Bryan Vanek, president of national champion CyberDawgs team, heads to computer security career

UMBC students have rewritten the record books in 2018. With graduation this week, and our soon-to-be new Retriever alumni preparing for graduate school, careers, and research around the world, we reflect on all they have achieved. Here is a CSEE student profile from the class of 2018.

Bryan Vanek
B.S., Computer Science
Minor: Mathematics
Cum Laude
Hometown: Frederick, Maryland
Plans: Computer Network Operations Development Program, U.S. Department of Defense

If it weren’t for the incredible mentors, teachers, and students at this school, I would not be the security researcher and professional that I am today.

When Bryan Vanek transferred to UMBC from Frederick Community College, he focused on building connections with classmates and professors, which proved incredibly valuable as he developed a passion for computer science and cybersecurity, and sought out new opportunities to grow.

Vanek became president of UMBC’s Cyber Dawgs team, which took first place at the 2017 National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. Following that major victory, he has continued to serve as Cyber Dawgs president, while also participating in other cybersecurity competitions, including the Wargames capture the flag event at the international DEFCON conference, where he placed 42nd overall.

The Center for Women in Technology provided mentorship and support to Vanek, who is a Transfer Scholar in Information Technology and Engineering (T-SITE) Scholar. He says that the Cyber Dawgs team and CWIT program have helped him to develop skills necessary for success in a computer science career. Vanek gives back by serving as a mentor in cybersecurity at Exerceo, a nonprofit which provides skill development opportunities to high school students, college students, and young adults.

Vanek also completed two internships at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) while at UMBC. These positions led to an exciting job offer for him, as a member of the Computer Network Operations Development Program at the DoD. Vanek credits “professors that continually showed a vested and fervent interest in my success” and UMBC’s connections with a robust networks of employers with empowering him to plan and pursue a cybersecurity career.

Adapted from a UMBC News article by Megan Hanks. Portrait by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

With three majors and a core passion for service, Max Poole (CS, Math, Econ ’18) promotes access to computing education

UMBC students have rewritten the record books in 2018. With graduation this week, and our soon-to-be new Retriever alumni preparing for graduate school, careers, and research around the world, we reflect on all they have achieved. Here is a CSEE student profile from the class of 2018.

Max Poole
B.S., Computer Science, B.S., Mathematics, B.A., Economics
Summa Cum Laude
Hometown: Takoma Park, Maryland
Plans: Site Reliability Engineer, eBay

UMBC provides extensive opportunities and support for students to get engaged and involved in service beginning in their freshman year. The UMBC Shriver Center has been incredibly supportive of every service endeavor I wanted to do.

Max Poole wants to live in a society where everyone can access an education, is informed, is open to hearing new ideas, and is willing to work together to achieve great things. With this ideal in mind, he is completing three majors in three different colleges, which has enabled him to explore problems from a range of angles. He has also pursued collaborative service-learning opportunities through the Shriver Center since his freshman year, with a focus on promoting college with middle school students and boosting access to computer science education.

“The amount of students with access to computer science in middle school is minuscule,” says Poole. Knowing that computing skills will be important for many kinds of jobs of the future, he suggests, “If you can get kids interested, learning, engaged, and involved as early as possible it prepares them to be successful.”

Poole has been recognized for his commitment to service with the 2016 Newman Civic Fellowship. He is also a Sondheim Public Affairs Scholar and a member of the Honors College, with stellar academic achievements that have garnered him recognition through the national honor societies Pi Mu Epsilon and Phi Beta Kappa.

“I have this need inside of me that pushes me to always be improving the world and myself, to create and collaborate,” explains Poole. “I feel like service is deeply ingrained in my DNA. It is something I have to do.”

Beyond UMBC, Poole even pursued service opportunities while a summer intern at eBay. He looks forward to resuming those projects when he begins a full-time position with the company after graduation.

Adapted from a UMBC News article by Megan Hanks. Portrait by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

SGA President Joshua Massey (CE ’18) prepares for a technology-focused teaching career

UMBC students have rewritten the record books in 2018. With graduation this week, and our soon-to-be new Retriever alumni preparing for graduate school, careers, and research around the world, we reflect on all they have achieved. Here is a CSEE student profile from the class of 2018.

Joshua Massey
B.S., Computer Engineering
Hometown: Upper Marlboro, Maryland
Plans: Master’s in teaching, UMBC

UMBC’s values and commitments to diversity, education, and social justice allowed me to grow into the interdisciplinary thinker, problem-solver, and leader I am today.

