April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

The Summer Undergraduate Research Opportunity in Chemistry (SUROC) provides students from outside the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill an opportunity to engage in hands-on cutting edge research in our state of the art facilities. This is an opportunity to experience Carolina Chemistry, recognized by ACS as one of the top ten graduate programs.

During the 10 weeks of research, students will be exposed to the various facets of independent research. A small cohort of 10 students will work together building a strong scholarly foundation. The experience will be heightened with the opportunities outside the hands-on laboratory work: site visits to large pharmaceutical and small startup companies; introduction to scientific entrepreneurship; experience presenting scientific research; training in research ethics; and exposure to chemical equipment and facilities.

UMBC Cyber Defense Lab

Blind Hashing; a new way to secure
passwords against offline attack

Jeremy Spilman

Founder/CTO of TapLink

11-12 Friday 27 March 2015, M/P 101, UMBC

Industry best practice is to secure passwords using a tunable hashing algorithm; pick the right hashing algorithm, tune its cost factors so it runs slowly and makes optimal use of your hardware, and it’s possible to protect very strong passwords from being cracked. However when average password strength and login latency requirements face off against bot-nets and GPU powered dictionary attacks, the vast majority of passwords are easily cracked. Blind hashing entangles password hashes with a massive pool of random data, so large it cannot be stolen over the network. A simple protocol allows any number of sites to share a centralized petabyte-scale data pool, amortizing the cost for defenders, while protecting low-entropy passwords with minimal run-time cost. Blind hashing can also be used as a general-purpose PBKDF to protect against brute-force attacks, and providing the opportunity to add server-based access policies and revocability to the key derivation process. Following his talk, Jeremy will be happy to discuss potential research opportunities with the company for students interested in developing new implementations of blind hashing for password-based authentication and encryption services.

Jeremy Spilman is the Founder and CTO of TapLink, a startup company that is developing systems using its patented Blind Hashing technique, which can completely protect passwords against offline attack, even if the password database is stolen. He was a double major in Computer Science and Economics at Brandeis University.

Summarizing Information in Big Data: Algorithms and Applications

Dr. Fei Liu

School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

12:00p Friday, 27 March 2015, ITE 325b

Information floods the lives of modern people, and we find it overwhelming. Summarization systems that identify salient pieces of information and present it concisely can help. In this talk, I will discuss both algorithmic and application perspectives of summarization. Algorithm-wise, I will describe keyword extraction, sentence extraction, and summary generation, including a range of techniques from information extraction to semantic representation of data sources; application-wise, I focus on summarizing human conversations, social media contents, and news articles. The data sources span low-quality speech recognizer outputs and social media chats to high-quality content produced by professional writers. A special focus of my work is exploring multiple information sources. In addition to better integration across sources, this allows abstraction to shared research challenges for broader impact. Finally, I try to identify the missing links in cross-genre summarization studies and discuss future research directions.

Dr. Fei Liu is a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, member of Noah’s ARK. Fei’s research interests are in the areas of natural language processing, machine learning, and data mining, with special emphasis on automatic summarization and social media. From 2011 to 2013, Fei worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Bosch Research, Palo Alto, California, one of the largest German companies providing intelligent car systems and home appliances. Fei received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2011, supported by Erik Jonsson Distinguished Research Fellowship. Prior to that, she obtained her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science from Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Fei has published over twenty peer reviewed articles, and she serves as a referee for leading journals and conferences.

Host: Nilanjan Banerjee and Mohamed Younis

March is Women’s History Month!

Two  years ago Women’s History Month’s national theme was “Women Inspiring Innovation Through Imagination: Celebrating Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.” The theme honored generations of women who throughout American history have used their intelligence, imagination, sense of wonder, and tenacity to make extraordinary contributions to the STEM fields. At UMBC we honored this theme by partnering with the Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) to feature some of their amazing students participating in technology in the engineering and information technology fields. Three years later, we still find it meaningful and important to continue spotlighting the stories of UMBC’s CWIT women and with the 2015 theme of “Weaving the Stories of Women’s Lives” there’s no better time than now to continue weaving the stories of our campus ITE women into the fabric of women’s history and current day lived experiences. So with that, we are honored to bring you the 3rd Annual CWIT Showcase in honor of Women’s History Month.

