Over Spring Break, a group of Chemical, Biochemical and Environmental Engineering students, Aaron Gibson, Dagmawi Tilahun, Kevin Tran, and Don Wong, led by Professor Govind Rao, and accompanied by Dr. Theresa Good and Ms. Geetha Ram, went to India in order to get end user data for a low cost neonatal incubator the team is developing for use in resource-poor environments.

If you listen to the students, they’ll tell you the project started in Professor Rao’s 2011 Sensors class, a senior elective, where students learned that over 340 neonates die an hour in their first week of life, with 99% of those deaths occurring in low and middle income countries. Most of those deaths could be prevented if appropriate technology were available.

Professor Rao challenged the class to develop incubators that would work in these resource limited environments, where electricity might only be available for 8 hours a day, and salaries might be less than $6 a day. A few students from that class have continued to work with Professor Rao on this project funded by National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance which has culminated in the trip to India, where students met with rural health care workers in the Mysore region in Southern India, to ensure that they design a low cost incubator that will meet the needs of the local population. They visited several rural health care providers and have now partnered with an incubator manufacturer (Phoenix Medical Systems) and a health care provider (Karuna Trust) to take the concept to reality. Of course, we couldn’t leave India without seeing a few famous wonders of the world – the trip to the Taj Mahal was a gift from Professor Rao to the students and his colleagues. It was breathtaking.

Earlier this week, a security research company released a report providing technical documentation and near-certain proof that China is engaging in cyber-espionage activities against the US.  While that’s not exactly a new discovery, it provided a much deeper degree of public information used in presenting its findings.

On Public Radio International’s program, The World UMBC’s Rick Forno discussed the report’s implications.

Forno says he was on the program to discuss American cybersecurity readiness in light of the heightened media interest in cybersecurity following the report’s release.

The fact that the networks and our critical infrastructure systems are still vulnerable after years of analysis and public warnings about their security posture said Forno, “is still very disturbing.”

“Those systems that we view as critical national infrastructures [such as those controlling power and water distribution] he said, “should be separated from the public internet.” But he adds, “When rubber meets the road [in terms of American cybersecurity] I don’t see a lot of improvements.”

The U.S.,” he said, “has the most vulnerable cybersecurity infrastructure on the planet.”

Listen to the interview 

“The University of Maryland, Baltimore County chess team tied four other college teams for first place at the Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship on Sunday — maintaining its record as one of two colleges with the most top finishes in the history of the international event,” wrote Kevin Rector in the Baltimore Sun.

The UMBC chess team tied for first place December 30, 2012 in the Pan-Am Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship, advancing to the 2013 President’s Cup, known as the “Final Four” of chess.

The team headed into the 2012 Pan-Am Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship with a record nine titles to its name. The competition known informally as the Pan-Am, was held December 27 to 30 in Princeton, New Jersey. Since the tournament began in 1946, dozens of universities throughout the Americas have participated. The Retrievers won their first Pan-Am title in 1996, and then embarked on a five-year title streak from 1998 to 2002.

This year, the Retrievers tied for first place with 3 other Universities: University of Texas, Dallas; Webster University, which had 2 teams; and the University of Illinois.
“It was an exciting finish. This was the strongest Pan Am in the history of the event. Twenty – three grandmasters as well as 5 teams rated over 2500 competed,” says Alan Sherman, Director of the UMBC Chess Program.

The UMBC team, all on chess scholarships, is composed of students not only with exceptional chess skills but also with strong academic records, Sherman says. UMBC requires students to maintain a 3.0 GPA to maintain chess scholarships.
The Retrievers last won the Pan-Am title in 2009, and took second last year. This year’s team will compete in the 2012 President’s Cup, the “Final Four of College Chess,” to be held in April 6-7, 2013 in Herndon, Va.

Hillol Kargupta, professor of computer science, is the winner of the 2012 10-Year ICDM Highest-Impact Paper Award for the ICDM 2003 paper on “On the Privacy Preserving Properties of Random Data Perturbation Techniques.” Researchers, Souptik Datta (UMBC), Qi Wang (Washington State University), and Krishnamoorthy Sivakumar (Washington State University), were also authors on the paper.

ICDM is the premier international conference on data mining (with an acceptance ratio of approx. 8-12% in the last ten years). The 10-Year ICDM Highest-Impact Paper Award is awarded every year since 2010. The first ICDM was held in 2001.

