UMBC and UMB celebrate partnerships
UMSOM Dean Reece reflects on research and teaching collaboration
Campus leaders from UMBC and the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) celebrated significant milestones in the growing partnership between the two research institutions at a lunchtime talk by University of Maryland School of Medicine Dean Albert Reece during the 2015 UMBC Retreat.
Held at the Institute for Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) in downtown Baltimore on August 19, 2015, the event began with a warm welcome from UMB President Jay Perman, who shared his pride in how “we leverage the strengths of our two universities to build a robust research base” in Baltimore.
President Perman first introduced several UMB leaders, including UMBC alumnus University of Maryland School of Dentistry Dean Mark Reynolds ’78 and ’81, M.S., psychology. He set a clear tone for the event. “We have a city in common that we care about,” President Perman emphasized, “and we need to find ways to make the city that needs us better.”
UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski introduced Dean Reece as a committed partner in supporting innovative research and “a brilliant guy who cares deeply about our students.” The collaborations Reece described in his talk spoke powerfully to that dual commitment to teaching and research that UMB and UMBC share.
The UMBC-UMB Research & Innovation Partnership Seed Grant program demonstrates how UMBC and UMB can “accomplish so much more together than we would apart,” Reece described. The program began in 2013-14 as a catalyst for the types of collaborations already underway among faculty at the two universities.
Initial projects addressed a wide range of societal needs, from providing relief for victims of spinal cord injury to developing new targeted methods to deliver drugs through nanotechnology.
In its second year the grant program expanded to include two tracks: Innovation Seed Grants of up to $50,000 for early-career researchers and Innovation Challenge Grants of up to $75,000 per year for two years for senior researchers. Recipients were announced in January 2015 at
an inaugural Research & Innovation Partnership Symposium at UMBC, a special event to celebrate the rapid growth of our collaborative research programs. Planning is underway for a second symposium to be hosted at UMB.
Reece also shared impressive results from joint UMB-UMBC graduate degree programs, in areas from gerontology to biochemistry and molecular biology. Students in these programs have completed notable research, receiving highly competitive fellowships and research grants from national agencies and publishing their findings in prominent journals.
Looking at the Meyerhoff Graduate Fellows Program alone, in 2014-15 participants produced 43 peer-reviewed publications, including those in scholarly journals with high impact factors, such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The Journal of Infectious Diseases. This includes 14 first-author publications.
The PROMISE program is another particularly strong partnership, with important impacts on student experiences and on higher education more broadly. Funded by the National Science Foundation, PROMISE is Maryland's Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP), which works to significantly increase the number of students in the sciences, technology, engineering and math from underrepresented populations who complete doctoral degrees and go on to become faculty. While UMBC leads PROMISE-AGEP, UMB is a vital collaborator and host of workshops and other training programs.
“Students have done extremely well,” Reece reflected, “and it’s a credit to the joint work we’ve done together.”
Reece also highlighted the burgeoning arts and culture partnership between UMB and UMBC, which came together recently for a special Center for Innovative Research in the Creative Arts (CIRCA) Catalyst event. Timothy Nohe, professor of visual arts and CIRCA director, serves as the UMBC lead on this initiative.
One theme repeated throughout the event was, as President Hrabowski put it, “There are individuals who work with individuals” and “relationships we’ve had for years,” but it is by identifying, formalizing, and strengthening our partnerships across disciplines that UMB and UMBC can have the greatest collective impact on Baltimore and beyond.
President Hrabowski concluded by affirming UMBC’s ongoing commitment to building this vital relationship. He stated, “We accept Al’s challenge on how we can take our research to the next level.”
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UMSOM Dean Reece reflects on research and teaching collaboration Campus leaders from UMBC and the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) celebrated significant milestones in the growing...
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Prof. King-Meadows on African-American political involvement
Tyson King-Meadows has forged a career examining the implementation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – and helping a new generation of political scientists emerge from UMBC.
By David Glenn
Fifty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act and seven years after the election of the first black president, what are the dynamics of African-American political participation? Can Southern states be trusted now to run fair elections without federal oversight? Can the Democratic Party sustain the coalitions that won the White House twice for Barack Obama?