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Alejandra Diaz
Computer Science
CWIT  Scholar

Meet Alejandra Diaz! A CWIT Scholar and computer science major.

Describe what sparked your interest STEM and the journey to choosing your major.

I’ve been interested in STEM ever since I was little. Funnily enough, the reason why I chose Computer Science as my major is because my dad forced me to take a programming elective in high school during my junior year. I whined about signing up for that class, but ended up loving programming to the point where I wanted to major in it.

Tell us about an internship, research experience or project that you are proud of.

I am really proud of my internship during the spring of my freshmen year at Ponte Technologies. This was my first major internship with a company, and I’ve learned so many things from that job. I refreshed myself in Wireshark and Nessus, and I learned the vulnerabilities a modern car has. You’d be surprised as to how easy it is to hack into a car!

Who are your role models in the engineering or IT field? How have their stories influenced your educational or career goals?

This might sound cliché, but my dad is my biggest role model in the IT field. He has come so far and now has more certifications and clearances than I can count. Seeing how he has progressed helps me outline what I want to accomplish during my career as an IT professional.

Explain your experience as a woman in a STEM major working with other women in STEM. How have you used each other to support your work and persevere in male-dominated fields?

I feel that a sense of community helps if any issue arrives because I’m a woman in STEM. My friends, who are also computer science majors, and I do homework together and study together. We don’t isolate ourselves in our classes, because we are just like the guys in our class – we’re here to learn.

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The Center for Women In Technology (CWIT) is dedicated to increasing the representation of women in the creation of technology in the engineering and information technology fields. CWIT efforts begin with nurturing a strong group of Scholars, grow to building community resources for other women in these majors, extend to fostering a healthy gender climate and ITE pedagogy in College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT) departments, and finally expand into outreach efforts to increase interest in technical careers. A successful program for female-friendly engineering and information technology education at UMBC will help make UMBC a destination for women (and men) interested in technical careers and serve as a national model for other universities.

For more information about Women’s History events and happenings, visit the Women’s Center myUMBC group page.

CSEE’s Dr. Rick Forno discussed cyber warfare in Ash Hunt’s latest policy paper ‘Cyber Quantifiable Restrictions: The Requirements to Generate Agreed Restrictions on the Use of Cyber Capabilities’ appearing in The Diplomatic Courier. Among other things, Hunt attempts to show that agreed restrictions should not blanket the use of cyber capabilities, but rather the unacceptable use of a range of capabilities that could be used to harm human life.

Recently, it has become apparent that “we’re in a [cyber] arms race” in a largely unregulated domain—the cyber wild west. With the increased diffusion of technology, nations have begun amassing offensive cyber capabilities: utilizing zero-day exploits, distributed denial of server (DDOS) attacks, and weaponized malware technology. Already, “the U.S. has poured billions of dollars into an electronic arsenal,” whilst the “stockpile of exploits runs into the thousands, aimed at every conceivable device.” This exponential growth of cyber arms is particularly dangerous considering the lack of rules and conventions governing the fifth arena of warfare. Dr. Richard Forno from the University of Maryland concedes, “there is no international agreement over what level of cyber warfare is acceptable.” He further recognizes that national systems such as power grids, water treatment plants and medical facilities “do not have adequate protection from hackers.” Clearly, “principles and agreements on cyber warfare must designate sensitive infrastructure as red lines.” It is necessary to afford our critical organizations the same level of protection from cyber hostility as we do from the multitude of other tangible threats.

Source: The Diplomatic Courier Volume 9, Issue 1, January/February 2015