The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

An Introduction to the Security of Software Defined Networks

Enis Golaszewski
CSEE Department, UMBC

11:15am-12:30pm, Friday, 7 October, UMBC, ITE 229

We introduce the concept of Software Defined Networks (SDNs) and the security challenges facing them. SDNs are a promising new network architecture that separates the data and control planes. By providing a central point of control and visibility over the network, SDNs allows a network to handle traffic with unprecedented flexibility, while simultaneously introducing potentially vulnerable lines of communication between a centralized controller and its constituent switches. To highlight the security challenges facing SDNs, we introduce and discuss several existing attacks. Anyone interested in networks and network security will want to know about the emerging trend of SDNs.

About the Speaker. Enis Golaszewski () is a first-semester PhD student and SFS scholar at UMBC working with Dr. Sherman on the security of software defined networks.

Host: Alan T. Sherman,

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays

Department of Information Systems

Challenges of Implementing Personalized (Precision) Medicine

Dr. Eddy Karnieli, Rambam Medical Center, Israel
11:00-12:00 Friday, 7 October 2016, ITE 459, UMBC

The concept of personalized (precision) medicine (PM) emphasizes the scientific and technological innovations that enable the physician to tailor disease prediction, diagnosis and treatment to the individual patient, based on a personalized data-driven approach. The major challenge for the medical systems is to translate the molecular and genomic advances into clinical available means.

For example, type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a major health problem. T2D is a very heterogeneous disease with at least three subgroups that exhibit distinct phenotypic and biological characteristics and susceptibilities to diabetes-related complications and comorbidities and specific genetic markers. Genomic analysis has already revealed about 80 gene loci variations. However, only few clinical and biochemical factors are taken into account in identifying diabetes type and advising therapy.

Among the main challenges to implementation of personalized (precision) medicine into current medical practice are knowledge gap of professionals; lack of approved and readily available genomic, phramcogenomics and other –omics tests; the lack of decision support systems integrated with EMRs clinical data, as well as updated genetic and molecular information at the clinical point of care and ethical and regulatory challenges. Currently, expensive cost of the new molecular targeting drugs like those used in treating cancers and rare genetic diseases patients results in major economic burden on the health system. Further, the question whether PM will reduce major causes of chronic morbidity and mortality still waits for an answer. During the lecture I will also outline programs currently being implemented to overcome these challenges.

Professor Eddy Karnieli is a graduate of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion– Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.He obtained clinical training in Internal Medicine and Endocrinology at the Rambam Medical Center and did his Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Diabetes, Obesity and Endocrinology at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He was a visiting scholar at the University of California at San Diego and at the National Institutes of Health. He is currently the Director of the Institute of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at the Rambam Medical Center. …

UMBC CSEE Seminar Series

Analytic approaches to study the chronnectome
(time-varying brain connectivity)

Dr. Vince D. Calhoun
Executive Science Officer and Director, Image Analysis and MR Research
The Mind Research Network
Distinguished Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
The University of New Mexico

1:00-2:00pm Friday, 7 October 2016, ITE 229 UMBC

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in moving functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) connectivity beyond simple scan-length averages into approaches that capture time-varying properties of connectivity. In this perspective we use the term “chronnectome” to describe such metrics that allow a dynamic view of coupling. We discuss the potential of these to improve characterization and understanding of brain function, which is inherently dynamic, not-well understood, and thus poorly suited to conventional scan-averaged connectivity measurements.

Prof. Vince Calhoun (EE Ph.D.’02, UMBC) is this year’s distinguished alum in the Engineering and Information Technology category and is the first speaker in our departmental seminar series.

Dr. Calhoun is currently Executive Science Officer at the Mind Research Network and a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of more than 450 full journal articles and over 550 technical reports, abstracts and conference proceedings. His work includes the development of flexible methods to analyze functional magnetic resonance imaging such as independent component analysis (ICA), data fusion of multimodal imaging and genetics data, and the identification of biomarkers for disease. Among other things, he leads an NIH P20 COBRE center grant on multimodal imaging of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression as well as an NSF EPSCoR grant focused on brain imaging and epigenetics of adolescent development. Dr. Calhoun is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), The Association for the Advancement of Science, The American Institute of Biomedical and Medical Engineers, The American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. He is currently chair of the IEEE Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) technical committee.

