In 2009 a small group took shape at UMBC. A student-run club composed of individuals who shared one common interest: computer and network security. They would meet weekly and discuss the latest cyber-security topics happening and even compete at a national security event, known as the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC). Officially, the UMBC Cyber Defense Team was born, but the group would also come to be known as the UMBC Cyber Dawgs.

Founding member Jorge Teixeira recounted what the early days of the UMBC Cyber Defense Team were like. “The idea started from Jeff Miller, who talked to Prof. John Pinkston,” said Teixeira, “I was sitting in [his lab] when they met to scout for a meeting room/lab.” At the time, Teixeira had done some security research for his MS and had a networking background and wanted to help Miller on what he could.

“We wanted to become an official SGA org but there was a lot of bureaucracy and delays involved, so that didn’t happen right away.” said Teixeira. In Fall 2010, the group competed in CCDC qualifications and went to regionals in mid Spring 2010, boosting the popularity of the group and finally becoming recognized by the SGA by late Fall 2010.

Teixeira also revealed the origins of the name Cyber Dawgs. “The name was coined by Dr. Nicholas in one of our early meetings with him, but the official name was and is UMBC Cyber Defense Team.” Said Teixeira.

“There are no limitations whatsoever with this group.”

Today, the Cyber Dawgs are still around and continue to compete at competitions like the CCDC. They have two faculty advisors, Dr. Charles Nicholas and Dr. Richard Forno, who take a hands off approach to let the club be student run. However, they do help with the logistics of the club and help provide necessary resources.

Bryan Vanek, Computer Science major and Cyber Dawgs club President, runs the day to day operations. While the majority of the group consists of STEM majors, Vanek doesn’t want the Cyber Dawgs to be limited to just people in the security or the computer science field. He actively encourages anyone who has an interest in some area of cybersecurity and a willingness to learn to join the group. “There are no limitations whatsoever with this group.” Vanek said, “We’ll be more than happy to help you along the way!”

Preparing for the yearly CCDC competition is a huge undertaking. The competition focuses on aspects of information assurance and system security, where teams are given a commercial system that they need to protect. In order to do this, security checklists are looked over and good security practices, such as firewall rules and permissions are implemented.

During the competition, a ‘red team’ will attack their system in order to compromise it. Cyber Dawgs have to react in real time, not only trying to close off their connection but cleaning up any damage the red team has done to prevent it from happening again. They have to achieve all of this while keeping any and all required services of that system up.

2015 CCDC

This year, the Cyber Dawgs placed fourth at regionals and the year before that they received first place at regionals, which let them move on to the national competition in Texas where they placed fourth overall.

“As long as people have a desire to learn security, we will be there to support them.”

Anh Ho, a junior Computer Science major and Vice President of Cyber Dawgs, helps plan meetings and events in addition to helping other club members prepare technically for competitions. It’s his 4th year in the club and will be his 3rd year competing. He also helps avoid some of the pitfalls they’ve had in the past when dealing with both club and competition logistics. “These can be simple logistical oversights such as failure to request T-Shirts from SGA [to] technical configurations and what we should do the following year to learn from our mistakes.” said Ho.

He also shares Vanek’s passion in supporting people who take an interest in security. “As long as people have a desire to learn security, we will be there to support them.” said Ho.

Other competitions include cyber Capture the Flags (CTFs). These events can last anywhere between a day or a week with a focus on cyber security as a whole. Some CTFs are more focused on red team activities, such as a reverse engineering and web exploitation. Other CTFs focus on defensive mechanics, like analyzing forensic data and implementing strong security practices on servers.

This is the lab where the Cyber Dawgs use to practice for competitions. From left to right: Julio Valcarcel, Anthony Sasadeusz, Anh Ho, Jorge Teixeira.

Recently, the group participated in UMD’s Cyber Skyline CTF and Booz Allen Hamilton’s Kaizen CTF. “In these competitions, we usually do pretty well,” said Vanek, “we received first place either by an individual or by a team.”

“One of our other missions is to spread the word about how awesome the world of cyber security is…”

The Cyber Dawgs aren’t strictly about competitions. Vanek said, “If we just did [competitions] a lot of new people would get deterred. Thus one of our other missions is to spread the word about how awesome the world of cyber security is by teaching others in whatever way we can.”

During regular club meetings, the group has a large selection of activities that people can choose from to learn more about cyber security. These activities change depending on the semester, so in the Fall the activities are focused more on prepping for CTFs while the Spring semester focuses on CCDC by setting up servers and learning about firewall rules.

Christian Beam, a junior studying Computer Science and serving as club treasurer mentioned how not all meetings are just preparing for competitions. “Some meetings we have guest speakers from the industry to give talks about topics such as reverse engineering, or cryptography.” said Beam.

This image is from a tech talk with the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. After the meeting, the firm networked with attendees and even accepted resumes for internship and job positions.

