As Retriever Nation erupted with joy for UMBC’s 74-54 upset victory over the University of Virginia—a team thought unbeatable just hours before—millions of new fans learned for the first time what UMBC stands for: University of a Million Brackets Crushed. Or U Must Be Cinderella. Or, as longtime Retriever fans will tell you, U Made the Best Choice.

Friday’s game wasn’t just record-setting, expectation-smashing victory for UMBC. It was also a major first for the NCAA. Never before has a no. 16 seed bested a no. 1 in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, until UMBC, as NPR noted, “beat the stuffing out of Virginia, the best team in the country.” Then again, UMBC is used to achieving what no one knew was possible for such a young public research university.

News of the historic victory immediately flashed on the homepage of the New York Times, which wrote that UMBC “played loose and fearless” and that although Virginia had the nation’s top defense going into the game, UMBC shot 54.2 percent from the floor.

Arguing that “college basketball has never seen a bigger upset than Maryland-Baltimore County 74, Virginia 54,” USA Today wrote, “When most uber-longshots in the NCAA tournament get tight, the Retrievers instead went to the rim with reckless abandon.” As UMBC’s lead over Virginia ballooned, the Cavaliers “played with nervousness while the Retrievers’ confidence grew.“

UMBC star guard Jairus Lyles ‘17, sociology, M.A. ‘18, education, again helped lead his team to victory, finishing with 28 points (82 percent from the floor). “UMBC needed a big bucket or Virginia seemed like it was going to make a run,” USA Today noted, “Lyles would carve through defenders for a tear-drop lay-up or hit a clutch jumper.”

As Bill Raftery said during the TNT broadcast, “The kid’s on fire.”
 For Lyles, whose parents are actually UVA alumni, it’s all about his coaches and fellow players. “I’m playing at a high level. But my teammates put that confidence in me,” he said just after the win. “We believe in each other.”

Today, Retriever fans are watching the game on repeat and catching up on posts from @UMBCAthletics, which also made headlines for its joyful, and often cheeky, tweets throughout the evening, calling out doubters, thanking fans, and lamenting a shortage of cookies in the media room.

At one point, account manager Zach Seidel ‘12, media and communication studies, M.S. ‘15, human-centered computing, reminded viewers:

Second Half about to start, no matter what happens we just want you all to remember……we are conveniently located just outside of Baltimore and have stellar academics

— UMBC Athletics (@UMBCAthletics) March 17, 2018

Luckily, there’s no risk that new or longstanding Retriever fans will forget the night. By the end of the evening — as the Washington Post shared with the world, “They did it. And it wasn’t even close” — UMBC was the number one topic people were talking about on Twitter…worldwide.

UMBC now advances to play ninth-seeded Kansas State on Sunday, March 18. As Head Coach Ryan Odom told the team just after their historic win, “The key now is you don’t have long to get ready for the next one.” That’s our Retrievers: always showing their grit and reaching together for greatness.

Game updates will be available soon on the Retriever Nation webpage.

— Dinah Winnick

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Header photo: Mitchell Layton
Additional photos: Ian Feldmann, UMBC Retriever Weekly

With tonight’s 74-54 win over the University of Virginia’s (UVA) Cavaliers, UMBC has made basketball history as the first No. 16 seed team to best a No. 1 seed in an NCAA men’s tournament. The victory sends the team into the second round of play versus Kansas State, on Sunday, March 18.

In the first half, the Retrievers stayed consistently within striking distance of the Cavaliers, pushing to a tie at halftime. They came back fresh, with an impressive run of confident three-pointers that took them all the way home.

“UMBC is the talk of the nation right now…what they’re doing to UVA,” noted a commentator with seven minutes left on the clock.

As the final buzzer rang in the news, the crowd went wild. #RetrieverNation fans took to social media to share their delight about this true Cinderella story.

“I love seeing them smile…they’re good kids, I’m so proud of them,” said head coach Ryan Odom, who said they’ll “prepare for the next one, just like we did for this one.”

Going into the game, star guard Jairus Lyles ‘17, sociology, M.A. ‘18, education, told a Virginia NBC affiliate: “We’re definitely a confident group. We know we have to play a tough team, a very tough team especially defensively…we’re still confident that we’re going to go out there and have fun and try to win the game.

We’d like to send a huge Retriever congratulations to our UMBC men’s basketball team for playing their hearts out this season, and for giving us all something wonderful to believe in.

