Bryan Vanek, president of national champion CyberDawgs team, heads to computer security career

UMBC students have rewritten the record books in 2018. With graduation this week, and our soon-to-be new Retriever alumni preparing for graduate school, careers, and research around the world, we reflect on all they have achieved. Here is a CSEE student profile from the class of 2018.

Bryan Vanek
B.S., Computer Science
Minor: Mathematics
Cum Laude
Hometown: Frederick, Maryland
Plans: Computer Network Operations Development Program, U.S. Department of Defense

If it weren’t for the incredible mentors, teachers, and students at this school, I would not be the security researcher and professional that I am today.

When Bryan Vanek transferred to UMBC from Frederick Community College, he focused on building connections with classmates and professors, which proved incredibly valuable as he developed a passion for computer science and cybersecurity, and sought out new opportunities to grow.

Vanek became president of UMBC’s Cyber Dawgs team, which took first place at the 2017 National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. Following that major victory, he has continued to serve as Cyber Dawgs president, while also participating in other cybersecurity competitions, including the Wargames capture the flag event at the international DEFCON conference, where he placed 42nd overall.

The Center for Women in Technology provided mentorship and support to Vanek, who is a Transfer Scholar in Information Technology and Engineering (T-SITE) Scholar. He says that the Cyber Dawgs team and CWIT program have helped him to develop skills necessary for success in a computer science career. Vanek gives back by serving as a mentor in cybersecurity at Exerceo, a nonprofit which provides skill development opportunities to high school students, college students, and young adults.

Vanek also completed two internships at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) while at UMBC. These positions led to an exciting job offer for him, as a member of the Computer Network Operations Development Program at the DoD. Vanek credits “professors that continually showed a vested and fervent interest in my success” and UMBC’s connections with a robust networks of employers with empowering him to plan and pursue a cybersecurity career.

Adapted from a UMBC News article by Megan Hanks. Portrait by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

The post Bryan Vanek (CS, ’18), president of national champion CyberDawgs team, heads to computer security career appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Meet Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman!

Your major(s) and minor(s): Mathematics and Economics

Your expected year of graduation: 2019

List any Scholars/Honors programs you are a part of: Honors College, Meyerhoff Scholars Program, MARC U*STAR Scholars Program

Title of your research project: The Impact of Early Childhood Malaria on Educational Attainment in Ghana

Describe your project: I am using two datasets from Ghana household survey data from 2012/2013 and malaria incidence rate data from 2000, to determine whether early childhood malaria increases the likelihood of a child dropping out of school or being held back a grade.

Who is your mentor(s) for your project? I am conducting research under the guidance of Dr. Tim Gindling, a UMBC professor in the Department of Economics, and Dr. Lauren Cohee, a researcher and infectious disease pediatrician at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine Institute for Global Health (IGH). I am also collaborating with the Ghana Health Service. After speaking with Dr. Gindling about his research and involvement with the World Bank, I realized that he possessed the expertise and experience to provide sound mentorship on my project. I have worked on Dr. Cohee’s project for nearly two years. Her study, which focuses on low-density malaria infections among school-age children in southern Malawi, inspired me to look into the long-term educational implications of the disease. I knew that she would help Dr. Gindling and I better understand the epidemiological data as well as hone in the public health focus of my research. Also, I really enjoy my lab and our team, they’re pretty awesome.

How did you become interested in this project? I have always wanted to understand barriers to education for children and youth in Ghana, my homeland. My interest in public health, and eventually, infectious disease, emerged after working at the Institute for Global Health and learning about the hundreds of millions of children impacted by malaria worldwide. As I worked with Dr. Cohee on her project, I began asking questions about the long-term impact of our work and the role of disease in determining the educational outcomes of children. I also saw that there remains a significant gap in the literature and conversation surrounding malaria and school-age children. Typically, when we talk about malaria, we focus exclusively on children under the age of five. Research about how school performance and educational attainment are affected by malaria is sparse. I hope that my work begins to scratch the surface in understanding the long run costs of malaria among young children.

What has been the hardest part about your research/what was the most unexpected thing about being a researcher? The hardest part about my research has been data collection. Obtaining data from a sub-Saharan African country is very difficult. I had to call in some favors to get the contact information for the Ghana Health Service and jump through a couple more hoops to get the data that I needed. Moving forward, my mentors and I anticipate that controlling for many different confounding factors will be the hardest part about my research. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to the challenge. In general, the unpredictability and timing of research is what can make the process a bit stressful. I think many people come into research with a plan of how things are supposed to go, but then reality hits. It’s best to patient with the process and yourself.

