UMBC will collaborate with the Howard County Public School System (HCPSS) to increase STEM opportunities for students. The partnership was formalized with an official signing on Thursday, September 1 at the Sheraton Columbia Waterside Restaurant in Columbia, Maryland.

UMBC will collaborate with the HCPSS Office of Career and Technology Education to inform students about the wide variety of information technology and engineering programs available at UMBC and the Center for Women In Technology (CWIT). UMBC will provide guest speakers for high school classes, attend HCPSS professional development days for computer science and technology teachers, and collaborate with Howard County community groups to promote STEM education to student groups underrepresented in STEM fields. CWIT offers scholarships, initiatives for creating a supportive learning environment, and programs for high school girls interested in engineering and information technology.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Categorizing Misconceptions of Cybersecurity Reasoning

 Travis Scheponik
Computer Science and Electronical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

11:15am-12:30pm Friday, 9 September 2016, ITE 237

We present preliminary analysis of student responses to cybersecurity interview prompts.

During spring 2016, we interviewed twenty-six students at three diverse colleges and universities (UMBC, Prince George’s Community College, Bowie State University) to understand how they reason about cybersecurity.  Each interview lasted approximately one hour during which we asked the subject to solve four cybersecurity problems.  For this purpose, we developed twelve engaging interview prompts organized in three protocols each comprising four prompts.  Using a paired expert-novice methodology, we are analyzing transcriptions of the interviews produced from audio and video recordings.  The twelve prompts focused on five difficult and important concepts identified from a Delphi method with thirty-six experts, which we carried out in fall 2014.

Preliminary analysis of student responses reveals common misconceptions and problematic reasoning, including conflating concepts, biased reasoning, unsound logic, and factual errors.  For example, students commonly conflate authentication and authorization, as well as encryption and hashing.   Examples of biased reasoning include seeing the situation only from the user’s perspective, placing inappropriately high trust in physical objects, and underestimating potential vulnerabilities from insider threats.  Initially, we marked student statements as “correct’’ or “incorrect.’’  From the “incorrect’’ responses, we identified misconceptions about cybersecurity.  Then, we categorized why responses were incorrect and we identified a variety of biases and problematic reasonings.

Our motivation is to produce educational assessment tools that will measure how well students understand cybersecurity concepts, for the purpose of identifying effective ways to teach cybersecurity.  Results of our work will also be useful in developing curricula, learning exercises, and other educational materials and policies.

Joint work with David Delatte, Geoffrey Herman, Michael Neary, Linda Oliva, Alan Sherman, and Julia Thompson.  Support for this research is provided in part by the U.S. Department of Defense under CAE-R grants H98230-15-1-0294 and H98230-15-1-0273, and by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant 1241576.  We will present our results at the Frontiers in Education Conference, October 12-15, 2016, in Erie, PA.

 About the Speaker:  Travis Scheponik is a PhD student in computer science at UMBC, working with Dr. Alan T. Sherman.  His research interests include cybersecurity education.

Host: Alan T. Sherman,

Are you interested in assistive robotics research?

Kavita Krishnaswamy is a Ph.D. candidate in the UMBC Computer Science program and has Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), a neuromuscular disorder that affects the control of muscle movement.

Her goal is to develop robotics aids to increase independence for people with physical disabilities like herself. As part of her research she is conducting a survey on attitudes toward robotic aids and how they may improve the quality of life for those with physical disabilities, their family members, and their caregivers.

If you have a physical disability, are a caregiver for a person with a physical disability, or are a friend or family member of a person with a physical disability, you can help Kavita with her research by particiating in the survey. Participation is voluntary and anonymous. The participant must be 18 years or older. You can access the survey here.

This study has been reviewed and approved by the UMBC Institutional Review Board (IRB). A representative of that Board, from the Office.for Research Protections and Compliance, is available to discuss the review process or Kavita’s rights as a research participant. Contact information of the Office is (410) 455-2737 or .

The UMBC ACM Student Chapter and CSEE department invite students, alumni, faculty and staff to its seventh annual Welcome Back Picnic held 1-2:30 on Thursday, September 8 in room 312 of the University Center.

It’s a opportunity to socialize with everyone and for the faculty and students to meet each other.

What: Seventh annual CSEE Welcome Back Picnic
Who: Limited to CSEE faculty, staff, students and alumni
Date: Thursday, 8 September 2016
Time: 1:00pm to 2:30pm
Location: University Center, Room 312

So get ready to dig into some good food and conversations. Have an amazing year ahead! Welcome once again, from the UMBC ACM Student Chapter Committee and CSEE department.

The Computing Research Association has published five short videos to explain the benefits of pursuing a PhD in a computing discipline. The videos showcase young researchers with PhDs who are now working in industry as they talk about what compelled them to pursue a doctorate and how they are using their advanced training in their work. The videos illustrate how a PhD is useful in industry as well as in academia.

• Video 1: Adrienne Porter Felt (PhD Berkeley) talks about her work on security at Google.
• Video 2: Hoda Eldardiry (PhD Purdue) talks about her work on predictive analytics, using machine learning and data mining at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
• Video 3: Susanna Ricco (PhD Duke) and Mac Mason (PhD Duke) at Google talk about their work in robotics and vision.
• Video 4: Richard Socher (PhD Stanford) talks about his work in artificial intelligence at Salesforce.
• Video 5: Tiffany Chen (PhD Stanford) talks about her work in bioinformatics at Cytobank.

