News

Helping out a co-worker—hard to find fault with that, right? In fact, depending on the source and kind of help being offered, it might be perceived more like a threat than a relief, according to new University of Maryland research.

Topic modeling—a machine learning technique originally developed as a text mining tool for computer scientists—is now widely used by historians, journalists and analysts to make sense of large collections of text. These probabilistic models produce various lists of related words, and each list corresponds to a subject in the collection. But despite their popularity, there are flaws in the way that topic models are evaluated for their accuracy, which ultimately affects how useful they are to the people that rely on them.

The University of Maryland School of Public Health’s Community Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health (CEEJH) group, has received an $800,000 gift from the Bezos Earth Fund to expand efforts focused on air quality monitoring in communities exposed to traffic-related pollution across the Mid-Atlantic region.