Today’s cybersecurity industry is expected to grow by almost $100 billion dollars by 2020. That means that there will be an unprecedented number of jobs to fill to meet the demand and keep to our economic and national security intact. Job postings for cybersecurity positions have increased 74%  in the past five years, with a global projection of 1.5 million unfilled jobs over the next five years. Many are calling the increasing shortage of workers a national crisis.

Northrop Grumman will host an online event to discuss Building the Cyber Workforce from 10:00-11:00am on Friday, 28 October 2016. The discussion features UMBC president Freeman Hrabowski and two UMBC alumni: Lauren Mazzoli (’15 CS, Math) who is currently a Northrop Grumman Cyber Software Engineer and Eric Conn (’85 CS) who is the founder and CEO of Leverege and a bwtech@UMBC Cync Incubator participant.  The discussion will be moderated by Tom Temin of Federal News Radio.

You can watch the discussion live this Friday on the Web, tweet questions to @NGCNews and follow @UMBC, which will be live tweeting the #NGcyber event. If you are on campus, join us in ITE325 to watch the event and discuss it afterward.

CSEE Prof. Anupam Joshi was interviewed on MPT’s Direct Connection about the recent massive distributed denial of service attack that was launched from a botnet from compromised IoT devices. The attack disrupted access to many popular Internet sites, including Twitter, Netflix, Amazon and PayPal. Dr. Joshi discussed the mechanism that used and what can be done to reduce the risks of similar attacks. He also pointed out that Mirai, the name of one of the software systems used by the attackers, is a Japanese word that means “future” and that this may be a harbinger of things to come.

CSEE Professor Anthony Johnson has been appointed by the IEEE to its Corporate Innovation Award Committee. The IEEE Corporate Innovation Award was established in 1985 to recognize outstanding innovation by an organization in an IEEE field of interest. The recipient must be a corporate, governmental, or academic entity working within the fields of interest to IEEE. Recent recipients include Intel, SanDisk, DARPA, and Applied Materials, Inc.

Dr. Johnson is the director of UMBC’s Center for Advanced Studies in Photonics Research. His research is in the area of ultrafast optics and optoelectronics- the ultrafast photophysics and nonlinear optical properties of bulk, nanoclustered, and quantum well semiconductor structures, untrashort pulse propagation in fibers and high-speed lightwave systems. He is a fellow of IEEE, the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society, AAAS and the National Society of Black Physicists.

CSEE faculty member Tim Finin was a judge in the Shark Tank event held at the AFCEA-DC’s 7th Annual Cybersecurity Summit on 11 October 2016. The summit is held each year by the DC chapter of AFCEA, the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

In the two shark tank session, cyber entrepreneurs presented their ideas to a panel of sharks that included cybersecurity experts from government, industry, academia and the venture capital community. The contestants tried to convince the sharks to choose their cyber technology over the other presentations. Early start-ups, as well as large federal system integrators, were eligible to sign up to present their latest and greatest technologies.

Two contestants were selected as winners, one from each session: Javelin Networks and Dark Cubed.  Videos of the two shark tank panels as well as other sessions are available at Cybersecurity TV.

UMBC’s Undergraduate Research Awards provide up to $1,500 to undergraduate students to support their research or creative work with a UMBC faculty mentor on an original project. UMBC students of all years and disciplines are invited to apply, as long as they will remain enrolled at UMBC long enough to complete the proposed work.

An informal workshop on the opportunity and how to apply for an award will be held from Noon to 1:00pm on Wednesday, 26 October 2016 in Sondheim Hall 103.

You can hear about the process and doing research as an undergraduate student from current and past URA mentors Dr. Lee Blaney of the Chemical, Biochemical, and Environmental Engineering department, Dr. Carolyn Forestiere of the Political Science department and Dr. Luis Pinet-Peralta of the Health Administration and Public Policy department. At least one or two current or former URA Scholars will also be in attendance to discuss their experience in the program.

Register for the URA Workshop here.

Registration for the Spring 2017 semester begins on November 1. If you are still unsure what classes you should take, come to the CWIT-sponsored Pick Your Classes event and share your thoughts with other students in your major.

