Dr. Rick Forno, Graduate Cybersecurity Program Director and Assistant Director of UMBC's Center for Cybersecurity, has received a $45,000 grant from the National Security Agency (NSA) to fund the prizes for student winners at the 2015 Maryland Cyber Challenge (MDC3) finals taking place at the CyberMaryland 2015 conference in Baltimore on October 28-29.   

The Maryland Cyber Challenge builds excitement around cybersecurity education and careers by bringing together teams of students and cybersecurity professionals to compete in a series of increasingly complex cybersecurity challenges. Now in its 5th year, over 800 student competitors have participated in this regional cybersecurity competition, with NSA providing more than $330,000 in prize money.

For 2015, each member of the first-place student team will receive $2,500 and each member of the second-place team will receive $1,250 to contribute toward their higher education and training in the cybersecurity and computer science fields. Identical prizes are awarded both in the high school and college divisions.

Dr. Forno and UMBC are co-founders of MDC3, along with Leidos and the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED). For the first four years of the event, Dr. Forno served as the competition coordinator and GameMaster, but transitioned into an advisory role for 2015 and beyond.

Interested? Register a team for MDC3 or join the CyberDawgs to train and compete – they've got two teams already registered!

Ph.D. Proposal Defense

Data, Energy, and Privacy Management
Techniques for Sustainable Microgrids

Zhichuan Huang

11:00am Tuesday, 11 August 2015, ITE 325b

Sustainable microgrids have gained increasing attention recently, because they can provide the power supply to places i) where the traditional power grid does not exist due to the poor economy or limited number of residences (e.g., islands); and ii) when the traditional power grid is temporally not functioning due to severe weather conditions (e.g., storms). However, in order to achieve sustainability, there are a lot of challenges to be addressed. In this thesis, we propose to investigate three key techniques in sustainable microgrids. First, we investigate the big energy data management problem and present E-Sketch, a middleware for utility companies to gather data from smart meters with much less storage and communication overhead. E-Sketch utilizes adaptive sampling to compress power consumption changes in time domain. Then frequency compression is applied to further compress the sampled data.

The second key technique is the energy management in microgrids. Because energy generation and demand in each individual home and microgrid is not matching, the key challenge of the energy management is to model the existing energy demand and propose novel energy management to reduce the overall energy usage and cost in microgrids. In this technique, we study the theoretical, technical, and economic feasibility of sustainable microgrids. To enable distributed energy management, energy consumption data of different homes needs to be shared in the microgrid. Thus an important problem is how we guarantee that the shared data can only be used for energy management but not revealing the privacy of individual homes in the microgrid. To address this problem, we leverage the unique feature of hybrid AC-DC microgrids and propose the third technique — Shepherd, a privacy protection framework to effectively protect occupants’ privacy. In Shepherd, we provide a generic model for energy consumption hiding from different types of detection techniques.

Committee: Drs. Ting Zhu (chair), Nilanjan Banerjee, Chintan Patel, and David Irwin (UMass Amherst)

Ph.D. Proposal Defense

Holistic Home Energy Management:
From Sensing to Data Analytics

David Lachut

2:00pm Tuesday, 11 August 2015, ITE 325b

As home automation tools become more prevalent, they provide great potential to assist energy conservation and promote sustainable energy use in a way that increases users’ quality of life. This paper proposes the Greenhome System: a software system for using off-the-shelf home automation components and back-end data analytics to provide intelligent home energy management capabilities primarily targeted to renewable powered homes. The system will take input from various sensors and user input to detect user activities, predict home energy consumption, and make energy consumption recommendations to users. To accomplish the project goals, the Greenhome system requires in-home hardware and software components, a mobile component for user interaction, and a server component to tie them together. These components will accomplish tasks of data collection and analysis, activity and anomaly detection, prediction, planning, and recommendation.

This project builds on prior research in several areas, combining such diverse fields as predictive analytics, data visualization and annotation, planning, and recommender systems into a holistic approach. Combining these fields will result in new adaptations and make the overall Greenhome System a novel contribution. Work has begun on the Greenhome System preliminary to this proposal, with published work on residential sensor system design and implementation, data annotation collection, and energy demand prediction. It remains to incorporate automated self-maintenance, user activity detection, and personalized recommendations into a holistic system for home energy management.

Committee: Drs. Nilanjan Banerjee (chair), Ting Zhu, Charles Nicholas, Nirmalya Roy

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

MS Thesis Defense in Computer Science

Identifying Significant, Difficult and Timeless
Concepts for Cybersecurity Assessment Tools:
Results and Analysis of Two Delphi Processes

Geet Parekh

11:00am Friday, 7 August 2015, ITE 228

As part of our ongoing project to create Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATs), we carried out two Delphi processes to help cybersecurity experts and educators build a consensus about the core concepts and skills in the field. We present and analyze the results of these processes.

