Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Cyber Security Mergers & Acquisitions — Striving for a
Successful Exit: Trends, Preparation, and Lessons Learned

9:00-10:30am, Friday 9 November 2012

RWD Building, UMBC Research Park
5521 Research Park Dr.
Baltimore, MD 21228

The Cyber Incubator at bwtech@UMBC will host a third CYBERInnovation Briefing on Friday 9 November 2012 in the RWD Building of UMBC's Research Park. Registration begins at 8:30am.

Cyber security acquisitions continue to heat up. Join the CyberHive community as we host a distinguished panel of cyber security executives and capital markets experts who will share their recent merger and acquisition experiences in the cyber security industry. Learn from buyers, sellers, and deal flow managers – how to drive a successful deal and be best prepared. Our panel will explore recent trends in activity, acquisition characteristics, attributes that enhance company valuation, lessons learned, process and financial preparation, retention of key employees, and offer words of wisdom.

Acquisition activity involving cyber security companies will continue to influence the economic growth of our region, as innovators from the National Security Agency, US Cyber Command, and the Defense Industrial Base launch creative business opportunities. These sessions are very interactive and we look forward to and welcome your participation.

For more information and to RSVP, contact Alexandra Gold, .

Originally from Frederick, MD, Beatrice Garcia is a Freshman Computer Science major and a Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) Scholar.

About Beatrice

When did you become interested in Computer Science? I've always liked computers and technology in general. I was always tinkering with the next new gadget. So, I decided to take a computer science class in high school, Introduction to Programming Concepts. We programmed in Java and I loved it. Sounds dorky, I know.

What area of Computer Science interests you the most? I love cyber security and I would love to explore bioinformatics. I have not taken any Biology classes yet, but I'm really interested in building software for the biology/medical field. As for cyber security, I think it's an integral part of our society nowadays because everything is being digitized and we need that security.

What Computer Science courses did you take in high school. How did those influence your choice of major? In high school, I took Introduction to Programming Concepts and AP Computer Science. No one really influenced me in taking those classes but my high school teacher was a huge influence in me majoring in Computer Science. She was a great teacher and really made the class a lot of fun.

What is your dream job? I would love to work for Google because they come up with the most innovative products. For example, the Chromebook. I've also heard about the amazing way Google treats their employees. They even have a program in Women in Leadership.

About being a CS major

What is the best part about being a CWIT Scholar? The absolute best thing about being a CWIT is the sense of community. Prior to entering freshman year, we went through a retreat. The retreat was really helpful because by the time classes started,  we already knew each other. So, college wasn't as intimidating as it could've been. In addition to already having friends as soon as you stepped onto campus, you already have an academic community supporting you. We instantly took advantage of study groups and helping each other with homework.

What classes are you taking? Right now, I'm taking Calculus I, Computer Science I for Computer Science Majors, Introduction to Gender/Women Studies, First-Year Experience, and English: Composition. I'm excited about taking CMSC 345: Software Design and CMSC 421: Operating Systems.

Are you part of any on-campus clubs, organizations, teams, or labs? Since this is my first semester as a college student, I actually did not sign up with as many clubs as I wanted because I wanted to test out the water first. Right now, I am a member of the Oxfam Club, which is an organization that helps build a future without poverty. I am a CWIT Scholar (Center of Women in Technology) and we try to promote gender diversity and equality in male-dominated technology fields. I'm also part of the Society of Women Engineers and for fun, I like to do yoga!

About life at UMBC

What is your favorite part about college so far? My favorite part of college is having more responsibility for myself. I know that I'm responsible for myself, so as long as I keep being level-headed and try my best, I will be fine. I've been constantly told that college is what you make of it and I will take advantage of that.

What is the best part about campus life at UMBC? I love that everyone on UMBC is mature and has an intention to succeed. But, we know how to have fun, too! The Students Events Board comes up with greatest events and they make sure you always have something fun to do!

What is your favorite spot on campus? I love walking by the pond or sitting at the ledges by the library because it's so peaceful and the landscape is beautiful.

Where can you get the best coffee/lunch/ food or beverage of choice? For the best coffee, I always go to Starbucks. But for breakfast, I always go to the Coffee Shop in the Administration Building. The ladies who work there are so nice and they have great food!

Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research (CHMPR)
Distinguished Computational Science Lecture Series

Computational Science at the
Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

Paul Messina
Director of Science Argonne National Laboratory
http://www.alcf.anl.gov

3:00 p.m. Thursday, 1 November 2012, ITE 456, UMBC

The goal of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) is to extend the frontiers of science by solving problems that require innovative approaches and the largest-scale computing systems. ALCF’s current production computer has over 150,000 cores, and the system currently being readied for production – Mira, an IBM Blue Gene/Q system — has nearly one million cores.  How does one program such systems?  Are current software tools such as MPI and OpenMP available for such systems. Are scientific and engineering applications able to scale to such levels of parallelism?   Is resilience a new concern for 1,000,000 production codes on Mira This talk will address these questions and describe a sampling of projects that are using ALCF systems in their research.  Finally, the ways to gain access to ALCF resources will be presented.

Paul Messina is Director of Science at the ALCF. Dr. Messina guides the ALCF science teams using the IBM Blue Gene systems. In 2002-2004, he served as Distinguished Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne and as Adviser to the Director General at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). Previously at Caltech, Dr. Messina served as Director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research, as Assistant Vice President for Scientific Computing, and as Faculty Associate for Scientific Computing. He led the Computational and Computer Science component of Caltech’s research project funded by the Academic Strategic Alliances Program of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative. He also acted as Co-principal Investigator for the National Virtual Observatory and TeraGrid. At Argonne, he held a number of positions from 1973-1987 and was the founding Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division.

CSEE Colloquium

Experiences Teaching Thousands Online

Professor Michael L. Littman
Computer Science, Brown University

1:00pm Friday, 26 October 2012, ITE 227, UMBC

Last Fall, a pair of well-respected computer scientists at Stanford offered their AI class for free to people everywhere via the Internet. Over 160,000 students signed up, spurring a worldwide conversation on the impact of online teaching on higher education and sending universities throughout the US scrambling to announce initiatives in this space. I had the good fortune to teach a class for one of the startups and will share my experiences.

Michael L. Littman is a professor of computer scientist at Brown University. He works mainly in reinforcement learning, but has done work in machine learning, game theory, computer networking, partially observable Markov decision process solving, computer solving of analogy problems and other areas. He has held faculty positions in the computer science departments at Duke University and Rutgers University, where he chaired the department from 2009 to 2012.  In the summer of 2012 he taught a massive open online course (MOOC) on graph algorithms.

Host: Tim Finin,

more information and directions

The UMBC Cyberdawgs triumphed at the Maryland Cyber Challenge & Conference (MDC3) yesterday. The team placed second at the MDC3 finals, held Wednesday at the Baltimore Convention Center. This is the first year that UMBC’s Cyberdawgs have placed in MDC3. In its second year, it is already the state’s biggest Cybersecurity battle.  

The UMBC winners include team captain Rob Waters, Brad Isbell, Christopher Moy, Jennifer Olk, Kevin Yu, and Patrick Ly. The win comes with a $2,000 cash prize for each student to be used to further their education and training in field of Cybersecurity.

First place went to the University of Maryland, College Park. “Throughout most of the day, UMBC and UMCP wrestled neck-in-neck for first place, and it was very, very close,” wrote Dr. Richard Forno, UMBC’s Cybersecurity graduate program director, in an e-mail announcement. “In a nutshell, UMBC entered 5 teams in the competition, 4 of them qualified for the finals, and 1 ‘took the silver’”.

The final challenge tasked teams with securing a number of systems on their own network while also attempting to gain (and keep) control of other “targets” that were provided as the day progressed. Points were earned by how well teams defended both their systems and those they gained control over.

UMBC is partnering with the Northrop Grumman Foundation to launch the UMBC Cyber Scholars Program. Funded by a generous $1 million grant from the Northrop Grumman Foundation, and facilitated by the new UMBC Center for Cybersecurity and the UMBC Center for Women in Technology, the scholarship program is slated to launch this January, according to this morning's press release.

The scholarship program will support 15 to 20 scholars each year, with a focus on women and underrepresented minorities. Along with financial support, scholars will have the opportunity to do advanced research, internships, and take both management-oriented and technical courses.

