Every January, we as a community acknowledge the need for awareness and education related to stalking. While we often joke about "facebook stalking," the fact is that stalking isn't a joke and can be a very scary experience for victims and their families. Please read the proclamation below for more information.
Additionally, be sure to check out UMBC's Relationship Violence Awareness and Prevention website for more information on stalking and other forms of interpersonal violence.

If you need support from campus members related to a stalking incident, please contact a member from the SARVRT team. For more information from the Stalking Resource Center: http://www.victimsofcrime.org/

Presidential Proclamation -- National Stalking Awareness Month, 2013
NATIONAL STALKING AWARENESS MONTH, 2013
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Each year, millions of Americans face the fear, isolation, and danger of being victims of stalking. At some point in their lives, 1 in 6 women and 1 in 19 men will be stalked, and many of these crimes will go unreported and unprosecuted. During National Stalking Awareness Month, we rededicate ourselves to supporting victims of stalking and sharpen our resolve to bring perpetrators to justice.

Stalking is a pattern of unwanted contact that causes victims to fear for their safety or the safety of family members. It can include implied or explicit threats; harassment; or nonconsensual communication through phone calls, text messages, or emails. The perpetrator is usually someone the victim knows. Stalking behaviors may appear innocuous to outside observers, but victims often endure intense physical and emotional distress that affects every aspect of their lives. Many feel forced to move, or change jobs. Tragically, stalking tends to escalate over time, and it is sometimes followed by sexual assault or homicide.

My Administration remains committed to building a robust criminal justice response to stalking -- one that holds offenders accountable, offers protection and support to all victims of violence, and empowers them to break the cycle of abuse. In January 2012, we held the first-ever White House stalking roundtable with survivors, law enforcement officers, victim advocates, and researchers. We have built partnerships with communities across the Nation to implement anti-stalking efforts. And we continue to support nonprofit organizations and local, State, and tribal governments as they develop more effective responses to violence against women -- including direct services, crisis intervention, transitional housing, legal assistance to victims, court improvement, and training for law enforcement and courts.

We are also working to address the threat of cyberstalking. While advances in technology are making this crime more prevalent, they can also pose unique opportunities to address it. Communities are developing new tools that help connect victims to local services, and State governments are updating statutes to further protect people from cyberstalking. Through our Apps Against Abuse challenge, my Administration recognized mobile applications that are empowering people to defend themselves against dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking.

Thanks to the dedicated work of law enforcement officials, community leaders, advocates, organizations, and survivors, our country has made great strides in combating stalking. During National Stalking Awareness Month, we resolve to keep building on this momentum until no American lives in fear of this crime.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim January 2013 as National Stalking Awareness Month. I call upon all Americans to recognize the signs of stalking, acknowledge stalking as a serious crime, and urge those impacted not to be afraid to speak out or ask for help. Let us also resolve to support victims and survivors, and to create communities that are secure and supportive for all Americans.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirty-first day of December, in the year of our Lord two thousand twelve, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-seventh.

BARACK OBAMA

During the summer of 2013, the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network will host a Research Experience for Undergraduates (NNIN REU) Program from June through August for approximately 85 interns to work at the fourteen NNIN sites. We are looking for engineering and science students with broad interests across the disciplines related to nanotechnology (including Biology, Chemistry, Materials Science, Physics, Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering, just to name a few. A few positions for social science majors may also be available).

This is the 17th year of this program. For reference, participants and reports from prior REU program years can be found here.

Minority and female candidates are especially encouraged to apply, along with students with no previous research experience and students from non-research universities.

The chosen undergraduates taking part in the ten-week NNIN REU program will receive hands-on nanoscience and technology experience through research with applications to bio-engineering, chemistry, electronics, materials science, optics, opto-electronics, physics, and the life sciences. The research projects are designed and supervised by the faculty and technical staff at the NNIN research facilities. Interns work with faculty and graduate students on projects using the unique resources offered at their award site.

Note: in our program you do not choose a project. You will be selected for a particular project that fits your profile, by the Professor in charge of that project. It is not possible for you to review and select a project. If selected, you will be offered a specific project at a specific site.

A scientific convocation, attended by all the network interns, is held in August -- this year at the Georgia Institute of Technology -- to allow each intern the opportunity to present their work to their peers in the form of a concise scientific presentation. Interns also must complete a written report, akin to a research paper, summarizing the findings of their research project. These reports are published as the NNIN REU Research Accomplishments; past research accomplishments can be accessed via the left menu.

Participants receive a $4,000 stipend, plus housing and all reasonable travel expenses to their research site and the convocation site. They may be responsible for their own meals.

Full participation in the site program for the entire period, the network convocation, and the submission of a final report, are mandatory.