Host: 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.

Organizers: Tulay Adali and Alan Sherman

In recent months, as the U.S. presidential election has approached, concerns over email hacks and the security of voting systems have frequently appeared in the news. Rick Forno, assistant director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity and director of the Cybersecurity Graduate Program at UMBC, recently described to WYPR’s Sheilah Kast that voting machines are just one part of a system that has concerning vulnerabilities.

“I think we have to separate the issue between voting machines and the overall voting process, because the two are related but have very different threat and vulnerability characteristics,” said Forno, who is particularly interested in the voting process and technologies used to collect data, as well as how that data is collected, counted, and reported.

A voting machine might report votes to a laptop across the room at a polling location, and that computer might then share data from the single polling place with a computer in a regional or state hub to be aggregated. In this scenario, Forno wonders how the laptop—as one small but crucial piece in the full chain of data transfer—is protected.

Data can be corrupted at moments when it is moving, and also when it is stationary, he says. “You’re looking at a range of security concerns that start with the individual voting machine in the voting booth, all the way up through the systems that officially record and report out the outcomes of an election.”

Voting machines include computers and other hardware that need to be maintained on a regular basis, much like computers that people use at work or at home. Forno warns that not regularly updating the technologies used in voting systems, can give hackers and researchers the opportunity to identify weaknesses and potential vulnerabilities in those systems.

Listen to the full segment “Cybersecurity and the Ballot Box” on the WYPR website.

Interested in learning more about Google?
Come hear it from Googlers and UMBC alumni!

On Thursday Sept. 29 and Friday Sept. 30, Google host hour tech/culture/info talk events on campus for UMBC students to learn more about Google and the internship and career opportunities it offers to students. They will have food, swags and many internship and full time opportunities for students.

Check out the details below and register for the event(s) HERE, if you’re interested in Google opportunites make sure to include a soft copy of your resume.

THE DEETS

Who: Except the first event on Thursday 09/29, at  1pm that is designed for PhD engineering students, all Computer Science and Engineering students regardless of degrees they are pursuing, and anyone else with an interest in software development are welcome!

Why: Learn more about Google’s hiring process, culture, technology, job and/ internship opportunities, and more! – directly from a Googler!

What to do next?: Register for the event HERE! Make sure your resume and LinkedIn profiles are up to date (feel free to link both in the form above) and of course come with lots of good questions!

Here’s information on the four events:

• What: Info Sharing: Google PhD Info Session for PhD CS/Engineering Students
  When: 9/29, Thursday, 1pm – 3pm
  Where: Commons 318 RSVP: RSVP Form

 

• What: Info Sharing: Resume Tips & Tricks for Technical Opportunities
  When: 9/29, Thursday, 4pm – 5pm
  Where: Commons 331 RSVP: RSVP Form

 

• What: Talk and Workshop: Google Technical Interview Prep Workshop
  When: 9/30, Friday, 1pm – 2:30pm
  Where: Commons 331 RSVP: RSVP Form

 

• What: Tech Talk: Google AppEngine, Simple & Scalable Solution for Startups
  When: 9/30, Friday, 3pm – 4pm
  Where: Commons 329 RSVP: RSVP Form

 

Have an idea on how to improve or change the world? Burning up with ideas to help the environment, society, business, your friends, social media or anything else you can dream up? UMBC wants to give you $750 for telling us your idea! How can you win cash for your innovative solution?

The UMBC Idea Competition is designed to challenge you to think about problems and opportunities facing society. If UMBC is one of the most innovative schools in the nation, then UMBC students are just the kind of innovators that can really change the world. Now’s your chance to make it happen.

