UMBC Hour of Code events

This week on Wednesday and Thursday from 10:00am – 1:00pm, the UMBC Computer Science Education Club will host Hour of Code events in the Engineering Building Atrium. Hour of Code is an annual campaign that is part of Computer Science Education Week with the goal of expanding access to computer science in schools and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented minorities.

On Wednesday, December 5th, the focus will be on on computer science outreach within the UMBC community. There will be an Arduino workshop from IEEE from 11:30am – 12:45pm (bring your laptop if interested), interactive games teaching introductory programming concepts, and Makey Makeys.

On Thursday, December 6th,  students from Lakeland Elementary School will visit the UMBC campus and learn about programming. The CS Ed club are still accepting volunteers to help students during the activity, and/or attend lunch with the students. You can sign-up here. Computer Science Education Club would appreciate any time you can dedicate to this event.

Email  with any questions. For more information about Hour of Code, visit https://code.org/about.

Distinguished Departmental Seminar

The Web PKI in Theory and Malpractice

Dr. Bruce Maggs, Duke University

11:00am Friday, 7 December 2018, ITE325b

The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for the web was designed to help thwart “phishing” attacks by providing a mechanism for browsers to authenticate web sites, and also to help prevent the disclosure of confidential information by enabling encrypted communications. For users to reap these benefits, however, the parties that implement and operate the PKI, including certificate authorities, web-site operators, and browser vendors, must each perform their roles properly.

This talk focuses on one aspect of the PKI: certificate revocation. The security of a web site hinges on the ability of the site operator to keeps its private keys private. While most operators guard their keys carefully, on occasion software vulnerabilities such as the notorious Heartbleed Bug have put millions of keys at risk. If a web-site operator fears that its private key has been compromised, it should ask its certificate authority to revoke the corresponding certificate. Browsers, however, often do not fully check whether the certificates they receive have been revoked, and mobile browsers never check. There are a variety of reasons for not checking, but the most important are the amount of bandwidth required to download certificate revocation lists in advance, the latency of checking certificates on the fly, and the slow progress of upgrading every web server to support the newer certificate status stapling approach.

This talk presents a new and much more efficient system, CRLite, for pushing the revocation status of every certificate to every browser. CRLite leverages a recent development: although lists of revoked certificates were previously available, Google’s Certificate Transparency project now also provides a log of all unrevoked certificates as well. With both lists in hand, a compact data structure called a filter cascade can be used to represent the status of every certificate with no false positives and no false negatives. CRLite requires a browser to download a 1.2MB filter cascade initially, and then a 40KB update (on average) every day. Our results demonstrate that complete revocation checking is within reach for all clients.

Bruce Maggs received the S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, 1986, and 1989, respectively. His advisor was Charles Leiserson. After spending one year as a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, he worked as a Research Scientist at NEC Research Institute in Princeton from 1990 to 1993. In 1994, he moved to Carnegie Mellon, where he stayed until joining Duke University in 2009. While on a two-year leave-of-absence from Carnegie Mellon, Maggs helped to launch Akamai Technologies, serving as its first Vice President for Research and Development. He retains a part-time role at Akamai as Vice President for Research. In 2017 he won the Best Dataset Award at the Passive and Active Measurement Conference, The Best Paper Award at CoNEXT, a Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security, and the 2017 IEEE Cybersecurity Innovation Award for work that appeared at IEEE Security and Privacy. In 2018 he was part of a large team that received the inaugural SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award for the Akamai CDN.

Supported by UMBC’s Eminent Scholar Mentoring program.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Legal Aspects of Privacy and Data Protection

Razvan Miutescu
Privacy Counsel, Whiteford, Taylor & Preston

12:00–1:00pm Friday, 9 November 2018, ITE 227, UMBC

Privacy and data security continue to be topics of interest for organizations of all sizes. In addition to being concerned about cyber crimes and data breaches occurring more frequently and with higher operational impact, consumers and regulators around the world are focusing on privacy. Individuals are becoming increasingly aware of the value and the use of the information that identifies them or analyzes their conduct and behavior. Privacy laws around the world are becoming stricter. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is viewed as a flagship law that imposes data protection requirements well beyond the borders of the European Economic Area. California recently passed its Consumer Privacy Act, which borrows concepts from the GDPR, leaving no doubt that privacy laws in the United States are also on track to become more complex. In this context, we will discuss practical legal approaches to an organization’s privacy and data security program.

Razvan Miutescu is a technology and information governance attorney with Whiteford, Taylor & Preston. His practice focuses on privacy and data security, information technology transactions and licensing, intellectual property, and data management, including data broker transactions, cloud services, distributed ledgers/blockchain, and related regulatory and compliance matters. Email:

Host: Alan T. Sherman,

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays. All meetings are open to the public.

