Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

On September 18, students from UMBC’s Graduate Cybersecurity Program joined others from Penn State, Penn State Harrisburg, and the Dickinson College of Law at the U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership and Development to participate in a scripted wargame considering the strategic aspects of cybersecurity during the 2014 Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence Symposium.

Students were provided the opportunity to be decision makers in one of six entitites ranging from DHS, DoD, and DoJ to state government and private sector organizations. The morning scenario required students to ascertain the roles and responsibilities of “their” agencies/organizations, their capabilities and liabilities, and decide who they should collaborate with to ensure that appropriate actions were taken and actionable information was conveyed appropriately. During the afternoon session, students considered whether acts of war were committed, decided what the appropriate steps were to counter those acts, and which agencies should be in the lead. The day concluded with a plenary session where each student group discussed their approach to the real-world scenario faced that day.

UMBC graduate cybersecurity students taking part in the event include Mark Lewis, Charles Swassing, Rina Chios, Chris Day, Sara Purdum, Michael Sterrett, Kristian Behel, and Joe Kirik (not pictured).

UMBC’s involvement was coordinated by CYBR faculty member Bill Waddell, who is the Director, Mission Command and Cyberspace Division and General George S. Patton Chair of Operations Research and Analysis Center for Strategic Leadership and Development at the US Army War College.

The Baltimore Code Craftsmanship meetup group will hold its monthly meeting at 6:30pm on Thursday, September 18 at Betamore (1111 Light St.) in Baltimore (map). The meetup is for the students and software developers in the Baltimore area that care about the quality of their work and want to practice and improve their programming skills, share what they know and learn new things from others.

The meetup is a hands on coding user group with no presentations. Each meeting will be a dojo where we will go through a challenging software craftsmanship exercise that focuses on clean code, test-driven development, design patterns, and refactoring. We will pair up and practice on a kata in order to learn and apply the values, principles, and disciplines of software craftsmanship. It’s also a great way to meet others in Baltimore’s computing community to network and find out about internships and jobs.

The September meeting will go through the next Test-Driven Development (TDD) exercise focusing on solutions using pair programming, test-driven development, clean code and refactoring.

Come with your laptop equipped with your favorite programming and unit testing environment. Be prepared to pair up, code, learn, share and have fun!

Join the meetup and register to attend here. If you are interested in going but need a ride from UMBC, contact Vlad Korolev.

UMBC Alumnus and Meyerhof Scholar Stephan Sherman (BS ’00, M8) spoke at Apple’s new product event  on Tuesday and described his company’s VainGlory game, which will run on the new iPhones using under iOS 8, taking advantage of Metal graphics API, larger screen and faster processors on the iPhone 6.

Stephan is Co-founder and CCO (Chief Creative Officer) of Super Evil Megacorp, a game development company headquartered in San Mateo, California.

While at UMBC, Stephen put together an independent study program combining Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Digital Animation. After graduating in 2000, he went on to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received a MS degree in computer science in 2002. He worked at a number of computer game companies as a programmer, lead programmer and senior engineer and co-founded Super Evil Megacorp in 2010.

CSEE’s Dr. Rick Forno, Cybersecurity GPD and Assistant Director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity, has received an $84K grant from the National Security Agency (NSA) to fund the prizes for student winners at the 2014 Maryland Cyber Challenge finals that will take place at the CyberMaryland 2014 conference in Baltimore on 29 and 30 October.

The Maryland Cyber Challenge aims to build excitement around pursuing education and careers in the cybersecurity field by bringing together teams of students and cyber practitioners to compete in a series of ever-more-complex cybersecurity challenges. To date, approximately 700 competitors across 115 teams have participated in the past three annual competitions. With the generous support of NSA, UMBC has provided more than $252,000 in monetary prizes to highly skilled and talented computer science students during the competition.

First place team members each will receive $5K and runners-up receive $2K each 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.

The 2014 Challenge begins with the first scored qualification round taking place over 13-15 September.

Dr. Forno and UMBC are co-founders of the Maryland Cyber Challenge, which is a partnership with Leidos and the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED).

