Since 2011, Applied Computer Security Associates, sponsor of the ACSAC and NSPW conferences, has offered scholarships for women in security-related undergraduate and masters’ degree programs through the Scholarships for Women Studying Information Security (SWSIS, http://www.swsis.org).

Thanks to a $250,000 4-year contribution by Hewlett-Packard company in early 2014, ACSA expanded our program to award 11 scholarships for the 2014-15 academic year. The Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W), an arm of the Computing Research Alliance, led selection of scholarship winners. Information about the 11 SWSIS Scholars (scholarship winners) is available at http://www.swsis.org.

ACSA, CRA-W, and HP are pleased to announce that applications for 2015-16 scholarships are open Dec 15 2014 – Feb 25 2015.

To apply, an applicant must provide:
* An essay describing her interest and background in the information security field.
* A current transcript.
* A resume or CV.
* At least two letters of reference (typically from faculty members).
* Her university name and class status.

The scholarship is renewable for a second year subject to availability of funds, given proof of satisfactory academic progress. Preference is for US citizens or permanent residents; funds are available for use at any US campus of a US university.

More information at http://www.swsis.org or swsis@swsis.org

The Discovery Chemistry department at Genentech is looking for undergraduate interns for summer 2015.

Description

The program is a 12 week  paid summer internship.  Interns work with Scientists and Research Associates in the department on individual projects focused on synthetic organic chemistry. 

Successful projects are often published in peer-reviewed journals.  There are also programs to introduce interns to the various aspects of drug discovery that go on at Genentech. 

Requirements?

Typical interns arrive having just completed their 3rd or 4th year of a Chemistry BS (although we do accept applications from students completing their 2nd year).  While previous research experience in organic chemistry is not required it is certainly preferred. 

Interested?

E-mail UMBC alumnus Dr. Steve McKerrall with a CV and a brief research summary or by using the online application provided by clicking "visit website" below.

mckerrall.steven@gene.com

Applicants will be accepted on a rolling basis and there is no deadline until all the positions have been filled

A post written by Women’s Center director, Jess Myers

A little snow won’t get in the way of Critical Social Justice 2015!

Yesterday was the kick-off to CSJ2015 with CSJ 101: Introduction to Brave Spaces. It was a rich conversation in which everyone was really invested and we went right through our allotted time in Commons 329. We thank our invited participants and moderator for helping us start the conversation! Prior to the start of CSJ week, we also provided ways for the UMBC community to begin engaging in the idea of creating brave spaces. You can find more on brave spaces and creating brave spaces throughout our blog like this awesome video created by the CSJ Student Alliance, a few blog posts written by Women’s Center staff members (check out Daniel and Ty’s posts), the Brave Space Guidelines of the Women’s Center, and of course, the chapter that started in all, From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces by Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens. These jumping off points, in addition to the diverse perspectives and experiences of our invited panelists and community members in the room took us on a journey as we uncovered the depth and breadth of brave spaces.

Arao and Clemens spend time in their chapter exploring what brave space can be. It’s grounded in the concept of safe space but recognizes that the idea of safety can be limiting when in engaging in difficult dialogues and social justice work. They find value and necessity in taking risk and engaging in controversy to facilitate authentic learning experiences about social justice. When this kind of authenticity is nourished a brave space has been created. It’s a great read and I’d highly recommend it to student leaders, staff, and faculty committed to integrating social justice into their work and communities. But what else is brave space? How is it created? How is it maintained? Is brave space the same for everyone or can it look different from person to person? These are some of the questions we explored in CSJ 101. Knowing that not everyone could attend yesterday’s event, I’m capturing some of the highlights here as a way to root the rest of the week in a better understanding of UMBC’s understanding and practice of brave space. 

In reflecting on the conversation, what I love most about what it uncovered was the moving of brave spaces from a noun to a verb. Brave space isn’t just a moment in time or a set of four walls. In our conversation brave space was described as an action. The concept of brave spaces for our invited panelist was a call to action, an invite to listen, an ask to share, and an exploration of identity, history, and context. Some examples offered at CSJ 101 included:

• Brave space asks us to listen.
• Brave spaces calls us into accountability.
• Brave space asks us to tell stories AND listen.
• Brave space asks us to get to know us as ourselves better.
• Brave space is being open to changing our mind.
• Brave space examines, critiques, and calls for change

The dialogue also included a theme of self, self-reflection, and self-examination as needed in the formation of brave space. As already mentioned above, brave space isn’t limited to a physical space or room. It often must be explored and created within ourselves before we can co-create brave spaces with others. Some examples shared throughout CSJ 101 included:

• Being in a brave space includes really thinking about yourself – both your privileged identities and marginalized identities. This also means being intentional in thinking about the root of your discomfort when engaging in difficult dialogues around social justice.
• Brave space is having an opportunity to have a voice. How does our voice represent ourselves? Our communities? When do we speak up and what do we risk in speaking up?
• Brave space acknowledges the differences in our lives.We must consider the ways in which people must navigate their worlds because of their identities and experiences. This might mean the creation of brave space looks different from person to person. With this in mind, self-reflection in needed to consider ways in which we can be generous, forgiving, and operate in good faith.

CSJ 101 helped to solidify understanding of brave spaces as ye, it also left us with more questions to ponder:

• How do we create a brave spaces in places we’ve been triggered?
• What can I do when I can’t create a brave space?
• How can we hold someone accountable when there’s great risk… like losing funding from a donor? Losing a community? Losing a paycheck? What do we sacrifice?
• What’s next? How to we use brave space to create change?

