The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Ting Zhu, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering, its prestigious CAREER Award for his work to significantly improve the existing sensing capabilities of common technologies, such as cell phones. The five-year grant will total nearly $500,000.

“We congratulate Dr. Zhu on his NSF CAREER Award, an important recognition of his inventive work and what it may mean for other fields,” said Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research. “Dr. Zhu’s recognition adds to our growing list of outstanding young faculty recognized by peers and national funding agencies for their potential to advance science and technology.”

Zhu’s research may have impacts on the daily lives of people who use their cell phones to track activities, like exercise and sleep. He finds that although many mobile phones have activity monitoring systems built in, these capabilities are often not used to their fullest potential.

“The purpose of my research is to enable Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to conduct accurate, efficient, and scalable N-way sensing,” explains Zhu. “This award will allow me to leverage sensing capabilities from different IoT devices to significantly improve people’s daily life for applications such as personal health monitoring, indoor localization, and smart home automation.”

To integrate research with education, Zhu will collaborate with his colleagues at UMBC to disseminate his research to local communities and recruit underrepresented groups. His work also has potential applications for enhancing the teaching of sensing technologies in classrooms, and his lab will provide opportunities for diverse UMBC students to complete hands-on research related to sensing technologies, as well as potentially exploring connections with virtual reality and 3D scanning.

In the last two decades, UMBC faculty have received 34 NSF CAREER awards. Additional UMBC faculty honored with CAREER awards so far in 2017 include Lee Blaney, assistant professor of chemical, biochemical and environmental engineering, for his work on water contamination, and Tinoosh Mohsenin, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering, for her work on energy efficient implementation of deep learning technologies and machine learning algorithms that are developed to function similarly to the brain.

Republished from UMBC News; Photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

CyberCorps SFS Spring Meeting at UMBC

9am-1pm, Friday, 26 May 26 2017, ITE 456, UMBC
open to the public

Six CyberCorps Scholarship for Service (SFS) students from Montgomery College and Prince George’s Community College will present their results solving IT security problems for their county governments. In spring 2017, these students worked collaboratively in a special applied research course at their school to help their county government. In fall 2017, 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.

This summer, these students will join forces with SFS scholars at UMBC to work collaboratively on an applied research problem involving analysis of a policy and set of scripts that enable machine owners at UMBC to lower the UMBC firewall on their machines.

09:00  light refreshments
09:30  Introduction, Alan T. Sherman, UMBC
09:35  Report from Montgomery College, Joe Roundy and students
10:40  Report from Prince George’s Community College, Casey W. O’Brien and students
11:45  Introducing the summer research study problem, Jack Suess and Damian Doyle, UMBC Division of Information Technology
12:00  lunch and informal discussions
13:00  adjourn

CyberCorps: Scholarship For Service (SFS) is a unique program designed to increase and strengthen the cadre of federal information assurance professionals that protect the government’s critical information infrastructure. This program provides scholarships that may fully fund the typical costs incurred by full-time students while attending a participating institution, including tuition and education and related fees. Additionally, participants receive stipends of $22,500 for undergraduate students and $34,000 for graduate students. The scholarships are funded through grants awarded by the National Science Foundation.

Host: 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.

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

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

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

Everyone is invited to see presentations and demonstrations of  six class projects done by the 17 students in CMSC 491/691, Virtual Reality Design for Science, taught by CSEE Professor Jian Chen this spring.  The demonstrations and presentations will take place 12:00-1:30pm Wednesday, 10 May 2017 in the π² Immersive Hybrid Reality Lab located in room 201b in the ITE building. Join us in this new adventure to explore ideas and foster interaction and interdisciplinary science. Pizza will be provided.

• Utilizing VR simulations to study the effect of food labeling on college students meal choices, by Elsie, Kristina, and Michael
• Integrating spatial-and-non-spatial approaches for interactive quantum physics data analyses, by Henan, John, and Nick
• Analyzing the benefits of immersion for environmental research, by Caroline, James, and Peter
• CPR training effectiveness, by Joey, Justin, and Zach
• Quantitative measurement of cosmological pollution visualization, by Kyle, Pratik, and Vineet
• Memorable mobile-VR-based campus tour, by Abhinav and Vincent

Support for this new course was provided by an award from the UMBC Hrabowski Fund for Innovation to CSEE Professors Jian Chen, Marc Olano and Adam Bargteil.  The project-oriented class introduces students to the use of hybrid reality displays, 3D modeling, visualization and fabrication to conduct and analyze scientific research. The new course embraces the university’s goal of advancing interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research activity.