The first process identified fundamental concepts for our Cybersecurity Concept Inventory to be given to students completing any first course in cybersecurity. The second process identified skills for our Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment, which will be given to students graduating from college headed for their first job in cybersecurity. These tests will provide infrastructure for evidence-based improvement of cybersecurity education to help universities better prepare the substantial number of cybersecurity professionals needed in America.

Thirty-six experts participated in four to five rounds of data collection. By the end of the processes, experts reached a consensus, as indicated by decreasing variations in their scoring of the importance, difficulty, and timelessness of concepts and topics that they identified. Participation by these diverse cybersecurity experts should help increase adoption of the tests.

Keywords: Cybersecurity Education, Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATs), Delphi Method, Concept Inventory

Committee: Drs. Alan T. Sherman (chair), Linda Oliva, Dhananjay Phatak, Chintan Patel

Remote Participation: If you wish to attend the defense remotely via Skype, please email Geet ().

Note: The Department of Defense has funded continuation of this research under BAA-003-15 via a collaborative award to UMBC and The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (PIs Alan Sherman and Geoffrey Herman; CoPIs Dhananjay Phatak and Linda Oliva).

A 12-Month Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) is sought for 2015-2016 to work on a DoD-funded cybersecurity education project at UMBC.

Position Highlights

• 9-month stipend: $18,752.94; 2.5 month summer stipend: $8,000.
• Hours: 20 hours/week (September 2015-May 2016)
• Benefits: tuition and mandatory fees, health insurance
• Eligibility: MS or PhD student at UMBC in CS, CE, EE, or related field (IS, math, education, physics).
• INS Requirements: USA citizen or permanent resident
• Source of funding: Department of Defense via a grant under BAA-003-15 (PI Alan Sherman)

Skills Needed

The GRA will (1) transcribe and analyze interviews of students to uncover their misconceptions about cybersecurity, (2) suggest interview prompts and test questions, and (3) help prepare publications describing the results. This work will include some statistical analysis and use of SurveyMonkey on-line questionnaires.

The GRA should bring knowledge and passion for cybersecurity, excellent communication skills, a strong work ethic, and a willingness, ability, and eagerness to learn whatever is needed to complete the project successfully.

The GRA will work closely with the investigators, including Drs. Alan Sherman, Dhananjay Phatak, Linda Oliva, Geoffrey Herman, and a post-doc in engineering education to be hired at The University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

Project Summary

Professors Alan Sherman (CSEE), Dhananjay Phatak (CSEE), and Linda Oliva (Education) have been awarded a research grant from the Department of Defense to create two educational cybersecurity assessment tools, to help improve the way cybersecurity is taught. The $294,016 one-year project is joint with Geoffrey Herman at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (UMBC portion $146,917). The research is being carried out at the UMBC Cyber Defense Lab at the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance and will fund a 12-month GRA in 2015-2016.

This project is creating infrastructure for a rigorous evidence-based improvement of cybersecurity education by developing the first Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATs) targeted at measuring the quality of instruction. The first CAT will be a Cybersecurity Concept Inventory (CCI) that measures how well students understand basic concepts in cybersecurity after a first course in the field. The second CAT will be a Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment (CCA) that measures how well curricula prepared students graduating from college on fundamentals needed for careers in cybersecurity. Each CAT will be a multiple-choice test with approximately thirty questions.

Inspired by the highly influential Force Concept Inventory from physics, the investigators are following a three-step process: In fall 2015, with MS student Geet Parekh, they carried out two Delphi processes to identify important and difficult concepts in cybersecurity. Next, they will interview students to uncover their misconceptions about these concepts. Finally, they will draft and psychometrically evaluate questions whose incorrect answers are driven by the uncovered misconceptions. For more information, see here and here.

In 2015-2016, the project will focus on (1) interviewing students and analyzing the results, and (2) developing draft questions.

How to Apply

Interested graduate students should email Dr. Sherman () a resume, unofficial transcript, and statement of interest and qualifications. Include “CATs GRA” in subject header.

Rick Forno, Graduate Program Director for Cybersecurity and Assistant Director of UMBC's Center for Cybersecurity spoke with the Baltimore Sun and Technical.ly Baltimore recently about hacktivism in the Baltimore riots and a recent ZeroFox report that analyzed social media to identify prominent activists, potential threats, and/or agitators during the riots.

ZeroFOX under fire for social media ‘Threat Actors’ report during Baltimore riots (8/5/2015)

City faced cyberattacks amid chaos and unrest on the streets (7/31/2015)

An article on CNN, Why women in tech came to a 'Halt', uses AMC Halt and Catch Fire television series to illustrate some of challenges in keeping more women in computing majors and careers.