Computing and engineering students are invited to join the Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) for their fall semester Pick Your Classes event on Wednesday, October 26, from 12-12:50pm in UC 312. Bring your plans and thoughts about your classes for the spring semester and get advice from others in your major. Also, be prepared to offer your advice to fellow COEIT students. Feel free to bring friends in computing and engineering majors who you think would benefit from this event. Pizza will be provided.

2016 ADVANCE Distinguished Lecture Series

Against the Odds: How I Became a Computer Scientist

Dr. Claudia Pearce (UMBC MS ’89, PhD ’94)
National Security Agency

4:30-5:30 Tuesday, 11 October 2016
Library and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn

Dr. Claudia Pearce, UMBC Alumna and Senior Computer Science Authority at NSA, shares a personal story of perseverance in her educational, research, and career journey as a computer scientist.

UMBC-ADVANCE is pleased to announce that alumna Dr. Claudia Pearce M.S., ’89 and Ph.D., ’94 and 2014 UMBC Alumna of the Year in COEIT is our 2016 ADVANCE Distinguished Speaker. Dr. Pearce is currently Senior Computer Science Authority at NSA, a member of UMBC’s COEIT advisory board, and involved in collaborative research with our CSEE faculty.

The event will take place on Tuesday, October 11th and we are proud to incorporate this event into UMBC’s 50th Anniversary celebrations. As part of this event, Dr. Pearce will deliver a campus-wide talk on her career trajectory at 4:30pm in the Library Gallery followed by a reception.

Claudia Pearce, UMBC Alumna (’89 M.S. in Computer Science and ’94 Ph.D. in Computer Science) and 2014 COEIT Alumna of the Year awardee, is currently the Senior Computer Science Authority at the NSA. In her time at the NSA, Pearce has created development programs for computer science and information technology new-hires to NSA, a short-course series on high-end topics in CS and IT, a summer intern program and organized a distinguished lecture series. In addition, she has created a computer science grants program with the National Science Foundation, for computer science education and outreach. She has also served on the Advisory Board of the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology and UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology Advisory Board.

Prior to becoming the NSA’s Senior Computer Science Authority, Pearce served as the Chief of Knowledge Discovery Sciences, where she directed a research team that created Knowledge Discovery applications.

From 2000-2003, Pearce was part of the Senior Technical Development Program. While involved with this program, Pearce collaborated with organizations such as the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and Magnify Research, Inc., on topics such as “applications of data mining techniques to natural language processing.” As a Senior Computer Scientist from 1985-2000, Pearce conducted research in the area of databases and information retrieval systems.

Pearce received a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Florida in 1973, graduating with High Honors and a Phi Beta Kappa distinction. She received an M.S. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Florida in 1974. In 1989 she received an M.S. in Computer Science from UMBC.  She also received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMBC in 1994.

Pearce is currently involved in research at UMBC. She helped to organize a workshop sponsored by the NSF and the Department of Defense, titled “Beyond Watson: Predictive Analytics and Big Data.” The research that inspired the Beyond Watson workshop ties into questions that are relevant to information retrieval systems. Questions such as “how do you find the right documents out of very large collections of text?” and “what are the kinds of languages, tools, techniques, infrastructure [needed]…to build our own Watson?” Pearce notes that she’s “always been interested in databases, and in particular text and natural language databases, and this notion of answering questions.” Furthermore, information retrieval systems was the topic of her Ph.D. dissertation.

Claudia lives with her husband Jonathan Cohen in Glenwood, MD. She is “an avid snow skier, quilt maker and trumpet player.”

Credibility, Privacy and Policing on Online Social Media

Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru (“PK”)
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, India

1:00-2:00pm Friday, 14 October 2016, ITE 229, UMBC

With increase in usage of the Internet, there has been an exponential increase in the use of online social media on the Internet. Websites like Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Orkut, Twitter and Flickr have changed the way the Internet is being used. There is a dire need to investigate, measure, and understand privacy and security on online social media from various perspectives (computational, cultural, psychological). Real world scalable systems need to be built to detect and defend security and privacy issues on online social media. I will describe briefly some cool projects that we work on: TweetCred, OSM & Policing, OCEAN, and Call Me MayBe. Many of our research work is made available for public use through tools or online services. Our work derives techniques from Computational Social Science, Data Science, Statistics, Network Science, and Human Computer Interaction. In particular, in this talk, I will focus on the following:

• TweetCred, a tool to extract intelligence from Twitter which can be useful to security analysts. TweetCred is backed by award-winning research publications in international and national venues.
• How police in India are using online social media, how we can use computer science understanding to help police engage more with citizens and increase the safety in society.
• OCEAN: Open source Collation of eGovernment data and Networks, how publicly available information on Government services can be used to profile citizens in India. This work obtained the Best Poster Award at Security and Privacy Symposium at IIT Kanpur, 2013 and it has gained a lot of traction in Indian media.
• Given an identity in one online social media, we are interested in finding the digital foot print of the user in other social media services, this is also called digital identity stitching problem. This work is also backed by award-winning research publication.