To the entire #RetrieverNation community — thanks for being Retriever Believers! Your passion for UMBC shines through in so many ways. We’ve chronicled some of our favorite social media highlights from this historic run to the NCAAs here. Enjoy, and stay tuned for more about Round 2!

Game photos by Ian Feldmann, the Retriever Weekly

March Madness: U.M.B.C. Makes NCAA History by Beating No. 1 Virginia — New York Times

Virginia becomes first No. 1 seed to lose in the first round of the NCAA tournament in an upset by UMBC — Washington Post

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U Must Be Cinderella
University of Millions of Brackets Crushed

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By now, the image of star guard Jairus Lyles’s incredible game-winning three-pointer at the America East championships is etched upon many of our brains. But, here’s one more for good measure. Swoosh!

By Haibin Zhang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Header photo:SWEviL/Shutterstock.com

As cloud storage becomes more common, data security is an increasing concern. Companies and schools have been increasing their use of services like Google Drive for some time, and lots of individual users also store files on Dropbox, Box, Amazon Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and the like. They’re no doubt concerned about keeping their information private – and millions more users might store data online if they were more certain of its security.

Data stored in the cloud is nearly always stored in an encrypted form that would need to be cracked before an intruder could read the information. But as a scholar of cloud computing and cloud security, I’ve seen that where the keys to that encryption are held varies among cloud storage services. In addition, there are relatively simple ways users can boost their own data’s security beyond what’s built into systems they use.

Who holds the keys?

Commercial cloud storage systems encode each user’s data with a specific encryption key. Without it, the files look like gibberish – rather than meaningful data.

But who has the key? It can be stored either by the service itself, or by individual users. Most services keep the key themselves, letting their systems see and process user data, such as indexing data for future searches. These services also access the key when a user logs in with a password, unlocking the data so the person can use it. This is much more convenient than having users keep the keys themselves.

But it is also less secure: Just like regular keys, if someone else has them, they might be stolen or misused without the data owner knowing. And some services might have flaws in their security practices that leave users’ data vulnerable.

Letting users keep control

A few less popular cloud services, including Mega and SpiderOak, require users to upload and download files through service-specific client applications that include encryption functions. That extra step lets users keep the encryption keys themselves. For that additional security, users forgo some functions, such as being able to search among their cloud-stored files.

These services aren’t perfect – there’s still a possibility that their own apps might be compromised or hacked, allowing an intruder to read your files either before they’re encrypted for uploading or after being downloaded and decrypted. An encrypted cloud service provider could even embed functions in its specific app that could leave data vulnerable. And, of course, if a user loses the password, the data is irretrievable.

One new mobile app says it can keep phone photos encrypted from the moment they’re taken, through transmission and storage in the cloud. Other new services may arise offering similar protection for other types of data, though users should still be on guard against the potential for information to be hijacked in the few moments after the picture is taken, before it’s encrypted and stored.

Protecting yourself

To maximize cloud storage security, it’s best to combine the features of these various approaches. Before uploading data to the cloud, first encrypt it using your own encryption software. Then upload the encoded file to the cloud. To get access to the file again, log in to the service, download it and decrypt it yourself.

This, of course, prevents users from taking advantage of many cloud services, like live editing of shared documents and searching cloud-stored files. And the company providing the cloud services could still modify the data, by altering the encrypted file before you download it.

The best way to protect against that is to use authenticated encryption. This method stores not only an encrypted file, but additional metadata that lets a user detect whether the file has been modified since it was created.

Ultimately, for people who don’t want to learn how to program their own tools, there are two basic choices: Find a cloud storage service with trustworthy upload and download software that is open-source and has been validated by independent security researchers. Or use trusted open-source encryption software to encrypt your data before uploading it to the cloud; these are available for all operating systems and are generally free or very low-cost.

Haibin Zhang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

So much goes into the making of a play. From conception to production — and all the twists and turns in between — the willingness to bend and change with the living, breathing work makes all the difference.

In her new show, “All She Must Possess,” UMBC assistant professor Susan McCully explores the lives of Baltimore’s Cone sisters, Etta and Claribel, who together built an impressive collection of more than 3,000 pieces of art, including 500 by Henri Matisse. The show, which recently closed out its world premiere at The Rep Stage in Columbia, MD, was part of the 2018 Women’s Voices Theater Festival.