Submit your idea online via the entry form by 13 October 2016. And you can also grab your camera or smartphone and post a YouTube video in which you pitch your idea. The top entries will be judged, live, by a panel of professionals and alumni along with a crowd of students at the final competition held 17 November 2016, in the Sports Zone in The Commons. The top three winners, determined by the results of student and panel voting, will receive cash prizes up to $750.

For details, see UMBC Idea Competition page.

On Saturday and Sunday, October 1-2, UMBC will host a 24-hour hackathon called HackUMBC where students come together in teams of up to four and build hardware or software projects, learn from technology experts, and share ideas. At the end of the 24 hours students will present their projects in an expo in which judges will select winners who will win awesome prizes!

All students are welcome! No experience or qualifications are necessary, just a curiosity to try new things and a passion for innovation.

The HackUMBC organizers will provide meals, snacks, swag, and sleeping space. Mentors and tech talks will share useful knowledge to help you create things that you never thought were possible.

Opening ceremonies will be in the Meyerhoff Chemistry Building then team formation, project building, and workshops will take place in the ITE and Engineering buildings. Registration will open up at 10:00am on Saturday October 1st in front of Meyerhoff. The project expo will be on Sunday in the University Center Ballroom starting at 1:00pm, and closing ceremonies will begin at 3:00pm.

UMBC students get priority consideration by applying on the HackUMBC website,  which will be updated with more details as the event approaches.  For more infomation, watch the website or contact the HackUMBC Team at hackumbc at gmail.com.

BOMBE was the name of an electro-mechanical machine, developed during WWII by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, while working as codebreakers at Bletchley Park.

On September 9th the NSA will launch its fourth annual Codebreaker Challenge — a hands-on, software reverse engineering challenge in which students work to complete mission-focused objectives and push their university to the top of the competition leaderboard. UMBC did well, both individually and as a campus, in last year’s challenge. The theme of this year’s challenge is countering improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and students will be given six tasks of increasing difficulty, culminating in them developing a capability to permanently disable the IED software (in the fictional scenario.)

Feedback from previous iterations of the challenge indicated that students were able to learn a great deal from participating.

• The challenge will be hosted at https://codebreaker.Ltsnet.net.
• The challenge will begin on Sept. 9th at 9 PM ET, and will end on Dec. 31st at midnight.
• Students should register for the site using their .edu email addresses.
• The challenge website has nine lectures on reverse engineering, so students with little coding experience can participate.

Visit the 2016 Codebreaker Challenge site for more info and to register.

Do you have an idea that could improve the lives of people in your community? Would you like to turn your idea into action with mentorship from experts in technology, social change, organization development and community health?

Kaiser Permanente is hosting a Social Innovation Challenge to identify innovate solutions to improve health and well being in Baltimore City. The hackathon will take place September 24-25 at < href=”http://www.coppin.edu/”>Coppin State University in Baltimore. Participants will come together to formulate solutions to address the some of the most pressing issues affecting the lives of people in Baltimore City.

You can compete individually, come with a team already in place, or find a team when the Hackathon kicks off. In addition to cash and tech prizes, winning teams will participate in a tailored incubation program to rapidly develop their ideas with the intention of bringing their solutions to life. Get more information at http://kpsic.bemyapp.com/.

CSEE lecturers Katherine Gibson and Jeremy Dixon received a Hrabowski Fund for Innovation seed grant to study, develop and evaluate ways in which the campus can reduce academic integrity violations in computer science classes.

Their goal is to improve student support for academic integrity practices with a focus on UMBC’s first and second classes in Computer Science, CMSC 201 and CMSC 202. The team will implement an improved system for educating students on class policies that uses aural and visual resources and a mandatory quiz to test comprehension. The new approach will also include developing and promoting supplemental academic opportunities for students struggling with course material.

Established in 2012, the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation supports initiatives to enhance teaching and learning at UMBC, with specific emphasis on innovative approaches to increase student success. The competition is open to all tenured and tenure-track faculty; clinical instructional faculty; and lecturers, instructors and staff with full-time appointments. Proposals for the next round of Innovation Fund grants are due by October 14, 2016.