Betamore is an urban campus for technology and entrepreneurship that is home to dozens of startups and entrepreneurs and located at 1111 Light St. in Baltimore's Federal Hill neighborhood. They are holding a "startup crawl" on Thusday, 2 May 2013 from 6:00pm to 9:00pm where students and recent graduates can meet with people from the Baltimore technology and startup community.

"Are you a current student or recent graduate looking to enter the startup market through an internship or job? Are you a startup looking for the next best thing? Join us here at Betamore for our first Startup Crawl, an event that puts talented college and graduate students in the same room with the startup / tech community to learn the industry, create beneficial connections and discover what the Baltimore Tech community has to offer.

Shake a few hands, have a couple beers, and experience how fun working for a startup can be. This event is exclusive to students and recent grads (must be less than one year out of school)."

If you are interested, see their Facebook Startup Crawl event page and register for this free event.

Betamore is an urban campus for technology and entrepreneurship that is home to dozens of startups and entrepreneurs and located at 1111 Light St. in Baltimore's Federal Hill neighborhood. They are holding a "startup crawl" on Thusday, 2 May 2013 from 6:00pm to 9:00pm where students and recent graduates can meet with people from the Baltimore technology and startup community.

"Are you a current student or recent graduate looking to enter the startup market through an internship or job? Are you a startup looking for the next best thing? Join us here at Betamore for our first Startup Crawl, an event that puts talented college and graduate students in the same room with the startup / tech community to learn the industry, create beneficial connections and discover what the Baltimore Tech community has to offer.

Shake a few hands, have a couple beers, and experience how fun working for a startup can be. This event is exclusive to students and recent grads (must be less than one year out of school)."

If you are interested, see their Facebook Startup Crawl event page and register for this free event.

The team of Yelena Yesha, Karuna Joshi and Lily Bengfort has been selected for the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program for April.

The NSF I-Corps is a set of activities and programs that prepare scientists and engineers to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and broadens the impact of select, NSF-funded, basic-research projects. Combining experience and guidance from established entrepreneurs with a targeted curriculum, I-Corps is a public-private partnership program that teaches grantees to identify valuable product opportunities that can emerge from academic research, and offers entrepreneurship training to student participants.

2013 Service-Learning & Civic Engagement Conference
Community-Based Learning: Getting Real About Civic Engagement

Saturday, April 6th, 2013
8:30 AM - 4:00 PM
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM (optional networking event)

University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)

On Saturday, April 6th, 2013, UMBC, the Baltimore Collegetown Network, and Maryland-DC Campus Compact, along with many other area colleges and universities, are partnering to present this unique day-long conference. This is the sixth annual "Service-Learning & Civic Engagement Conference" and will be attended by students, faculty and staff from colleges and universities, as well as community organizations in the Maryland - Washington, DC region.

The purpose of the conference is to share success strategies among students, faculty and staff at institutions in partnership with a community voice throughout Maryland and DC on the topics of community service, service-learning and civic engagement.

REGISTER TODAY: http://sixthannualslcec.eventbrite.com 

To learn more please visit http://www.baltimorecollegetown.org/events/service-learning-conference/

Read a recent Breaking Ground Post written by Emily Scheerer ’14, computer science, is a CWIT Scholar and Technology Editor for The Retriever Weekly. Abigail Williams ’14, chemical engineering, is the president of the UMBC chapter of the Society of Women Engineers.

UMBC Information Systems

Sensor-based assessment of the quality
of human motion during therapeutic exercise

Dr. Portia Taylor
Social Security Administration

12-1pm Wednesday, 10 April 2013, ITE 459

Advances in technology and research have been employed in recent years to develop efficient mechanisms to deliver home-based exercise therapy to patients suffering from knee osteoarthritis, a degenerative disease associated with aging. Essential to the success of a therapeutic home-exercise program is the quality of the motion performed by the patient. The unsupervised nature of home-based exercise may lead to incorrect exercise performance by patients; however, current home-based exercise programs do not provide mechanisms for monitoring the quality of motion performed or for providing feedback to the patient. This lack of support has been found to be a factor in patient non-compliance to home exercise programs.

Our goal is to provide a motion sensor-based system that can evaluate the quality of exercise to support home rehabilitation. We introduce the Quality Assessment Framework (QAF) that uses low-cost motion sensors with data processing and machine learning techniques to assess the quality of human motion performed during therapeutic exercises. Data from fifteen persons with knee osteoarthritis was collected in a laboratory environment, and a classifier was trained using multi-label learning methods to detect descriptive characteristics of the patient's motion. These characteristics represent errors in the exercise performance as well as variables regularly monitored by the patient's therapist, such as speed.

Results from multi-label learning are presented and recommendations made on requirements for an in-home therapeutic exercise system. The QAF can be adapted to the home therapy needs of conditions other than knee OA. We present a preliminary design of the InForm Exercise System that utilizes the QAF and has the potential to present feedback to patients completing home exercise programs.

Portia Taylor received her BS degree in Computer Science from Grambling State University in 2007 and a Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2012. At CMU, she was part of the Quality of LifeTechnology Center, a NSF Engineering Research Center dedicated to the development of technologies for the elderly and disabled. Currently, Dr. Taylor works at the Social Security Administration as an IT Fellow. Her research interests include machine learning applications in biomedical engineering, intelligent systems for rehabilitation and physical therapy, and heath information technology.

UMBC CSEE Colloquium

Machine learning techniques for predicting chronic diseases

Vladimir Korolev

1:00pm Friday, 5 April 2013, ITE 227, UMBC

In recent years we saw an explosion of cheap genetic tests, which lead to the emergence of personalized medicine. Personalized medicine is defined as practice of medicine that is tailored to specifics of individual patient. My work addresses the problem predicting an individual’s predisposition towards certain chronic diseases based on the their genetic makeup. The benefits of such work allow for more selective administration of invasive tests such as biopsies, which are known to cause health problems themselves.

Recently NIH has done a number of Gene Wide Association Studies q that resulted in massive datasets containing subjects’ generic makeup and labeled with clinical data including occurrence of chronic diseases. Unfortunately, given the relatively small number of patients in such studies and the vast number of genes possessed by human beings, these datasets cannot be analyzed with traditional statistical predictive models, which require a large number of samples (patients) with a very few features per sample.

My work attempts to solve this problem by employing state of the art machine learning techniques. In the past year I have built a software system that is capable of crunching of multi-terabyte scale datasets to refactor the NIH data into the form that is palatable by modern big data systems. I have run initial stages of feature selection. I will present the current state of the work and future plans. Another goal of this work is to ensure the repeatability of the experiments and flexibility to run with any similar dataset from current and future studies

Vlad Korolev is a PhD student in the UMBC Computer Science program. His research interests are in the are of personalized medicine, machine learning and large scale data processing. Vlad has considerable experience in the industry specializing in IT security, large scale data processing and the organization of software development processes.

Each semester UMBC sets aside several days for partnering organizations to be showcased on campus. Through our Corporate Visibility Days program, organizations are given the opportunity to highlight themselves to the UMBC student body.  Traditional schedules include information sessions, career-related workshops,networking opportunities and lunch.

Held from 11:00 am - 2:00 pm, you do not need to attend the entire event, please stop by when you are able and stay for as long as you can!

** Kennedy Krieger Institute

April 4 ~ 11:00 am - 2:00 pm
Commons 331

** Mitre Corporation
April 10 ~ 11:00 am - 2:00 pm
University Center 312