UMBC senior theatre design and production major Isabelle Tabet interviewed McCully about the genesis of “All She Must Possess,” and what it was like to watch her play take shape on the stage.

Below: Photos of “All She Must Possess” by Katie Simmons-Barth, courtesy of Rep Stage.

It’s easy for a single person to feel helpless in the face of really big problems. That’s why UMBC students banded together this week as part of a national effort to tackle hunger.

In partnership with Cheerios and Ellen DeGeneres, and organized at UMBC by Chartwells, which manages Dining Services and True Grit’s dining hall, the “One Million Acts of Good” project made it easy and fun for students to “Matterboxes” with food essentials, notes of encouragement, and educational inserts. The 300 boxes will be shared with five area organizations — Southwest Emergency Services, Elkridge Food Pantry, Maryland Food Bank, Inc., Catonsville Emergency Assistance, and UMBC’s own Retriever Essentials, which runs a campus food pantry and other efforts to combat student food insecurity.

“Helping people is really wonderful,” said freshman Kristy Chan, biology, who cheerfully stuffed boxes alongside her friends, including fellow freshman Kusum Sharma, mechanical engineering.

“Knowing someone out there in the world is going to receive what we’re making is just so great,” agreed Sharma. “It feels good to help.”

Photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC Magazine.

From the bonfire and Alumni Awards, to our soccer game and annual Comedy Show featuring Trevor Noah, UMBC Homecoming is not to be missed! What are YOUR top five reasons for catching Retriever Fever?

UMBC Homecoming 2017 runs October 5-14, right here on campus! Learn more at homecoming.umbc.edu.

Video by Jenny O’Grady.

Kafui Dzirasa ’01, chemical engineering, is only 38, but is already emerging as a national leader in brain science. His research – which posits that some of the most common mental illnesses might be explained by unexpected connections between electrical patterns in different parts of the brain – could lead to more targeted and effective ways to treat conditions from schizophrenia to autism to depression.

The former Meyerhoff Scholar has also drawn national attention. Last October, as part of a White House panel on research, he found himself explaining to the leader of the free world what it means to think about the brain as an engineered electrical system.

Dzirasa started out at UMBC as a chemistry major but switched to chemical engineering so he could continue using math and computer science, subjects he enjoyed in high school. As graduation approached, he found himself gravitating toward health-related fields, so he stayed on for a fifth year to take pre-med courses and serve as student body president. “I realized it would be useful to learn as much about the body as I could,” he says.

Dzirasa then headed to Duke University to earn his M.D./Ph.D. in bioengineering, with the goal of designing neuroprosthetics—devices that interface with and augment the brain’s abilities and functions. But a stint in Duke’s schizophrenia ward realigned Dzirasa’s plans, awakening him to the huge need for better mental health treatments. “It was not until I got to the clinic that I realized mental illness was a real thing,” he says. “It was tremendous wake-up call.” Instead of giving healthy people additional capabilities, he realized he could help sick people live fuller lives by creating neuroprosthetics for mental illness.

While scientists believe that psychiatric symptoms should map onto underlying physical conditions in the brain, identifying those conditions has been challenging. Scientists still have a limited understanding of the neural basis of most illnesses or why treatments such as antidepressant drugs and electroshock therapy are effective.

Dzirasa, now an assistant professor in Duke’s biomedical engineering and neurobiology departments, hopes to change that by studying the brain’s electrical signals. Though we hear a lot about brain chemicals, the brain is also electrical: Like the information-processing transistors in your computer or phone, each of the roughly 100 billion neurons in your brain transmits information using electrical impulses. Dzirasa takes advantage of this by inducing various conditions—stress, bipolar disorder, even drug addiction—in mice and using tiny implanted electrodes to measure how electrical activity changes.

He uses mathematical and computational tools to find connections between recorded electrical patterns in different brain areas. In the prestigious journal Neuron, he recently reported an instance in which communication between two regions in a mouse’s brain was influenced by activity in a third, seemingly unrelated, one. When he exposed the mice to stress, the communication broke down. “It’s almost like parents sitting in the front seat of a car and kids sitting in the back,” he says. “When the parents are controlling the kids’ communication, everything is fine. But if you tell the kids to stop talking and they don’t, then you’ve got problems. We found that the parent lost the ability to control the kids’ communication.”