Ponnurangam Kumaraguru (“PK”) is an Associate Professor, at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi, India from Aug 2009. He is currently the Hemant Bharat Ram Faculty Research Fellow, and the Founding Head of Cybersecurity Education and Research Centre. PK is an ACM Distinguished Speaker. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is primarily excited about and works with a bunch of smart students and collaborators around the world on the issues related to Privacy and Security in Online Social Media, Computational Social Science, and Data Science for Social Good. In the past seven years of his faculty life, he has managed projects close to a $800,000 USDs. PK has received research funds from multiple departments of the Government of India, National Science Foundation, Adobe, RSA, and International Development Research Centre. PK is part of multiple government initiatives / projects in the area of Cybersecurity in India. Technology that PK and his students have developed at IIIT Delhi is currently being used by 40+ different State and Central Government agencies in India. PK has spent his summer sabbaticals at IBM India Research Labs, Adobe Research Labs – India, and Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. He is currently visiting Max Planck Institute for Software Systems for Summer 2016. PK regularly serves as a PC member at prestigious conferences like WWW, ICWSM, CSCW, AsiaCCS and he also serves as a reviewer for International Journal of Information Security and ACM’s Transactions on Internet Technology. PK’s Ph.D. thesis work on anti-phishing research at CMU has contributed in creating an award winning start-up Wombat Security Technologies, which recently raised Series C funding and also acquired a company. PK founded and manages the PreCog research group at IIIT-Delhi.

Host: Anupam Joshi,

UMBC will hold an event to celebrate the opening of  the new  π² Immersive Hybrid Reality Laboratory from 2:00-4:00pm on Friday, 14 October 2016 in the new lab in room 229 of the Information Technology/Engineering building.

π² will be one of the most advanced visualization facilities of its kind in the mid-Atlantic region. UMBC sees it as enabling new research efforts on the visual exploration of data and knowledge discovery for biology, math, engineering, visual arts, and digital humanities as well as a tool to study and enhance the potential of the medium itself.

The instrument features a curved wall with a 50 million pixel resolution made from multi-column, thin-bezel, and stereo-capable LCD panels with a six degree-of-freedom tracking system. The system will integrate and leverage many important characteristics: immersion, hybrid reality, high resolution, large field of view, large space and size, body-centric human-computer interaction, and support for heterogeneous data fusion.

The facility was made possible by an NSF MRI award  granted to a team lead by Professor Jian Chen (CSEE) and including Craig Saper (Language, Literacy, and Culture), Karl Steiner (VP of Research), Penny Rheingans (CSEE) and Michael Summers (Biological Science).

The event is an open house with only a few formal remarks. Speakers will include Freeman Hrabowski (President of UMBC), Karl Steiner (Vice President for Research at UMBC) and Jian Chen (the UMBC professor who was awarded an NSF grant to create the system).  Get more information and register to attend here.

What’s it really like to be an intern at the National Security Agency? Learn about the wide array of available opportunities from former NSA interns who are now NSA employees. Join them for a live webinar 5-6pm Thursday, October 13 to learn more about the benefits of our paid internships and co-op programs. NSA has more than 30 programs available in a wide variety of majors:

• Computer Science, Computer/Electrical Engineering & Information Systems
• Mechanical/Civil Engineering & Architecture
• Mathematics
• International Affairs & Foreign Language
• Other fields like Business & Human Resources

They will also talk about the application process and what to expect. Don’t miss this final window to apply — all internship programs close later this month!  U.S. citizenship is required for NSA employment NSA is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Register now for the Student Programs Webinar, 5-6pm Thursday, 13 Oct. 2016. Seats are limited, so don’t put it off!