Restrictions and Eligibility Requirements for NNIN REU Interns:

1. If you participated in a NNUN or NNIN Program in the past, you cannot participate again.
2. You must be a U.S. Citizen or Permanent Resident.
3. You must be 18 years of age or older, have graduated from high school, and be completing at least your first year in college.
4. You must have health insurance coverage for the summer.
5. You must not be graduating (from a 4 yr. college) before the end of the program in August.
6. You must not already have a four-year degree of any kind.
7. You must have an overall GPA of 3.0 or better.

Your completed application includes the following materials, which must be submitted by the deadlines stated above. All these items are described more fully on the application website:

1. The online account and application information.
2. A Personal Essay.
3. A One-Page Resume.
4. One Letter of Recommendation.
5. List of Relevant Engineering and Scientific Coursework, including grades and number of credits received for each course (in lieu of official transcript).
6. Permanent Residents of the USA must submit a copy of their Green Card (both sides). If you are a citizen of another country and ARE NOT a Permanent Resident, you are not eligible for our program.

PLEASE NOTE: If and when you accept an NNIN REU internship offer, you will be required to submit an official transcript before your internship is secure.

Visit http://www.nnin.org/reu/reu-application-gateway to apply.

Congratulations to our December Ph.D. graduates! Read on to hear about their Ph.D. dissertation research and their plans for the future. 

	Dr. Karuna Joshi Computer Science Semantically Rich, Policy Based Framework to Automate Lifecycle of Cloud Based Services Mentors: Yelena Yesha and Tim Finin Thesis Topic: Dr. Joshi developed a new framework to automate the acquisition, composition, and consumption/monitoring of virtualized services delivered on the cloud. The lifecycle consists of five phases of requirements, discovery, negotiation, composition, and consumption. She has developed ontologies to represent the concepts and relationships for each phase using Semantic Web languages. She has also developed a protocol to automate the negotiation process when acquiring virtualized services. "I chose to concentrate on Cloud Services automation for my Ph.D. thesis since I was able to draw upon my extensive experience as an IT Project Manager to determine open issues that need to be addressed for broader adoption of cloud computing." Future plans: Dr. Joshi has received funding from NIST to continue her research on Cloud Computing and Big Data management. As part of this funding, she will be working as a research faculty member in the CSEE Department. In the spring, Dr. Joshi will teach a course on Software Design and Development.
	Dr. Phuong Nguyen Computer Science Data Intensive Scientific Compute Model For Multicore Clusters Mentors: Milton Halem and Yelena Yesha Thesis Topic: Dr. Phuong developed a scalable workflow system on top Apache Hadoop for orchestrating data intensive scientific workflows. New scheduling algorithms have been developed in the workflow system to manage and reduce latency of the workflow executions. The evaluations of the workflow system on the climate data processing and analysis application (several TB dataset) showed that it is feasible and improved. The scientific results of the application provide new global climate change indicators for the decade of 2002-2012. "The Ph.D. topic came from the motivations related to our NASA and NOAA projects which need to process and analyze very large datasets to study climate change. My research contributions provide new tools for accelerating scientific discoveries from very large datasets and the scientific results." Future plans: Work on research and development related to building large distributed systems or applications.
	Dr. David Chapman Computer Science A Decadal Gridded Hyperspectral Infrared Record for Climate Mentors: Milton Halem Yelena Yesha, Shujia Zhou, John Dorband, Joel Susskind (NASA) Thesis Topic: Dr. Chapman helped improve our understanding of Global Climate Change by creating a Climate Data Record (CDR) of Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) from 55 terabytes of NASA satellite weather observations from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS). He developed a parallel data-intensive scientific workflow infrastructure making use of Large Array Storage (LAS) in order to show the complete derivation these climate trending results. "Global Climate Change and Global Warming are very important and controversial issues, and we need to measure if they have actually happened. AIRS is the first of its kind because it measures hyperspectral radiation. The trick is to take a Big Dataset, and squeeze it into something meaningful. This takes a lot of hardware, and typically a large software team to develop the processing system. I showed how the Large Array Storage (LAS) paradigm can simplify these calculations along with their derivation." Future plans: Dr. Chapman has applied for a post doc in Climate Modeling at Columbia University. It would allow him to do interdisciplinary work to develop Big Data Analytics infrastructure alongside the statistical validation of climate models.
	Dr. Niyati Chhaya Computer Science Joint Inference for Extracting Soft Biometric Text Descriptors from Patient Triage Images Mentors: Tim Oates Thesis Topic: Dr. Chhaya's research was a combination of Soft biometrics, Probalistic Graphical Models, and Natural Language Processing techniques. The aim was to extract soft biometric text labels (using computer vision techniques) from images of mass disaster victims. The main contributions of the work include soft biometric feature extractors, a probalistic graphical model that exploits related appearance-related features, and a novel study of natural human descriptors using NLP techniques that help understand 1) how people describe other people and 2) order and structure of free text human descriptions. "Socially, this work aims at addressing the issue of providing victim information to the public in a post disaster situation. It forms an important contribution to anonymize available image data using text labels to facilitate efficient search. Technically, this is the first work of its kind that aims at using Probabilistic Graphical Models to relate Soft biometric features, and in turn improve the overall accuracy of text label extraction. Also, the NLP study is a significant contribution along with the datasets gathered for this research. The key contribution is the use of techniques from computer vision, machine learning, and NLP to build a robust system that extracts soft biometric features." Future Plans: Dr. Chhaya has moved back to India and will work as a Computer Scientist with Adobe Research Labs starting in January.
	Dr. Yasaman Haghpanah Jahromi Computer Science A Trust and Reputation Mechanism Through Behavioral Modeling of Reviewers Mentors: Marie desJardins Thesis Topic: Dr. Haghpanah introduced a novel mechanism to represent trust and reputation using behavioral modeling of online reviewers. Her approach helps decision makers utilize reputation information more effectively. "Evidence shows that people are now relying more and more on other people's posted opinions for making decisions about which product to buy, which movie to watch, etc. So, I modeled the raters' or in general information providers' behavior and showed how we can improve our decisions by knowing the behavior of the online raters." Future Plans: Dr. Haghpanah is currently interviewing for postdoctoral positions at universities and research labs to extend and broaden her knowledge.
	Dr. Ganesh Saiprasad Electrical Engineering Automatic Detection of Adrenal Gland Abnormality Using The Random Forest Classification Framework combined with Histogram Analysis Mentors: Chein-I Chang Thesis Topic: Dr. Saiprasad proposed a new, more accurate way to detect adrenal abnormalities: rather than using the popular Region of Interest (ROI) method, Dr. Saiprasad suggests segmenting the adrenal gland automatically using the random forest classification framework and then performing histogram analysis. "Working with radiologists and surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center on my Master's research helped me pick a topic for my Ph.D. research. Adrenal gland abnormality detection is a very challenging problem and we have some preliminary results now to show that it can be done automatically. This is a very important step forward in using such systems as decision support tools and also the same methodology can be used for other smaller organs to detect abnormalities which are challenging to detect on CT." Future Plans: Postdoc at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
	Dr. Kevin Fisher Computer Engineering Real-Time Progressive Band Processing for Linear Spectral Unmixing and Endmember Extraction Mentors: Chein-I Chang Milton Halem (NASA) Thesis Topic: Dr. Fisher developed three algorithms that work on hyperspectral images–pictures (often taken by satellites or airborne cameras) where each pixel is a spectograph of the materials in that part of the image. His algorithms work to reduce the amount of irrelevant data in the image, detect samples of pure materials in the image, and then estimate the abundance of those materials in each pixel in the image. "In 2006, I finished a Master's thesis with Prof. Alan Sherman on electronic voting systems. It was an engaging project in a hot topic in computing, but it was not related to the work I was doing as an intern at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. I sat down with my supervisor and some NASA technologists, and looked for common areas of interest between UMBC and NASA. Hyperspectral image processing was on the short list and that's when I contacted Prof. Chein-I Chang about potential research projects." Future Plans: Dr. Fisher will continue working at NASA as a software systems engineer working on the ground antenna system for the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, R-Series (GOES-R) spacecraft, a new line of weather satellites due to launch in 2015.
	Dr. Joel Sachs Computer Science Supporting Citizen Science and Biodiversity Informatics on the Semantic Web Mentors: Tim Finin Thesis Topic: Dr. Sachs introduces an approach to constructing ontologies by layer, designed to make it easier for both data publishers and application developers to tailor-fit semantics to use cases.

