ISRC Meet-ups

Stay up to date on the ISRC events by signing up for the ISRC listerv. Contact Helena Mentis (mentis [at] umbc [dot] edu) with your request to be added.

The monthly ISRC meet-up occurs the first Monday of every month at 3pm in ITE 430, the ISRC Collaboratory. Below is a list of those meetings that have highlighted our internal membership and lab spaces. Please visit our Externally Invited Speakers page to see past and future invited speakers.

October 3rd – “Managing Ambiguity in Legal Requirements” – Aaron Massey is a Research Assistant Professor in IS (7/31/22-7/30/23)
Abstract: Ambiguities in legal texts can make the difference between regulatory compliance and non-compliance in software systems, and they are prevalent in laws and regulations. Policy analysts who write laws and regulations and software engineers who build software systems that must comply with laws and regulations approach ambiguity differently. In this talk, I will examine differences between the approach taken by policy analysts and technologists in identifying and classifying ambiguities in legal texts. Understanding the rationale behind the identification and classification of legal ambiguities is essential to disambiguating them for requirements engineering. I will discuss two case studies designed to improve our understanding of the rationale used to make determinations about ambiguities in legal texts. The results of the these studies suggest that participants are consistently able to identify words and phrases they believe to be ambiguous, but are unable to express and agree on a consistent rationale defending their classification.  Based on these results, we developed tool support for identifying ambiguities in policy documents at a greatly reduced investment of time and effort, allowing all stakeholders more time to focus on the challenge of resolving these ambiguities.

May 2nd – “Wearable Sensors for Movement Detection” – Nilanjan Banerjee, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, UMBC
Abstract: In this talk, I will broadly discuss wearable sensors developed in our research cluster for gesture recognition and movement detection. Specifically, I will discuss our textile capacitive sensor array for hand gesture recognition, and micro-radar array for tongue gesture recognition. I will also touch on multi-sensor systems for detecting leg movements during sleep that have correlations with texture of sleep and sleep disorders and distracted driving detection.

February 1st – “Talking to Robots” – Cynthia Matuszek, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, UMBC

November 2nd – A tour of the Imaging Research Center and project demo
Join us in ITE 108 for a tour and an exciting demo of some of the IRC’s projects by Dan Bailey, Lee BootRyan Zuber, and Mark Jarzynski.

October 5th – “A conversation with Dr. Wayne Lutters” – Wayne Lutters, Information Systems, UMBC
Dr. Lutters will provide a general overview of his research program and pilot some ideas from a talk he will be giving at the UMCP iSchool tomorrow entitled “The GLOBE project: Transforming scientific knowledge production in Land Change Science”