What has been the most rewarding part? I love talking to laymen about the work that I am doing. The most satisfying feeling is to see the light bulb go off in someone’s head or entertain questions that I had not previously thought about. For this project, I am really excited to explore how this research informs the decision-making of educators and health workers in Ghana.

How will you disseminate your research? My aim is to share my research with the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, and the Ghanaian community at large. I also plan to present at URCAD next year and submit my work to a number of undergraduate  and public health journals.

What is your advice to other students about getting involved in research? I want to encourage students to be bold and reach out to people who are conducting research that interests them. Oftentimes, students will assume that they cannot join a lab or with a professor because they don’t have the highest grades or the most experience. While there is definitely a learning curve, I think that it is important to identify mentors who will tap into your potential; this means putting yourself out there, calling a PI (Primary Investigator), and/or attending conferences on and off campus. UMBC is unique because information about undergraduate research can be obtained through a variety of different programs and campus-wide initiatives made available to students. This kind of a luxury is scarcely available to students who attend larger institutions. Many of these programs (e.g. Meyerhoff Friend Program, McNair Scholars Program, MARC U*STAR Scholars Program) offer resources and advice for those who are new to research. Also, if a student is not interested in any of the research on campus, I recommend off-campus research. I know some people who work remotely with their PI.

What are your career goals? Currently, I would like to obtain a Ph.D in Economics. I hope to work at the intersection of academia and policy and research the barriers to human capital accumulation in sub-Saharan Africa and Black America.

Photo: Anna presenting her researcher at URCAD 2018

Want to be featured as a Researcher of the Week? Email: aprilh@umbc.edu

With three majors and a core passion for service, Max Poole (CS, Math, Econ ’18) promotes access to computing education

UMBC students have rewritten the record books in 2018. With graduation this week, and our soon-to-be new Retriever alumni preparing for graduate school, careers, and research around the world, we reflect on all they have achieved. Here is a CSEE student profile from the class of 2018.

Max Poole
B.S., Computer Science, B.S., Mathematics, B.A., Economics
Summa Cum Laude
Hometown: Takoma Park, Maryland
Plans: Site Reliability Engineer, eBay

UMBC provides extensive opportunities and support for students to get engaged and involved in service beginning in their freshman year. The UMBC Shriver Center has been incredibly supportive of every service endeavor I wanted to do.

Max Poole wants to live in a society where everyone can access an education, is informed, is open to hearing new ideas, and is willing to work together to achieve great things. With this ideal in mind, he is completing three majors in three different colleges, which has enabled him to explore problems from a range of angles. He has also pursued collaborative service-learning opportunities through the Shriver Center since his freshman year, with a focus on promoting college with middle school students and boosting access to computer science education.

“The amount of students with access to computer science in middle school is minuscule,” says Poole. Knowing that computing skills will be important for many kinds of jobs of the future, he suggests, “If you can get kids interested, learning, engaged, and involved as early as possible it prepares them to be successful.”

Poole has been recognized for his commitment to service with the 2016 Newman Civic Fellowship. He is also a Sondheim Public Affairs Scholar and a member of the Honors College, with stellar academic achievements that have garnered him recognition through the national honor societies Pi Mu Epsilon and Phi Beta Kappa.

“I have this need inside of me that pushes me to always be improving the world and myself, to create and collaborate,” explains Poole. “I feel like service is deeply ingrained in my DNA. It is something I have to do.”

Beyond UMBC, Poole even pursued service opportunities while a summer intern at eBay. He looks forward to resuming those projects when he begins a full-time position with the company after graduation.

Adapted from a UMBC News article by Megan Hanks. Portrait by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

The post With 3 majors and a passion for service, Max Poole (CS, Math, Econ ’18) promotes access to computing education appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

SGA President Joshua Massey (CE ’18) prepares for a technology-focused teaching career

UMBC students have rewritten the record books in 2018. With graduation this week, and our soon-to-be new Retriever alumni preparing for graduate school, careers, and research around the world, we reflect on all they have achieved. Here is a CSEE student profile from the class of 2018.

