The

PROTG
Promoting Students' Scholarship in theCollegeof Arts and Sciences Fall 2012
From the Dean
The College of Arts and Sciences is committed to promoting a high level of scholarship among faculty and students.
Many of our faculty members adopt the discovery learning instructional pedagogy, to enable students participate in the
knowledge-discovery or creation process, rather than being consumers of knowledge. We encourage students at all
levels, undergraduate and graduate, to engage in research. Further, we encourage students to publish their work, either
by themselves or in conjunction with their mentors. The PROTG is devoted to highlighting student-mentored research
or outstanding scholarly work by students.
Mentor: Dr. Sharad Sharma, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Director of the Virtual Reality Lab.

Dr. Sharmas students presented at major professionals meetings during the
academic year, in addition to publishing in noted professional journals. Students
presented at the 21st International Conference on Software Engineering and Data
Engineering, SEDE, at Los Angeles, California, USA, June 27-29, 2012. Student
mentees were: Kato Mivule, Stephen Otunba, Tattwamasi Tripathy, Kenneth MBal,
Arinze Nwolisa, Kola Ogunlana.
In addition, these students and their mentor published two publications:
1. Kato Mivule, Stephen Otunba, Tattwamasi Tripathy, Sharad Sharma,
Implementation of Data Privacy and Security in an Online Student Health Records
System, 21st International Conference on Software Engineering and Data
Engineering, SEDE, Los Angeles, California, USA, page 143-148, June 27-29, 2012.
2. Kenneth MBal, Arinze Nwolisa, Kola Ogunlana and Sharad Sharma,
Teaching Domain Simplification using Furaha 21st International Conference on
Software Engineering and Data Engineering, SEDE, Los Angeles, California, USA, page
7-12, June 27-29, 2012.
Stephen Otunba

Three other students presented at the Emerging Researchers National
(ERN) Conference in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
(STEM), hosted by AAAS, EHR and NSF, Atlanta, GA, February 23-25 2012.
Aaron Boothe, Undergraduate student Won Second Prize. This group of
students also contributed to journal publications as follows:
1. Stephen Otunba and Dr. Sharad Sharma, "Evacuation Simulation in a
Multiuser Virtual Reality Environment", Oral Presentation
2. Aaron Boothe and Dr. Sharad Sharma, "Emergency Airplane Evacuation
Using Game Development Toolkit", Oral Presentation [Won Second
Prize in the oral section under category: Computer Sciences and
Information Systems and Computer Engineering]
3. Aaron Boothe, Mike Tice, Zachary Springer, and Dr. Sharad Sharma, "MultiUser Environment in VR for Evacuation
Scenarios Using Gaming Metaphor", Poster Presentation

Dr. Sharma also collaborated with some of his students to make several conference presentations this year,
including:
1. Sharma, S., Otunba,S., "Collaborative Virtual Environment to Study Aircraft Evacuation for Training and
Education", Proceedings of IEEE, International Workshop on Collaboration in Virtual Environments (CoVE -2012),
as part of The 2012 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2012), Denver,
Colorado, USA, Page 569-574, May 21-25, 2012.
2. Sharma, S., Otunba, S., and Ogunlana, K. , Tripathy, T., "Intelligent Agents in a Goal Finding Application for
Homeland Security", Proceedings of IEEE, SoutheastCon 2012, Orlando, Florida, USA, Page 1-5, March 14-17,
2012.
Mentor: Dr. Anne Osano, Assistant Professor, Department of Natural Sciences
Dr. Anne Osano has ongoing research collaboration with Dr. Manuel Aregullin, Director of the Cornell MHIRT
Biomedicines and Control of Tropical Infectious Diseases and Vectors Program, geared towards increasing minority
participation in graduate and medical programs. Through this collaboration, three BSU students in the Department of
Natural Sciences Meryl Collins, Charles Whaler, and Ghislain Tchomobe were sponsored to conduct field research
over the summer in the
Dominican Republic!
Their research topics were:
Meryl Collins Biological
Activities of Medicinal
Plants; Charles Waller -
Cytotoxicity and
antimicrobial and allopathic
properties of medicinal
plants; Ghislain Tchombe
In vitro Antibiotic,
Allellopathic and Cytotoxicity
of Ethnopharmacologically of selected Medicinal Plants from Dominican Republic.
Other students being mentored by Dr. Osano also made presentations at the Emerging Researchers National Conference
in STEM, in February, in Atlanta, Georgia. Chanae Frasers topic was DNA Barcoding Approach to Species
Authentication and Validation of Actaea racemosa (Black Cohosh), which is a medically and economically important
botanical dietary supplement on the market. Jephter Bauhens presentation was entitled Bioactive properties of six
medicinal plants in the Dominican Republic. The study was undertaken to investigate the antimicrobial, antimitotic and
cytotoxic activities of the selected plants from the Dominican Republic.
Mentor: Dr. Jie Yan, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science
Dr. Jie Yan is a highly respected researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. She serves as an advisor to doctoral
students and mentors undergraduate students as well in her lab. One of his mentees, Kevin Gross, recently presented at
a conference in Nevada:

