Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

This week it was revealed that Target suffered a data breach that involved more than 40 million credit and debit card accounts. Target reports that “The unauthorized access may impact guests who made credit or debit card purchases in our U.S. stores from Nov. 27 to Dec. 15, 2013.”

Director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity and CSEE Professor Anupam Joshi discussed the possible consequences of the breach in video reports by local affiliates for both ABC and NBC. Dr. Joshi outlined some of the possible ways that the data breach might have happened and pointed out that while the lost data could be used to make illegal charges to the accounts, it was unlikely to lead to larger identity theft problems.

Professor Marie desJardins received a research award from the National Science Foundation focused on increasing the expertise of Maryland high school teachers for teaching computer science, with the ultimate goal of increasing the number of computer science classes offered in Maryland and the number and diversity of students taking them.

The project, CS10K: Collaborative Research: A Structured CS Principles Approach to Professional Development for Maryland High School Teachers, is led by Dr. desJardins and will involve collaborators from the Computer Science department at the University of Maryland, College Park, and high school teachers from Charles County and Baltimore County. The NSF award will provide $845,000 in funding over a three year period and is part of the Computing Education for the 21st Century (CE21) program, which aims to build a robust computing research community, a computationally competent 21st century workforce, and a computationally empowered citizenry.

The project is also part of the CS 10K community, which works to make computer science accessible in high schools. The nationwide effort has a goal of getting rigorous academic computer science courses into 10,000 schools taught by 10,000 well-prepared teachers. The project pays careful attention to the inclusion of women and minorities–groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in computing.

The project will develop and evaluate professional development activities focused on increasing the expertise of Maryland high school teachers for teaching computer science. Experienced higher education faculty and highly effective high school teachers will collaborate to train other high school teachers to develop and offer a college preparatory CS curriculum. In the first year, an initial cohort of 12 master teachers will collaborate with the project leadership team to develop standardized classroom materials based on the CS Principles curriculum and then offer the CS Principles course in their home schools. In the second year, the project staff will train less experienced teachers in the CS Principles curriculum, and in the third year, the leadership team will demonstrate scalability by supporting the delivery of multiple independently funded regional workshops. The project’s ultimate goal is to achieve significantly increased interest of Maryland students in studying and pursuing careers in computer science.

UMBC is once again hosting the Global Gam Jam this January. It will run from 5pm Friday, January 24th to 5pm Sunday, January 26th, just before classes start. Once again, thanks to a generous donation by NextCentury, registration is free. Space is limited, so sign up now! 

For anyone who hasn’t participated, the global game jam is a 48 hour game development event with hundreds of host sites around the world. At 5pm local time, introduce the jam and announce this year’s theme. Previous year’s themes have ranged from a phrase (“as long as we’re together there will always be problems”) to a word (“extinction”) to an image (ouroboros: a snake eating its tail), to a sound (the recording of a heartbeat). Participants brainstorm game ideas around the theme, form into teams, and spend the weekend building games that are designed to be both fun and express the theme.

The UMBC site is not restricted to just students. In previous years, we have had a mix of UMBC students, faculty, alumni, students from other schools, game development professionals, and just people with an interest in game development. More details at gaim.umbc.edu/global-game-jam. However, we are limited to just 40 participants, so sign up early if you want to come. If the UMBC site fills, other local(ish) sites include the Unviersity of Baltimore, American University, and George Mason University.

Professor Gymama Slaughter received a research award from the National Science Foundation to support her work on a self-powered biosensing microsystem that simultaneously generates bioelectricity and monitors glucose.

The four-year award in the amount of $400,000 is from NSF’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, which supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.

With the support from NSF, Professor Slaughter and the students in her Bioelectronics Laboratory will fabricate and characterize a self-powered biosensing microsystem that simultaneously generates bioelectricity and monitors glucose. This will be accomplished using an inertial power scavenging design by converting interstitial glucose into energy through the coupling of enzymes and three-dimensional nanowire arrays to power implantable glucose monitors.