Joshua Massey
B.S., Computer Engineering
Hometown: Upper Marlboro, Maryland
Plans: Master’s in teaching, UMBC

UMBC’s values and commitments to diversity, education, and social justice allowed me to grow into the interdisciplinary thinker, problem-solver, and leader I am today.

Joshua Massey, president of UMBC’s Student Government Association (SGA), has been recognized across campus and by university partners for his leadership, his enthusiasm for community connections, and his passion for technology in education.

Massey was one of the first recipients of the Northrop Grumman Scholarship for increasing the number of undergraduate and graduate students in the United States pursuing degrees in computer engineering and electrical engineering. Through the program, Massey had the opportunity to connect with industry leaders and attend mentoring events. Massey is a member of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, and also received the Meyerhoff National Security Administration Scholarship, which enabled him to connect with industry mentors regularly and to participate in monthly seminars.

In addition to receiving mentorship from faculty and professionals in technical fields, Massey also provided support to others as a peer mentor and a teaching fellow for a course in computational thinking and design.

On campus, Massey is known for his enthusiasm for the UMBC community. He served as a “Woolie”—a Welcome Week student leader—in addition to serving as SGA senator and chief of staff, before being elected SGA president.

One of Massey’s most memorable SGA moments was the 2017 SGA summer retreat, which he attended as incoming president. “At our annual summer retreat, new and returning students involved in SGA learn about the history and values of UMBC and the SGA, work cooperatively on plans for an upcoming year of campus change, and build relationships with one another as we continually create the story of SGA at UMBC,” Massey explains. He enjoyed facilitating sessions on the important role of students in UMBC governance.

Massey will continue on at UMBC after graduation, pursuing a master’s degree in teaching, with a focus on educating students in tech fields. “Looking forward to a future career in education and advocacy, I am reminded of the strong sense of community and shared ownership that is present at UMBC,” he says. “I look forward to carrying that forward in life.”

Adapted from a UMBC News article by Megan Hanks. Portrait by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

The post SGA President Joshua Massey (CE ’18) prepares for a technology-focused teaching career appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

CWIT Scholar Katherine Dillon heads to Google as a software engineer

UMBC students have rewritten the record books in 2018. With graduation this week, and our soon-to-be new Retriever alumni preparing for graduate school, careers, and research around the world, we reflect on all they have achieved. Here is a CSEE student profile from the class of 2018.

Katherine Dillon
B.S., Computer Science
Magna Cum Laude
Hometown: Ellicott City, Maryland
Plans: Software Engineer, Google; M.S., computer science, UMBC

“The CWIT program has prepared me to be a professional and take on leadership roles, and ultimately helped me get my jobs and internships. The friends I’ve made in CWIT served as such a great support system, and I couldn’t have done it without them.”

Katherine Dillon came to UMBC with interest, but not much experience, in computer science, but through the Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) was able to rapidly grow her knowledge of the field. Before long, she was conducting computer science research, taking graduate-level courses in artificial intelligence and machine learning, serving as a teaching assistant in computer science and interactive media, and volunteering through outreach opportunities, to inspire and support future computing students.

Dillon says the support she received from the faculty and staff at UMBC, particularly in CWIT and the Honors College, has been instrumental in enabling her to achieve her goals and continuously set the bar higher for what she would achieve next. Dillon conducted data visualization research under Penny Rheingans, professor of computer science and director of CWIT, and attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing as an Anita Borg Scholar. After the Grace Hopper Celebration, Dillon was offered an internship opportunity at Google in Boston. The following summer she completed another Google internship, this time in Germany.

After graduation, Dillon will work as a software engineer at Google in San Francisco, while also completing her master’s degree in computer science online through UMBC.

Adapted from a UMBC News article by Megan Hanks. Portrait by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

The post CWIT Scholar Katherine Dillon (CS ’18) heads to Google as a software engineer appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

UMBC SFS Cybersecurity Spring Meeting

Student Project Reports and

Cybersecurity from the view of NSA’s Cybersecurity Threat Operations Center
Dave Hogue, Technical Director of NSA’s Cybersecurity Threat Operations Center (NCTOC)

11am-3pm, Friday, 25 May 2018, ITE 456, UMBC

Open to the public

Scholarship for Service (SFS) students will present their cybersecurity research from spring 2018. Eight SFS students from Montgomery College (MC) and Prince George’s Community College (PGCC) will present their results solving IT security problems for their universities and county governments. In spring 2018, these students worked collaboratively in a special applied research course at their school to help their schools and county governments. In fall 2018, these students will transfer to UMBC to complete their four-year degrees. This activity is part of a pioneering program centered at UMBC to extend SFS scholarships to community college students. In January 2018, all SFS scholars at UMBC, PGCC, and MC worked collaboratively to analyze the security of UMBC’s WebAdmin system.