Professor Adam Bargteil was elected to a three-year term as director-at-large for ACM SIGGRAPH, the premier professional organization for computer graphics and interactive techniques.

Dr. Bargteil completed his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, where he worked in the Berkeley Computer Animation and Modeling group. Before joining the UMBC CSEE department, he spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Graphics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University and was an assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. His primary research interests are in computer graphics and animation, especially using physics-based animation. He is also interested in scientific computing, numerical methods, computational physics, and computational geometry.

SIGGRAPH is a special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s first and largest computing society. Since its beginning in 1974 as a small group of specialists in a previously unknown discipline, it has evolved to become an international community of researchers, artists, developers, filmmakers, scientists, and business professionals who share an interest in computer graphics and interactive techniques.

As a director-at-large, Professor Bargteil will be part of a nine-person committee charged with steering the organization on its mission to foster and celebrate innovation in computer graphics and interactive techniques. Like all voting members of the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee, directors-at-large are elected by the ACM SIGGRAPH membership.

UMBC’s Professor Marie desJardins was quoted recently in a TechRebublic article on the possible risks of adding more autonomy to weapons used by police and the military. The article focused on the novel use of a remotely controlled bomb-disposal robot by Dallas police to kill the suspect involved in the shooting of police officers. Although it was manually controlled by police officers, its use raised concerns about future devices that expected to have the capacity for independent decision making and actions.

Marie desJardins, AI professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County, agrees with Yampolskiy. “The real challenge will come when we start to put more autonomy into drones and assault robots. I don’t think that we should be building weapons that can, of their own accord, decide who to kill, and how to kill,” said desJardins.

“I think those decisions always need to be made by people—not just by individual people, but by processes in military organizations that have safeguards and accountability measures built into the process,” she said.

These issues were addressed by a recent series of workshops sponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to learn more about the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence.

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Solving Mathematical Problems in Quantum Regime

Omar Shehab

2:00pm Thursday, 7 July 2016, ITE 325b

In this dissertation, I investigate a number of algorithmic approaches in quantum computational regime to solve mathematical problems. My problems of interest are the graph isomorphism and graph automorphism problems, and the complexity of memory recall of Hopfield network. I show that the hidden subgroup algorithm, quantum Fourier sampling, always fails, to construct the automorphism group for the class of the cycle graphs. I have discussed what we may infer for a few non-trivial classes of graphs from this result. This raises the question, which I have discussed in this dissertation, whether the hidden subgroup algorithm is the best approach for these kinds of problems. I have given a correctness proof of the Hen-Young quantum adiabatic algorithm for graph isomorphism for cycle graphs. To the best of my knowledge, this result is the first of its kind. I also report a proof-of-concept implementation of a quantum annealing algorithm for the graph isomorphism problem on a commercial quantum annealing device. This is also, to the best of my knowledge, the first of its kind. I have also discussed the worst-case for the algorithm. Finally, I have shown that quantum annealing helps us achieve exponential capacity for Hopfield networks.

Committee: Drs. Samuel J Lomonaco Jr. (Chair), Milton Halem, Yanhua Shih, William Gasarch and John Dorband

On June 14, the Democratic National Committee announced that its computer system had been hacked. Rick Forno, director of UMBC’s graduate program in cybersecurity and assistant director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity, discussed the “ongoing process” of stopping such attacks during a long-form discussion segment on the WOSU Radio’s “All Sides” show.

Forno made clear that there is no single, permanent solution to thwarting cyber threats, and a single mistake or vulnerability can have a major impact on digital security.. “All it takes is one person who does something wrong”—opening an email or plugging in a thumb-drive containing malware—“to place the entire organization at risk,” he says.

Forno also focused on the challenge of educating people about how to practice safe computing, and turning those practices into regular habits. The issues that arise with computing are as much human-based as they are technology-based, he suggests, plus, “You attack one problem and three more pop up the next day.”

To understand how a hack happened and to prevent hackers from taking advantage of vulnerabilities in the future, Forno suggests collecting and analyzing “artifacts” of the attack—things the hackers left behind—and heightening ongoing monitoring of key systems, approaches the DNC is likely now taking.

Google will fund travel grants to the 2016 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference (GHC) which takes place in Houston, Oct 19-21, 2016. The GHC is the world’s largest gathering of women technologists and offers many valuable resources to students and academics alike, from a Student Opportunity Lab to tracks specifically designed to educate and inspire faculty. Its career fair, one of the largest in the U.S., earns a 97% satisfaction rate from our student survey respondents.

University students and industry professionals in the US and Canada who are excelling in computing and passionate about supporting women in tech can apply for a travel grant to attend the 2016 Grace Hopper conference. Sponsorship includes: conference registration, round trip flight to Houston, TX, arranged hotel accommodations from October 18-22, $75 USD reimbursement for miscellaneous travel costs and a fun social event with your fellow travel grant recipients on one of the evenings of the conference.

Apply by Sunday, July 10 using this online form. The Grace Hopper Travel Grant recipients will be announced by July 27th.