The self-powered biosensing microsystem will monitor sugar levels and embodies two key technical contributions: it eliminates the need for a potentiostat circuit and an external power source or batteries, leading to dramatic improvements in both speed and energy efficiency, and it demonstrates an autonomous, self-powered, low-power biosensing microsystem that can be adapted for other uses. For people suffering from diabetes, continuous, self-powered monitoring of glucose will improve their quality of life and can save lives.

Professor Slaughter notes that the educational component of the project enriches and complements other programs at UMBC designed to increase minority and female participation in STEM fields. The exposure of these students to a real-world problem and its solution will enable them to better appreciate the contribution of scientific research.

The inaugural hackUMBC hackathon was a smashing success!

Held in the UMBC Skylight Room from 7:00pm Friday to 7:00pm Saturday this past weekend, UMBC’s first-ever hackathon was open to all UMBC students of any skill level, from innovators and explorers to designers and hardcore coders. Its purpose was 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, industry leaders, and faculty. Admission was free and attracted students from across the UMBC campus community, including CS, CE, EE, IS, Biology, Biotechnology, Math, Physics, and Media Studies.

The term ‘hackathon’ hearkens back to the original meaning of “hacker” and “hacking” in early Internet history — namely, to “hack together (create) something quickly” instead of their current interpretations typically referring to illegal cybersecurity activities.

The theme for hackUMBC 2013 was “Hacking to Improve Campus Life” with the goal of ‘hacking together’ any sort of hardware or software project that helps students, teachers, or schools. Accordingly, projects developed during the event included a textbook resale service, realtime intelligent parking space sensors, Peoplesoft interface refinements, and mobile apps to help UMBC students network, socialize, and monitor class schedules, among many others.

Throughout the event, volunteer mentors from UMBC and local industry circulated amongst the teams to offer advice and guidance on their efforts, including how to successfully ‘pitch’ their products to the judges.

UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski joined the festivities early Friday evening to offer words of encouragement and motivation for the nearly 100 UMBC students competing in this innovative and highly charged event.

hackUMBC was conceived by CSEE students Perry Ogwuche and Randi Williams following their summer experience as fellows at CODE2040. Assisting in the effort was Prajit Kumar Das, CS PhD student and president of UMBC’s ACM chapter, and Alexander Morrow, a senior CS student and president of UMBC’s Cryptocurrency Club. CSEE’s Dr. Rick Forno served as faculty advisor to the event.

Projects were evaluated by several faculty and staff judges based on creativity, technical difficulty, polish, relevance, and usefulness. More than $2500 in prizes were awarded!

First Place: BookSwap (Rostislav Tsiomenko, Ilya Dynin)

Second Place: Erill Labs (Robert Forder, Talmo Pereira, Patrick O’Neill, Sefa Kilic)

Third Place: Clever Source Solutions (Edward Mukasey, Ian Shefferman, Chinonso Ugwu)

hackUMBC Judges: Tim Oates, Rick Forno, Wesley Griffin, Dan Hood, Shawn Lupoli, Valerie Thomas, Geoffrey Weiss, and Ashwinkumar Ganesan.

hackUMBC was sponsored by Northrop Grumman, the UMBC Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, ClearEdge IT Solutions, Independent Security Evaluators, Next Century Corporation, TriTech Systems, Github, CODE2040, the UMBC BWTech Cync Program, and the UMBC Alex Brown Center.

More information can be found at the hackUMBC page.

UMBC’s ACM student chapter has a new website that will be used to announce its activities and events as well as news about computing related opportunities and resources. The chapter is open to both undergraduate and graduate students interested in computing from all majors. Joining is free and is a great way to meet other students interested in computing and to participate in activities that will help you grow as a professional.

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. It provides members with resources that advance computing both as a science and a profession. UMBC’s chapter meetings are open to all undergraduate and graduate students of any major. While you do not need to join ACM to be a part of the local chapter, the annual membership dues for students is only $19, heavily discounted from the non-student rate. See the ACM site for more information on student membership and its benefits.

For more information contact us at acmofficers AT lists.umbc.edu.