I look forward to the ways CSJ2015 will give the UMBC community the opportunity to unpack the concept of brave space and co-create more ways for ourselves and our community to be a brave space. It is our hope that sharing the dialogue created in CSJ 101 will serve as groundwork and a set of “working assumptions” that will lend itself to rich and authentic dialogue and learning throughout the week.

For more quotable moments from CSJ 101, check out some of the live tweets from the event by searching for #CSJ2015 on Twitter. 

A post curated by Women’s Center staff member, Daniel

This week is Critical Social Justice week!! Yay!! The Women’s Center will be occupying Main Street on Wednesday from 11am to 1pm by bringing our lounge out of the center and into the public! We’ll be doing a number of really cool activities including creating a scrapbook full of pages made by community members about their Feminist Click Moments.

What’s a Feminist Click Moment?????

Your Click Moment is the event or thought or moment when you realized the word “feminist” applied to you. Click is a book of essays about various authors’ Click Moments compiled by Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan. You can read an interview about the book here. Each of our staff members created their scrapbook pages for you all to see and get you thinking about how you want to express your Click Moment and add a piece of yourself to a Women’s Center project that will be available for all to see!

Amelia:

I don’t know if you can actually be a “natural born feminist,” but I was definitely raised as a feminist. My mom has always encouraged my social justice activism, and her constant cheering me on has been invaluable in my journey as a feminist. That might not be an actual “click” moment, but I feel like it’s one of the most important relationships I’ve had as a lil’ baby feminist person growing into a full on raging feminist scholar and activist.

Bria:

(You can read more about Bria’s Click Moment here.)

My click moments were clouds with silver linings.

Black

Woman

Comprehensive Health Care

Sex Positive

Activist

Reproductive Rights

Feminist

Yoo-Jin:

“So…are you a feminist now?”

When I first heard this question, one fateful day, I had to take a moment to pause. Why was this even a question? And why was this person asking like I had the plague? Most of my college experience has been me exploring my identities, values, and passions. My click moment can’t be pointed to just one event but many. Thanks to the amazing and strong women in my life, being a survivor and meeting other survivors, and Gender and Women’s Studies courses, I have learned and will continue to learn so much. So anyway, the answer is

“Damn right, I’m a feminist.”

Narges:

It has been few years since I had my feminist click moment, and identify as a feminist. I never forget the first time that I started thinking about this more in depth, asking myself if I am a feminist or not. It was during my Gender and Women’s Studies 100 class, when our professor asked the class “ Do you identify as a feminist?” This was something that I never really thought about, I asked myself that question and after a little while my answer was “no!” I don’t exactly remember why I chose that answer. Thinking about it now, it might be because of the fact that I wasn’t really sure of how I defined feminism and what my personal understanding of it was. Later on when I was able to explore my personal identity more and define feminism for myself I realize that I was and am a feminist!

(Narges wrote a longer blog about her journey to feminism last year! You can check it out here.)

Dan:

I was raised to politically conscious from the start. I went to my first protest at the age of 10 with my dad and my older sister. Once I realized I was bisexual at the age of 15, I began to get involved in gay rights activism by being the only student in my entire school to participate in the Day of Silence. But I never even considered the word “feminist” until I joined tumblr and a whole world of new ideas was opened up to me. I came into my feminist identity at the same time as I was coming into my queer/trans identity and the two have always been and will forever be tied to one another.

Understanding Social Spammers: A Data Mining Perspective
Xia “Ben” Hu

Computer Science and Engineering
Arizona State University

12:00-1:00 Tuesday, 24 February 2015

With the growing popularity of social media, social spamming has become rampant on all platforms. Many (fake) accounts, known as social spammers, are employed to overwhelm legitimate users with unwanted information. Social spammers are unique due to their coordinated efforts to launch attacks such as distributing ads to generate sales, disseminating pornography and viruses, executing phishing attacks, or simply sabotaging a system’s reputation. In this talk, I will introduce a novel and systematic analysis of social spammers from a data mining perspective to tackle the challenges raised by social media data for spammer detection. Specifically, I will formally define the problem of social spammer detection and discuss the unique properties of social media data that make this problem challenging. By analyzing the two most important types of information, network and content information, I will introduce a unified framework by collectively using heterogeneous information in social media. To tackle the labeling bottleneck in social media, I will show how we can take advantage of the existing information about spam in email, SMS, and on the web for spammer detection in microblogging. I will also present a solution for efficient online processing to handle fast-evolving social spammers.

Xia Hu is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University, supervised by Professor Huan Liu. His research interests include data mining, machine learning, social network analysis, etc. As a result of his research work, he has published nearly 40 papers in several major academic venues, including WWW, SIGIR, KDD, WSDM, IJCAI, AAAI, CIKM, SDM, etc. One of his papers was selected for the Best Paper Shortlist in WSDM’13. He is the recipient of IEEE “Atluri Award” Scholarship, 2014 ASU’s President’s Award for Innovation, and Faculty Emeriti Fellowship. He has served on program committees for several major conferences such as WWW, IJCAI, SDM and ICWSM, and reviewed for multiple journals, including IEEE TKDE, ACM TOIS and Neurocomputing. His research attracts wide range of external government and industry sponsors, including NSF, ONR, AFOSR, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

– more information and directions: http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks –