Join us for URCAD Online, April 19-25 at URCAD.umbc.edu

Dariush Aligholizadeh | Optimizing in-situ longevity Of Silver Nanoplates | Mary Devadas | Towson University Department of Chemistry

Karis Barnett | Assay of an Antiparasitic Medication Using High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) | William LaCourse | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Toan Bui | Characterizing the Interaction Between A Eukaryotic Arginyltransferase 1 (ATE1) And An Aminoacyl-tRNA | Aaron Smith | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Tyler Carlyle | Synthesis Of Flex-Remdesivir Analogues As Potential Antiviral Therapeutics | Katherine Seley-Radtke | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Autumn Cook | Discovering And Characterizing New Functional Ferroelectric And Antiferroelectric Materials Using Computers | Joseph Bennett | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Faith Davis | USING PARAMAGNETIC TAGS TO ELUCIDATE THE STRUCTURE OF THE HIV-1 5' LEADER | Michael Summers | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Adilia Espinoza-Jones | Structural Characterization Of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type-1 RNAs | Michael Summers | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Aaliyah Khan | Systematic Route to Explore the Potential Energy Landscape of a New Family of Functional Materials | Joseph Bennett | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Joshua Leginze | Use Of Density Functional Theory And First Principle Thermodynamics In Understanding Lead Oxide Surface Transformations | Joseph Bennett | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Sean O’Sullivan | Probing Interactions Between Bacterial Ferrous Iron Acquisition Proteins FeoA And FeoB Through Peptide-Binding Studies | Aaron Smith | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Adam Ratajczak | A High-Throughput Arduino-Based TEER Meter With A Microfluidic Platform For Pharmacokinetic Studies | Chengpeng Chen | Chemistry and Biochemistry

David Shelly | Crystal Engineering For Non-Linear Optical Properties | Paul Smith | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Join us for URCAD Online, April 19-25 at URCAD.umbc.edu

Susan Afolabi | Regulation And Effects Of Ferritin In Border Cell Migration In D. Melanogaster | Michelle Starz-Gaiano | Biological Sciences

Shandon Amos | Investigation Of The Protein-Protein Interactions And Function Of The Chromatin-Associated Protein Set4 In S. Cerevisiae | Erin Green | Biological Sciences

Nahum Arefeayne | Role of Histone Gene Mutations in Tumorigenesis | Anita Corbett | Department of Biology, Emory University

Briah Barksdale | INVESTIGATING THE ROLE OF RHO1 IN BACTERIAL CLEARANCE USING DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER | Jeff Leips | Biological Sciences

Maria Bieberich | Characterizing The Role Of Shep In Border Cell Migration In Drosophila Melanogaster | Michelle Starz-Gaiano | Biological Sciences

Dominique Brooks | Evidence For Conserved Mechanisms Of Neurulation in the Zebrafish Forebrain | Rachel Brewster | Biological Sciences

Allyson Caldwell | APICAL CONSTRICTION MOLECULAR MACHINERY WITHIN THE ZEBRAFISH MEDIAL HINGE POINT | Rachel Brewster | Biological Sciences

Isabella Salguero Cespedes | EFFECTS OF THE UV-FILTER OCTOCRYLINE IN D. MELANOGASTER | Fernando Vonhoff | Biological Sciences

Wujin Choi | “The Effect Of Different Gut Bacterial Environments On The Brain Of Fruit Flies” | Fernando Vonhoff | Biological Sciences

Tessa Clement | Regulation Of Proteasome Assembly Chaperone PAC3 In Human Cancer Cells | Achuth Padmanabhan | Biological Sciences

Arushi Dalal, Julia Warfield | Grasshopper Sparrow Song Diversity in the Caribbean | Bernard Lohr | Biological Sciences

Ayushi Dave | Investigating The Role Of Effete In Border Cell Migration In D. Melanogaster | Michelle Starz-Gaiano | Biological Sciences

Alexandra Erazo | ASK1 May Be A Therapeutic Target For Burn Injuries | Manik Ghosh | TLST

Bailey Godwin | Analyzing The Effect of NPF Dependent Chronic Pain on Ethanol Preference in Drosophila Melanogaster | Fernando Vonhoff | Biological Sciences

Mitra Harrison | Deciphering The Function Of The rlsA Gene In The Multicellular Green Alga, Volvox Carteri | Stephen Miller | Biological Sciences

Joana Hernandez | Assessing The Function Of Human Amyloid Precursor Protein And Its Fly Homolog APP-Like In Drosophila | Fernando Vonhoff | Biological Sciences

Malika Hitam | Effects Of Zinc Exposure On APPL-dependent Neurodegeneration In Drosophila Melanogaster | Fernando Vonhoff | Biological Sciences

Kathryn Hogan | Bioinformatics Modelling Of MicroRNA-mRNA Interaction Network Perturbation Using Nanostring RNA Expression Data | Jeffrey Robinson | USG TLST

Nneamaka Iwobi | Oral Exposure to Arsenic Through Food Consumption | Christopher Bradfield | University of Wisconsin-Madison

Jafira Johnson | Establishing Zebrafish As A Model To Study Genetic Components Underlying Neural Tube Defects Using Genetic Components | Rachel Brewster | Biological Sciences

Rahul Kamdar | Assessing Mutant P53 Levels Via Stable Expression And Molecular Screening In Ovarian Cancer Cells | Achuth Padmanabhan | Biological Sciences

Emma Kartalia | Conservation Genetics of the Endangered Bahama Oriole | Kevin Omland | Biological Sciences

Ziam Khan | Drosophila Melanogaster As A Model To Study Autism Genes At The Cellular And Behavioral Level | Fernando Vonhoff | Biological Sciences

Se Rin Lee | Understanding Nucleus Accumbens Synaptic Plasticity In Regulating Reward-related Behaviors | Tara LeGates | Biological Sciences

Se Rin Lee | Investigating The Divergence And Structure Of Chromatin Modifiers Set3 And Set4 In Budding Yeast | Erin Green | Biological Sciences

Yiwei Ma | Testing For A Species Concept In Betta Splendens | Tamra Mendelson | Biological Sciences

Sahar Mahate | The Significance Of ACE2 Receptor For SARS-CoV-2 Entry On Relationship Between Vaping And COVID-19 Risk | Weihong Lin | Biological Sciences

Olufolake Majekodunmi | Examination Of Flavor Vanillin In E-liquid On Mouse Models Using Comparative Chemosensory Behavioral Experimentation | Weihong Lin | Biological Sciences

Luz Martinez | Comparison Of Autism Linked Genes, SHANK3 And DLGAP2, In Humans With Its Fly Orthologs, Prosap and Vulcan | Fernando Vonhoff | Biological Sciences

Alexandra Misciagna | Identification Of Critical Iron Transporters Via RNAseq in the Gram-negative Bacterium Cellvibrio Japonicus | Jeffrey Gardner | Biological Sciences

D'Juan Moreland | Acoustic Similarity Between Yearling And Adult Males In Orchard Orioles | Kevin Omland | Biological Sciences

Nithya Navarathna | Establishing A Cell-Based High-Throughput Screen To Identify Pathways Targeting ZNF217 Levels In Ovarian Cancer Cells | Achuth Padmanabhan | Biological Sciences

Oluwateniayo Ogunsan | Automatically Generated Phase Portraits For Understanding Biological Systems | Daniel Lobo | Biological Sciences

Crystal Parry | Effect Of Lisinopril Dosage On Level Of ROS & A

Join us for URCAD Online, April 19-25 at URCAD.umbc.edu

Varsha Pudi | Neural Structure-function Analysis For Connectome Biomarker Identification | Marisel Villafane-Delgado | Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory

Join us for URCAD Online, April 19-25 at URCAD.umbc.edu

Dariush Aligholizadeh | Optimizing in-situ longevity Of Silver Nanoplates | Mary Devadas | Towson University Department of Chemistry

Iman Asfari | Reflection.( A Short Animation) | Corrie Parks | Visual Arts

Karis Barnett | Assay of an Antiparasitic Medication Using High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) | William LaCourse | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Benjamin Brown | Electro-optic Polymers For Wideband THz Sensing | Michael Hayden | Physics

Toan Bui | Characterizing the Interaction Between A Eukaryotic Arginyltransferase 1 (ATE1) And An Aminoacyl-tRNA | Aaron Smith | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Isabella Salguero Cespedes | EFFECTS OF THE UV-FILTER OCTOCRYLINE IN D. MELANOGASTER | Fernando Vonhoff | Biological Sciences

Autumn Cook | Discovering And Characterizing New Functional Ferroelectric And Antiferroelectric Materials Using Computers | Joseph Bennett | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Faith Davis | USING PARAMAGNETIC TAGS TO ELUCIDATE THE STRUCTURE OF THE HIV-1 5' LEADER | Michael Summers | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Mikaila Donaldson | Utilizing Evidence-Based Argumentative Writing - Preparing Students To Engage In College, Career, and Civic Life | Timothy Johnson | Education

Sydney Fryer | Decriminalizing (and Re-Humanizing) the 'Squeegee Kid' | Dena Aufseeser | Geography and Environmental Systems

Ayra Hussain | Spiderwebs For Long-Term Air Quality Monitoring | Nava Rastegar | Geography and Environmental Systems

Mohammed Khalid | Assessing Potential Indicators of Online Radicalization | Anupam Joshi | Computer Science and Electrical Engineering 

