Prof. Tülay Adali receives prestigious Humboldt Research Award for advanced data analysis

UMBC’s Tülay Adali, professor of computer science and electrical engineering (CSEE) and distinguished university professor, has received the prestigious Humboldt Research Award. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation describes the award as presented to scholars “whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.”

Adali is the director of UMBC’s Machine Learning for Signal Processing Lab. Her research focuses on developing flexible methods for data fusion. These innovative methods enable researchers to extract powerful features from multi-modal data by letting them fully interact with and inform each other.

A main application area of her work has been medical image analysis, where these features are used in diagnosis as well as treatment planning and evaluation. Adali and her research collaborators are also exploring applications of these methods in remote sensing, misinformation detection, and gesture and video analysis. 

A years-long research collaboration

Humboldt Award recipients spend up to one year conducting collaborative research at institutions in Germany. Adali plans to continue to work with her longtime collaborator Peter Schreier, who is based in Paderborn University. Through a research connection that has spanned many years, Adali says that her lab and Schreier’s continue to have wonderful synergy. 

Together, Adali and Schreier have worked to address problems such as data-driven discovery of relationships in multi-modal data, and in particular, when the sample sizes are small. “This is a key practical problem in many applications, especially in the medical domain,” Adali shares. She notes that this provides an important starting point for their current work. 

“Things are moving along, even though I could not travel this summer, as we started having weekly research meetings between our groups,” Adali says. “This is a valuable experience for my students. In the past, we had hosted Schreier and his students here at UMBC, some of my students had met Schreier and his students at conferences before, and these initial physical connections matter. I am hoping we will all be able to travel again, soon.”

Receiving the award

As a Humboldt Award recipient, Adali was invited to attend a gathering in June with her fellow awardees, hailing from universities around the world. Due to COVID-19, the event was moved online. Awardees had an opportunity to meet the German president virtually as part of the event. 

While she wishes the event could have been held in person, Adali says that it gave her an exciting opportunity to connect with other Humboldt awardees and learn more about scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt.

In 2015, Curtis Menyuk, professor of CSEE, received a Humboldt Award.

Adapted from a UMBC News article written by Megan Hanks. Banner image: Tülay Adali, fourth from left, with the members of her lab. Photo courtesy of Adali.

Naghmeh Karimi receives NSF CAREER award to develop long-lasting security for cryptographic chips

Naghmeh Karimi is the most recent UMBC faculty member to receive a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant, totaling approximately $500,000 over five years, will support her work to investigate how device-aging related risks compromise the security of cryptographic devices.

Karimi explains that cryptographic chips offer continued advances in authenticating messages and devices as well as preserving the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive information. They do so by implementing cryptographic algorithms in hardware. These chips combine the benefits of cryptographic applications with the speed and power advantage of hardware implementations. 

Despite their significant benefits, cryptographic chips can be compromised by adversaries who have gained physical access to the chips. Current protections against such attacks do not consider the aging of devices, which can shift device parameters over time.

Addressing security vulnerabilities 

Aging makes cryptographic chips operate slower and, ultimately, results in their malfunction, says Karimi. She explains that the typical lifetime of integrated circuits is 7 to 8 years. As the devices age, their performance decreases. Karimi is exploring the specific security vulnerabilities of aged devices and how they can be protected.

“We want to preserve the security of devices over their lifetime,” Karimi says.

Karimi and her research team will study whether the success of the side-channel analysis and fault-injection attacks increase in older devices. Karimi will create and test several countermeasures to protect devices against such attacks.

Connecting students with opportunities in tech security

The CAREER Award funding will support several UMBC undergraduate and graduate student researchers working with Karimi to develop long-lasting security solutions for hardware platforms. 

At the same time, Karimi will also develop and launch a new course in UMBC’s computer science and electrical engineering department on cryptography, hardware security, and testing. She will also work with the UMBC Cyber Scholars Program to connect students with internship opportunities focused on hardware security, to give them additional hands-on experience in the field. 

“The success of this project will enable us to develop long-lasting security for trusted hardware platforms,” Karimi says. “This will result in aging-resistant security solutions that benefit society through devices that remain secure over their lifetime.”

Adapted from a UMBC News article by Megan Hanks. Banner image: UMBC’s ITE building. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

CSEE Prof. LaBerge receives USM Board of Regents’
Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching

E. F. Charles LaBerge, Professor of the Practice in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department, has been awarded the 2020 University System of Maryland Board of Regents’ Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Since joining UMBC in 2008, E.F. Charles LaBerge’s career has been marked by outstanding classroom instruction, innovative teaching methods, and development of active learning spaces on campus. He brings a wealth of industry experience and knowledge to UMBC students enrolled in the range of courses that he teaches. As a professor of the practice in computer science and electrical engineering, LaBerge exposes his students to computer and electrical engineering concepts through real-world examples and multidisciplinary instruction. His extensive connections in industry have benefited his students and helped to prepare them for careers and graduate degrees.

As an instructor for the introduction to engineering course taken by all engineering students, he has impacted the educational careers of students across the College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT). He consistently receives high ranks and positive comments from students on course evaluations. Both his students and colleagues acknowledge and appreciate LaBerge’s modern approach to classroom instruction, which incorporates technology and new practices.

LaBerge was instrumental in the development of UMBC’s Active Learning Center, a space that supports collaborative learning to promote student success and retention in computing courses. He is a strong supporter of students across campus, opening his office to students, from those who have questions about classes to those seeking professional advice and mentorship. His teaching extends beyond the classroom, and he supports and mentors students presenting at UMBC’s annual Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievements Day each spring.

He is a very engaged member of COEIT, having served as the undergraduate program director for computer engineering and as the coordinator for computer engineering’s accreditation program, among other roles. His commitment to the College was recognized with the inaugural College of Engineering and Information Technology Award for Teaching Excellence in 2018. This award was presented to him based on feedback from fellow faculty and colleagues.

LaBerge earned his B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from UMBC.

Adapted from the UMBC faculty awards announcement.

Investigating the Impact of Device Aging on the Security of Cryptographic Chips

Professor Naghmeh Karimi received a prestigious NSF CAREER award to support her research on Investigating the impact of device aging on the security of cryptographic chips.

CAREER awards are among NFS’s most prestigious awards and are intended to support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Cryptographic chips implement cryptographic functions in hardware for better performance. Despite the significant performance benefits, cryptographic chips can be compromised by the adversaries via monitoring their power-consumption, tampering their logic or placing the chips under stress to generate erroneous outputs to infer sensitive data. The current protections against such attacks do not consider the aging of the devices that can cause a parametric shift of device parameters over time which can compromise device security.

Supported by this five-year award, Professor Karimi and her students will investigate the effects of device aging on the security of cryptographic devices, particularly those with protection against physical attacks, and develop solutions to ensure security when device aging comes into account. Her work will help enable the development of long-lasting security for trusted hardware platforms, and result in aging-resistant security solutions that benefit the society via devices that remain secure over their lifetime.