The UMBC π² Immersive Hybrid Reality Lab is funded by a $360,000 NSF award, with additional support from Next Century Corporation. In the lab, users wear 3D glasses with sensors attached to them and operate handheld controls that allow them to sensorially immerse themselves in data, which appears on dozens of high-resolution screens that are precisely aligned to work together. Users control the data by manipulating it in the space around them. The user’s body is fairly stationary, but the brain thinks the body is moving within the virtual world. The lab brings together tools “that will allow humans and the computer to augment each other,” notes Dr. Chen.

This semester, the CS Education Club has started a mini lecture series for students to interact with faculty outside of the classroom. They will have Dr. Marie desJardins as their next speaker. She will give an informal presentation followed by a discussion at 12:00 Noon on Monday May 8 in ITE 227. Light snacks and refreshments will be provided.

Dr. desJardins is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for the College of Engineering and Information Technology and a full Professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department. She has had an amazing career as a computer science researcher and educator. She has done research ranging from Artificial Intelligence to building a community of CS educators and improving CS education at the high school level in Maryland. She oversees the MAPLE lab, with a primary research interest in multi-agent intelligent systems. She has been an advocate for a better student experience as an administrator in COEIT, as well as the director of the Grand Challenges program at UMBC. Read more of her background on her website.

Please RSVP on myUMBC at the CS ED Club’s event page.

Information Systems Eminent Scholar Talk

Big Microbiome Data

Xiaohua Hu, Drexel University

10:00am Tuesday, 2 May 2017, ITE 459, UMBC

We know little about the microbial world. Microbiome sequencing (i.e., metagenome, 16s rRNA) extracts DNA directly from a microbial environment without culturing any species. Recently, huge amount of data are generated from many micorbiome projects such as Human Microbiome Project (HMP), Metagenomics of the Human Intestinal Tract (MetaHIT), et al. Analyzing these data will help us to better understand the function and structure of microbial community of human body, earth and other environmental eco-systems. However, the huge data volume, the complexity of microbial community and the intricate data properties have created a lot of opportunities and challenges for data analysis and mining. For example, it is estimate that in the microbial eco- system of human gut, there are about 1000 kinds of bacteria with ten billion bacteria and more than four million genes in more than 6000 orthologous gene family. The challenges are due to the complex properties of microbiome: large-scale, complicated, diversity, correlation, composition, hierarchy, incompleteness etc.

Current microbiomes data analysis methods seldom consider these data properties and often make some assumptions such as linear, Euclidean space, metric-space, continue data type, which conflict with the true data properties. For example, some similarities are non-metric because the prevalent existence of some species; and the interactions among species and environment are complex in high order. Thus it is urgent to develop novel computational methods to overcome these assumptions and consider the microbiome data properties in the analysis procedure.  In this talk, we will discuss some computational methods to analyze and visualize microbiome big data. Our studies are focusing on 1) novel machine learning and computational technologies for dimension reduction and visualization of microbiome data based on non-Euclidean spaces (manifold learning) to discover nonlinear intrinsic features and patterns in these data to overcome the linear assumptions, 2) novel statistical methods for variable selection in microbiome data by integrating group information among variables.

Xiaohua Tony Hu is a full professor and the founding director of the data mining and bioinformatics lab at the College of Computing and Informatics. He is also serving as the founding Co-Director of the NSF Center on Visual and Decision Informatics, IEEE Computer Society Bioinformatics and Biomedicine Steering Committee Chair, and IEEE Computer Society Big Data Steering Committee Chair. He joined Drexel University in 2002. He founded the International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, the IEEE International Conference on Big Data and the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine. In 2001, he founded the DMW Software in Silicon Valley, California. He received many awards, including NSF CAREER Award and IEEE Data Mining Outstanding Service Award.  Tony’s current research interests are in data/text/web mining, big data, bioinformatics, information retrieval and information extraction, social network analysis, healthcare informatics, rough set theory and application. He has published more than 270 peer-reviewed research papers in various journals, conferences and books He has obtained more than US$8.5 million research grants in the past ten years as PI or Co-PI. He has graduated 19 Ph.D. students from 2006 to 2017 and is currently supervising nine Ph.D. students.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

A Practical Introduction to Penetration Testing

Dr. Arno Wacker
University of Kassel, Germany
and UMBC 2017

12:00noon Friday, 28 April 2017, ITE 227, UMBC

While many students learn the theoretical concepts of cybersecurity and cryptology at universities, their exposure to real life systems and the application of learned theoretical foundations in the real world is usually limited. Additionally, most students and sometimes even students of cybersecurity often deal with cybersecurity threats on a very abstract level, thereby being unaware that these threats are not abstract but real for everyone, including for themselves.

Therefore, this talk intends to raise the awareness about real cybersecurity threats for everyone by demonstrating live the process of penetration testing a system. I will show live how an attacker can gain control over a victim’s PC in a matter of seconds, and how this attack can be prevented. To do so, several techniques and tools will be used, including breaking a WPA-protected wireless network, defeating SSL/TLS encryption, and obtaining a reverse shell with system rights on the victim’s computer.

