CHMPR Distinguished Lecture

Challenges and pitfalls in big data analysis

Yoav Benjamini, Tel Aviv University

3:30-5:00 Thursday, 12 April 2018, ITE 325b, UMBC

I shall warn about the pitfalls resulting from the false assurance that “we have all data at hand”, and discuss the challenges that are not commonly recognised such as the validity and replicability of the analysis results. Examples will be given from our work on the Health Informatics part of the European Human Brain Project, as well as from our studies in neuroscience and genomics.

Yoav Benjamini is the Nathan and Lily Silver Professor of Applied Statistics at the Department of statistics and operations research at Tel Aviv University. He holds B.Sc in physics and mathematics and M.Sc in mathematics from the Hebrew University (1976), and Ph.D in Statistics from Princeton University (1981). He is a member of the Sagol School of Neuroscience, and of the Edmond Safra Bioinformatics Center both at Tel Aviv University. He taught as a visiting professor at Wharton, UC Berkeley and Stanford and is currently visiting Columbia University. Prof. Benjamini is a co-developer of the widely used and cited False Discovery Rate concept and methodology. His current research topics are selective and simultaneous inference, replicability and reproducibility in science, model selection, and data mining. His applied research fields are Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, Animal Behavior and Brain Imaging, and as a member of the European Human Brain Project he is involved in health informatics research. Prof. Benjamini served as the president of the Israel Statistical Association, He received the Israel Prize for research in Statistics and Economics at 2012, and is an elected member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

By Fourandsixty (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The Women Data Scientists in Baltimore Meetup will hold its first meeting this month, featuring a talk by Patty Stanton of the Social Security Administration on how to get started in the field of data science. Men are also welcome at this event. More information below.

Get started in Data Science!
2:00-4:00pm Saturday, March 31, 2018
Howard County Library Miller Branch, 9421 Frederick Rd, Ellicott City MD 21042

The existing gender gap and lack of female representation in the IT industry and STEM fields is a serious issue that needs to be met in the 21st century. A career in these fields can offer prestige, challenges, and rewards while still providing a work life balance. Please join us for networking, food, and a discussion with Patty Stanton.

Patty Stanton is a data scientist in the federal government. Patty would like to share with you her journey in becoming a data scientist, which is a career she loves. She has over twenty years of development and technical leadership role having worked as branch chief, a developer, and an engineer. She encourages more women with your unique skills and experience to join this field. She would like to discuss opportunities in data science and how to get started using different tools in data science. Patty will discuss some of her personal experiences, tips for getting started in data science, show you some interesting examples, and teach you how to pick projects at Kaggle! For more information, please read her article Women in Stem – Dealing with unconscious bias.

Schedule
2:00 PM Arrive, Networking, Food
2:30 PM Introductions
2:45 PM A Talk from Patty Stanton
3:45 PM Free discussion
Bring your computer if you want.

Men are welcome at this event. Our mission is to encourage more women and non-binary individuals to get involved in the data scientist community. Please help us by spreading the word about women data scientist in Baltimore.  This is our first women’ data scientist event, please take a moment to review R-Ladies Global code of conduct.  RSVP here.

UMBC ACM Student Chapter

Planning and Learning in Complex Stochastic Domains: AMDPs, Option Discovery, Learning Transfer, Language Learning, and More

Dr. Marie desJardins, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
1-2pm Friday, March 9th, 2018, ITE 456, UMBC

Robots acting in human-scale environments must plan under uncertainty in large state–action spaces and face constantly changing reward functions as requirements and goals change. We introduce a new hierarchical planning framework called Abstract Markov Decision Processes (AMDPs) that can plan in a fraction of the time needed for complex decision making in ordinary MDPs. AMDPs provide abstract states, actions, and transition dynamics in multiple layers above a base-level “flat” MDP. AMDPs decompose problems into a series of subtasks with both local reward and local transition functions used to create policies for subtasks. The resulting hierarchical planning method is independently optimal at each level of abstraction, and is recursively optimal when the local reward and transition functions are correct.

I will present empirical results in several domains showing significantly improved planning speed, while maintaining solution quality. I will also discuss related work within the same project on automated option discovery, abstraction construction, language learning, and initial steps towards automated methods for learning AMDPs from base MDPs, from teacher demonstrations, and from direct observations in the domain.

This work is collaborative research with Dr. Michael Littman and Dr. Stefanie Tellex of Brown University. Dr. James MacGlashan of SIFT and Dr. Smaranda Muresan of Columbia University collaborated on earlier stages of the project. The following UMBC students have also contributed to the project: Khalil Anderson, Tadewos Bellete, Michael Bishoff, Rose Carignan, Nick Haltemeyer, Nathaniel Lam, Matthew Landen, Keith McNamara, Stephanie Milani, Shane Parr (UMass), Shawn Squire, Tenji Tembo, Nicholay Topin, Puja Trivedi, and John Winder.