UMBC Quantum Computation Seminar

How to program the D-Wave Quantum Annealing Computer?

Omar Shehab

2:30-4:00 pm, Tuesday, 9 September 2014, ITE 325B

In this tutorial session, we will give a gentle introduction to the programming model of the D-Wave Quantum Annealing Computer. The implementations of a number of programs will be demonstrated. Mapping of generic problems, minor embedding of problem Ising graphs, classical computational complexity of problem mapping and different system parameters will be discussed in details. We will also discuss how to enhance the success probability of finding a solution.

Omar Shehab is a PhD student of the department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering working under the direction of Professor Samuel Lomonaco. Omar’s research areas of interest are quantum Hamiltonian complexity and quantum cryptography.

Name: Olivia Wolfe
Educational Background: Bachelor’s and Master’s degree (Counseling and Personnel Services) from University of Maryland, College Park
Hometown: Albuquerque, New Mexico
Current role: As Coordinator of Academic Affairs, Olivia oversees academic services staff of the department, oversees course scheduling for the department, coordinates adjunct instructor and TA/RA hiring, addresses undergraduate and graduate student concerns, assists with special events in the college, coordinates administration of the Promotion and Tenure process, coordinates prospective faculty interviews, and room scheduling.

Olivia is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She joined UMBC’s CSEE Department in January of 2014. Prior to her arrival at UMBC, Olivia worked as the Undergraduate Student Services Coordinator in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. When not working, Olivia volunteers with a fire department, a missing persons search and rescue group, and a large breed dog rescue. She also enjoys photography, reading, and spending time outdoors.

The new Eclipse research custer includes three collaborating labs at UMBC that focus on low-level hardware design to data analytics. Current projects include wearable computing, hardware security, and human assisted computer vision.

Professor Nilanjan Banerjee’s Mobile, Pervasive, and Sensor System Lab performs research in cyber-physical systems spanning mobile systems, renewable-energy driven systems, and low power wearable sensors. It uses cross-disciplinary techniques including hardware design, software systems design, and analytics to build more usable and robust systems.

Professor Ryan Robucci’s Covail Lab develops on cooperative technolgy that explores ultra-low-power hybrid analog-digital computational systems, sensors, and hardware security. Studies of biological systems are leveraged for inspiring signal and image processing algoritghms and sensor system design for embedded aplications including robust wearable, mobile, biomedical systems.

Professor Chintan Patel’s VLSI Lab focuses on electronic design automation (EDA) for reliable digital systems and low-power VLSI design. Research on hardware security, power supply noise analysis and estimation, delay testing enables the development of secure and robust systems.

Baltimore has an active technology community comprised of researchers and developers from companies, startups, consultancies and academe. There will be a Super Meetup event Baltimore Innovation Week 2014 that will draw on the more than 30 Baltimore area meetup groups focused on different technologies.

The Super Meetup will be held from 5:00pm to 8:00pm on Saturday, September 13, 2014 at Betamore (1111 Light Street, 4th Floor, Baltimore, MD map).

This is a good opportunity for students to network with Baltimore-area developers and find leads for internships and full-time jobs.

“Like last year, in the spirit of coming together to celebrate tech and innovation in this great community, we are hosting a Super Meetup of all the local tech-related Meetups.

Come have a beer, grab a snack and get to know one another at Betamore. Meetup organizers will each give a shout out about their respective groups.”

Join the Super Meetup and RSVP here.

The second hackUMBC is coming! (And has nothing to do with security.)

hackUMBC ’14 will take place on the weekend of 27-28 September (Saturday into Sunday). The event is open to students of any skill level, from innovators and entrepreneurs to designers and hardcore coders. Its purpose is to allow students to mingle and collaborate for 24 continuous hours of community exploration to grow technology projects from scratch while expanding their connections to other students and mentors from both industry and academia. Through the generosity of various sponsors, admission is free, and includes meals, snacks, swag, prizes, and more!

Last year’s inaugural event ‘sold out’ at 100 students from across the UMBC campus community, including teams from CMSC, CMPE, EE, IS, Biology, Biotechnology, Math, Physics, and Media Studies. This year we’re expanding admission to students from both UMBC and local colleges/high schools, so register early!