Professional Graduate Programs Open House, Sat. 10/20

The Fall Open House for UMBC’s Professional Programs (Main Campus offerings) takes place on Saturday, October 20 in the first floor of PAHB from 9:30-11:30am. Students interested in exploring and/or pursuing these graduate programs (degrees and/or certificates) or just want to learn more about these fields are encouraged to register and attend. CSEE students interested in pursuing a BS/MPS option for selected programs (such as CYBR or Data Science) are especially welcome.

Programs represented include

• • Cybersecurity
  • Data Science
  • Health Information Technology
  • Engineering Management
  • Systems Engineering
  • Instructional Systems Development
  • Integrated Product Development & Manufacturing
  • Technical Management

Faculty program directors will be presenting in individual breakout sessions and relevant support staff will be on-hand to provide administrative overviews, answer questions, and mingle. Refreshments will be provided.

If you are interested, please RSVP at https://openhouse.umbc.edu/. If you have questions contact:

MD-AI Meetup holds 1st event at UMBC
6-8pm Wed 10/3, 7th floor library

A new Maryland-based meetup interest group has been established for Artificial Intelligence (MD-AI Meetup) and will have its first meeting at UMBC this coming Wednesday (Oct 3) from 6:00-8:00pm in the 7th floor of the library.  The first meeting will feature a talk by UMCP Professor Phil Resnik on the state of NLP and an AI research agenda.  Refreshments will be provided.  The meetup is organized by Seth Grimes and supported by TEDCO, local AI startup RedShred, and the Maryland Tech Council.

If you are interested in attending this and possibly future meetings (which will probably be monthly), go to the Meetup site and join (it’s free) and RSVP to attend this meeting (if there’s still room).  If you join the meetup and RSVP, you can see who’s registered to attend.

These meetups are good opportunities to meet and network with people in the area who share interests. It’s a great opportunity for students who are will be looking for internships or jobs in the coming year.

Ninth annual CSEE Welcome Back Picnic, 12-2 Mon 9/24, ENGR atrium

A very warm welcome to all the new and returning retrievers, on behalf of ACM and IEEE student chapters!

As the semester is still gearing up, we invite you all to our ninth annual Welcome Back Picnic, jointly hosted by UMBC’s ACM and IEEE student chapters. This CSEE networking event is a great opportunity for students (undergraduate, graduate and MPS) faculty and staff to interact and socialize outside the classroom. Free lunch will be provided 🙂

Location: Engineering Atrium
Date: Monday September 24, 2018
Time: 12:00pm to 2:00pm
Limited to CSEE Faculty, Staff & Students (CMSC, CMPE, ENEE, CYBER, DATA)

We hope to see you all there.

Regards,
UMBC ACM, IEEE Student Chapters and CSEE Department

UMBC Information Systems Department

Innovations in NSF Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Research Workforce Development and Education Programs

Dr. Sushil K. Prasad
National Science Foundation

2:00pm Tuesday, 18 September 2018, ITE459, UMBC

The National Science Foundation Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) has growing research and education programs, including programs for early career multidisciplinary faculty such as CAREER and CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII). OAC is pleased to announce its newest program, its core research program solicitation (NSF 18-567), with the goals of supporting all aspects of advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) research that will significantly impact the future capabilities of advanced research CI, as well as the research career paths of computer as well as computational and data-driven scientists and engineers. Through this solicitation, OAC seeks to foster the development of new knowledge in the innovative design, development, and utilization of robust research CI. The OAC core research areas include architectures and middleware for extreme-scale systems, scalable algorithms and applications, including simulation and modeling, and the advanced CI ecosystem, including tools and sociotechnical aspects.

OAC also introduced a CyberTraining program (NSF 18-516) for education and training aimed to fully prepare scientific workforce for nation’s research enterprise to innovate and utilize high performance computing resources, tools and methods. The community response in its two rounds of competition have exceeded expectations. OAC also has programs for research training of undergraduate students (REU sites).

I will introduce these and share some of the recent awards. I will also touch on other OAC opportunities in cyberinfrastructure including those on high performance computing (HPC) hardware, software, data, networking and security, and on NSF’s ten big ideas, including Harnessing the Data Revolution.

Sushil K. Prasad is a Program Director at National Science Foundation in its Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate leading its emerging research and education programs such as CAREER, CRII, Expeditions, CyberTraining, and the most-recently introduced OAC-Core research. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a Professor of Computer Science at Georgia State University. He is the director of Distributed and Mobile Systems Lab carrying out research in Parallel, Distributed, and Data Intensive Computing and Systems. He has been twice-elected chair of IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP), and leads the NSF-supported TCPP Curriculum Initiative on Parallel and Distributed Computing for undergraduate education.

