Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

The UMBC Council of Computing Majors (CCM) will hold a general meeting from 3:00pm to 4:00pm this Wednesday, April 27, in the CSEE Department conference room, ITE 325b.

Come discuss service opportunities, CSEE speakers, and upcoming CCM events.  Several professors have generously agreed to lecture on tools and topics in computer science.  Dates and details will be announced at the meeting.

The Council of Computing Majors is a student organization for CMSC and CMPE majors and other students interested in computing.  Come if you are interested in joining or just finding out more about the CCM.

For questions of more information, send email to .

The CSEE Department will hold a CMPE Undergraduate Townhall Meeting on Wednesday, April 3, 2013 from 11:30am to 1:00pm in the University Center Ballroom Lounge. All CMPE majors and other interested students are welcome.

We will discuss recent important changes to the CMPE program, course scheduling, current Capstone projects, the BS/MS program, guidance about undergraduate research opportunities, and more. There will also be ample time for questions and discussion.

Please sign up in your CMPE classes by Friday, March 29. If you have any questions, please contact Professor Chintan Patel at .

Rick Forno, Assistant Director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity, was quoted in an article in the Louisville KY Courier-Journal about a compromised online poll the paper ran about Internet voting. The paper's March 20th poll was prompted by a Kentucky initiative to make voting easier for overseas personnel and asked "Should overseas U.S. military personnel be allowed to vote via the Internet?".

University of South Carolina computer science professor Duncan Buell and his students cast tens of thousands of votes for the "No, the possibility of fraud is just too great" response to highlight the potential risks of online voting.  Before the poll was shut down, more than 91% of the votes cast were negative and only 7% were positive ("Yes, it can be made just as secure as any balloting system").

In the Courier-Journal article, Forno pointed commented on relatively low security for most online polls.

But the difference between an online newspaper poll and state-run online election balloting is “night and day,” said Richard Forno, director of the Graduate Cybersecurity Program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and assistant director of the university’s Center for Cybersecurity. “I’m not saying it’s impossible to hack some online voting for a state election, but it’s much more difficult to do it there” than with the newspaper’s poll, Forno said. A state election system “would have far more security features built in,” he said.  …   Forno said hacking generally is on the increase in the United States. “We’re seeing more and more cyber-related incidents” of all kinds, ranging from foreign theft of the intellectual property of U.S. companies to theft of personal information and webpage defacement, he said.

The security of voting systems is a specialty of UMBC Professor Alan Sherman, whose Center for Information Security and Assurance has worked on secure voting systems for more than ten years. In 2009, Sherman and his students helped the city of Takoma Park, Maryland use the Scantegrity voting system — the first time any end-to-end cryptographic system will be used in a binding governmental election.

The Problem with Print: publishing born digital scholarship

Professor Helen J. Burgess
Department of English, UMBC

4:00pm Monday, 25 March 2013
7th Floor, A. O. Kuhn Library

Dr. Burgess will discuss some of the difficulties for academics seeking to work and publish outside traditional "print-bound" models of humanities scholarship – including issues of professional evaluation and distribution – and show some examples of "born digital" works that would benefit from a new model of publishing. A reception, sponsored by the Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, will follow the program.

Helen J. Burgess is an Assistant Professor of English in the Communication and Technology track. Dr Burgess received her BA(Hons) and MA(Dist.) in English Language and Literature from Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, and her PhD in English from West Virginia University. She is active in the new media research community as editor of the online journal Hyperrhiz: new Media Cultures, and technical editor of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. Dr Burgess is coauthor of Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Enounters with Mars and Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information, both titles published in the Mariner10 interactive DVD-Rom series at the University of Pennsylvania Press. She has interests in multimedia and web development, open source and open content production, electronic literature, and science fiction.

As more corporate and personal data moves online, Assistant Director at the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity Richard Forno provides tips on protecting financial information before a cyberattack hits.

In this video, Mariko Sanchanta of the Wall Stree Journal Digital Network interviews Dr. Rick Forno on the risks of cyberattacks on banks and other financial insititutions.

UMBC will host a free two-day workshop April 11-12 for faculty, researchers, and students from all disciplines who are interested in learning how to incorporate high performance computing, advanced data analysis, modeling and simulation and data visualization into their teaching and research.

The workshop will be given by representatives from XSEDE, an NSF-sponsored distributed resource for high performance computing and data storage that is available for UMBC faculty and students to use for their research. The workshop will be held in room 120 of the Meyerhoff Building on the UMBC campus, starting at Noon on Thursday April 11 and ending at 4:00pm on Friday, April 12.

Workshop participants get information on gaining access to XSEDE resources and hands on training one a topics including computational thinking, parallel computing, scientific visualization, research data management, using Unix and adding computational science to curricula. The XSEDE resources are a natural "next step" for applications that have outgrown the cluster computing facilities available at UMBC, such as HPCF and MC2.

While the workshop is free, you must pre-register online — start by creating an account via the SIGN IN link. Registration closes on March 25 and space is limited, so if you are interested, register as soon as possible.

For more information about the workshop and XSEDE, see the workshop flier or contact Andrew Raim (), Linda Akli () or Prof. Ian Thorpe ().