More details and sign-up information is available at the event website.

Faculty, staff, and leaders from around campus and the local industry who are interested in serving as mentors or judges for hackUMBC are invited to contact Dr. Rick Forno for more information.

Photos from last year’s inaugural event held in the Skylight Room can be found here.

UMBC Professors Nilanjan Banerjee and Ryan Robucci have been awarded an NSF grant from the NSF-NIH Smart and Connected Health program. The total sum is $650,000 over 3 years. It is a collaboration between UMBC, Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital and UA.

The collaborators include Dr. Susan Fager, a physical therapist from Madonna, and Dr. James Parkerson from UA, who is helping with the energy harvesting component of the project. The SCH program is very competitive, and last year the acceptance rate was close to 6%. The project deals with building wearable sensing systems for environmental control and therapy for paralysis patients, and cuts across electronics, sensor analytics, and usability.

According to Banerjee, “What we mean by environmental control is controlling appliances, and so on and so forth, and therapies basically helping…[patients] to improve their motion over time. So, we are building the sensors, we are building the software on the sensors, and also…the ensuing systems around it.”

Banerjee goes on to describe the project as “a marriage between electronics, software and usability.”

Robucci adds that “We’re working on this project to take into account the patient, and integrate them in as part of the system, rather than forcing them to use the system in a particular way. We want to make sure that the technology and interfaces that we’re building are adaptable to each person and their needs.”

The project is described in greater detail in this abstract from the NSF website:

An estimated 1.5 million individuals in the United States are hospitalized each year because of strokes, brain injuries and spinal cord injuries. Severe impairment such as paralysis, paresis, weakness and limited range of motion are common sequels resulting from these injuries, requiring extensive rehabilitation. This project is developing invisible sensing systems embedded into bed sheets, pillows, wheelchair pads, and clothing, for environmental control and physical therapy for such paralysis patients. The system detects gestures regardless of evolving environmental and patient conditions and provides explicit real-time feedback to the user. Through the use of low-cost and ultra-low power capacitive sensing, the system reduces hospital visits and therapy costs.

The proposed system addresses the limitations of existing assistive care sensors through three novel technical contributions: (1) The use of a self-sustainable hierarchy of sensors; textile-based capacitive sensor arrays (CSA) and inertial sensors on the human body; to improve the accuracy of gesture recognition while consuming minimal energy. The inertial sensors train the capacitive sensor arrays for different body positions; (2) A self-learning algorithm that determines gestures automatically regardless of the position of the patient’s body and conditions using templates of gestures and patient conditions over time; and (3) Seamless integration of the patient in the feedback loop using amplification and animation to provide explicit real-time feedback to the user on how she/he is performing on his/her physical therapy, and how the system is interpreting his/her gestures. Additionally, the PIs are developing a cross-disciplinary undergraduate and graduate course that focuses on developing sensing systems while being cognizant of the actual needs in a rehabilitation hospital. The PIs are also using local university initiatives to engage minority and women researchers in the project.

Banerjee notes that, “The project would not be possible without the efforts of very motivated and hard-working students in the Analog/Digital and MPSS labs: Rebecca Baldwin, Alexander Nelson, Stanislav Bobovych, and Gurashish Singh.”

In the next month or so, Microsoft Research will be developing a five minute video showcasing Robucci, Banerjee, and Dr. Sandy McCombe-Waller. Microsoft has expressed an interest in advertising the wearable sensing system, because the system utilizes the Lab of Things, Microsoft’s home automation tool. (This video is in addition to the live interview that Banerjee recently conducted with Microsoft Research.)

In related news, Robucci, Banerjee and fellow UMBC professor Chintan Patel have been given a TEDCO award of $150, 000 for the wearable sensing systems project. According to Banerjee, “The TEDCO grant deals with developing a prototype for environmental control for patients with paralysis. It will also help [us in] designing a product for the system. As part of the grant we will build the system, and evaluate it on real patients at University of Maryland, Baltimore.”

Related Links:

NSF Grant Award Details and Brief

Brief on TEDCO Grant