Ballerina, a modern programming language
focused on integration

Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana
Founder, Chairman and Chief Architect, WSO2

2:00-3:00pm, Thursday, 6 September 2018, ITE325, UMBC

Ballerina is a concurrent, transactional, statically typed programming language. It provides all the functionality expected of a modern, general purpose programming language, but it is designed specifically for integration: it brings fundamental concepts, ideas and tools of distributed system integration into the language with direct support for providing and consuming network services, distributed transactions, reliable messaging, stream processing, security and workflows. It is intended to be a pragmatic language suitable for mass-market commercial adoption; it tries to feel familiar to programmers who are used to popular, modern C-family languages, notably Java, C# JavaScript.

Ballerina’s type system is much more flexible than traditional statically typed languages. The type system is structural, has union types and open records with optional/mandatory fields. This flexibility allows it also to be used as a schema for the data that is exchanged in distributed applications. Ballerina’s data types are designed to work particularly well with JSON; any JSON value has a direct, natural representation as a Ballerina value. Ballerina also provides support for XML and relational data.

Ballerina’s concurrency model is built on the sequence diagram metaphor and offers simple constructs for writing concurrent programs. Its type system is a modern type system designed with sufficient power to describe data that occurs in distributed applications. It also includes a distributed security architecture to make it easier to write applications that are secure by design.

Ballerina is designed for modern development practices with a modularity architecture based on packages that are easily shared widely. Version management, dependency management, testing, documentation, building and sharing are part of the language design architecture and not left for later add-on tools. The Ballerina standard library is in two parts: the usual standard library level functionality (akin to libc) and a standard library of network protocols, interface standards, data formats, authentication/authorization standards that make writing secure, resilient distributed applications significantly easier than with other languages.

Ballerina has been inspired by Java, Go, C, C++, Rust, Haskell, Kotlin, Dart, Typescript, Javascript, Swift and other languages. This talk will discuss the core principles behind Ballerina including the semantics of combining aspects of networking, security, transactions, concurrency and events into a single architecture.

Sanjiva Weerawarana founded WSO2 in 2005 with a vision to reinvent the way enterprise middleware is developed, sold, delivered, and supported through an open source model. Prior to starting WSO2, Sanjiva worked for nearly eight years in IBM Research, where he focused on innovations in middleware and emerging industry standards. At IBM, he was one of the founders of the Web services platform, and he co-authored many Web services specifications, including WSDL, BPEL4WS, WS-Addressing, WS-RF, and WS-Eventing. In recognition for his company-wide technical leadership, Sanjiva was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 2003.

Sanjiva also has been committed to open source development for many years. An elected member of the Apache Software Foundation, Sanjiva was the original creator of Apache SOAP, and he has contributed to Apache Axis, Apache Axis2 and most Apache Web services projects.

In 2003, Sanjiva founded the Lanka Software Foundation (LSF), a non-profit organization formed with the objective of promoting open source development, not usage, by Sri Lankan developers. He is currently its chief scientist and a director. LSF’s success stories include many Apache Web services projects and Sahana, the predominant disaster management system in the world. In recognition of his role in promoting open source participation from developing countries, Sanjiva was elected to the board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in April 2005, where he served for two years.

Sanjiva also teaches and guides student projects part-time in the Computer Science & Engineering department of the University of Moratuwa, and he is a member of the university’s Faculty of Engineering Industry consultative board. Prior to joining IBM, Sanjiva spent three years at Purdue University as visiting faculty, where he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1994.

Game Developers Club Fall 2018
Opening Meeting and Game Jam

The UMBC Game Developer’s Club (GDC) explores the art and science of game development in a club environment and includes members from many backgrounds, including computing, digital art, computer modeling and music composition.

Their first meeting will start next week at 1pm on Friday, September 7th, in Engineering 005a. This meeting will kick off their annual Fall Game Jam, where participants will have a chance to propose game ideas, form teams, and develop a prototype over the course of the weekend (9/7 through 9/9).

The meeting will start with announcements and a brief presentation about the club for new members, followed by game idea proposals and the Game Jam itself. If you want to propose an idea for the Game Jam, be ready to give a brief presentation on the following things on September 7th:

• A 1-2 sentence summary of your idea
• What you want to have done by the end of the game jam
• What team roles you still need to fill
• Whether it will be 2D/3D/no preference
• Game engine preference (if any)

2018 Maryland Cyber Challenge seeks student teams

The 2018 Maryland Cyber Challenge seeks teams willing to test a range of skills simulating real-word cyber scenarios. Teams will climb a ladder of challenges demonstrating an ability to work together, understand both simple and complex vulnerabilities, defensive operations and gamified offensive operations.

Registration is now open. An initial orientation session start the week of August 13 and qualification Round 1 will be September 8-9..

The finals will take place live at CyberMaryland 2018 in Baltimore on October 10. Prizes (TBA) will be presented LIVE by during a closing session at CyberMaryland.

Get more information and register here