Joshua Massey, president of UMBC’s Student Government Association (SGA), has been recognized across campus and by university partners for his leadership, his enthusiasm for community connections, and his passion for technology in education.

Massey was one of the first recipients of the Northrop Grumman Scholarship for increasing the number of undergraduate and graduate students in the United States pursuing degrees in computer engineering and electrical engineering. Through the program, Massey had the opportunity to connect with industry leaders and attend mentoring events. Massey is a member of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, and also received the Meyerhoff National Security Administration Scholarship, which enabled him to connect with industry mentors regularly and to participate in monthly seminars.

In addition to receiving mentorship from faculty and professionals in technical fields, Massey also provided support to others as a peer mentor and a teaching fellow for a course in computational thinking and design.

On campus, Massey is known for his enthusiasm for the UMBC community. He served as a “Woolie”—a Welcome Week student leader—in addition to serving as SGA senator and chief of staff, before being elected SGA president.

One of Massey’s most memorable SGA moments was the 2017 SGA summer retreat, which he attended as incoming president. “At our annual summer retreat, new and returning students involved in SGA learn about the history and values of UMBC and the SGA, work cooperatively on plans for an upcoming year of campus change, and build relationships with one another as we continually create the story of SGA at UMBC,” Massey explains. He enjoyed facilitating sessions on the important role of students in UMBC governance.

Massey will continue on at UMBC after graduation, pursuing a master’s degree in teaching, with a focus on educating students in tech fields. “Looking forward to a future career in education and advocacy, I am reminded of the strong sense of community and shared ownership that is present at UMBC,” he says. “I look forward to carrying that forward in life.”

Adapted from a UMBC News article by Megan Hanks. Portrait by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

CWIT Scholar Katherine Dillon heads to Google as a software engineer

UMBC students have rewritten the record books in 2018. With graduation this week, and our soon-to-be new Retriever alumni preparing for graduate school, careers, and research around the world, we reflect on all they have achieved. Here is a CSEE student profile from the class of 2018.

Katherine Dillon
B.S., Computer Science
Magna Cum Laude
Hometown: Ellicott City, Maryland
Plans: Software Engineer, Google; M.S., computer science, UMBC

“The CWIT program has prepared me to be a professional and take on leadership roles, and ultimately helped me get my jobs and internships. The friends I’ve made in CWIT served as such a great support system, and I couldn’t have done it without them.”

Katherine Dillon came to UMBC with interest, but not much experience, in computer science, but through the Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) was able to rapidly grow her knowledge of the field. Before long, she was conducting computer science research, taking graduate-level courses in artificial intelligence and machine learning, serving as a teaching assistant in computer science and interactive media, and volunteering through outreach opportunities, to inspire and support future computing students.

Dillon says the support she received from the faculty and staff at UMBC, particularly in CWIT and the Honors College, has been instrumental in enabling her to achieve her goals and continuously set the bar higher for what she would achieve next. Dillon conducted data visualization research under Penny Rheingans, professor of computer science and director of CWIT, and attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing as an Anita Borg Scholar. After the Grace Hopper Celebration, Dillon was offered an internship opportunity at Google in Boston. The following summer she completed another Google internship, this time in Germany.

After graduation, Dillon will work as a software engineer at Google in San Francisco, while also completing her master’s degree in computer science online through UMBC.

Adapted from a UMBC News article by Megan Hanks. Portrait by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC SFS Cybersecurity Spring Meeting

Student Project Reports and

Cybersecurity from the view of NSA’s Cybersecurity Threat Operations Center
Dave Hogue, Technical Director of NSA’s Cybersecurity Threat Operations Center (NCTOC)

11am-3pm, Friday, 25 May 2018, ITE 456, UMBC

Open to the public

Scholarship for Service (SFS) students will present their cybersecurity research from spring 2018. Eight SFS students from Montgomery College (MC) and Prince George’s Community College (PGCC) will present their results solving IT security problems for their universities and county governments. In spring 2018, these students worked collaboratively in a special applied research course at their school to help their schools and county governments. In fall 2018, these students will transfer to UMBC to complete their four-year degrees. This activity is part of a pioneering program centered at UMBC to extend SFS scholarships to community college students. In January 2018, all SFS scholars at UMBC, PGCC, and MC worked collaboratively to analyze the security of UMBC’s WebAdmin system.