Loose punditry on those topics is cheap and easy to find. But for empirically grounded analysis, scholars and policy experts are increasingly turning to Tyson D. King-Meadows, an associate professor of political science and chair of the department of Africana studies at UMBC.
King-Meadows has spent more than 20 years studying African-American political life, with an emphasis on the architecture and enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. When the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies – one of Washington’s most venerable African-American policy organizations – wanted to develop an analytic forecast of the black vote in various states in 2014, King-Meadows was one of the two experts they sought.
Such assignments have not turned King-Meadows into a creature of Washington, D.C. He first arrived at UMBC in 2002, not long after completing his doctorate in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a fellowship at Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African-American Research. He also taught at Middle Tennessee State University and received a place in in the Fulbright Scholars Program, during which he traveled to West Africa, and taught and conducted research at the University of Ghana.
Since landing permanently at UMBC in 2004, King-Meadows has become a popular teacher and mentor at UMBC, and a campus leader on projects such as the creation of the minority postdoctoral fellowship program.
“Tyson is a strong scholar and a great teacher, but he also has this gift for administration and making things happen, which not many academics have,” says Tom Schaller, the chair of the political science department. Schaller first met King-Meadows in 1995, when both were graduate students at Chapel Hill. They also co-authored a book, Devolution and Black State Legislators, which published in 2006 by State University of New York Press.
“He seems to know everyone on campus on a first-name basis,” Schaller says.
Between The Lines
The Voting Rights Act (VRA) that King-Meadows has studied so closely is now approaching its fiftieth birthday. His research these days is turning much less to the history of the law itself, and to the huge range of dubious electoral practices that are not – and perhaps could never be – prohibited by federal law.
“Everybody knows about Julius Henson and the robocalls,” he says, referring to the 2010 case in which a Maryland campaign operative was prosecuted for deceptive phone calls that encouraged voters to stay home. “But there are practices out there that are subtler than that – for example, leaflets that say that you can’t vote if you’re behind on child support. The Supreme Court has sometimes argued that deceptive practices are freedom of speech, part and parcel of the practice of electoral politics. And maybe that’s correct. You really can’t legislate that kind of trickery away. What you have to have is a very aggressive or vibrant civic education strategy, so citizens reject those kinds of deceptions.”
That broad question of troubling electoral practices that are and are not covered by the VRA is the topic of one of two books King-Meadows is working on. The second book is a rhetorical analysis of how the how the Senate Judiciary Committee framed its discussions of race, representation, and democracy during the hearings which led to Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings to the Supreme Court.
King-Meadows is also co-editing a volume on African-American partisan identification, and supervising a team of undergraduate research assistants who are analyzing 55 years’ worth of U.S. newspaper coverage of voting rights, all in addition to directing UMBC’s Africana studies department.
“Tyson is incredibly thoughtful as a scholar, and I’ve also gotten to see him act as an institution-builder,” says Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University, who was King-Meadows’ co-author on the 2014 analysis of African-American voting patterns. “When he served as president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, he encouraged us to be ambitious about where we could go as an organization. He’s a great colleague and a great friend. I feel lucky to have him in my circle.”
A Diverse Discourse
When King-Meadows started at North Carolina Central University in Durham, he expected to go to law school. Instead, he fell in love with political science, applying to graduate school a few miles away in Chapel Hill.
It was here that King-Meadows’ habit of multitasking took root. In addition to the eternal grad student burdens of studying and teaching, he plunged into several activist campaigns calling on UNC to do better at recruiting and retaining students and faculty of color.
“I realized that many of our concerns about the university’s commitment to diversity and inclusion were also related to curriculum,” he recalls. “Whose voices get into the syllabus, whose perspectives get elevated or excluded, and whose ideas get taken as empirical facts.”
Schaller joined King-Meadows in a few of those campaigns. “One of the formative early moments in our friendship,” he recalls, “was when he asked me, ‘How many times have you been stopped going into the building?,’ meaning Hamilton Hall, where the political science department is. And I said, ‘What? I’ve never been stopped.’ I always came in and out of the building late at night – that’s just part of the grad student life. You’re in your carrel reading or grading papers. No one ever questioned whether I was legitimately in the building. But every few months somebody would say to Tyson, ‘Excuse me, do you have any ID?’”
