Organization Description

Young Audiences/Arts for Learning, founded in Baltimore in 1950, is the country’s foremost arts-in-education non-profit organization. The Maryland chapter of Young Audiences (YA) provides more than 9,000 arts education opportunities to nearly 200,000 students, artists, and educators throughout the state each year. The staff, board, and teaching artists of YA work tirelessly to generate opportunities for all students to imagine, create, and realize their full potential through the arts.

UMBC’s Eileen Meyer, assistant professor of physics, argues that recent technological advances in the big data era are changing how astronomers learn about the universe.  In an article published in outlets from Popular Science to Smithsonian Magazine, Meyer describes recent research that discovered thousands of black holes near the center of the Milky Way. The research team found them not with a new telescope, but “by digging through old, long-archived data,” she writes. “Astronomers are gathering an exponentially greater amount of data every day—so much that it will take years to uncover all the hidden signals buried in the archives.”

Over the past several decades, advances in communications have allowed astronomy research to shift away from being conducted largely by individual scientists working with the instruments available at their own institutions. Today, large, international research teams collaborate on projects, often using instruments shared by several institutions across multiple countries.

The research instruments themselves are also vastly more powerful today than in the past. Older instruments could only detect visible light (with wavelengths from about 400 to 700 billionths of a meter). New instruments examine everything from gamma rays (extremely high-energy waves with wavelengths less than a trillionth of a meter) to radio waves (with wavelengths as big as a meter).

Newer equipment can also quickly process more data—a lot more. Meyer writes that the Hubble Space Telescope has made 1.3 million observations since its launch in 1990, and it transmits 20 GB of data per week, “which is impressive for a telescope first designed in the 1970s.” Compare that to the Square Kilometer Array, scheduled for completion in 2020. “In just one year of activity,” Meyer notes, “it will generate more data than the entire internet.”

“These ambitious projects will test scientists’ ability to handle data,” Meyer writes. Archives will need to have capacity to store, and then make accessible, a million times more data than can be stored on a typical 1 terabyte external hard drive.

Although it poses challenges, “the data deluge will make astronomy become a more collaborative and open science than ever before,” Meyer says. Whereas before you had to be “an academic or eccentric rich person with access to a good telescope” to do this kind of research, Meyer says, that’s no longer the case. “Thanks to internet archives, robust learning communities and new outreach initiatives, citizens can now participate in science.”

Meyer has taken advantage of huge, stored data sets in her own work studying the jets of high-speed plasma that spew from black holes. She collected 400 raw images taken over 13 years by Hubble to reveal the structure of these jets for the first time.

“This kind of work was only possible because other observers, for other purposes, just happened to capture images of the source I was interested in, back when I was in kindergarten,” she says. “As astronomical images become larger, higher resolution and ever more sensitive, this kind of research will become the norm.”

Meyer’s article, originally published on The Conversation, has been republished in Salon, Popular Science, Smithsonian Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Space.com, Raw Story, Phys.org, and several other outlets, receiving nearly 90,000 views to date.

Image: An artist’s concept of a supermassive black hole. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

June 4, 2018

Tenzin Yangchen

Italian Politics in Siena, Italy

Global Studies (International Affairs)

Arrival:

The UMBC study abroad group met in Rome, where we experienced the city through the cultural trip exploring the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, and Italian political palaces. We headed to our program location on the third day in a bus journey of about three hrs. The program I chose to study is Italian politics in Siena, Italy. Siena is a lovely medieval city that is distinguished by its medieval brick buildings. Located in the Tuscany region, the city has 17 contradas, or districts; each representing with a flag of their own, especially during their annual horse race or the Palio di Siena. The student group from my study abroad program is separated in groups of three, and assigned to various different contradas. My apartment is just off of the main square of Piazza Del Campo, the town square. The housing looks medieval and has a rustic touch to it. I am accompanied by my two program classmates and an Italian RA who is a twenty four year old university student herself. Our classes are held for about two hours Monday through Friday, with mixed schedule of guided tour alongside free weekends.

My favorite things about my host location so far is definitely the number of designated stores for wine, pizza, and gelato that the place has to offer. I have two roomates where one is obsessed with gelatos, while the other with wine as she admiringly promises that she is not an alcoholic, but explains how it is simply a part of the European culture.

Siena is famous for its magnificent art and architecture that are reminders of the renaissance period. So naturally, we had a couple guided tours of cathedrals around the town. One of the best schools in the country, University of Sienna, is also located here and luckily, our program allows us access the library and cafeteria amongst other Italian students.

The location of the town square had an uncanny resemblance to my hometown of Boudha, which is an UNESCO heritage site itself. Similar to the town I grew up in, Piazza Del Campo was said to be formed through the passing of trade routes like many medieval towns.

I must admit that I experienced (or am experiencing) a mild version of culture shock where there are ups and downs for excitement and joy. The downer mostly being the difference in daily lifestyle which I was used to back home, but on the bright side, it makes a perfect circumstance to push one out of their comfort zone and experience growth.

Baltimore Center Stage (LORT B) is accepting applicants for the position of Master Carpenter. BCS produces six mainstage shows and a mix of other artistic programs on three stages. We are committed to being an inclusive workplace, and strongly believe in the importance of having a diverse group of individuals represented both on stage and off. Primary duties include:

Construction of scenic elements for all productions

Attribute Based Encryption for Secure Access to Cloud Based EHR Systems

Medical organizations find it challenging to adopt cloud-based electronic medical records services, due to the risk of data breaches and the resulting compromise of patient data. Existing authorization models follow a patient centric approach for EHR management where the responsibility of authorizing data access is handled at the patients’ end. This however creates a significant overhead for the patient who has to authorize every access of their health record. This is not practical given the multiple personnel involved in providing care and that at times the patient may not be in a state to provide this authorization. Hence there is a need of developing a proper authorization delegation mechanism for safe, secure and easy cloud-based EHR management. We have developed a novel, centralized, attribute based authorization mechanism that uses Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) and allows for delegated secure access of patient records. This mechanism transfers the service management overhead from the patient to the medical organization and allows easy delegation of cloud-based EHR’s access authority to the medical providers. In this paper, we describe this novel ABE approach as well as the prototype system that we have created to illustrate it.

The post paper: Attribute Based Encryption for Secure Access to Cloud Based EHR Systems appeared first on UMBC ebiquity.