Gross, K., Yan, J. Speech-Driven Animation of an Expressive Talking Avatar, in the proceeding of The 2012
international conference on Computer Graphics and virtual Reality, July 16-19, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 2012,
Page(s):48 51

Human emotional characteristics can be
identified by the features in the audio and
speech signal such as frequency, speaking rate,
and placement of stressed and unstressed
syllables. The identifying factors enable
computers to recognize basic human
emotions, thus providing methods for the
computer to interact more effectively with
human. Our research was based on the theory
that emotions can be partially detected by the
corresponding features produced in humans
speech. We then built an avatar model with six
basic emotional targets from which all other
emotions can be derived. The six basic
emotions were known as surprise, happiness,
anger, fear, disgust, and sadness. Based on the
emotion status detected from the speech
signal, the avatar was animated by adding the
animation tags in the phoneme transcription
sequence. Experimental result shows that the animation sequences produced by the animated avatar are very similar to
the original videos of the real human speaker.

Mentors: Dr. Pamela OBrien and Dr. Kehbuma Langmia, Department of Communications
Faculty researchers in the Department of Communications are actively engaged in social media research. Dr. OBrien and
Langmia organized and hosted the first annual Social Media conference at the Bowie
State, in conjunction with Howard University. In February, one of their mentees, Ms.
Paola Rodriguez, a graduate Teaching Assistant in the Organizational Communications
program, presented at the HBCU Retention Summit in February, along with four other
panelists. Paola researched how different groups of people use different types of social
media. She also focused on how students are using social media. The topic of the panel
discussion was Nuts and Bolts of Social Media. This session looked at the nuts and
bolts of the use of social media. It explored who is using social media and how, the types
of applications available for higher education use, and then the legal and ethical
questions surrounding the use of social media in the classroom. Following the
outstanding presentation, Paola was requested to present to the 2012 faculty institute in fall.
Dr. Claude Turner, Associated Professor, Department of Computer Science
Dr. Claude Turner is leading our efforts at BSU to become a national leader in the area of information assurance. BSU has
been designated a National Center of Excellence for Information Assurance Education. Dr. Turner is dissertation mentor
and adviser for several students. One of his students, Kato Mivule, presented at the Complex Adaptive Systems
conference held on Nov. 14-16 in Dulles, VA . The title of his presentation, which was co-authored by Dr. Turner and Ji
was:
Towards a differential privacy and utility preserving machine learning classifier
Many organizations transact in large amounts of data often containing personal identifiable information (PII) and various
confidential data. Such organizations are bound by state, federal,
and international laws to ensure that the confidentiality of both
individuals and sensitive data is not compromised. However,
during the privacy preserving process, the utility of such datasets
diminishes even while confidentiality is achieved--a problem that
has been defined as NP-Hard. We investigate a differential
privacy machine learning ensemble classifier approach that seeks
to preserve data privacy while maintaining an acceptable level of
utility. The first step of the methodology applies a strong data
privacy granting technique on a dataset using differential privacy.
The resulting perturbed data is then passed through a machine
learning ensemble classifier, which aims to reduce the
classification error, or, equivalently, to increase utility. Then, the
association between increasing the number of weak decision tree
learners and data utility, which informs us as to whether the ensemble machine learner would classify more correctly is
examined. Our results show that a combined adjustment of the privacy granting noise parameters and an increase in the
number of weak learners in the ensemble machine might lead to a lower classification error.

Dr. Alan Anderson, Assistant Professor, Department of Natural Sciences
Dr. Andersons research is focused on two areas, (1) the rational design and synthesis of biologically active small
molecules with medicinal applications, i.e., antimicrobial and anticarcinoma
agents.and (2) the design and synthesis of polarized surface layers for power-efficient
organic semiconductor devices. Students involved in Dr. Andersons research gain
knowledge and experience in the latest organic synthetic spectroscopic techniques.
Photo on the left shows Senior Patricia Hernandez conducting an Infrared
Spectroscopy analysis on an organic
analyte.
Dr. Anderson, along with his department
Chair Dr. Patricia Ramsey, recently entered
into a 5-year research and education
partnership with Case University that further enhances the research
infrastructure at Bowie State University and broadens the participation of
African-American students in the science and technology programs at both
universities. This past summer, his research student Mariela Hernandez, a
junior biology major at Bowie State University, conducted research at Case
Western Reserve University. Her research focused the cause of unstirred layers
found around biofilms formaround medical implants
Mariela Hermandez

Strive To Succeed, Not Because Of, But In Spite OfGeorge Acquaah