One of King-Meadows’ mentors at Chapel Hill was Terry Sullivan, a political scientist who is known for empirical studies of Congressional decision-making. (“Terry is where I got my love for Congress,” King-Meadows says.) Sullivan recalls that in King-Meadows’ first years of graduate school, he was besieged by appeals for support and advice from undergraduate students, especially students of color.
“He was drowning in these requests,” says Sullivan. “And that was hard on him as a graduate student, because he was trying to balance his obligations. But he took that burden, which was substantial, and turned it into something special. He used it as an opportunity to think hard about what he wanted to be as a teacher. By the time he left Chapel Hill, he was an award-winning instructor.”
Finding The Patterns
Shawn Tang ’15 is not surprised to learn that King-Meadows won a teaching prize back in graduate school. “I took a course on Congress with him last semester,” Tang says. “It was a conversation more than a lecture. You couldn’t get away with not doing the reading. He kept all of his students accountable.”
Today, Tang is part of King-Meadows’ small army of research assistants. Among other projects, Tang is analyzing and coding archival newspaper articles on voting rights in general and the Voting Rights Act in particular.
Another member of the team, Divya Prasad ‘16, says that King-Meadows gives his research assistants a generous degree of freedom, but also expects them to be able to defend their choices. “Whenever we do something in our research,” Prasad says, “he wants to make sure that we’ve really thought about how we’ve come to our decisions.”
Lauren Lochocki ’14, political science, was hired as an analyst at IMPAQ International after serving on King-Meadows’ team of research assistants. The duo have given papers together at academic conferences, and their collaboration was spotlighted as an example of outstanding undergraduate research by the American Political Science Association.
Lochocki says that “when I was applying for jobs, I was confident in the skill sets [I had], and I am able to apply them to where I’m working now.”
Coding newspaper articles is inescapably tedious work, but the experience may pay dividends. Rhoanne Esteban ’11, political science, worked as a research assistant for King-Meadows several years ago, analyzing data from surveys of African-American state legislators and voters in a racially divided Congressional district in Tennessee. She is now a doctoral student in political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
“When I started here,” she says, “I don’t think anyone else in my cohort had the range of research skills that I had. Dr. King-Meadows made sure that all of his RAs knew our methods. He always reminded us that other scholars have to be able to replicate our work.”
The newspaper-coding project will inform King-Meadows’ book-in-progress on deceptive election practices and congressional authority to stop them – a sequel to his earlier work When the Letter Betrays the Spirit (Lexington Books, 2011). In that book, King-Meadows argued that throughout the Voting Rights Act’s history, Congress has been too passive in overseeing the law’s enforcement, and too willing to defer to the preferences of the executive branch.
Marchers carrying banner lead way as 15,000 parade in Harlem (March 1965)/World Telegram & Sun photo by Stanley Wolfson. Library of Congress.
Marchers carrying banner lead way as 15,000 parade in Harlem (March 1965)/World Telegram & Sun. Photo by Stanley Wolfson. Library of Congress.
That passivity, King-Meadows believes, was baked into the law from the beginning: When Congressional members were crafting the bill in the spring and summer of 1965, Lyndon Johnson successfully pushed for language that gave enforcement discretion to the Department of Justice.
That impulse was understandable – the White House didn’t want to cope with obstruction from recalcitrant Southern senators. But the flexibility carried a heavy cost, King-Meadows believes. Because the VRA has given extensive discretion to the executive branch, certain presidents have chosen to enforce the law only weakly. If Congress had written the law more tightly, King-Meadows believes, it would have been less subject to watering down by the executive or by the courts.
“You have the same law that can be enforced strongly or weakly depending on the preferences of the executive branch,” King-Meadows says. “And the various coalitions in Congress have never really figured out how they want to respond to this.”
After completing his 2011 book, King-Meadows got to see that confusion and ambivalence up close. He won an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship, a program that embeds academics in the Capitol. He spent a year as a staffer on the House Judiciary Committee, which was then led by Chairman Robert Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia, and ranking member John Conyers, who is a Democrat from Michigan.
“This was absolutely the greatest experience of my professional life,” he says. “I got to be in the room, to see documents, to attend strategy sessions, to write memos. I got to walk to the Supreme Court for the oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder.” (In that 2013 case, the court voided a key component of the Voting Rights Act.)
“That year has absolutely changed the way I teach Congress and the way I mentor students,” says King-Meadows. Among other things, he was struck by the influence wielded by fresh-out-of-college legislative staffers.
“A lot of political science students think they have to go to law school and do this and that and wait years until they can change the world,” King-Meadows says. “And I try to explain to them: No. If you pick up the right skills as an undergraduate, you can go out and change the world right now.”
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(This article originally appeared in the UMBC Magazine) Tyson King-Meadows has forged a career examining the implementation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – and helping a new generation of...
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Claudia Pearce, Engineering/IT Alum of the Year, on Big Data
(This article originally appeared in the UMBC Magazine)
Computers can crunch mind-boggling arrays of data. They can even win quiz shows. But are there more powerful applications of this analytical power yet to come? Claudia Pearce ’89 M.S., ’94 Ph.D., computer science, is the Senior Computer Science Authority at the National Security Agency (NSA). The winner of UMBC’s Alumna of the Year Award in Engineering and Information Technology in 2014, Pearce is diligently seeking the answer to that question.
sp15_Alumni-Stories_watson3Watson is IBM’s Deep Question Answering system. You might recall that when Watson was put to the test against human contestants on the television quiz show, Jeopardy!, the system successfully bested its competitors in providing questions to answers whose associated question was already known. (And won $1,000,000.)
But like any game, Jeopardy! has its rules – and its limits. Along with my colleagues and others in the field who study big data and predictive analytics, I’ve been wondering whether the techniques implemented in Watson could be used as a powerful knowledge discovery tool to find the questions to answers whose associated questions are unknown.
Subspecialties in the fields of computer science and statistics such as knowledge discovery, machine learning, data mining, and information retrieval are commonly applied in medicine and in the natural and physical sciences – and increasingly in the social sciences, advertising, and cybersecurity, too. (It’s often called “computational biology” or “computational advertising.”)
And as the scope of computational practices has increased, the resources needed to perform it have shrunken tremendously. Ten years ago, massive computation was primarily in the areas of physics, astronomy, and biology, where petabytes of data were collected and analyzed using massive high performance computing systems. The advent of Cloud computing technologies –and their increasing public availability – now allows institutions, companies, and users to rent time for large-scale computation without the enormous costs of creating and maintaining supercomputers.
Additionally, programming and data storage paradigms have evolved to make use of the inherent parallelism in many domain applications. This trend has created new applications for computer science that provide individuals and organizations access to a plethora of online information in real time.
Real-time data sources spur not only social media, but online commerce, video streaming, and geolocation. Wireless technologies and smartphones put that information in the palm of our hands.
The power and speed of these technologies have aided the machine learning and data mining techniques at the heart of analytics, from retrieval of simple facts to trends and predictions. Advertising applications, for instance, analyze your click stream and cookies so that ads tailored to your interests appear as you browse in real time.
Yet the process of developing and maintaining analytics has its costs. First, there is labor. It usually requires teams of people to identify and solve problems in various domains. Analysts (who are usually experts in their subject) develop a collection of research questions in their discipline. They are teamed with statisticians, computer scientists, and others to develop and write programs to put the data in a usable form and create machine learning applications, tools, and algorithms. This combination of data and programming combines into analytics designed to answer a question in a given line of inquiry.
Labor isn’t the only cost. Depending on the application, analytics can be reused – but eventually need to be refreshed with new data. This is particularly true when the analytic is designed to be predictive. Real-time financial industry data, for example, requires that credit card fraud models must be recreated at least annually. Computational advertising models must be refreshed weekly.
Outdated analytics become an artifact of the maintenance cycle. Reuse requires knowledge specific to the analytic, data, and inherent question, and is most likely unknown outside of a small development team. So how can we get beyond these limitations and make a simple easy-to-use system that helps people get answers to questions beyond Googling them?