Read more about her experience here...

• Educational Partnership Program Undergraduate Scholarship: http://www.epp.noaa.gov
• Application Deadline: February 15, 2013
  

• Ernest F. Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship Program: http://www.oesd.noaa.gov/Hollings_info.html
• Application Deadline: January 31, 2013
  

• US Citizenship
• 3.0 GPA
• Studying a NOAA science: atmospheric science, biology, cartography, chemistry, computer science, engineering, environmental science, geodesy, geography, marine science, mathematics, meteorology, oceanography, physical science, photogrammetry, physics, etc.

• Eight weeks of field study at a premier biological station in a diverse tropical rainforest
• Experienced scientific mentors to guide you through independent research
• Cultural exchanges with Costa Rican and international students and researchers

Competitive applicants will have a strong background in biology and a demonstrated interest in field ecology. An introductory knowledge of Spanish will be helpful but is not mandatory. Prior field experience is not a requisite for admission. As part of the application process, students must designate the mentors with whom they wish to work. It is recommended that they also contact those mentors to confirm that they share similar research interests. Projects in previous years have investigated the ecology and conservation of various organisms and their ecosystems, such as GIS mapping of regenerating forests, behavioral ecology of understory insectivorous birds, and pesticide and climate effects on declining amphibians.

REU award covers the cost of room and board and international travel to and from Costa Rica. Participants will also receive a generous stipend of $3600 for their 8 weeks of research.