Caitlyn Leiter-Mason and Dr. Phyllis Robinson are representing UMBC on this awesome page highlighting women from USM for Women's History Month! Check it out!

Reinventing the Classroom:
creating a new course and a space to teach it

Professor Harry Lewis

Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science
Harvard University

12:00-2:00 ITE 456, UMBC

slides (ppt); talk (video); discussion (video)

TALK AND LUNCH: 12:00-1:00. Lunch courtesy of Dr. Warren DeVries, Dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology. RSVP on my.umbc.edu by Monday, February 25 to reserve a spot. Email requests from outside UMBC to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

DISCUSSION: 1:00-2:00. The community is invited to stay after the talk for an open discussion and conversation with Professor Lewis and your UMBC colleagues about designing new classroom spaces for active learning and the flipped classroom approach.

For decades my lectures kept getting better, my enrollments kept going up, and the number of warm bodies in the lecture hall kept going down. So I decided to try something entirely different, a "flipped classroom." Students watched lectures over the Internet at night in their rooms, and spent class time solving problems under supervision in small groups. The subject matter was discrete mathematics, which is well suited to this pedagogical style, but the class was so successful that it is being adapted for use in other Harvard courses. I will report on some of the conceptual and practical problems I encountered, including the creation of a new teaching space, which had to be cheap to construct and adaptable in use since the experiment might have failed.

Harry Lewis is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, where he has taught since 1974. He is uncertain whether he should be proud of his role in launching the careers of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom dropped out of Harvard shortly after taking his course. From 1995-2003 Lewis served as Dean of Harvard College. In this capacity he oversaw the undergraduate experience, including residential life, career services, public service, academic and personal advising, athletic policy, and intercultural and race relations. He is a long time member of the College’s Admissions Committee.

For more information, see his article Reinventing the Classroom in the Fall 2013 issue of Harvard Magazine.

CSEE professor Anupam Joshi–director of the new UMBC Center for Cybersecurity–has been invited to give a keynote talk at the Security & Privacy Symposium. The symposium will take place at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur India from February 28 to March 1. His talk is entitled “A Semantically Rich approach to Cybersecurity”.

The objective of the symposium is to bring together students, faculty, and researchers from across India to discuss the growing field of security and privacy. Dr. Joshi joins a dozen fellow scholars who will discuss topics including emerging security and privacy challenges and privacy and security in online social media.

Dr. Joshi is an Oros Family Professor of Technology. He has been a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (CSEE) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) for more than a decade, teaching courses in Mobile Computing, Security, Social Media, and Operating Systems at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

His own research interests deal with Intelligent Networked Systems, with a focus on Mobile Computing. He has recently received a grant from NSF’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, a three year project to investigate how to better manage security and privacy constraints while querying semantically annotated linked data sources. The project, Policy Compliant Integration of Linked Data, is a collaboration with researchers at M.I.T. and the University of Texas at Dallas.

UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal

Paper form digitization for information systems strengthening and socio-economic development in developing countries

Huguens Jean

3:00pm Tuesday, 5 March 2013, ITE346, UMBC

In developing countries, people are now more likely to have access to a mobile phone than clean water, making cellular based technology the only viable medium for collecting, aggregating, and communicating local data so that it can be turned into useful information. While mobile phones have found broad application in reporting health, financial, and environmental data, many data collection methods still suffer from delays, inefficiency and difficulties maintaining quality. In environments with insufficient IT support and infrastructure, and among populations with limited education and experience with technology, paper forms rather than electronic methods remain the predominant means for data collection. To meet the digitization needs of paper driven data collection practices, this thesis proposes the development and study of a software platform that automatically converts unknown paper forms into digital structured data and uses human intelligence when necessary to improve its performance.

We begin by identifying a high-level system architecture for dealing with infrastructure constraints and human resources limitations. We then break the architecture into its integral pieces and organize them into three distinct functional and interacting stages: data collection, data conversion, and crowdsourcing. In the collection phase, we focus on visually detecting structurally identical form instances and transmitting the images of their raw input data to a remote server. During this phase, we present a novel framework for identifying specific form types by generating a multipart template for unknown forms and decomposing the form identification problem into three distinct tasks: similar image retrieval, learning, and duplicate matching. The conversion phase uses a mixture of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and human annotations techniques to convert images into digital information and group structurally identical forms in their respective database table. In crowdsourcing, we investigates how to use low-end smartphones for collecting training information to improve OCR related tasks and verify the accuracy of converted input values. We pay special emphasis on identifying natural interaction forms that lower the technical and knowledge threshold for local residents. Furthermore, because crowdsourcing can also provide money to the mobile workers of its micro-tasking platform, we concurrently explore how systems that facilitate collaboration between humans and machines for improving the quality of intelligent information systems can be used a vehicle for delivering socioeconomic opportunities to developing countries.

Committee: Dr. Timothy Oates (Chair), Dr. Janet Rutledge, Dr. Fow-Sen Choa, Dr. Jesus Caban

The World Bank’s Development Prospects Group (DECPG) is looking for a top-tier undergraduate student with a passion for software development to work on a part-time basis during the school year. The selected individual will play a significant role in designing, developing, testing, and launching various innovative software tools for World Bank economists. These projects are critical to DECPG’s operations and have the potential to be highly visible within The World Bank.

The selected candidate will be expected to work part-time during the school year, with the potential to continue on a full-time basis as a short-term consultant over the summer.  The location is 1818 H Street N.W., Washington, D.C.

Background

DECPG provides information, analysis and advice on the impact of trends in the world economy on developing countries, develops and documents the Bank's views on the state of the world economy, and produces some of the Bank's leading publications, including the Global Economic Prospects, the Global Development Horizons, and the Global Monitoring Report.

Selection Criteria

• Pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in computer science, information systems, or computer engineering
• Demonstrated self-starter (Have you started your own business? Do you contribute to open source projects in your spare time?)
• Have a working knowledge of the .NET framework (preferably VB.NET). However, we are more interested in strong programming fundamentals than in knowledge of any particular programming language
• Basic understanding of database design and operation; familiarity with SQL (ideally either MySQL or MSSQL)
• Strong understanding of programming design patterns and data structures
• The ideal candidate will have some exposure to the fundamentals of macroeconomics, statistics, or econometrics. However, this is not required.
• Good interpersonal skills and ability to work in a team environment
• Must be self-motivated and inspired to learn
• Ability to deal sensitively in multi-cultural environments and build effective working relations with colleagues
• Effective verbal and written communication skills

Due to the high volume of resumes that we normally receive, we will only be able to contact short listed candidates. Please send all resumes to David Horowitz (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) with the subject "Application for STC 2013"