Josiah Dykstra, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science, won the Outstanding Case Study Award for 2012 of the The American Academy of Forensic Sciences, based on his presentation of a paper by Dykstra and his advisor Alan Sherman,
published in the Journal of Network Forensics. Dykstra will accept the award in February at the Academy’s annual meeting.

The department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (CSEE) announces its new NSF Scholarship for Service (SFS) CyberCorps program scholars.

According to CSEE,

“Four students in UMBC’s Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering have been selected for major scholarships to study cybersecurity in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Scholarship for Service (SFS) CyberCorps program.   Each student will receive full tuition, fees, and a nine-month stipend ($20,000 for undergraduates, $25,000 for MS/MPS students, and $30,000 for PhD students) for up to  two years (three years for PhD).  For this first year of the program at UMBC, recipients are Oliver Kubik (BS student in computer science), Brendan Masiar and Brandyn Schult (MPS students in cybersecurity), and Mary Mathews (PhD student in computer science).

While in the program at UMBC, each student will participate in paid summer internships and have opportunities to engage in mentored research opportunities at the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance (CISA) and its partners from industry and government.  Following graduation, each student must work for the government (for pay) for one year for each year of scholarship received.  Drs. Alan T. Sherman and Richard Forno direct the program using support they received from their recently awarded $2.5 million NSF grant.  The CyberCorps program will produce highly-qualified professionals to meet the increasing need to protect American’s cyber infrastructure.

Each year students may apply for SFS CyberCorps scholarships at UMBC, with application deadline in mid January.  For details, see www.cisa.umbc.edu.  In each of the next three years, UMBC expects to make six new awards.   Applicants must be accepted to a full-time degree program in a cybersecurity-related field (CS, CE, cyber, EE, IS, math, physics, education, public policy).”

Meet the scholars

Alumna Jeehye Yun ’97, computer science, was profiled along with her cybersecurity company Secured Sciences Group (SSG) by The Baltimore Business Journal‘s Jack Lambert in an article published on September 7th.

Yun told Lambert that SSG–a member of UMBC’s Research and Technology Park, and which is in the process of working with the research park on a plan to attract investors–is particularly adept at cutting through red tape and redundancies which can occur in government applications, saying, “We can take a lot of disparate policies and figure out where the overlaps are.”

The alumna, who is CEO/President of SSG as well as a former teacher at her alma mater from the late-90’s, also told Lambert that the company’s upcoming technology will new technology will hopefully cut through the quantity of material companies have to sift through from government grant applications and contracts by finding the overlaps between for organizations like the Department of Defense, the Navy and the Marines.

Yun also noted that her company’s products also have value for colleges, management consultants and small businesses, saying, “The biggest rule of thumb for us is, actually, are we solving a problem where we would want to use the product?”

Two Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (CSEE) professors Alan Sherman and Rick Forno received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) this month. The grant is $2.5 million in total, and is a part of part of the Federal Cyber Scholarship for Service (SFS) program, whose aim “to increase and strengthen the cadre of federal information assurance professionals that protect the government’s critical information infrastructure,” according to the SFS website.

The grant will give students at UMBC from the undergraduate to the professional studies programs a full scholarship plus an annual stipend of $8,000 for undergraduate and $12,000 for graduate students. In an article on the grant published on CSEE’s departmental page, Forno spoke of the benefits the honor will pay for the university, saying, “UMBC’s strength in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, and related STEM fields, combined with our reputation for producing qualified technologitsts makes our participation in SFS very attractive both to the school and our current and future students.”

The Imaging Research Center (IRC) recently filmed several faculty as they attempted to solve President Hrabowski’s favorite math problem. As told to Nagaraj Neerchal and Manil Suri, mathematics and statistics, and Anne Spence, mechanical engineering, the problem is as follows:

29 children are in a class.

20 have dogs.

15 have cats.

How many have both a dog and a cat?

Watch the video below to see the various methods and strategies used by the professors to answer the problem.

[vimeo 45245451 w=500 h=281]

UMBC Professors Solve F. Hrabowski’s Favorite Math Problem from ircumbc on Vimeo.

The Washington Post published an article by Steven Overly on June 11 detailing the recent partnership between the University of Maryland, College Park and the aerospace and defense technology corporation Northrop Grumman. The article noted the recent trend of corporations engaging more directly with universities via donations and partnerships, and cited specifically UMBC’s own collaboration with Northrop Grumman and other firms in the development of both a master’s program and an incubator program in cybersecurity.

Read Overly’s original article for Washington Post here.