To learn more about the new UMBC Cyber Scholars Program, read Northrop Grumman and UMBC's joint press release.
To learn more about the new UMBC Center for Cybersecurity, click here.

Northrop Grumman Foundation announced $1 million grant to launch the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Cyber Scholars program. Pictured from left are Freeman Hrabowski, president of UMBC; Sandra Evers-Manly, president of the Northrop Grumman Foundation; Alex Markowski, UMBC CWIT Scholar; Alec Pulianas, UMBC CWIT Scholar; and Anupam Joshi, director of UMBC’s Cybersecurity Center and head of the Cyber Scholars program.

This morning, UMBC President Dr. Freeman Hrabowski announced the creation of the new UMBC Center for Cybersecurity.

The aim of the center is to provide both Maryland and the nation with academic and research leadership, collaboration, innovation, and outreach in this critical discipline by streamlining UMBC's academic, research, workforce development, and technology incubation activities to advance the University's position as a leading research university in cybersecurity-related disciplines.

CSEE Professor Dr. Anupam Joshi will be the new center's director. Dr. Richard Forno, director of UMBC's Cybersecurity graduate programs, will serve as Assistant Director.

The center is made up of UMBC faculty across many disciplines, including Computer Science, Information Systems, Public Policy, Mathematics and Statistics, and Physics. It will expand upon UMBC's pre-existing Cybersersecurity efforts like the Center for Information Security and Assurance (CISA), and the Cync Program run by the Cyber Incubator@bwtech.

In partnership with UMBC's Center for Women in Technology, the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity will also facilitate a new scholarship program called the UMBC Cyber Scholars program. Set to launch this January, the scholarship program is funded by a generous $1 million grant from the Northrop Grumman Foundation.

To learn more about the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity, visit: cybersecurity.umbc.edu and follow the center on Facebook and Twitter.

Welcome to the 2013 Academic Year. We have a lot to celebrate in our department. We welcome two new Assistant Professors: Nilanjan Banerjee and Jian Chen, and new Lecturer John Park. Dr. Banerjee directs UMBC’s new Mobile, Pervasive, and Sensor Systems Laboratory, which will carry out research that focuses on renewable energy driven devices. Dr. Chen specializes in visualization techniques that help scientists make better sense of their data. John Park has extensive indsutry experience in areas including operating systems, real-time control systems, artificial intelligence/machine learning, digital imaging and graphics, and bioinformatics. This Fall he will teach CMSC 104 and 201.

We will have a very busy recruiting season this year. We are searching for two lecturers in Computer Science and a third lecturer/Professor of Practice in Computer Science with expertise in CyberSecurity.

Our research efforts continue to remain strong and our expenditures were approximately at the $5 million level for last fiscal year. Our awards starting January 1, 2012 to date exceed $5.5 million! CSEE Professor Dr. Alan Sherman (PI) and Dr. Rick Forno (Co-PI), Graduate Program Director, Cybersecurity have received an NSF grant of $2.5 million over five years to fund 22 students studying Information Assurance (IA) and Cybersecurity. The scholarships are part of the Federal Cyber Scholarship for Service (SFS) program. UMBC CSEE Professor Penny Rheingans received an NSF research award, Transforming the Freshman Experience of Computing Majors, to develop and evaluate an innovative first-year seminar for computing majors aimed at increasing retention, completion, and success among students, especially women and those from underrepresented groups. Dr. Rheingans will serve as the principal investiga-tor for this three year project, which will also include Drs. Marie desJardins (CSEE), Carolyn Seaman (IS), and Susan Martin (CWIT).

Both the Computer Engineering and Computer Science undergraduate programs were successful in their ABET accreditation. Have a great Fall semester. Keep up to date by visiting www.csee.umbc.edu

-Gary

CWIT Director and CSEE professor Penny Rheingans was interviewed by Sheila Kast on today's Maryland Morning show on WYPR as part of a segment on Ada Lovelace Day (October 16). You can listen to the WYPR interview here.

Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer in the mid nineteenth century. She is considered the "first computer programmer" because she was the first person to develop an algorithm intended to be executed by a machine. Ada Lovelace Day is about "sharing stories of women — whether engineers, scientists, technologists or mathematicians — who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM."