Given their scholarship, experience, and expertise, in 2023, UMD President Darryll J. Pines appointed Professors Jo Richardson and Woodie Kessel to co-direct PROGRESS.

About Professor Richardson

About Professor Kessel

From climate change to international relations to racial disparities in health care, researchers in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences are exploring and addressing the most important and challenging issues of our times. 

BSOS is one of the largest colleges at the University of Maryland, and has nearly 85,000 living undergraduate and graduate alumni working in countless fields across the globe. At the heart of our college’s operations and impact are its academic and research pursuits.

In classrooms and research sites/labs, BSOS students learn from and conduct groundbreaking research alongside our world-renowned faculty, who are committed to teaching and to making valuable contributions to their disciplines. 

Interdisciplinary efforts are a hallmark of research activity in BSOS—both within the college’s numerous departments and centers, and across other colleges and units on campus. Beyond the College Park campus, we partner with state, federal, private and international entities. These collaborations are critical, as the grand challenges facing our nation and our world must be tackled from every angle. 

BSOS Research Hubs
 

September 2018

The University of Maryland (UMD) has received a $500,000 grant from the Maryland Governor’s Office of Crime Control & Prevention (GOCCP) to support the development of a new Maryland Crime Research and Innovation Center. UMD will lead the effort and will partner with University System of Maryland (USM) institutions to engage interdisciplinary capabilities, in coordination with resources offered by industry and state partners, to support the establishment of a knowledge and research center to help the state’s crime control and prevention efforts. The initiative will benefit from the state’s collective talent and expertise to conduct interdisciplinary research and to help inform state policies and programs.

Through these collaborative efforts, the Center will:

• Work to identify threats, develop innovative, outcome-based solutions aimed at combatting violent crime, and evaluate progress;
• Examine criminal justice issues related to human trafficking, firearms trafficking, drug trafficking, as well as gangs;
• Bring together resources, research experts, thought leaders, and industry innovations to tackle the complex social issues that underlie violent crime in Maryland;
• Conduct research to inform pilot tests of promising crime prevention interventions, with the ultimate goal of informing statewide policy; and
• Employ data and analysis of data to develop law enforcement solutions, victim services, prevention efforts, and criminal justice programs that reduce violent crime and improve quality of life for Maryland residents.

"We are excited to contribute our collective research expertise to support this initiative, which we believe will help positively impact safety, security, and quality of life for Maryland residents," said UMD Senior Vice President and Provost Mary Ann Rankin. 

The year-long initiative will be led by the School of Public Policy’s Dawn Pulliam, project director and principal investigator, and William Lucyshyn, co-principal investigator, in partnership with faculty experts from the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, the Robert H. Smith School of Business, the School of Public Health, the A. James Clark School of Engineering, the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, and the College of Information Studies, as well as a liaison from the GOCCP.

“The safety and security of the citizens of Maryland requires a team approach,” said V. Glenn Fueston, Jr., Executive Director of GOCCP. “Everything we do must be centered around identifying the roots of violent crime and finding solutions that focus on prevention, enforcement, and victims services. We look forward to engaging the academic expertise across Maryland’s university system, while partnering with stakeholders, to ensure that we have the benefit of the best talent across the state working together to make Maryland the best state in which to live, work and raise a family.”

About the University of Maryland

The University of Maryland, College Park is the state's flagship university and one of the nation's preeminent public research universities. A global leader in research, entrepreneurship and innovation, the university is home to more than 38,000 students, 9,000 faculty and staff, and 250 academic programs. Its faculty includes two Nobel laureates, three Pulitzer Prize winners, 60 members of the national academies and scores of Fulbright scholars. The University of Maryland Safe Center for Human Trafficking Survivors, a joint MPowering the State initiative between the University of Maryland, College Park, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, helps prevent human trafficking and serves survivors through research and policy advocacy. UMD’s Department of Criminology, ranked No. 1 in the nation by U.S. News and World Report. For more information about the University of Maryland, College Park, visit www.umd.edu.

About the Governor’s Office of Crime Control & Prevention

The Governor’s Office of Crime Control & Prevention serves as a coordinating office that advises the Governor on criminal justice strategies. The office plans, promotes, and funds efforts with government entities, private organizations, and the community to advance public policy, enhance public safety, reduce crime and juvenile delinquency, and serve victims. For more information about GOCCP, visit goccp.maryland.gov.

Kunpeng Zhang, Assistant Professor
Robert H. Smith School of Business

This project seeks to reduce or prevent violent crimes by using large-scale data collection from Twitter and a methodology called Recurrent Cascades Convolutional Networks (CasCN) to monitor, predict, and visualize violent cascades in a given area. Using user-generated data from Twitter, this research could help proactively offer information for law enforcement policies regarding violence.

The research implements real-time social media monitoring to dynamically predict the cascade size of a certain violent topic at a specific geographical area (e.g., if a robbery happened in College Park today, how many residents in this area will pay attention to it for the next three days?), in addition to standard reporting. The research leverages long short-term memory (LSTM) and graph convolutional network (GCN) to predict the future size of a given cascade.

Deep learning is a machine learning technique that teaches computers to do what comes naturally to humans: learn by example. Deep learning is used in technologies such as autonomous cars and voice-controlled devices. Using a deep-learning framework, the researcher is modeling the structural and temporal characteristics of violence, as well as the features. The algorithm is being implemented and evaluated using Python and Pytorch.

Next steps include using existing data to test and validate the model, further validation using social media data, and creating a visualization of the results.

Stephanie Weaver, Jeff Horwitz, and Charles Harry, Associate Research Professor
School of Public Policy

The opioid epidemic costs the U.S. over a hundred lives every day and hundreds of billions of dollars each year. The mission of Stop the Addiction Fatality Epidemic (SAFE) is to contribute in a tangible way to overcoming the addiction epidemic in the U.S. The treatment locator application helps individuals find treatment centers that match their needs quickly and independently.

Other treatment locators only identify facilities which are located the closest to the individual, not taking into account needs characteristics. SAFE identifies the facility best suited to a treatment-seeker’s specific needs as well as their proximity to the facility. The SAFE Treatment Locator draws on individual parameters from a potential patient while protecting their privacy.

SAFE completed the database integration and application programming interface. After final beta testing was completed, SAFE publicly launched the treatment locator at www.SAFEProject.us. The marketing strategy targets Maryland and, particularly, Arundel County through social media. SAFE is collecting usage data and feedback from users, which will be used to determine improvements to the application.

SAFE plans to include more information and resources related to payment (e.g., insurance information) in order to assist individuals in determining how they can pay for treatment. Additionally, future versions of the locator will include analytical data that could assist policymakers in assessing and determining growing treatment facility needs. Lastly, some cosmetic changes will be made to accommodate requests from users.