Dr. Marie desJardins is a Professor of Computer Science and the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Prior to joining the faculty at UMBC in 2001, she was a Senior Computer Scientist in the AI Center at SRI International. Her research is in artificial intelligence, focusing on the areas of machine learning, multi-agent systems, planning, interactive AI techniques, information management, reasoning with uncertainty, and decision theory. She is active in the computer science education community, founded the Maryland Center for Computing Education, and leads the CS Matters in Maryland project to develop curriculum and train high school teachers to teach AP CS Principles.

Dr. desJardins has published over 125 scientific papers in journals, conferences, and workshops. She will be the IJCAI-20 Conference Chair, and has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, a member of the editorial board of AI Magazine, and Program Co-chair for AAAI-13. She has previously served as AAAI Liaison to the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association, Vice-Chair of ACM’s SIGART, and AAAI Councillor. She is a AAAI Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Member, a Member-at-Large for Section T (Information, Computing, and Communication) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the 2014-17 UMBC Presidential Teaching Professor, a member and former chair of UMBC’s Honors College Advisory Board, former chair of UMBC’s Faculty Affairs Committee, and a member of the advisory board of UMBC’s Center for Women in Technology.

UMBC Cyber Dawgs
Capture The Flag Cybersecurity Competition

The national champion UMBC Cyber Dawgs will hold the second annual computer security Capture The Flag (CTF) competition on Sunday, March 11th from 11am-7pm in the UC Ballroom. This CTF event is a Jeopardy-style competition where teams of four people use their laptops to discover answers to questions about cybersecurity, including network forensics, reverse engineering, reconnaissance, and cryptography. Each question has a point value based upon its difficulty and whichever team has the most points at the end wins!

The competition is open to all current UMBC students and student from a few other nearby schools. Both beginners and experts are welcome to participate.

Prizes will be awarded to the top teams. There will also be door prizes for randomly selected participants as well as T-Shirts for everyone. Some prizes from last year include Raspberry Pis, a Wireless Pineapple Nano, a YARD Stick One, and a Chromebook! Lunch and dinner (Lima’s Chicken) will be provided for everyone.

Students who are interested must register online in advance and bring a laptop to the event. Please note any dietary restrictions on the registration form as well as your T-Shirt size. See the event website for more information

ACM Faculty Talk Series

Semi-supervised Learning for Visual Recognition

Dr. Hamed Pirsiavash, Assistant Professor, CSEE

1:00-2:00pm Friday, February 23, 2018, ITE 325, UMBC

We are interested in learning representations (features) that are discriminative for semantic image understanding tasks such as object classification, detection, and segmentation in images. A common approach to obtain such features is to use supervised learning. However, this requires manual annotation of images, which is costly, time-consuming, and prone to errors. In contrast, unsupervised or self-supervised feature learning methods exploiting unlabeled data can be much more scalable and flexible. I will present some of our efforts in this direction.

Hamed Pirsiavash is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Prior to joining UMBC in 2015 he was a postdoctoral research associate at MIT and he obtained his PhD at the University of California Irvine. He does research in the intersection of computer vision and machine learning.

This talk is sponsored by the UMBC Student Chapter of the ACM. Contact with any questions regarding this event.

On UMBC Giving Day, alumni, students, faculty, staff, and friends will join the #BlackandGoldRush by giving to their favorite UMBC causes, and by inspiring others to give. Throughout this marathon day of giving, participants will have chances to help unlock giving challenges to drive additional support for areas they want to help.

Your gift will have an even bigger impact than usual thanks to some generous alumni, parents, and employees who stepped up to give special challenge gifts for the day. You can designate your gift to support UMBC’s Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department at https://gritstarter.umbc.edu/p/umbc-csee/ or go to the giving day site (after the stroke of Midnight on February 28th) and explore other projects to support.

Spread the word by using #BlackandGoldRush.

Towards Hardware Cybersecurity

Professor Houman Homayoun
George Mason University

11:00am-12:00pm Tuesday, 20 Febuary 2018, ITE 325, UMBC

Electronic system security, trust and reliability has become an increasingly critical area of concern for modern society. Secure hardware systems, platforms, as well as supply chains are critical to industry and government sectors such as national defense, healthcare, transportation, and finance.

Traditionally, authenticity and integrity of data has been protected with various security protocol at the software level with the underlying hardware assumed to be secure, and reliable. This assumption however is no longer true with an increasing number of attacks reported on the hardware. Counterfeiting electronic components, inserting hardware trojans, and cloning integrated circuits are just few out of many malicious byproducts of hardware vulnerabilities, which need to be urgently addressed.