The article mentions the UMBC CWIT Bits and Bytes program as one example of an effort to address this.

"Even with the number of computer science jobs increasing, the number of women pursuing careers in computer science is falling," said Jennifer Koebele, a writer who specializes in research on higher education and technology. … I found that according to Stanford University studies, women's quit rate in technology exceeds that of other science and engineering fields — with a full 56 percent leaving their organizations at midlevel points in their careers," Koebele said.

She points out that there are major efforts to try to bring these numbers up to the levels of decades ago. Programs such as Bits and Bytes, which brings a couple of dozen female high school students to the campus of University of Maryland, Baltimore County, each year to shadow women in computer science programs. At the same time, colleges are making a concerted effort to target girls in middle and high school, sparking interest in math and science.

CSEE professor Curtis Menyuk was recently awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award. This award is a significant honor, and comes with 60,000 euros in funding to support research in with German research collaborators.

The Humbolt Research Award award is given to recognize the lifetime research achievments of academics "whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future."

Dr. Menyuk's research is in the field of nonlinear optics and its applications.  His expertise is in theoretical and computational modeling, although much of his work has been in collaboration with experimental groups.  One major reearch achievement is the development of the basic equations that govern light propagation in optical fibers in the presence of nonlinearity, birefringence, and chromatic dispersion.  These equations are the basis for the physical layer modeling of optical fiber communication systems and are used extensively in the telecommunications and photonics industry. 

A second achievment is the development of models for determining the stability and noise response of modelocked lasers and other resonators.  This work is ongoing, but has already had a significant on the design of short-pulse lasers and other resonators.  

A third body of work has been fundamental studies of nonlinear processes in gases and optical fibers.  This theoretical work led to scientifically important experimental work and may lead to new methods for high-energy pulse generation and time transfer in optical fibers.

Dr. Menyuk has authored or co-authored more than 250 archival journal publications, edited three books and he is a co-inventor of six patents.  He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the IEEE. He is a former UMBC Presidential Research Professor.

Here is what Dr. Menyuk has to say about winning the award:

“I was pleased and honored to receive the Humboldt Research Award, which is one of the world's most prestigious academic awards. Most Nobel prize winners in my field and many members of the national academies have won this award. I have been at UMBC for 30 years, and this award is really a recognition of the collective efforts of my research group and colleagues here at UMBC. I am grateful for Dr. Philip Russell of the Max Planck Institute for Light for nominating me and — what is even more important — for giving my research group at UMBC the opportunity to collaborate with one of the world's great research institutes.”

This is the second major international award Dr. Menyuk has won in the past two years. In 2013, Dr. Menyuk was awarded the IEEE Photonics Society Streifer Award.

CSEE faculty Alan Sherman and Dhananjay Phatak and Education Professor Linda Oliva received a research grant from the Department of Defense to create educational assessment tools to improve the teaching of cybersecurity. The one-year funded project is a collaboration with Geoffrey Herman at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The research is being carried out at the UMBC Cyber Defense Laboratory.

The project will create infrastructure for a rigorous evidence-based improvement of cybersecurity education by developing Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATs) targeted at measuring the quality of instruction. The first CAT will be a Cybersecurity Concept Inventory that measures how well students understand basic concepts in cybersecurity after a first course in the field. The second CAT will be a Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment that measures how well curricula prepared students graduating from college on fundamentals needed for careers in cybersecurity. Each CAT will be a multiple-choice test with approximately thirty questions.

Inspired by the highly influential Force Concept Inventory from physics, the investigators are following a three-step process. In fall 2014, with MS student Geet Parekh, they carried out two Delphi processes to identify an initial set of important and difficult concepts in cybersecurity. The second step will involve interviews with students to uncover their misconceptions about these concepts. In the final step, the team will draft and psychometrically evaluate questions whose incorrect answers are driven by the uncovered misconceptions. Information on the work and its results will be available on the Cybersecurity Assessment Tools web site.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University Of Maryland, Baltimore County

M.S. Thesis Defense

Assessing Confidence in Relation Extraction Systems

Lianjie Sun

2:00ppm Thursday, 27 July 2015, ITE 325b, UMBC

In information extraction, a central and challenging task is extraction of relations. Systems that extract relations from text tend to be very productive, so it is important to quantify confidence or certainty in what is extracted. In this thesis we introduce a framework to assess confidence in relation extraction systems. We trained our system using a logistic regression model based on manually tagged sentences from the New York Times Annotated Corpora. Empirical results based on ROC curves show that our system performs better at computing confidence than previous systems such as Reverb. We conclude with a detailed analysis of the features used in our system and explain how these features might be tailored for use in other relation extraction systems.

Committee: Drs. Tim Oates (chair), Charles Nicholas and Matt Schmill