David Hogue will talk about cybersecurity from the view of NSA’s Cybersecurity Threat Operations Center, including the key threats, techniques, and challenges posed by the sophisticated threat actors that NCTOC is charged to defend against.

11:00am Introductions

Alan T. Sherman (UMBC)
Casey W. O’Brien (PGCC)
David Kuijt (MC)

11:30am-1:00pm Student Project Reports

PGCC students
MC students
UMBC – Mohammad Khan, UMBC parking system
UMBC – Enis Golaszewski, winter research study on UMBC’s WebAdmin

1:00pm-2:00pm Lunch

2:00pm-3:00pm Dave Hogue, Technical Director, NSA Cybersecurity Threat Operations Center (NCTOC)

Cybersecurity from the view of NSA’s Cybersecurity Threat Operations Center: Key threats, techniques, and challenges posed by the sophisticated threat actors that NCTOC is charged to defend against.

3:00pm Adjourn

Host: Alan T. Sherman,

Alan T. Sherman is a professor of computer science and Director of the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance (CISA), which center is responsible for UMBC’s designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education and Cyber Defense Research.

Casey W. O’Brien is Executive Director and Principal Investigator of the National CyberWatch Center, Prince George’s Community College.

David Kuijt is an associate professor at Montgomery College, Rockville.

Joe Roundy is the Cybersecurity Program Manager at Montgomery College, Germantown.

Support for this event is provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS Grant 1241576.

Cynthia Matuszek named one of AI’s 10 to Watch 

UMBC CSEE Professor Cynthia Matuszek was named as one AI’s 10 to Watch by IEEE Intelligent Systems. The designation is given every two years to a group of “10 young stars who have demonstrated outstanding AI achievements”.  IEEE Intelligent Systems accepts nominations from around the world, which are then evaluated by the the publication’s  editorial and advisory boards based on reputation, impact, expert endorsement, and diversity.  Dr. Matuszek was recognized for her research that “combined robotics, natural language processing, and machine learning to build systems that nonspecialists can instruct, control, and interact with intuitively and naturally”.

Professor Matuszek joined UMBC in 2014 after receiving her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington.  At UMBC, she established and leads the Interactive Robotics and Language Lab that integrates research on robotics and natural language processing with the goal of “bringing the fields together: developing robots that everyday people can talk to, telling them to do tasks or about the world around them”.

Here is how she describes her research in the IEEE Intelligent Systems article.

​You can access a pdf version of the full IEEE AI’s 10 to Watch article here.

Professor Milton Halem receives UMBC Research Faculty Excellence Award

Dr. Milton Halem, Research Professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department, has been selected as the inaugural recipient of the UMBC Research Faculty Excellence Award. The award recognizes overall excellence in research, and where appropriate, significant contributions to teaching and service/leadership while at UMBC.

Dr. Halem joined UMBC in 2003, after retiring from a highly successful career at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where he still holds an Emeritus position as Chief Information Research Scientist to the Director of the Earth Sciences Directorate.

Upon joining UMBC, Dr. Halem served as the founding Director of UMBC’s Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research (CHMPR) and today continues to serve as the UMBC Site Director for this major NSF-supported multi-institutional center that works closely with government and private sector sponsors in the areas of big-data computation, next generation computing and software tool development.

In 2013, Dr. Halem was instrumental in negotiating and securing a major equipment donation from NASA Goddard that significantly enhanced our high-performance computing capacity through the donation of a 512 -node supercomputer to the UMBC campus.

Dr. Halem’s scholarly achievements include more than 150 scientific publications in the areas of atmospheric and oceanographic sciences and computational and information sciences. He is most noted for his groundbreaking research in simulation studies of space-observing systems and for development of four-dimensional data assimilation for weather and climate prediction.

Over the years, Dr. Halem’s achievements have earned him numerous awards including the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, the NASA Medal for Outstanding Leadership, and NASA’s highest award – the NASA Distinguished Service Medal – in 1996.

Keith J. Bowman, Dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology, comments: “Dr. Halem’s exceptional vision and his unrelenting drive for excellence continue to serve our UMBC community well. His dedication to pushing the scientific and engineering boundaries serves as a model for our campus and beyond.”

Karl V. Steiner, Vice President for Research, adds: “ I could not think of a more deserving member of our UMBC research community to receive this inaugural Research Faculty Excellence Award than Milt Halem. UMBC is the academic home to over 180 Research Faculty who contribute their expertise and personal commitment to making UMBC a destination for cutting-edge research while providing our students with remarkable insights and opportunities. Milt Halem is clearly one the leaders in the field of high-performance computation and his energy and expertise have been a major factor in UMBC being recognized as a major contributor to high performance computation and data analytics.”

