Two of UMBC’s regular hackathon participants took 3rd place at MHacks, a competitive 1000 student hackathon at the University of Michigan this past weekend!

CSEE students Michael Bishoff (President, HackUMBC) and Sekar Kulandaivel created a haptic feedback suit that makes virtual reality more immersive. To do this, the team created 12 vibrating modules that are placed on the user’s arms, legs, chest, and head. When various events occur in the virtual environment, the user will feel a vibration in the appropriate location on their body. For example, when a user falls in a virtual environment, they will feel a vibration in their legs, or when a user gets hit in their arm, they will experience a vibration on the appropriate arm.

For placing third, the duo won a trip to Seoul, South Korea in the summer to represent UMBC at the Global Hackathon, a 2000 person hackathon event backed by the mayor of Seoul. The event’s goal is to increase innovation and produce projects that make a global impact. Attendees of the event will include other brilliant students from around the world!

Mike and Sekar incorporated Oculus Rift technology, which they won at UMD’s 2014 Bitcamp hackathon.

Interested in maker-faires and participating in future hackathons? Join hackUMBC!

Each year for 9 weeks during the summer, the MPC co-sponsors a Research Internship Program. The program has brought hundreds of the best science and engineering undergraduates from across the country to conduct graduate-level materials research. Students can select from a wide array of projects available.

This year's Summer Scholar Internship Program will run from June 8 - August 8, 2015.

For more information about the Internship Program, please refer to the Summer Scholar Quick Facts and the FAQ portion of our website.

The application deadline is February 13, 2015. 

CSEE’s Dr. Rick Forno was a panelist for Schmoocon 2015’s closing plenary session on January 18 in Washington, DC. The session, entitled “Get Off My Lawn: Examining Change through the Eyes of The Old Guard” brought together four longtime security practitioners to discuss in a free-flowing (if not somewhat curmudgeonly) manner the state of Internet security over the years while fielding audience questions and avoiding Schmooballs tossed their way.

Joining Rick on the panel were Carole Fennelly (independent New York area security consultant), Ben Laurie (Google), and Space Rogue (L0pht). Schmoocon founder Bruce Potter moderated the session.

ShmooCon is an annual east coast hacker convention held in Washington, DC offering three days of demonstrating technology exploitation, inventive software and hardware solutions, and hosting open, unfiltered discussions of critical information security issues. Tickets to the conference routinely sell out within seconds, and the acceptance rate for proposals traditionally hovers around 20%.

Critical Social Justice 2015 is quickly approaching and we’re looking for art submissions to add to the CSJ 2015 Art Gallery! This year’s CSJ theme is Creating Brave Spaces and we’re asking for art submissions that explore and/or address what it means to create brave spaces.

Last year’s CSJ art gallery located on the Mezzanine of The Commons.

CSJ invites different types of activists — students, teachers, artists, musicians, doctors, and more — to talk critically about social justice and how they are creating change in their own unique ways. In addition to our discussions, keynotes, and reflections, the CSJ Art Gallery is intended to give another kind of voice and experience to the conversations we’re having on campus about social justice.

All UMBC community members are invited to submit their work by Wednesday, February 4th at 4pm Sunday, February 8th. Artists are asked to complete this form and email a jpg image of their artwork to womens.center@umbc.edu. 

Deadline extended until Sunday, February 8th!!!

Accepted artwork must be dropped off to the Women’s Center no later than Wednesday, February 11th at 5pm to ensure timely installation. Additional information will be provided once your artwork has been submitted and confirmed for inclusion in the gallery.

The Critical Social Justice 2015 Art Gallery will be on display from February 16th-20th in The Commons Mezzanine Gallery. For more on last year’s art gallery, check out former student staff member Kelly Martin Broderick’s reflection about art and activism.

For additional questions, contact the Women’s Center staff at womens.center@umbc.edu or 410-455-2714.

Top 10 highest rated passwords for most “Highly Usable” and “Highly Secure.” The highest rated is in the top left, and moving left-to-right by row, the tenth, highest rated is the lower right.

UMBC Information Systems

Measuring Visual Perceptions of Security

Professor Adam J. Aviv
United States Naval Academy

10:00am – 11:00am Friday, 16 January 2015, ITE 459

This talk presents the results of a user study of the Android graphical password system to measure visual perceptions of security. The survey methodology asked participants to select between carefully selected pairs of patterns indicating either a security or usability preference. By selecting password pairs that isolate a visual feature, a perception of usability and security of different features can be quantified in relatively. We conducted a large IRB-approved survey using pairwise preferences which attracted 384 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Analyzing the results, we find that visual features that can be attributed to complexity indicated a stronger perception of security, while spatial features, such as shifts up/down or left/right are not strong indicators for security or usability.

We extended and applied the survey data by building logistic models to predict perception preferences by training on features used in the survey and other features proposed in related work. The logistic model accurately predicted preferences above 70%, twice the rate of random guessing, and the strongest feature in classification is password distance, the total length of all lines in the pattern, a feature not used in the online survey. This result provides insight into the internal visual calculus of users when comparing choices and selecting visual passwords, and the ultimate goal of this work is to leverage the visual calculus to design systems where inherent perceptions for usability coincides with a known metric of security.

Adam J. Aviv is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the United States Naval Academy, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania under the advisement of Jonathan Smith and Matt Blaze. He has varied research interests including in system and network security, applied cryptography, smartphone security, and more recently in the area of usable security with a focus on mobile devices.