The Cyber Dawgs try to reach as many people as possible, whether that involves letting people know about their club meetings through their list serve or attending involvement fest and networking with other groups and clubs that share an interest in cyber security. They reach out to groups like the UMBC Cyber Scholars group to let them know about meetings and encouraging them to get involved.

Chris Gardner joined the Cyber Dawgs in his freshmen year at UMBC in 2014. “I’ve been interested in cyber security for a few years now and was the president of my high school’s security club, so joining the Cyber Dawgs seemed like a natural progression.” said Gardner.

He now helps lead the group in cyber CTFs and has learned a lot about cyber security since he’s been with the group.

The Cyber Dawgs are now working on quite a few projects for the upcoming school year. They plan to update their website with new tools and resources for current and future members. In addition to that, they plan on getting a coach for the CCDC to help them in structure and to show their weak points.

“…great way to give people who are new to cyber security another way to learn.”

In the future, the group wants to host their own CTF event right at UMBC. Vanek said, “This is not only a fun project that we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but it will be a great way to give people who are new to cyber security another way to learn.”

Vanek is proud to be president of the Cyber Dawgs, and is looking forward to all their goals and future as an organization. “I can’t begin to thank everyone enough for all that I’ve learned so far from our experiences together,” Vanek said, “and I truly look forward to what we’re all going to be able to accomplish together in these next few years.”

From left to right: Zack Orndorff, Chris Gardner, Josh Domangue, Julio Valcarcel, Jake Rust, Anh Ho, Christian Beam, Tyler Campbell

For more information, you can check out the Cyber Dawgs through their website.

The Cyber Dawgs send out most of their information through the use of their list server. Just send an email to umbccd-subscribe @lists.umbc.edu using your UMBC email address.

You can also chat with members as well by joining their slack channel using for your UMBC email.

Missed that news? It was not a real storm, but it might as well have been.

Philadelphia Water Department employees turned on a fire hydrant on West Girard Avenue for three hours, enough to fill up two longish ditches with 35,000 gallons of water - an experimental simulation of 3.5 inches of rain. Then they watched it disappear.

The ditches are rain gardens, brimming with grasses, flowers, and monitoring equipment, and they are part of an underground revolution.

This week marks the fifth anniversary of a consent agreement signed with state environmental regulators, and the city says it has met its target of keeping more than 600 million gallons of rain out of the aging sewer system each year.

It has done so with hundreds of water-absorbing "tools": plant-studded green roofs, parking lots made of permeable pavement, stormwater trenches, and rain gardens such as the two on West Girard.

The reason for the ambitious program? As in many older communities, most of the city is served by combined sewer systems, meaning that rainwater is directed into the same pipes that carry the flow from showers, sinks, and toilets.

That is OK in dry weather, but with any amount of significant rainfall, the combined stream of sewage and rainwater starts to overflow into creeks and rivers, running afoul of the federal Clean Water Act.

Some cities have opted to comply with the law by building giant underground tanks to hold stormwater temporarily before sending it off to sewage treatment plants. Philadelphia proposed, instead, to soak as much rain as possible into the ground, the way nature intended, said Christopher S. Crockett, a deputy commissioner for the water department.

"Instead of creating expressways for the stormwater to get into our system, we're trying to create little traffic jams for the stormwater to stay on the site and get into the ground," Crockett said.

But the job is less than 10 percent completed.

The city says it has exceeded its five-year pledge to "green" 744 acres, defined as acreage where the various rain gardens and other infiltration tools can absorb at least one inch of rain.

In the next five years, the agreement calls for the city to triple that amount. And by 2036, the target is 9,564 acres - the equivalent of keeping nearly eight billion gallons out of the sewer system each year. Even then, there would still be occasional sewage overflows.

How much is eight billion gallons? Imagine a giant tank covering JFK Plaza. That amount of liquid would fill such a tank more than a mile high.

Still, the water already being kept out the sewers, conservatively estimated at 600 million gallons a year, is more than a drop in the bucket. That amount would still fill an imaginary JFK Plaza tank more than 500 feet high.

"It's one of the largest-scale implementations of greened acres that we've seen in the nation," said Jon Capacasa, director of the water protection division for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's mid-Atlantic region.

Collecting data

The water department has water-pressure sensors deployed at dozens of sites to see how well it works. And at a handful of spots, scientists are busy gathering more detailed data.

At the West Girard location, among others, Villanova University researchers are measuring near-surface water pressure, temperature, humidity, and other indicators.

Readings are captured every five minutes, and Cara Albright, who is working on her doctorate in water resources engineering, comes by periodically to download it onto her laptop. Water-pressure readings are translated into rates of flow.

"We basically try to measure everything that's coming into the site and everything that's leaving the site," she said.

The gardens are planted with purple coneflower, black-eyed Susan, Shenandoah switchgrass, and other hardy species, said Chris Bergerson, a water resources engineer for the city water department.