David Hogue will talk about cybersecurity from the view of NSA’s Cybersecurity Threat Operations Center, including the key threats, techniques, and challenges posed by the sophisticated threat actors that NCTOC is charged to defend against.

11:00am Introductions

Alan T. Sherman (UMBC)
Casey W. O’Brien (PGCC)
David Kuijt (MC)

11:30am-1:00pm Student Project Reports

PGCC students
MC students
UMBC – Mohammad Khan, UMBC parking system
UMBC – Enis Golaszewski, winter research study on UMBC’s WebAdmin

1:00pm-2:00pm Lunch

2:00pm-3:00pm Dave Hogue, Technical Director, NSA Cybersecurity Threat Operations Center (NCTOC)

Cybersecurity from the view of NSA’s Cybersecurity Threat Operations Center: Key threats, techniques, and challenges posed by the sophisticated threat actors that NCTOC is charged to defend against.

3:00pm Adjourn

Host: Alan T. Sherman, *protected email*

Alan T. Sherman is a professor of computer science and Director of the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance (CISA), which center is responsible for UMBC’s designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education and Cyber Defense Research.

Casey W. O’Brien is Executive Director and Principal Investigator of the National CyberWatch Center, Prince George’s Community College.

David Kuijt is an associate professor at Montgomery College, Rockville.

Joe Roundy is the Cybersecurity Program Manager at Montgomery College, Germantown.

Support for this event is provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS Grant 1241576.

The post UMBC Scholarship for Service Cybersecurity Spring Meeting, Fri 25 May 2018 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

The Department of Gender and Women’s Studies is proud to celebrate the accomplishments of our faculty over the last academic year –

Dr. Amy Bhatt was incredibly active at the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Conference this year. She presented her paper, “Baltimore to Bangalore: Intersectional Geographies and Place-Based Feminist Teaching and Research,” served as a moderator on a panel titled “Reflections, Curriculum, and Solidarity: From the Combahee River Collective, to Transnational Feminist Theory, to BLM.” She was also a discussant on the “Traveling Feminisms: Intersectionality and Assemblage in an Asian Frame” panel.

Dr. Bhatt also gave papers at the Association of Asian American Studies Conference in March (“From Dreamers to Tech Workers: Building South Asian American Solidarities”) and at the American Studies Association Conference in November (“Anchors Along the Climb: Developing Resources for Asian Americans and Asian American Studies”).

Her book, High-Tech Housewives: Indian IT Workers, Gendered Labor, and Transmigration, came out in May, and she also had a number of news media articles come out over the last year. These include:

“From dependents to deportees: How US immigration policy is impacting Indian families.”The Indian Express, February 12, 2018.

Bhatt, Amy and Dillon Mahmoudi. “White men may be biggest winners when a city snags Amazon’s HQ2.” The Conversation, February 6, 2018.

Bhatt, Amy and Catalina Sofia Dansberger Duque. “The Trump Administration’s Visa Rules Are an Attack on Immigrant Women.” Ms. Magazine Blog, December 19, 2017.

“Why Trump’s Plan to Forbid Spouses of H-1B Workers to Work is a Bad Idea.” The Conversation, December 18, 2017.

Dr. Bhatt has also mentored a number of students through some exciting achievements this past year. She mentored three Gender and Women’s Studies students through URCARD – Daniel Willey, Jamie Tingler, and Emily Ruppert – and mentored one student, Susannah Hochmuth-Jones, through the UMBC Review.

Dr. Kathryn Kein has a new article out in Studies in American Humor, vol. 4 no.1 – “Domestic Failure, Comic Pleasure: Phyllis Diller and the Feminist Potential of Failure, 1955-1969.”

Dr. Carole McCann had one article (“Figuring the Population Explosion: Demography in the Mid-Twentieth Century,” Feminist Media Histories) and one encyclopedia entry (“Feminist Theories,” The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology) out this year. She also published a review of Michael Helquist’s Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions in Pacific Historical Review.