Dzirasa’s ultimate goal is to make a “pacemaker” for the human brain. Like the heart implant that restores a regular heartbeat, his dream device would correct faulty electrical signals that underlie debilitating conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. “If mental disorders are problems with electricity, we should be able to treat them using electricity,” he says. “I could see a future in which people sleep in a hat” wired with electrodes to stimulate healthy brain function.

A recent discovery may be a step in that direction: Dzirasa and colleagues have figured out a way to not just read but write electrical information from one part of the brain to another. He has a paper coming out and a patent pending on the technique. But challenges remain. For obvious reasons, he cannot stick wires into a living human the way he can in a mouse, and there are significant differences between how mouse and human brains work that need to be accounted for. Translating his findings from mice to humans is “the next step,” he says.

Dzirasa credits UMBC’s Meyerhoff Scholarship program with shaping his career ambitions. And he is now giving back to the program that helped him, returning to campus once or twice a month to mentor scholars in “everything from career advice to life advice, decision-making advice—all the things that go along with helping college students figure out their place in the world.”

It’s yet another set of connections through which Dzirasa is making the world a better, more caring place.

— Gabriel Popkin

Image: Les Todd, Duke Photography

Read more about brain research at UMBC in “Staking Our Claim.”

After 35 years on campus, West Hill Apartments are finally getting a makeover! Over the summer, UMBC began work  to fully renovate five apartment buildings that house 236 students. West Hill, UMBC’s first campus apartment complex, has been here since 1980, so we’re sure you’ll agree the updates are as welcome as they are striking.

The work on West Hill caps off several years of renovation projects for the campus apartments, and completion is anticipated in summer 2016. Earlier this fall, students moved into the completed halls with work continuing on the newly vacated spaces.

New exterior community gathering spaces will be developed as part of the project, including a small recreation field. The community is supported by the adjoining Residential Community Center, with large communal rooms, meeting spaces and laundry facilities.

When renovations are complete, the buildings will feature:

• New siding and windows
• Enclosed stairwells that feature key-swipe access.
• Each room in each apartment requires key-swipe access
• Lifted ceilings
• Sensor-activated lighting for increased energy efficiency
• Upgraded electrical wiring and mechanical systems
• New wall finishes
• Improved bathrooms
• ADA accessible rooms
• Full refrigerators
• Built-in routers
• Smart desks

Check out photos of the transformation!

Staying in the Loop is a new post series from the Chapter of Black and Latino Alumni (CBLA) that seeks to create connections between alumni, faculty, staff, and other supporters of UMBC and CBLA. Click here for more information about CBLA.

Name: Dr. Yvette Mozie-Ross
Major: Health Science and Policy
Grad year: 1988
Staff: Vice Provost for Enrollment Management and Planning

Q: What do/did you enjoy most about being a part of the UMBC community?

I enjoyed the close sense of community. Everyone knew everyone and looked out for each others’ well-being. I remember celebrating birthdays and also coming together to help classmates through difficult times as well (personal/family challenges).

Q: UMBC is approaching its 50th anniversary (2016) and certainly the campus has come a long way – from a small commuter school to the nation’s #1 “up-and-coming” university – in such a relatively short period of time. What, in your opinion, makes UMBC so unique/special? What’s your most memorable experience/moment at UMBC?

I think what’s special about UMBC is we provide a place for ordinary, everyday people who are passionate about their interests and willing to work hard to become extraordinary!

Q: If you could meet one person in the world who would it be and why?

Oprah Winfrey. I think she is an amazing person who has positively impacted so many lives through her work in television and media. She is a deeply spiritual person who (unapologetically) works to ensure her that her spiritual self and her professional self are in alignment. I strive for that in my day to day work.

Q: What is the best advice you’ve received?

Whatever follows “I am” will come looking for you!

Q: What is one book you think everyone should read?

Five Languages of Love by Gary Chapman. This book is great no matter where you are in your relationship – whether you are just getting started in a new relationship or celebrating 50 years of marriage!

Q: What is one thing you can’t live without?

Chocolate!

Thank you to everyone who came out to the 10th Annual Wine Tasting and Silent Auction hosted by our Chapter of Young Alumni. By attending the event, you helped raise nearly $5,000 for student scholarships. We loved seeing you there and hope you had as much fun as we did! We’ve shared just a few photos from the event below, but we hope you’ll check out our full gallery on Flickr.