Center for Information Security and Assurance
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Finding privacy leaks and stolen data with
bulk data analysis and optimistic decoding

Dr. Simson Garfinkel
Naval Postgraduate School

12:00-1:00 Friday, 6 December 2013, ITE 229

Modern digital forensics tools are largely based on the recovery and analysis of files. This talk explores how identity information such as email addresses, credit card numbers, and other of information can be more efficiently found using bulk data analysis, and how results are significantly improved through the use of optimistic decompression. Together, these techniques can find important information on computer media that are ignored by the majority of today’s digital forensics tools.

This talk presents the results of a study of roughly 5000 hard drives purchased on the secondary market and shows how different kinds of data formats can be traced to different kinds of privacy leaks and coding errors. It shows how the results were generated using bulk_extractor, an easy-to-use open source digital forensics tool. Finally, it shows how bulk_extractor was extended to detect data obscured with a simple steganographic technique (XOR 255), and how a subsequence re-analysis of the research corpus found significant use of the technique in commercial software, malware, and by at least one computer criminal.

Dr. Simson L. Garfinkel is an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. Based in Arlington VA, Garfinkel’s research interests include digital forensics, usable security, data fusion, information policy and terrorism. He holds six US patents for his computer-related research and has published dozens of research articles on security and digital forensics.

Garfinkel is the author or co-author of fourteen books on computing. He is perhaps best known for his book Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. Garfinkel’s most successful book, Practical UNIX and Internet Security (co-authored with Gene Spafford), has sold more than 250,000 copies and been translated into more than a dozen languages since the first edition was published in 1991.

Garfinkel received three Bachelor of Science degrees from MIT in 1987, a Master’s of Science in Journalism from Columbia University in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2005.

Host: Dr. Alan T. Sherman,

hackUMBC is a 24 hour hackathon for UMBC students held in the UMBC Skylight room from 7:00pm Friday December 6 to 7:00pm Saturday December 7. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and caffeine will be provided.

The event is open to all UMBC students of any skill level, from innovators to designers to hardcore coders. Join other hackers for 24 hours of teamwork and exploration as you compete to grow projects from scratch, all while expanding your connections to other students, industry leaders, and professors.

All kinds of computing systems are game: Web, desktop, server, mobile, wearable,enbedded, entertainment, game and hardware projects are all welcome. Projects will be judged based on creativity, technical difficulty, polish, and usefulness. More than $2500 in prizes will be awarded.

For more information and to register, see the hackUMBC site.

CSEE Professor and director of the chess program Alan Sherman with the team that will represent UMBC at the 2013 Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship next month in Lubbock, Texas.  The top four qualifying schools from the PanAms go on to compete in the Final Four of college chess, held in the spring. The winner is considered national champion and takes home the President’s Cup.

M.S. Thesis Defense
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Fabrication and Characterization of a

Pd Nanowire-based Glucose Biofuel Cell

Kweku Amoah

10:30-12:30 Monday, 25 November 2013, ITE 346

The use of glucose as a biofuel has received a lot of attention in part due to the potential applications of such systems. In addition to the being a clean energy alternative, it provides a pathway for implantable microelectronic devices such as pacemakers to be powered by interstitial fluid and eliminate the need for batteries. Furthermore, using interstitial fluid as power sources will drastically reduce necessary invasive surgeries to replace batteries. Additionally, cost to such patients will be reduced while quality of life enhanced. The research presents a unique platform for harvesting energy from glucose. Using semiconductor cleanroom techniques, electrically conductive palladium nanowires are grown on anodized aluminum oxide (AAO) templates using silicon and glass as supporting substrates. Photolithography is used to create two non-continuous gold windows and contact pads on the substrates. AAO templates are attached to the two gold windows and palladium nanowires are electrochemically grown on the AAO templates. Glucose oxidase and catalase are immobilized on the anode and laccase on the cathode. In the presence of glucose, electrons are released that generate voltage and current. The current-voltage behavior of the fuel cell, as well as electrochemical properties, is characterized using standard performance metrics. In 0.5 moles per liter of glucose solution with a neutral pH of 7.3, the open circuit voltage obtained was 335 mV and the short circuit current of 6 µA to yield a maximum power output of 2.01µW.

Committee: Drs. Gymama Slaughter (Chair), Fow-Sen Choa and Joel Morris