UMBC professor Mohammad Samarah will give a practical webinar that breaks down key concepts in artificial intelligence and explores how you can leverage them in your personal and professional life. Whether you’re curious or cautious about AI, this session will help you engage with it more confidently and strategically. Dr. Samarah is the graduate program director for UMBC’s Masters of Professional Studies in Software Engineering program.
Get more information and join the webinar at Noon on April 16 here.
The webinar is part of the Paws & Pivot webinar series that provides a platform for recently laid-off federal workers and other affected professionals to connect, learn, and thrive. Its expert-led sessions focus on providing practical resources and fostering a community of practice centered on successful career transitions, essential upskilling opportunities, and leveraging available community support. ]]>I’ve always loved writing, but it was at UMBC that I found my passion for rhetoric while majoring in English on the communication and technology track. I transferred to UMBC from Howard Community College, and it immediately solidified my decision to major in English. My time at UMBC was marked by the onset of the COVID pandemic and the 2020 protests. My support networks, including the McNair Scholars Program and professors I had in English, made me feel equipped intellectually to process and adapt to these pivotal moments, a skill that’s invaluable in the current moment. My time in the English Department also helped me find areas of research I am still passionate about today. My current research on disability rhetorics in graduate student narratives began as an essay I wrote in ENGL 671. I was able to take this class and begin a more intensive project as part of the accelerated BA/MA program in English, which also prepared me for the rigor of graduate seminars.
After graduating from UMBC, I started grad school (fully funded) at The Ohio State University. I am currently a third year MA/PhD student in English, in the Writing, Rhetoric and Literacy program. I’m also the president of GAMHAA, a grad student mental health organization on campus and Chief of Staff for The Graduate Student Council. Having earned my MA last spring, I am currently finishing coursework and starting to prep for candidacy exams. I’ve taught first-year composition at OSU for two semesters and I’m currently a graduate writing program assistant. I’ve really enjoyed getting to see the administrative side of running a writing program and supporting instructors who are teaching the class for the first time. My research areas are institutional rhetoric, rhetorics of health and medicine and disability studies. I would not have gotten here if it were not for the support of professors I had in the department at UMBC, and being a McNair scholar. I am especially grateful to Professors Brooks, McCarthy, Holladay, Patton (MCS), Mata-McMahon (Education), and Jones Lewis (Ancient Studies) for encouraging me to grow so much as a writer, researcher and thinker and for being some of the kindest people I’ve worked with.
The key problem to be addressed is developing a process that can break down claims in a given scientific domain into their constituent components that can then be assessed. During the 32 month program, the researchers will develop and test their tools on three leading areas of scientific research: materials science, AI, and quantum computing. These domains were chosen to represent a progression in scientific complexity.
Read more about this new research award here.
Yuchuan Huang, UMN iHARP PhD Student, will join Databricks in Mountain View, California, to work on the Open Source Apache Spark project, focusing on developing new Spark SQL features and enhancing Spark performance and user experience.
Subhankar Ghosh, UMN iHARP PhD Student, will join the Climate Science Institute at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee to work on Diffusion Models for climate downscaling tasks as part of ORBIT: Oak Ridge Base Foundation Model for Earth System Predictability.
Tolulope Ale, UMBC iHARP PhD Candidate, will join Microsoft Corporation to work on machine learning and statistical modeling techniques for handling large-scale data, contributing to innovative solutions in computer hardware and software.
Congratulations to all three! We can’t wait to see you grow and the impact you’ll make.
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