"They have to be able to withstand periods of drought, and they have to be able to survive when inundated," he said.

Elsewhere, Swarthmore College is leading an effort to measure underground water pressure at various levels down to seven feet below the surface, in order to calculate how much water is getting to the water table. Measurements are taken beneath "greened" sites as well as under regular patches of grass.

Philadelphia as role model

It is too soon to report hard numbers, but the differences between greened and un-greened sites appear "dramatic," said team member Claire Welty, a groundwater hydrologist and engineering professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

"The whole country is looking to Philadelphia to see how to do it," she said.

Crockett said it also is too soon to see measurable improvements in the four water bodies into which the combined sewers discharge their flow: the Delaware River and Schuylkill, and the Cobbs and Tacony Creeks.

But the end result will be cleaner water as well as more natural, stable flow rates.

Currently, a heavy rain takes the Tacony from ankle-deep to more than 6 feet deep in some places, Crockett said. That leads to flooding and erosion, and it wreaks havoc on wildlife.

The benefits go beyond clean water, Crockett said. The added greenery keeps the city cooler in the summer, along with absorbing greenhouse gases that can contribute to climate change. Then there is the improved quality of life when a vacant lot is turned into an inviting urban oasis, he said.

It is not cheap, with an estimated long-term price tag of more than $2 billion. Some of that comes from business owners, who now pay sewer bills based in part on the amount of impervious cover on their sites - rather than the old method based strictly on water usage. Rates have soared for some.

The water department says the alternative to the green approach, building large underground holding tanks, would cost even more.

And such tanks likely would be built with outside labor, whereas the weeding, drain-clearing, and other maintenance required for the green approach is done by hiring city residents.

"You're really getting many, many benefits in one," said the EPA's Capacasa.

The tally of green installations changes from week to week, at www.phillywatersheds.org, but is well into the hundreds - some built by the city, others by private landowners.

That is because for all development on sites measuring more than 15,000 square feet, the builder is required to install enough rain gardens, green roofs, and the like to handle the first 1.5 inches of runoff.

Expect to see much more in the coming years. When a real tropical storm hits, rain gardens such as the one on West Girard will be ready.

tavril@phillynews.com

215-854-2430

@TomAvril1

Computer Science PhD Dissertation Defense

Learning Representations and Modeling Temporal Signals:
Symbolic Approximation, Deep Learning, Optimization and Beyond

Zhiguang Wang

1:00pm Tuesday, 31 May 2016, ITE 325, UMBC

Most real-world data has a temporal component, whether it is measurements of natural or man-made phenomena. Specifically, complex, high-dimensional and noisy temporal data are often difficult to model because the intrinsic temporal/topographic structures are highly non-linear, which makes the learning and optimization procedure more complicated. This talk will cover three correlated but self-contained topics to address the problem of representation learning in time series, deep learning optimization, and unsupervised feature learning.

First, I will show how to incorporate ideas from symbolic approximation with simple NLP techniques to represent and model temporal signals. To improve the symbolic approximation to model signals as words, we build a time-delay embedding vector (AKA skip gram) to extract the dependencies at different time scales, which yields state-of-the-art classification performance with a bag-of-patterns and vector space model. A non-parametric pooling/weighting scheme is proposed to extend the methods to multivariate signals

Second, I will show how to encode signals as images to learn and analyze them with deep learning methods. The Gramian Angular Field (GAF) and Markov Transition Field (MTF), as two novel approaches to encode both multi-scale spatial correlation and first order Markov dynamics of the temporal signals as images, are proposed. These visual representations are proved to work well in both visualizations by humans and pattern recognition using deep learning approaches. This work yields state-of-the-art algorithms for temporal data classification and imputation.

Finally, deep learning in image recognition (e.g. pictures or GAF/MTF images) involves high-dimensional non-convex optimization. Such optimization is generally intractable. However, I show how to use a set of exponential form based error estimators (NRAE/NAAE) and learning approaches (Adaptive Training) to attack the non-convex optimization problems in training deep neural networks. Both in theory and practice, they are able to achieve optimality on accuracy and robustness against outliers/noise. They provide another perspective to address the non-convex optimization problem (especially saddle points) in deep learning.

Committee: Tim Oates (Chair), Matt Schmill (Miner & Kasch), Hamed Pirsiavash, Yun Peng, Kostas Kalpakis

Image: Marc Olano during the opening of the 3D Scanning Room at UMBC. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

CSEE professor Marc Olano talked at TEDx Towson on how technology has changed how we think about reality. “New technology has started blurring the lines between the real and the virtual,” he said at the May 5 event.  He focused on how new 3D technologies have evolved and used examples including 3D graphics, virtual reality, video games and 3D printers. Professor Olano ended his talk pointing out that while he had not mentioned science fiction, “I can feel the world of holodecks and replicators on the horizon.”  Read more about his TEDx talk at UMBC News and watch it on YouTube.