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Nidhi Mittal, a 2013 graduate of UMBC’s Cybersecurity Master’s in Professional Studies program talks about her experience. In this video Ms. Mital talks about the value of the cybersecurity program’s instructors, who bring with them a wealth of experience in the public and private sector. 

UMBC offers a variety of master’s degree and certificate options. Our cybersecurity graduate programs leverage a student’s experience toward a range of opportunities within the cybersecurity profession. UMBC’s in-person cybersecurity programs are designed to prepare computer science, information systems, and other experienced professionals to fill management and leadership roles in cybersecurity and cyber operations.

Graduate Student Support Group 

Are you a graduate student? Are you free Friday’s at 2 pm? Join the Graduate Student Support Group! The group focuses on issues related to dissertations/theses, relationships with advisors, balancing school and social life, etc. The best way to sign-up is to contact the Counseling Center and schedule a pre-group interview, stating an interest in the Graduate Student Support Group.  

If there are any questions, please free to contact Alexis M. Melville. 

Contact Information: 

Alexis M. Melville, Psy.D.

Staff Psychologist/Multicultural Coordinator 

Counseling Center

University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)

1000 Hilltop CircleBaltimore, MD   21250

tel:   410-455-2472   fax:  410-455-2399

melville@umbc.edu  

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CSEE’s Jane Gethmann, Assistant to the Chair, received UMBC’s inaugural Karen L. Wensch Endowment Award for Outstanding Non-Exempt Staff earlier this month. She has played a leadership role in our Department since she joined it in 1997 and has been a key staff member for the thousands of faculty, staff and students who have been part of our department in the past 17 years.

The following is the citation for her well deserved award.

Jane Gethmann first came to UMBC in 1971, and over the years has worked in Financial Aid, the Department of Biological Sciences, and the Graduate School. She joined the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in 1997, and is known as the glue that holds the department together, going above and beyond her responsibilities.

In addition to assisting the chair and handling administrative and financial duties, Gethmann also takes the lead when additional resources are needed or when she sees a way to increase efficiency in the department. She has served as facilities manager and scheduling coordinator, managed the Computer Science Help Center, coordinated part-time faculty hiring, and created a graduate admissions database. She also managed the installation of a new teaching laboratory, working with faculty and Facilities Management in order to get it up and running by the start of the semester.

A leader and trusted advisor, Gethmann’s vast knowledge of UMBC and departmental procedures as well as her excellent judgment make her invaluable to those she serves. She is a dedicated people person with a helpful and positive attitude. Whether working with faculty, staff, students, or visitors, her goal is to help people solve whatever problem they are facing, and ensure that they have what they need.

Jane plans to retire at the end of this academic year. We will miss her and all that that she has done for UMBC and our department.

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CSEE’s Jane Gethmann, Assistant to the Chair, received UMBC’s inaugural Karen L. Wensch Endowment Award for Outstanding Non-Exempt Staff earlier this month. She has played a leadership role in our Department since she joined it in 1997 and has been a key staff member for the thousands of faculty, staff and students who have been part of our department in the past 17 years.

The following is the citation for her well deserved award.

Jane Gethmann first came to UMBC in 1971, and over the years has worked in Financial Aid, the Department of Biological Sciences, and the Graduate School. She joined the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in 1997, and is known as the glue that holds the department together, going above and beyond her responsibilities.

In addition to assisting the chair and handling administrative and financial duties, Gethmann also takes the lead when additional resources are needed or when she sees a way to increase efficiency in the department. She has served as facilities manager and scheduling coordinator, managed the Computer Science Help Center, coordinated part-time faculty hiring, and created a graduate admissions database. She also managed the installation of a new teaching laboratory, working with faculty and Facilities Management in order to get it up and running by the start of the semester.

A leader and trusted advisor, Gethmann’s vast knowledge of UMBC and departmental procedures as well as her excellent judgment make her invaluable to those she serves. She is a dedicated people person with a helpful and positive attitude. Whether working with faculty, staff, students, or visitors, her goal is to help people solve whatever problem they are facing, and ensure that they have what they need.

Jane plans to retire at the end of this academic year. We will miss her and all that that she has done for UMBC and our department.

We were happy to see that ACM is using the Helios online voting system for a number its elections this year, including the 2014 ACM Council election. ACM members, all 100,000 of them, have the option of voting online via the Web or requesting a paper ballot in the election of ACM’s top officers. This demonstrates the confidence that the “world’s largest educational and scientific computing society” has in the technology of online verifiable voting systems.

Helios is an example of an end-to-end verifiable voting system that uses cryptographic techniques that can provide ballot privacy as well as high confidence that errors and fraud will be detected and that the election outcome is correct.  Such systems let voters verify that their votes were not modified and were counted without revealing which candidates were voted for. In some cases, they allow anyone to determine that all of an election’s ballots have been correctly counted and also help prevent coercion and vote selling by making it impossible for a voter to prove how she voted to a third party.

