Next Friday UMBC will host the Third Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning (MASC-SLL). This is a one day, student run event that brings together students, postdocs, faculty and researchers from universities in the Mid-Atlantic area doing research on speech, language or machine learning.

This year MASC-SLL will be held from 10am to 5pm on Friday 11 October on the seventh floor of the Albert O. Kuhn Library. The program includes more than 30 posters, eight short talks, three breakout sessions and a panel. More than 100 students and postdocs from 13 universities are expected to participate. Seven projects involving UMBC students will be presented.

The event was organized by a student committee including five PhD students: Snigdha Chaturvedi (UMCP), Ben Johnson (UMBC), Michael Paul (JHU), Jennifer Sleeman (UMBC) and Bryan Wilkinson (UMBC). They were supported by a program committee of 14 additional students from seven universities in the middle-Atlantic region.

The first MASC-SLL colloquium was held in 2011 at Johns Hopkins University and the second in 2012 at the University of Maryland, College Park. This year the colloquium was made possible with the generous support of the UMBC Provost office, UMBC Graduate School, the UMBC College of Engineering and Information Technology and the UMBC CSEE Department.

We look forward to welcoming MASC-SLL participants and hearing about their research.

UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance

Quantum Computing and Cybersecurity

John Seymour

Noon-1:00 Friday, 4 October 2013
Cyber Defense Lab, room 228 ITE, UMBC

This talk will be a brief introduction to the topic of quantum computing for the computer scientist interested in cybersecurity. It will begin with a light summary of the fundamental quantum algorithms and move to discuss the recent advances in quantum computing, including the D-Wave quantum optimizer, University of Bristol’s new quantum chip, quantum programming languages, and more. Finally, it will introduce some current research questions and projects residing in the intersection of quantum computing and cybersecurity.

John Seymour is a Ph.D. student in the UMBC computer science graduate program. As a UMBC undergraduate, he was a triple major — Computer Science, — Mathematics and Philosophy. He is currently working on three research projects: evaluation of a detection protocol for Man-in-the-Middle attacks, a web-based game for teaching students basic concepts of internet security, and integration of social media with internet voting to facilitate collaborative decision making.

Host: Dr. Alan T. Sherman,

CSEE research professor Karuna Joshi received a $100K grant to develop an advanced prototype for a cloud service broker from the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO). The software system will help companies and organizations negotiate for, select and procure cloud computing services based on a description of their needs and preferences.

TEDCO was created by the Maryland State Legislature to facilitate the transfer and commercialization of technology from Maryland’s research universities and federal labs into the marketplace and to assist in the creation and growth of technology-based businesses in Maryland.

Dr. Joshi’s project will build on a novel framework she developed as part of her PhD dissertation for automating the process lifecycle of cloud services. She designed technology that allowed users to compare different cloud services and determine which were best suited for their needs. Her initial prototype demonstrated a system that could negotiate for and procure storaage services from a provider like Amazon Web Services.

As part of the TEDCO funded project, Dr. Joshi will develop an commercially viable enhanced cloud broker engine that can be extended to include other services, as well as do more complex matchmaking based on functional and compliance requirements.

UMBC’s intercollegiate Cyber Defense Team (the “CyberDawgs”) once again will be competing in the finals of the Maryland Cyber Challenge (MDC3) taking place on October 9th at the CyberMaryland 2013 conference in Baltimore. All three of UMBC’s teams are in the finals!

Competing against the three CyberDawgs teams will be two teams from UMUC, two from Towson, and one from Indiana Tech.

During the finals, teams will compete in a Capture-The-Flag/King-of-The-Hill hybrid event where they must attempt to gain (and maintain) control of other systems on the network – which are also being targetted by other teams seeking to gain and ‘own’ them as well.

Each member of the first place team will receive a $5,000 cash prize. and members of the second place team each receive $2,000. For the third consecutive year, cash prizes for the students are provided by the National Security Agency in the hopes of furthering students’ cybersecurity education and professional training. (UMBC is a co-founder of MDC3.)

CSEE faculty Richard Forno and Charles Nicholas serve as faculty advisors to the team.

Professor Jian Chen received a research award from the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) Measurement Science and Engineering research grant program to discover new immersive metrology, visualization, and analysis tools for interacting with and understanding multi-valued volumes of large scientific data in immersive display environments.

The research will explore new approaches to integrate scientific and information visualization, optimize information access and precise measurement to recommend good default visualization, study natural and intuitive input modalities including gestural and handheld 3D inputs, and synthesize visualizations to address complex data analysis workflow. The efficacy and insights of these scientific methods will be validated in close collaboration with engineering scientists at NIST.

The research is significant because the methods will be able to address problems in three independent scientific applications at NIST: suspension rheology, body area network and tissue engineering. It will also make possible new forms of scientific research by developing new immersive analysis capabilities, integrating new approaches into experimental research, and for the first time, creating new human-computer interaction techniques to query both scientific and information visualizations to leverage human intelligence.