Adapted from a news article on the UMBC Office of the Vice President for Research site.

At the inaugural COEIT Celebration on May 6, 2018, several College-level faculty and staff awards were initiated by COEIT Dean Keith Bowman. We are pleased to announce that the first recipient of the COEIT 2018 Excellence in Teaching Award is CSEE’s Professor of the Practice, Dr. E. F. Charles LaBerge!

As his nomination statement reads,

CONGRATULATIONS TO DR. LABERGE!

2018 Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning

The 2018 Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning (MASC-SLL) is a student-run, one-day event on speech, language & machine learning research to be held at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County  (UMBC) from 10:00am to 6:00pm on Saturday, May 12.  There is no registration charge and lunch and refreshments will be provided.  Students, postdocs, faculty and researchers from universities & industry are invited to participate and network with other researchers working in related fields.

Students and postdocs are encouraged to submit abstracts describing ongoing, planned, or completed research projects, including previously published results and negative results. Research in any field applying computational methods to any aspect of human language, including speech and learning, from all areas of computer science, linguistics, engineering, neuroscience, information science, and related fields is welcome. Submissions and presentations must be made by students or postdocs. Accepted submissions will be presented as either posters or talks.

Program

Big Data, Security and Privacy

Prof. Bhavani Thuraisingham, University of Texas at Dallas
11:00-12:00 Wednesday, 16 May 2018, ITE 459, UMBC

The collection, storage, manipulation and retention of massive amounts of data have resulted in serious security and privacy considerations. Various regulations are being proposed to handle big data so that the privacy of the individuals is not violated. For example, even if personally identifiable information is removed from the data, when data is combined with other data, an individual can be identified. This is essentially the inference and aggregation problem that data security researchers have been exploring for the past four decades. This problem is exacerbated with the management of big data as different sources of data now exist that are related to various individuals.

While collecting massive amounts of data causes security and privacy concerns, big data analytics applications in cyber security is exploding. For example, an organization can outsource activities such as identity management, email filtering and intrusion detection to the cloud. This is because massive amounts of data are being collected for such applications and this data has to be analyzed. The question is, how can the developments in big data management and analytics techniques be used to solve security problems? These problems include malware detection, insider threat detection, and intrusion detection.

To address the challenges of big data security and privacy as well as big data analytics for cyber security applications, we organized a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation in September 2014 and presented the results in 2015 at an inter-agency workshop in Washington DC. Since then several developments have been reported on big data security and privacy as well as on big data analytics of cyber security. This presenting will summarize the findings of the workshop and discuss the developments and directions.

Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham is the Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) and the Executive Director of UTD’s Cyber Security Research and Education Institute since October 2004. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at Kings College, University of London (2015-2018) and a New America Cyber Security Policy Fellow (2017-2018). Her current research is on integrating cyber security and data science. Prior to joining UTD she worked at the MITRE Corporation for 16 years including a three-year stint as a Program Director at the NSF. She initiated the Data and Applications Security program at NSF and was a member of the Cyber Trust theme. While at MITRE she was a department head and was also a technical advisor to the DoD, the NSA, the CIA, and the IRS. Prior to that, she worked for the commercial industry for six years including at Honeywell, Inc. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the IEEE CS 1997 Technical Achievement Award, the IEEE ISI 2010 Research Leadership Award, ACM SIGSAC 2010 Outstanding Contributions Award, SDPS 2012 Transformative Achievement Gold Medal, 2013 IBM Faculty Award, ACM CODASPY 2017 Innovative and Lasting Research Contributions Award, IEEE CS Services Computing 2017 Research Innovation Award, and Dallas Business Journal 2017 Women in Technology Award. She is a 2003 Fellow of the IEEE and the AAAS and a 2005 Fellow of the British Computer Society. She has published over 120 journal articles, 250 conference papers, 15 books, has delivered over 130 keynote and featured addresses, and is the inventor of six US patents. She has chaired/co-chaired top tier conferences including the Women in Cyber Security (WiCyS) 2016, ACM CCS 2017, and is serving as the Program co-Chair for IEEE ICDM 2018. She also delivered a featured address at the Women in Data Science (WiDS) conference in 2018. She received her PhD at the University of Wales, Swansea, UK, and the earned higher doctorate (D. Eng) from the University of Bristol, England, UK for her published research in secure data management.