Martin Onuegbu
Frederic Worden, Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts

AC IV A 110  |  2:00 - 2:10 p.m.

Life Is Like Basketball is a narrative film depicting a young man’s struggles in his life and makes use of the game of basketball as a metaphorical representation of those struggles. This short movie presents a dazzling array of action shots and makes use of special effects to tell an epic story of a boy named Ron battling a variety of foes. These battles unfold both on a basketball court as well as in an imaginary trial room in his mind. As the story progresses, the protagonist overcomes his foes through his determination as well as his fantastic basketball skills. This film is intended to be both entertaining, as well as an in-depth character study of a man striving to overcome the obstacles in his life. Both the visual imagery and the original musical soundtrack are designed to communicate and articulate the character’s struggles. The hope is that the film will both entertain as well as make viewers think about the sources of inspiration that can be called upon to rise above some of life’s more challenging obstacles.

Morgan A. Madeira

Anupam Joshi, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

UC Ballroom  |  10:00-12:30 PM

Social media has increasingly become an outlet for expression for a large part of our society. Literature suggests that analyzing data from these sites can lead to improvements in areas such as health-care and search-ad targeting. Users of these sites often associate with many other users described as “friends,” even if they do not have a strong connection, or what would be described as friendship in daily life. It is valuable to determine the strength of relationships between users and to identify communities within social networks. These communities represent people with similar characteristics, which are used by applications to solve many real-world problems. For instance, it is useful to identify groups that listen to the same type of music, are similarly affected by a natural disaster, or share health risks for a particular disease. We have created a system to collect and analyze the data about user characteristics, while being respectful of privacy concerns. The system is composed of a front end Facebook application and a back end machine-learning based tool. The front end component gathers data about a user and their friends. The back end uses the collected data and machine-learning techniques to determine relationships between users.

This work was funded through an Undergraduate Research Award from the UMBC Office of Undergraduate Education.

Eva Jannotta

Jessica Berman, Associate Professor, Department of English

UC 310  |  10:15-10:30 AM

Contemporary popular fiction novels written by and for women, often called “chick-lit” novels, are a genre frequently derided by the media and literary critics. Yet their commercial success and popularity attest to their importance and relevance to contemporary women readers. My research examines chick-lit novels from a Gender and Women's Studies and literary criticism perspective. I first analyze nine novels for the ways in which they imagine and represent contemporary white professional women, paying particular attention to portrayals of female relationships, feminism, careers, and the perpetuation of whiteness as an invisible racial category. I then analyze three chick-lit novels in-depth, exploring them as contemporary revisions of fairy tales. Using folktale and postfeminist theory I explore how chick-lit novels masquerade as verisimilitude and disguise their elements of fantasy, thereby attempting to persuade the reader to believe in the fairy tale and feel reassured by it. My research illuminates the hopes and anxieties of contemporary white professional women as portrayed through the novels they read and write. Understanding the dynamics reflected in chick-lit novels and the fairy tale tropes these novels deploy allows readers and critics to understand the function, appeal and insight of chick-lit novels despite their dubious reputation.

*This work was funded through an Undergraduate Research Award from the UMBC Office of Undergraduate Education.

Please take some time to go through the relationship screening tool in the relationship violence awareness and prevention website! This is a great tool for yourself or others that's interactive and informational!

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