Among the things we like about Helios is that it provides a free service that anyone can use to hold end-to-end verifiable votes on the Web and that its code is open sourced, allowing one to study the (mostly Python)  code and install and run it on their own computers.

Developing verifiable voting systems has been one of the research activities of UMBC’s Center for Information Security and Assurance for more than six years. Professor Alan Sherman and his students contributed to Scantegrity, the first end-to-end verifiable voting system used in a binding municipal election.  The UMBC team oversaw that first use in the Takoma Park, Maryland municipal election in November, 2009.   A subsequent system, Remotegrity, was used to allow Takoma Park residents to submit absentee ballots over the Internet in the November 2011 Takoma Park election.  A current secure voting project in Professor Sherman’s lab is led by Ph.D. student Christopher Nguyen, who is developing techniques to support random-sample elections.

We were happy to see that ACM is using the Helios online voting system for a number its elections this year, including the 2014 ACM Council election. ACM members, all 100,000 of them, have the option of voting online via the Web or requesting a paper ballot in the election of ACM’s top officers. This demonstrates the confidence that the “world’s largest educational and scientific computing society” has in the technology of online verifiable voting systems.

Helios is an example of an end-to-end verifiable voting system that uses cryptographic techniques that can provide ballot privacy as well as high confidence that errors and fraud will be detected and that the election outcome is correct.  Such systems let voters verify that their votes were not modified and were counted without revealing which candidates were voted for. In some cases, they allow anyone to determine that all of an election’s ballots have been correctly counted and also help prevent coercion and vote selling by making it impossible for a voter to prove how she voted to a third party.

Among the things we like about Helios is that it provides a free service that anyone can use to hold end-to-end verifiable votes on the Web and that its code is open sourced, allowing one to study the (mostly Python)  code and install and run it on their own computers.

Developing verifiable voting systems has been one of the research activities of UMBC’s Center for Information Security and Assurance for more than six years. Professor Alan Sherman and his students contributed to Scantegrity, the first end-to-end verifiable voting system used in a binding municipal election.  The UMBC team oversaw that first use in the Takoma Park, Maryland municipal election in November, 2009.   A subsequent system, Remotegrity, was used to allow Takoma Park residents to submit absentee ballots over the Internet in the November 2011 Takoma Park election.  A current secure voting project in Professor Sherman’s lab is led by Ph.D. student Christopher Nguyen, who is developing techniques to support random-sample elections.

Name: Aastha Jain

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START)

Major(s)/Minor(s): Interdisciplinary Studies: Criminology and Criminal Justice

Expected Graduation Year: May 2015

Briefly describe your internship, co-op, research, or service-learning opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

START triages (or "takes in") news media covering incidents of terrorism from around the world. Senior staff at START creates summaries of the terrorist incidents and makes them available on the Database Management System (DMS). The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is run on the DMS and includes variables such as the location, perpetrators, and targets of each terrorist event. My job is to identify who was targeted in any given terrorist attack around the world.

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?

I enjoy that interns are allowed the responsibility of coding on such an important database. Senior-level staff members bring interns into their meetings to discuss coding progress. In that way, I feel like I am part of something truly unique and important.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

I have been able to bring an interdisciplinary perspective to this internship. This is not possible everywhere. START is made up of a team of researchers, programmers, media specialists, and IT personnel all working together. This is interdisciplinarity at its finest.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

My advice to students seeking an internship is to make sure the internship fits you, not just that you fit the internship. As students we always want to look qualified but we need to make sure not to sacrifice our personal qualities.

How do you see your experience as meaningful? This might involve skills you’ve gained, information you’ve learned, mentors you’ve connected with, or projects you’ve completed.

My experience is meaningful because there is nothing like the Global Terrorism Database! There is no where else researchers and academic professionals can search for certain variables of all the terrorist incidents in one area. Where else can you look up the number of businesses that were targeted in Yemen during a specific span of time??

Please provide a short quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process.

Viewing terrorist incidents from all around the world provides me a global perspective on the nature of terrorist attacks.

More insight about Aastha’s internship experience.

I worked on the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) at The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). START has defined terrorism for its purposes so all incidents included are of a uniform standard. The GTD is an incident-level database that can be searched based on many variables. Want to know how many police personnel were killed by firearms in Kenya between 2000-2007? That is the kind of information provided by the GTD.

More specifically, I worked on the target classification distinction of the database. There were four interns populating this portion of the GTD for 2012-2013 terrorist attacks around the world. Currently, there are over 20 types of targets within the GTD. Some of these include civilians, transportation, military, and business targets amongst many. The type of target was determined after reading aggregated news media about each attack from many sources. Staff members worked on filtering through the articles and determining relevancy before interns began coding.

Based on my networking and interests, I asked Dr. Gary LaFree, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, to come serve as the INDS Council of Majors Annual Petrovich Lecturer. He came and spoke at UMBC on March 2nd to shed the myths of terrorism and share some of the exciting research coming out of START. I loved my experience at START and was very fortunate to foster that relationship past a semester.