By experiencing these attacks in a simulated penetration test, we can gain a deeper understanding of the theoretical foundations and their implications for real-life scenarios. With this knowledge, the attack vectors can be mitigated to a bare minimum. In many cases, the cybersecurity-aware usage of IT systems is already countering many real threats.

Prof. Dr. Arno Wacker is an assistant professor with the University of Kassel in Germany and the head of the research group Applied Information Security (AIS). Currently, he is a visiting assistant professor at UMBC teaching the network security class. He is also the lead of the open source project CrypTool 2  and a member of the steering group of MysteryTwister C3 . His main research interests are modern security protocols for decentralized distributed systems, computerized cryptanalysis of classical ciphers, and cybersecurity awareness. At the University of Kassel, he teaches classes about cryptology and cybersecurity. Additionally, he regularly offers cryptology workshops for students at local schools and gives talks about penetration testing for companies. Email: <>

Host: Alan T. Sherman,

The UMBC Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research (CHMPR)
is pleased to present as part of our distinguished lecture series

Human-Like Strategies for Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents

Dr. Sergei Nirenburg
Professor of Cognitive Science
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

11:00am Friday, 28 April 2017, ITE 325b

Artificial intelligent agents functioning in human-agent teams must correctly interpret perceptual input and make appropriate decisions about their actions. These are arguably the two central problems in computational cognitive modeling. The RPI LEIA Lab builds language-endowed intelligent agents that extract meaning of text and dialog and use the results together with input from other perception modes, a long-term belief repository, rich models of the world and of other agents, and a model of the interaction situation to make decisions about actions. Specific phenomena we currently concentrate on include incrementality, treatment of unexpected input and non-literal language (e.g., metaphor), analysis of agent biases and “mindreading,” and deliberate concept learning. All these studies are characterized by our belief in the ultimate utility of building causal models of agent capabilities that are inspired by human strategies in language processing and decision-making that go beyond analogical reasoning. In this talk I will give an overview of our recent work in the above areas.

Sergei Nirenburg is Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He also serves as Head of the Department of Cognitive Science. He has worked in the areas of cognitive science, artificial intelligence and natural language processing for over 35 years, leading R&D teams of up to 80. Dr. Nirenburg’s professional interests include developing computational models of human cognitive capabilities and implementing them in computer models of societies of human and computer agents, continuing development of the theory of ontological semantics, and the acquisition and management of knowledge about the world and about language. Academic R&D teams under Dr. Nirenburg’s leadership have implemented a variety of proof-of-concept and prototype application systems for cognitive modeling, intelligent tutoring and a variety of NLP tasks (machine translation, question answering, text summarization, information extraction, computational field linguistics, knowledge elicitation and learning). Dr. Nirenburg has written two and edited five books and published over 200 scholarly articles in journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings.

UMBC CSEE Seminar Series

Resynchronization of circadian neurons and the east-west asymmetry of jet-lag recovery

Zhixin Lu
University of Maryland, College Park

1-2pm Friday, 21 April 2017, ITE 231

Cells in the brain’s Suprachiasmatic Nucleus (SCN) are known to regulate circadian rhythms in mammals. We model synchronization of SCN cells using the forced Kuramoto model, which consists of a large population of coupled phase oscillators (modeling individual SCN cells) with heterogeneous intrinsic frequencies and external periodic forcing. Here, the periodic forcing models diurnally varying external inputs such as sunrise, sunset, and alarm clocks. We reduce the dimensionality of the system using the ansatz of Ott and Antonsen and then study the effect of a sudden change of clock phase to simulate cross-time-zone travel. We estimate model parameters from previous biological experiments. By examining the phase space dynamics of the model, we study the mechanism leading to the difference typically experienced in the severity of jet-lag resulting from eastward and westward travel.

Zhixin Lu, PhD Candidate, joined the Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos Group in the University of Maryland, College Park in 2011, as a Graduate Research Assistant in Dr. Edward Ott’s group. He acquired expertise in nonlinear dynamics and complex systems. Together with the colleagues from UMD, he used methods from nonlinear dynamics theory to investigate the synchronization of circadian neurons, the statistical properties of critical avalanching firing in integrate-and-fire neuron models, as well as dynamical behavior of artificial recurrent neuronal networks. His main research interests are the applications of nonlinear dynamics and the theory of complex networks to biological and artificial neural networks.

Host: Fow-Sen Choa; Organizer: Tulay Adali

About the CSEE Seminar Series: The UMBC Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering presents technical talks on current significant research projects of broad interest to the Department and the research community. Each talk is free and open to the public. We welcome your feedback and suggestions for future talks.