The award will provide nearly $440,000 over the next five years to support Professor Chen and her students in the DaVinCI (Data Visualization, Computing, and Interaction) lab working on the project.

UMBC Quantum Computation Seminar

Thermal light N-qubits

Yanhau Shih

Physics Department, UMBC

2:30-4:00 Tuesday, 1 October 2013, ITE 325b

This talk will discuss a few recent experiments on Nth-order interference of N independent and incoherent thermal fields from their intensity fluctuation correlation measurement. The observed interference is similar to that of entangled states. These experiments have demonstrated the possibility of producing N-qubits from N incoherent thermal fields.

Yanhua Shih received his B.S. degree in theoretical physics from Northwestern University of China in 1981, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1987. He joined the Faculty of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 1989 and established the Quantum Optics Program at UMBC. He is currently Professor of Physics at UMBC. His research interests include fundamental problems of quantum theory and general relativity.

Organizer: Prof. Samuel Lomonaco,

Security expert Linda McCarthy has written a 48-page book, Digital Drama: Staying Safe While Being Social Online, aimed teens and their families on how to manage online behavior to enhance safety, security and privacy. McCarthy is an author and computer security consultant with more than twenty years of industry experience in educating families, security auditing, consulting, training, research and development, and leading high-performing teams.

Click to access

In support of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, Microsoft has provided support to allow her to offer free downloads of Digital Drama from Amazon in both English and Spanish. The free offer is only available this week, from today through 3:00am (EDT) Saturday, September 28.

Kim Sanchez, who heads Microsoft’s Online Safety – Trustworthy Computing Communications efforts, interviewed McCarthy last week about her new book and it’s goals. “Digital Drama has something for everyone.”, McCarty said about who she write the book for. “Parents can read it and get ideas about how to talk with their kids about online safety. Even if you don’t have kids, you’ll find guidance that will help you, a family member, or a friend. So download the ebook and share it with everyone you know.”

Here’s how the book is described on McCarthy’s site:

Every day, millions of teens log on and make decisions that can compromise their safety, security, privacy, and future. If you are like most teens, you are already using social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook and have your smartphone super-glued to your hand. You tag your friends in photos, share your location and thoughts with friends, and post jokes online that later may be misunderstood. At the same time, you might not realize how that information can affect your reputation and safety, both online and offline. We’ve all heard the horror stories of stolen identities, cyber stalking, pedophiles on the Internet, and lost job, school, and personal opportunities. All teens need to learn how to protect themselves against malware, social networking scams, and cyberbullies. This book helps you learn crucial skills:

• Deal with cyberbullies
• Learn key social networking skills
• Protect your privacy
• Create a positive online reputation
• Protect yourself from phishing and malware scams

Microsoft (@Safer_Online) will hold an online Twitter chat at 3:00pm (EDT) on September 25 with Linda McCarthy (@ddramabook) and other online safety experts about how her ebook can help people talk with kids about digital safety. Use #ChatSTC to ask questions or join the conversation.

Professor Charles Nicholas has received research funding from the National Science Foundation to develop better ways to detect malicious software (malware) and defend computers against it. The award will provide up to $75,000 over the next year to support the research of Dr. Nicholas and his students.

The process of creating malware has become more automated in recent years, as a result of so-called exploit kits, such as the Blackhole exploit kit. The UMBC project will investigate ways of characterizing these exploit kits, as well as the malware they produce. Developing models of how current kits work will help to predict what exploit kits will look like in the future as well as suggest better techniques for detecting the malware they are used to produce.

On challenging problem the research will address is dealing with polymorphic malware, malware that makes new versions of itself as it moves from machine to machine, in the hope of avoiding detection by conventional, signature-based anti-virus software. The research will characterize malware families that exist as products of a specific exploit kit as well as those that develop through polymorphism.

Dr. Nicholas is the faculty advisor of UMBC’s Cyber Defense Team, a student group that studies information security, intrusion detection, cybersecurity, and network security and participates in competitions such as the Maryland Cyber Challenge. He is also teaching a special topics class this semester on Malware Analysis for both undergraduate and graduate students.

CSEE Professor Marie desJardins was one of three UMBC professors who spoke at a recent UMBC Provost’s luncheon and new faculty seminar on Great Teachers Talk about Teaching. She was joined by Professor James Grubb (History) and Manil Suri (Mathematics & Statistics), who also spoke at the seminar.

Dr. desJardins will also be talking on Diversity in CS Education and Research at a special Women in Data Science event hosted by the Data Innovation DC meetup group.  The group explores the “intersection of the data revolution and the art of creating value” and meets monthly in the DC area.

The event, which will also include presentations from two other women working in data science, is intended to demonstrate the impact of women technologists in the growing area of data analytics and encourage more participation by women. The meeting is free and open to the public (RSVP here) and will take place between 6:00pm and 8:30pm on Monday, September 23, 2013 at Cooley LLP (1299 Pennsylvania Ave. NW Suite 700, Washington, DC map)