Teaching & Research with Mathematica 9 and Wolfram|Alpha Pro

2:30-3:45 Tuesday, 9 April 2013, 401 Math/Psyc Building, UMBC

This talk by staff from Wolfram will illustrate capabilities in Mathematica 9 that are directly applicable for use in teaching and research on campus. Topics include the folowing

• Free-form linguistic input & predictive interface features
• 2D and 3D visualization
• Dynamic interactivity & On-demand scientific data
• Example-driven course materials
• Symbolic interface construction
• Statistics & Data anaylsis
• Digital Image Processing, Parallelization, and Control Systems functionality

The new Wolfram|Alpha Pro website will be featured, demonstrating the following capabilities.

• built-in CDF interactivity
• automatic creation of interactive models
• ability to upload data (spreadsheets, data, text) for instant and
• thorough analysis
• step-by-step solution guide to many problems
• specialized keyboard for mathematical and scientific symbols
• export results to over 60 formats

Current Mathematica users will benefit from seeing improvements and new features of Mathematica 9 as well as Wolfram|Alpha Pro but prior knowledge of Mathematica is not required.

"Shafi Goldwasser of MIT and the Weizmann Institute of Science and Silvio Micali of MIT were names as the winners of the 2012 ACM A.M. Turing Award. Working together, they pioneered the field of provable security, which laid the mathematical foundations that made modern cryptography possible. By formalizing the concept that cryptographic security had to be computational rather than absolute, they created mathematical structures that turned cryptography from an art into a science.

Their work addresses important practical problems such as the protection of data from being viewed or modified, providing a secure means of communications and transactions over the Internet. Their advances led to the notion of interactive and probabilistic proofs and had a profound impact on computational complexity, an area that focuses on classifying computational problems according to their inherent difficulty.

The ACM Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing," carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc."

…more…

UMBC's Training Centers is offering a new Certificate in Cyber Operations that is designed to help move participants from a basic competence with computers and technology up to the level of a competent, entry-level professional as a Cyber Analyst or Operator.

Homer Minnick, the Training Centers' director for Cybersecurity training, will host a free webinar on the certificate program from 12:00-1:00pm on Wednesday March 27, 2013. It will include the following topics.

• What is the Cybersecurity Academy?
• Is the Certificate in Cyber Operations right for me?
• How does the Certificate in Cyber Operations contrast with other certifications from UMBC Training Centers?”
• What are the education and experience eligibility requirements?
• Which industry certifications are included in this program?
• What is the value this certification brings to my organization?
• How do you apply for the program?
• What is the next step? Where do I get more information?

  If you are interested in participating, please register online for the free webinar.

Privacy and Security in Online Social Media (PSOSM)

Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK")
Assistant Professor
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, India

10:30-12:00 Monday, March 11, 2013, ITE 325b, UMBC

With increase in usage of the Internet, there has been an exponential increase in the use of online social media on the Internet. Websites like Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Orkut, Twitter and Flickr have changed the way Internet is being used. There is a dire need to investigate, study and characterize privacy and security on online social media from various perspectives (computational, cultural, psychological). Real world scalable systems need to be built to detect and defend security and privacy issues on online social media. This talk will give you a preview of what we do at PreCog in the area of PSOSM. I will describe briefly some of the cool ongoing projects that we have: ChaMAILeon, PhishAri, Twit-Digest, U2P2, and OCEAN. Much of our research work is made available for public use through tools or online services. Our work derives techniques from Data Mining, Text Mining, Statistics, Network Science, Public Policy, Complex networks, Human Computer Interaction, and Psychology.

In this talk, I will focus on the following: (1) Twit-Digest is a tool to extract intelligence from Twitter which can be useful to security analysts. Pro-cursor to this work is published at PSOSM 2012, this work also obtained second best award at IBM ICARE 2012. (2) OCEAN: Open source Collation of eGovernment data and Networks. Here, we show how publicly available information on Government services can be used to profile citizens in India. This work obtained the Best Poster Award at Security and Privacy Symposium at IIT Kanpur, 2013. (3) Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness V 2.0 U2P2, this is one of the largest ever done privacy study in India. This has been in media recently; if you are interested search for #privacyindia12 on Twitter. This work obtained the third Best Poster Award at Security and Privacy Symposium at IIT Kanpur, 2013.

Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK") Assistant Professor, is currently the Hemant Bharat Ram Faculty Research Fellow at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi, India. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His research interests include developing technological and inter-disciplinary solutions to detect and prevent computer crime, in particular, these days be has been dabbling with complex networked systems (e.g. social web systems like Twitter, Facebook, and telephone logs). He is also very passionate about issues related to human computer interaction. As Principal Investigator, PK is currently managing research projects value of about 2 Crores INR. PK is a Co-Principal Investigator in a project that is approved at the Europe Union FP7 which is about 5.3 million Euros. PK has received research funds Government of India, National Science Foundation, industry bodies in India, and International Development Research Centre. He is serving as a PC member in WWW 2013, AsiaCCS 2013 and he is also serving as a reviewer for International Journal of Information Security and ACM's Transactions on Internet Technology. PK’s Ph.D. thesis work on anti-phishing research at Carnegie Mellon University has contributed in creating a successful start-up company, Wombat Security Technologies. PK founded and manages PreCog, a research group at IIIT-Delhi. PK can be reached at .