In the first part of this talk I will address the security and vulnerability challenges in the horizontal integrated hardware development process. I will then present the concept of hybrid spin-transfer torque CMOS look up table based design which is our latest effort on developing a cost-effective solution to prevent physical reverse engineering attacks.

In the second part of my talk I will present how information at the hardware level can be used to address some of the major challenges of software security vulnerabilities monitoring and detection methods. I will first discuss these challenges and will then show how the use of data at the hardware architecture level in combination with an effective machine learning based predictor helps protecting systems against various classes of hardware vulnerability attacks.

I will conclude the talk by emphasizing the importance of this emerging area and proposing a research agenda for the future.

Dr. Houman Homayoun is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at George Mason University. He also holds a courtesy appointment with the Department of Computer Science as well as Information Science and Technology Department. He is the director of GMU’s Accelerated, Secure, and Energy-Efficient Computing Laboratory (ASEEC).  Prior to joining GMU, Houman spent two years at the University of California, San Diego, as NSF Computing Innovation (CI) Fellow awarded by the CRA-CCC. Houman graduated in 2010 from University of California, Irvine with a Ph.D. in Computer Science. He was a recipient of the four-year University of California, Irvine Computer Science Department chair fellowship. Houman received the MS degree in computer engineering in 2005 from University of Victoria and BS degree in electrical engineering in 2003 from Sharif University of Technology. Houman conducts research in hardware security and trust, big data computing, and heterogeneous computing, where he has published more than 80 technical papers in the prestigious conferences and journals on the subject. Since 2012 he leads ten research projects, a total of $7.2 million in funding, supported by DARPA, AFRL, NSF, NIST, and GM on the topics of hardware security and trust, big data computing, heterogeneous architectures, and biomedical computing. Houman received the 2016 GLSVLSI conference best paper award for developing a manycore accelerator for wearable biomedical computing. Since 2017 he has been serving as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on VLSI. He is currently serving as technical program co-chair of 2018 GLSVLSI conference.

Free Screenings of the AlphaGo movie at UMBC

UMBC will hold two free, public screenings of the award-winning documentary film AlphaGo, one 7:00-9:00pm Tuesday evening, February 13 and another 2:00-4:00pm Friday, February 16. Both will be held in lecture hall 5 (EMGR 027) in the UMBC Engineering Building (maps: campus, google).  Each screening will be followed by comments and discussion by several faculty members.

AlphaGo is the first computer program to defeat a Go world champion, and arguably the strongest Go player in history. It was developed by DeepMind, a London-based company that specializes in AI and machine learning that was acquired by Google in 2014.

“On March 9, 2016, the worlds of Go and artificial intelligence collided in South Korea for an extraordinary best-of-five-game competition, coined The DeepMind Challenge Match. Hundreds of millions of people around the world watched as a legendary Go master took on an unproven AI challenger for the first time in history…Directed by Greg Kohs with an original score by Academy Award nominee, Hauschka, AlphaGo chronicles a journey from the halls of Oxford, through the backstreets of Bordeaux, past the coding terminals of Google DeepMind in London, and ultimately, to the seven-day tournament in Seoul. As the drama unfolds, more questions emerge: What can artificial intelligence reveal about a 3000-year-old game? What can it teach us about humanity?”

Go has been considered to be one of the most challenging games for AI systems to master because of its enormous search space and the difficulty of evaluating board positions and moves. AlphaGo’s success is especially significant in that it is an example of the powerful new deep learning approaches based on neural networks.

Please join us at one  of the screenings this exciting film and take part in the discussions that follow.

Global Game Jam at UMBC

For the 10th(!) year in a row, UMBC is the Baltimore host site for the Global Game Jam!

Where: Engineering (ENG) building on the UMBC campus
When: 5 PM January 26 – 5 PM January 28, 2018
Cost: Free, but advance registration is required (register at globalgamejam.org)

What is a Game Jam?

In a game jam, participants come together to make a video game. Each participant joins a small team at the jam, and over a couple of day period creates a new, unique and creative video game according to the rules of the jam.

Game Jams are a great way to meet other developers, beef up your resume, or just learn what it takes to make a game. Teams need designers who can come up with a creative game idea according to the jam constraints, artists, programmers and testers, so there is something to do for participants at all levels of experience.

So what is the Global Game Jam?

The Global Game Jam takes place in the same 48 hours all over the world! The first year there were 53 host sites in the US, Canada, Brazil, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Belgium, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Spain, Turkey, Wales, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Last year had hundreds of host sites across the world.