Dr. McCann served on two panels at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in November. She was a round table panelist on the “From Alternative Facts to Alternative Worlds: The Possibilities and Limits of Feminist Science” panel, and served as moderator for the “Building Solidarity: Parents Form a Racial Justice Parenting Group at a Baltimore City Elementary School” panel.

Dr. McCann was also invited to deliver 2018’s annual Lipitz Lecture – her talk, “Maryland Planned Parenthood: A Vital Community Resource” was delivered at the Albin O. Kuhn Library in May.

Dr. Mejdulene B. Shomali had two articles come out this year – “Political Social Movements: Homosexuality and Queer Movements” was published in Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, and “”Scheherazade and the Limits of Inclusive Politics in Arab American Literature” came out in the February issue of Multi Ethnic Literature of the United States. She also had a book chapter out this year in The Immigrant Experience. Her chapter is titled “We Are Made to Leave, We Are Made to Return: Writing Movement in Contemporary Arab American Literature.”

Dr. Shomali was also awarded a Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation Fellowship and will be attending their workshop in Berkeley, CA this summer.

Big Data, Security and Privacy

Prof. Bhavani Thuraisingham, University of Texas at Dallas
11:00-12:00 Wednesday, 16 May 2018, ITE 459, UMBC

The collection, storage, manipulation and retention of massive amounts of data have resulted in serious security and privacy considerations. Various regulations are being proposed to handle big data so that the privacy of the individuals is not violated. For example, even if personally identifiable information is removed from the data, when data is combined with other data, an individual can be identified. This is essentially the inference and aggregation problem that data security researchers have been exploring for the past four decades. This problem is exacerbated with the management of big data as different sources of data now exist that are related to various individuals.

While collecting massive amounts of data causes security and privacy concerns, big data analytics applications in cyber security is exploding. For example, an organization can outsource activities such as identity management, email filtering and intrusion detection to the cloud. This is because massive amounts of data are being collected for such applications and this data has to be analyzed. The question is, how can the developments in big data management and analytics techniques be used to solve security problems? These problems include malware detection, insider threat detection, and intrusion detection.

To address the challenges of big data security and privacy as well as big data analytics for cyber security applications, we organized a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation in September 2014 and presented the results in 2015 at an inter-agency workshop in Washington DC. Since then several developments have been reported on big data security and privacy as well as on big data analytics of cyber security. This presenting will summarize the findings of the workshop and discuss the developments and directions.

Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham is the Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) and the Executive Director of UTD’s Cyber Security Research and Education Institute since October 2004. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at Kings College, University of London (2015-2018) and a New America Cyber Security Policy Fellow (2017-2018). Her current research is on integrating cyber security and data science. Prior to joining UTD she worked at the MITRE Corporation for 16 years including a three-year stint as a Program Director at the NSF. She initiated the Data and Applications Security program at NSF and was a member of the Cyber Trust theme. While at MITRE she was a department head and was also a technical advisor to the DoD, the NSA, the CIA, and the IRS. Prior to that, she worked for the commercial industry for six years including at Honeywell, Inc. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the IEEE CS 1997 Technical Achievement Award, the IEEE ISI 2010 Research Leadership Award, ACM SIGSAC 2010 Outstanding Contributions Award, SDPS 2012 Transformative Achievement Gold Medal, 2013 IBM Faculty Award, ACM CODASPY 2017 Innovative and Lasting Research Contributions Award, IEEE CS Services Computing 2017 Research Innovation Award, and Dallas Business Journal 2017 Women in Technology Award. She is a 2003 Fellow of the IEEE and the AAAS and a 2005 Fellow of the British Computer Society. She has published over 120 journal articles, 250 conference papers, 15 books, has delivered over 130 keynote and featured addresses, and is the inventor of six US patents. She has chaired/co-chaired top tier conferences including the Women in Cyber Security (WiCyS) 2016, ACM CCS 2017, and is serving as the Program co-Chair for IEEE ICDM 2018. She also delivered a featured address at the Women in Data Science (WiDS) conference in 2018. She received her PhD at the University of Wales, Swansea, UK, and the earned higher doctorate (D. Eng) from the University of Bristol, England, UK for her published research in secure data management.

The post talk: Big Data, Security and Privacy, 11am Wed 5/16 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.