Aaliyah Khan | Systematic Route to Explore the Potential Energy Landscape of a New Family of Functional Materials | Joseph Bennett | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Thomas Kiley | A Qualitative Analysis of Business Decisions Under the Roberts Court | Jeffrey Davis | Political Science

Gerson Kroiz | Improving Accuracy In Deep Learning Methods on Compton Camera Based Prompt Gamma Imaging for Proton Radiotherapy | Matthias Gobbert | Mathematics and Statistics

James Lefkowitz | Speech Development in German | David Beard | Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication

Danylo Leshchyshyn | Legacies Of The First-Called: Saint Andrew And Claims To Apostolic Succession In The Rus’-Byzantine World | Sufian Zhemukhov | History

Lexie Mathis | A Review Of The Efficacy Of Treatments For Comorbid PTSD And Chronic Pain Across Sociodemographic Characteristics | Raimi Quiton | Psychology

Sebastian McNary | Under-employment And Abuse Intervention Response | Christopher Murphy | Psychology

Rachel Morin | Charge Transfer From Semiconductor Nanorods | Matthew Pelton | Physics

Harini Narayan | A Picture Paints a Thousand Words: Examining Linkages Between North Korean Propaganda and U.S.-Bilateral Relations | Kyung-Eun Yoon | Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication

Ouriel Ndalamba | Determination of Selectivity And Diffusion Coefficients for Ammonium Recovery by Donnan Dialysis | Lee Blaney | Chemical, Biochemical, and Environmental Engineering

Paul Ocone | Dis/join: Unification Of Sound, Music, Narrative, And Animation In Liz And The Blue Bird | Steven McAlpine | Individualized Study

Katherine Poteet | Building A Nation: How National Service Requirements Affect Patriotic Sentiment | Carolyn Forestiere | Political Science

Varsha Pudi | Neural Structure-function Analysis For Connectome Biomarker Identification | Marisel Villafane-Delgado | Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab

Maila Raphael | Analyzing The Role Of Convents In Medieval German Society | Susanne Sutton | MLLI

Adam Ratajczak | A High-Throughput Arduino-Based TEER Meter With A Microfluidic Platform For Pharmacokinetic Studies | Chengpeng Chen | Chemistry and Biochemistry

Dominique Ross | Public Health in Northern Brazil's Refugee Borderlands | Felipe Filomeno | Political Science

Alexandra Seas | Development of a Pharmacokinetic Model of the Sustained Subconjunctival Delivery of Timolol Maleate | Erin Lavik | Chemical, Biochemical, and Environmental Engineering

Fatimah Shaalan | “Flexing” Anything But Muscles: An Analysis Of Social Media Trends And Conspicuous Consumption | Liz Stanwyck | Mathematics and Statistics

Franklin Sun | Stimulus Equivalence | Mirela Cengher | Psychology

Micah Thorpe | Binder-Free Manganese Dioxide Cathode Performance In Flexible Batteries | Deepa Madan | Mechanical Engineering

Dante Washington | Meta-Analysis Of Sexual Conflict In Temperate And Tropical Biomes | Mercedes Burns | Biological Sciences

Kateryna Yakusheva | The Role Of Leadership And National Factors In Building An Effective COVID-19 Response | Brigid Starkey | Global Studies

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

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MeetingMayhem:  Teaching Adversarial Thinking through a Web-Based Game

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Akriti Anand, Richard Baldwin, Sudha, Kosuri, Julie Nau, and Ryan Wunk-Fink
UMBC Cyber Defense Lab

joint work with Alan Sherman, Marc Olano, Linda Oliva, Edward Zieglar, and Enis Golazewski

12:00 noon–1 pm ET, Friday, 9 April 2021
online via WebEx

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We present our progress and plans in developing MeetingMayhem, a new web-based educational exercise that helps students learn adversarial thinking in communication networks. The goal of the exercise is to arrange a meeting time and place by sending and receiving messages through an insecure network that is under the control of a malicious adversary.  Players can assume the role of participants or an adversary.  The adversary can disrupt the efforts of the participants by intercepting, modifying, blocking, replaying, and injecting messages.  Through this engaging authentic challenge, students learn the dangers of the network, and in particular, the Dolev-Yao network intruder model. They also learn the value and subtleties of using cryptography (including encryption, digital signatures, and hashing), and protocols to mitigate these dangers.  Our team is developing the exercise in spring 2021 and will evaluate its educational effectiveness.

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Akriti Anand (*protected email*) is an MS student in computer science working with Alan Sherman.  She is the lead software engineer and focuses on the web frontend. Richard Baldwin (*protected email*) is a BS student in computer science, a member of Cyberdawgs, and lab manager for the Cyber Defense Lab. Sudha Kosuri (*protected email*) is a MS student in computer science.  She is working on the frontend (using React and Flask) and its integration with the backend. Julie Nau (*protected email*) is a BS student in computer science.  She is working on the backend and on visualizations. Ryan Wunk-Fink (*protected email*) is a PhD student in computer science working with Alan Sherman. He is developing the backend.