The Global Game Jam will start 5 PM local time Friday, January 26th and end 5 PM local time Sunday, January 28th, 2018. All participants in the Global Game Jam will be constrained by the same theme and set of rules. After the theme is announced, participants will have the chance to brainstorm game ideas and pitch them to other participants to form development teams. After a couple of mad days of game development, all the games are demoed and submitted to the global game jam site.

Even if you don’t participate, you can track the action on twitter #ggj18 and #umbcggj, and try out the game submissions after the event is over.

For the full list of sites, more Global Game Jam information, and information on the keynote speaker and other exciting developments, be sure to visit the main Global Game Jam site.

UMBC Site Information

The UMBC Global Game Jam site will close from 11 PM to 7 AM each Friday and Saturday night. Non-local participants should plan accordingly.

We’ll have a mix of computers and development platforms:

• Windows
• Mac
• WiFi (with your own laptop)

These have a mix of the following software (not all software on all platforms)

• Visual Studio
• Unity
• Unreal Engine
• Maya
• NVIDIA PhysX
• Adobe Creative Suite

What you should bring

Yourself. Your creativity.

Don’t come with a pre-planned team. Teams will be formed on-site after the game pitches are made. Also, don’t bring pre-made content (art, code, sounds, etc.) that is not publically available. The idea is not to see how well you anticipate the constraints, it is to see what each team can create during the Jam!

UMBC faculty, alumni and corporate partners discuss cybersecurity and industry challenges

Cybersecurity is regularly a headliner in the news, especially when personal information stored online has been compromised, whether through a breach, hack, or threat. On Thursday, December 7, UMBC hosted experts from industry and academia at the National Press Club to discuss the cyber challenges professionals face, and how those groups can work together to prepare future generations of cybersecurity professionals.

Scott Shane, a reporter with The New York Times, led the discussion with five panelists representing industry, small business, and higher education. “I think it’s fair to say the internet was built without adequate attention to security,” stated Shane, who writes about cyber and information attacks regularly. “It’s almost like somebody who starts a bank with branches all over the world, and after it’s up and running and has millions of account holders, suddenly starts to think about safes, locks on the doors and bulletproof glass. I think that’s sort of the stage that we’re at right now.”

UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski and Anupam Joshi, professor and chair of computer science and electrical engineering, and director of the Center for Cybersecurity at UMBC, were joined by alumni and partners who have been working on the challenge of educating the workforce together. Hrabowski explained that there are currently about 350,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs, and that number is expected to continue to grow. By 2021, it is anticipated that there will be approximately three million job openings in cyber-related fields.

Over the course of his professional career, Nigel Faulkner, chief technology officer at T. Rowe Price, has experienced the emergence of technology and many changes. “As the CTO of a medium-large company, cyber is a defensive investment for us. The best thing that can happen is nothing happens,” Faulkner said, adding that he is always thinking about whether the company is investing enough, doing the right thing, and making the right connections in the industry to keep clients’ information safe.

As president and founder of TCecure, LLC, and cybersecurity academic innovation officer for University System of Maryland (USM), Tina Williams ’02, computer science, shared the importance of building security into technology from the beginning, rather than adding these features on at the “tail end of a development cycle.” Not only does her company handle security, they also monitor threats and risks that can compromise the technology’s health. In her role at USM, Williams represents the system as a whole to integrate academia and academic research, relationships, and resources into what’s taking place nationally, at the Federally Funded Research and Development Centers.

As head of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity, Joshi explained that UMBC is combating these national challenges by partnering with industry and government leaders to conduct research that addresses specific real-world needs that benefit both. Collaborative relationships, such as UMBC’s work with Northrop Grumman and T. Rowe Price, is one way that UMBC is working to cultivate the next generation of cybersecurity talent.

As an alumna of UMBC and a current employee at Northrop Grumman, Lauren Mazzoli ’15, computer science and mathematics, M.S. ’17, computer science, a systems engineer in the Future Technical Leaders Program at Northrop Grumman, discussed her experience in the Cyber Scholars Program. The Cyber Scholars Program works to increase the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in the field. Mazzoli explained that her experience at UMBC, in the Cyber Scholars Program, and working alongside mentors on and off-campus led her to be involved with continuing to encourage women to pursue careers in cybersecurity. “For me it’s been a product of the relationship between academia and industry, that have allowed me to find my own career path, and at the same time help others find theirs,” she explained, noting her passion for helping students consider careers in cybersecurity and related fields.

“We know there’s a huge workforce that we need and we can’t fill that pipeline. So yes, we need more women, yes, we need students of all backgrounds, but we need diversity of thought, experience, education, and problem-solving skills,” said Mazzoli, adding that it is important for students to know from a young age that cybersecurity is a field they can pursue.

Adapted from a UMBC News article article written by Megan Hanks Photo by Abnet Shiferaw ’11, visual arts.