worked with the Myo armband and Google Glass.

Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research, shares, “We congratulate Dr. Mentis on her NSF CAREER Award, a highly-deserved recognition of her innovation and growing national reputation as a researcher and scholar of human-computer interaction and health informatics.”

The CAREER Program is one of NSF’s most prestigious awards, created to support “junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholar through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.” The funding will support Mentis’ project, “Collaborative Image Manipulation and Annotation in Surgical Telemedicine.”  

Mentis will advance understanding of which tools and best practices can most effectively facilitate telemedicine, teleconsulting (consulting between surgeons with similar expertise and experience), and telementoring (interaction between two professionals, one of whom has more experience and expertise than the other). In addition, she will determine the verbal and nonverbal mechanisms that medical professionals can use to share knowledge and images quickly, while avoiding contamination in the operating room.

“The NSF CAREER Award will allow me to take my work to the next level,” says Mentis. She explains that although telemedicine is a popular topic in discussions about the future of medicine, and many promising technologies are now available, “there are no clear directions yet about the best ways to do telemedicine.”

Mentis utilizes a surgical training space at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, Maryland, to test gestural interface functionality before bringing technologies to surgeons in operating rooms. She predicts that over the course of the grant she will continue to incorporate new emerging technologies into her research.

In addition to having clear benefits for medical practitioners and patients, Mentis’s work also provides research opportunities for graduate, undergraduate, and high school students. Bringing students into the training room early on, to work closely with these new technologies, gives them a more direct connection with engineering careers and encourages them to stay in STEM fields, she explains.  

“It’s not just about data systems or solving computational problems,” says Mentis. “We get to show and explain what the students can do with a degree.”

UMBC faculty have received 29 NSF CAREER awards in the last two decades. Most recently Christopher Hennigan, assistant professor of chemical, biochemical and environmental engineering, received a CAREER award of over half a million dollars to further his atmospheric particle research. Gymama Slaughter, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering, received a CAREER award in December 2013 for to develop a self-powered implantable glucose monitor, research she recently presented at TEDxBaltimore.

Image: Helena Mentis demonstrating a few of the gesture-based tools that she uses in her work. Photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. 

Posted February 24, 2016 by Megan Hanks

Kafui Dzirasa ‘01, chemical engineering, has been named a recipient of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He will be presented with the award during a White House event in spring 2016. This award is the highest honor that the U.S. government presents to science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their research careers.

Spatiotemporal Data Mining and Analytics:
Issues, Methods, and Applications

Shen-Shyang Ho, Nanyang Technological University

12:00pm Thursday, 3 March 2016, ITE325b, UMBC

The extensive and ubiquitous uses of sensors (e.g., satellites, in-situ sensors) and smartphones have resulted in the collection of huge amount of time-stamped data with location information. These large-scale dynamic datasets present many research challenges and application opportunities. In this talk, I describe my research work on spatiotemporal tasks related to (1) application-specific pattern mining, (2) prediction methods, (3) similarity search, and (4) privacy issue. Moreover, I highlight my new research direction in array-based distributed database for spatiotemporal domains.

Shen-Shyang Ho is a tenure-track assistant professor in the School of Computer Engineering at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore since January 2012. Before this, he was a researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park from 2010 to 2011. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology from 2009 to 2010 and a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) from 2007 to 2009. Shen-Shyang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from George Mason University in 2007 and his Bachelor (Honors) in Science (Mathematics and Computational Science) from the National University of Singapore in 1999. His research was supported by NASA, JPL, and GSFC between 2007 and 2012. His current research is supported by the Ministry of Education (Singapore), National Research Foundation (Singapore), Rolls Royce (UK), and BMW (Germany). He has two US patents and one pending Germany patent. He has given technical tutorials at AAAI (2011), IJCNN (2011), and ECML (2014).

Host: Cynthia Matuszek

This Wednesday is the deadline to apply to the Cangialosi Business
 Innovation Competition! You only have one day left!

Don't miss this chance to win $5,000 to help you launch your business
idea. All you have to do is tell us what it is!

Participants will be paired with an experienced entrepreneur who will
personally train and mentor them to perfect their pitch and flesh out
their business idea. This is an opportunity you don't want to miss, and
all you need to do is apply!

Register Here

What is the Cangialosi Business Innovation Competition (CBIC)? 

CBIC is an opportunity for UMBC graduate and undergraduate students who aspire to fulfill entrepreneurial pursuits. Participants will experience the process of planning a startup business by submitting a competitive and realistic 3-5 page business plan and qualifiers will present their idea in a final competition. 

NOTE: the CBIC requires that technology (mobile, web, etc), be a focus of your startup idea. 

Who should participate? 

Any UMBC student (full or part time, graduate or undergraduate) with a dream, of launching his or her own business and who plans on actively pursuing that dream. 

Why participate? 

The CBIC is a next level competition designed to give aspiring entrepreneurs a real-life opportunity to experience every aspect of launching a startup. The competition will pair you with business mentors from the community and will give you practice presenting your idea to a panel of experts. It will also provide "real world" experience and helpful feedback. In addition to mentorship from real world experts, the program is also designed to connect students to the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. 

Winners also get seed funding for their businesses, and support from our sponsors including: 

·         Free legal services

·         Accounting advice 

·         Membership at the award winning Betamore campus in Federal Hill 

·         Fundraising advice & pitch practice with member of the Baltimore Angels 

Prizes: 

First Prize = $5,000

Second Prize = $2,000

Third Prize = $1,000