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Host: Alan T. Sherman, *protected email* Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681. The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays.  All meetings are open to the public.

 Upcoming CDL Meetings: April 23, Peter Peterson (Univ. of Minnesota Duluth), Adversarial thinking; May 7, Farid Javani (UMBC), Anonymization by oblivious transfer

The post talk: MeetingMayhem: Teaching Adversarial Thinking through a Web-Based Game, 12-1 ET 4/9 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

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Human-in-the-Loop Entity Mining from Noisy Web Data

Professor Eduard Dragut, Temple University

1-2 pm, Tuesday, 6 April 2021
online via WebEx

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Recognizing entities that follow or closely resemble a regular expression (regex) pattern is an important task in information extraction. Due to a vast diversity of web documents and ways in which they are generated, even seemingly straightforward tasks such as identifying mentions of date in a document becomes very challenging. It is reasonable to claim that it is impossible to create a regex that is capable of identifying such entities from web documents with perfect precision and recall. Rather than abandoning regex as a go-to approach for entity detection, we present methods to combine the expressive power of regexes, the ability of deep learning to learn from large data, and the human-in-the-loop approach into a new integrated framework for entity identification from web data. The framework starts by creating or collecting the existing regexes for a particular type of entity. Those regexes are then used over a large document corpus to collect weak labels for the entity mentions and a neural network is trained to predict those regex-generated weak labels. Finally, a human expert is asked to label a set of documents and the neural network is fine-tuned on those documents.

While human effort is critical to build an entity recognition model, surprisingly little is known about how to best invest that effort given a limited time budget. Should a human’s effort be spent on writing a regex recognizing an entity or on manually label entity mentions in a document corpus? When a user is allowed to choose between regex construction and manual labeling, we discover that (1) if the time budget is low, spending all time for regex construction is often advantageous, (2) if the time budget is high, spending all time for manual labeling seems to be superior, and (3) between those two extremes, writing regexes followed by manual labeling is typically the best approach. I will also give an overview of the ongoing and future projects.

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Eduard Dragut is an Associate Professor in the Computer and Information Sciences Department at Temple University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He previously was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Purdue University, Discovery Park, Cyber Center. His main area of research is Web data management, e.g., retrieval, extraction, representation, cleaning, analysis, and integration. He is actively pursuing projects in  Data Cleaning, Social  Media Mining (e.g., user behavior and fake news), the Future of Work, and Cyber-Infrastructure for Scientific Research. He is co-author of a book on Deep Web data integration, Deep Web Query Interface Understanding, and Integration.

The post talk: Human-in-the-Loop Entity Mining from Noisy Web Data, 1-2 4/6 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Congratulation to the UMBC Cyber Dawgs team, which took first place in the 2021 Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (MACCDC) finals. UMBC’s team was one of eight teams out of an initial 23 that qualified for the final competition. UMBC’s Cyber Dawgs will move on to compete in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NCCDC), which will be held April 23-25, 2021.

The 2021 MACCDC regional final took place online April 1-3 and had teams fighting to protect their networks efficiently and effectively from simulated cyber threats and attacks using a scenario based on the COVID-19 global pandemic for its competition events.

The National Emergency Response Division (N.E.R.D.) is a data science-focused group within the Big Time Health Organization (BTHO), a multinational entity headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland. N.E.R.D. employees have been exceptionally busy dealing with the global health pandemic. As such, they have had to not only shift to work from home, but also expand the number of employees to support the inordinate amounts of data that is flooding each of its eight geographic locations throughout the U.S. Protecting the integrity of the data is critical, but when the data affects the delivery of health services to the public, the job of N.E.R.D. becomes even more mission critical.

The student teams will stand on the front lines of technology, alongside various healthcare providers. The main task at hand will be to ensure that pandemic-related data from state departments of health are accurate and delivered quickly. Information on outbreak locations, promising interventions, efficacy of testing, mortality rates, and other related statistics are critical so physicians, public health officials, and government entities can make informed decisions about resource allocations. Loss or inaccurate information can lead to tragic consequences. Vigilance is a must – be smart, be strong, be safe.

These regional and national competitions attract leading collegiate cybersecurity teams from across the nation. They put teams in situations that mimic scenarios they might encounter working to secure and protect online systems for government agencies and companies. Throughout each challenge, teammates work together to protect their systems from hackers and cyber attacks. At the same time, they keep their networks accessible to the users relying on them. 

The UMBC Cyber Dawgs team won the MACCDC regionals last year and were national champions in 2017. In this year’s MACCDC, George Mason placed second and Liberty University third. Good luck to the Cyber Dawgs as they compete with the winners of nine other regional competitions in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition later this month.

The post UMBC Cyber Dawgs win 2021 Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.