Part of the answer may be found in a series of Beyond Watson workshops and other activities involving university, government, and industry partners, including one held at UMBC in February.
We’re looking at things like natural language, which is at the core of the ultimate computer human interface. Think back to Star Trek, when Spock would say something like: “Computer, what is the probability the Klingons will attack the Enterprise in this sector of the galaxy?” The computer would often engage in a back and forth interaction with Spock, asking for more information or clarification before offering one or more scenarios (and probabilities supporting those scenarios) to aid the crew of the Enterprise in their next move. When we can ask a computer a question and then engage in a dialogue with it in this way, we can freely use computers to their best advantage. This sort of exchange allows us to hone in on an answer (or answers) to our question, supported by knowing both how the information was derived and what level of confidence to place in it.
Envisioning such a model opens up new vistas. We may not be limited to retrieving existing answers from Wikipedia-like text, but use all available data to elicit answers to non-obvious questions, or to queries that have never been asked. We might also dispense with arcane interfaces that are poorly matched to both the task at hand and the needs of users and consumers. Database management systems, for instance, have historically been developed to ask a few specific questions of data, but imposing such a structure on the data makes it very difficult to anticipate (or answer) questions we weren’t thinking of when we built the system.
Pushing our thinking – and technology – to generalize on the automation of building big data analytics could permit us to leverage existing tools and build on them instead of shelving them. And pulling these tools together in yet another set of big data analytics may even allow for the entire enterprise of analytics (newly created systems as well as existing ones) to help us advance particular knowledge.
Your cell phone has a plethora of apps (collected in an “app store”) to help you make the best use of it. Creating a similar “analytics store” for our Question Answering systems will accelerate automation of these processes and encourage crowd sourcing in analytics development. It’s a vision of the future for which technology already exists. By specifying and clarifying what we want big data analytics to accomplish, we can start to build that future now.
Note: The views and opinions expressed are those of Claudia Pearce and do not reflect those of NSA/CSS.
TO: UMBC Community
FROM: Karl Steiner, Vice President for Research and William LaCourse, Dean, College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences
We are delighted to announce the appointment of physics professor Jane Turner as associate director of UMBC's Center for Space Science Technology (CSST), a member of the NASA-supported Center for Research and Exploration in Space Science & Technology consortium.
Dr. Turner is assuming her responsibilities from physics professor Ian George. Our deep gratitude goes to Dr. George for his outstanding leadership of CSST.
Dr. Turner joined UMBC in 1998 and is currently a professor in the physics department. She received her bachelors in Mathematics with Astronomy in 1984 and her Ph.D. in X-ray Astronomy in 1988 – both from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. Arriving in the United States in 1988, she first worked as an associate research scientist for the Universities Space Research Association, based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). During her time there, Dr. Turner supported the guest observer facility for the X-ray satellite ROSAT and timeline planning for the GSFC-built Broad Band X-ray Telescope, which flew as part of the ASTRO-1 shuttle mission.
Dr. Turner and her collaborators use X-ray data to pick up signatures of material close to the black hole that lies at the nucleus of an Active Galactic Nucleus. From these X-ray signatures they can learn about accretion onto black holes, and the process of forming a wind that returns gas back to the host galaxy.
UMBC has a strong focus on space sciences, and we are proud of our long-term and mutually beneficial relationship with NASA Goddard through several major centers.
Established in 2006, the Center for Research and Exploration in Space Science & Technology (CRESST) is a cooperative agreement between UMBC, the University of Maryland, College Park, the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
CRESST researchers cover a broad range of astrophysical studies and instrument development, including high-energy astrophysics, cosmology, gravitational astrophysics, exoplanets, and planetary studies. The Center also works to increase the involvement of minority and women scientists in space science research and facilitate university student participation in such research.
To enhance the effectiveness of our on-campus operations and our interactions with NASA, the Center for Space Science Technology will report to the Office of the Vice President for Research, effective July 1, 2015.
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TO: UMBC Community FROM: Karl Steiner, Vice President for Research and William LaCourse, Dean, College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences We are delighted to announce the appointment of physics...
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Office of the Vice President for Research
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Tue, 11 Aug 2015 11:32:41 -0400