Professor Alan Sherman received two research awards from the National Science Foundation to support work at UMBC on cybersecurity.

Sherman is a co-principal investigator on a two year, $300K Eager award to foster research cooperation among four successful and mature Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research: Purdue University, UMBC, UC Davis, and Mississippi State. The project will provide opportunities for students to work on problems proposed and mentored by practitioners in the real world rather than just faculty led research. As a result, more pressing and urgent problems will be addressed, the students will benefit from the guidance of multiple and interdisciplinary research faculty from multiple institutions and the student-lead research may produce solutions for pressing national problems.

Professor Sherman also received a supplement of $271K to his UMBC Cybersecurity SFS Program award to support graduate research assistants who will work on two new projects. One will develop new algorithms for verifiable randomness that can generate random bits in a way that the recipients will have verifiably high assurance that the bits were generated in a truly random fashion. The work will improve upon the (unverifiable) NIST random beacon project. The second project will develop a new security education game, inspired by the UMBC-developed classroom game SecurityEmpire, to be fielded as a Facebook application for free use by anyone. This is joint work with UMBC faculty Marc Olano and Linda Oliva.

The research will be carried out in the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance under Professor Sherman’s supervision.

If you are a senior planning to apply to a graduate program next year or a current graduate student early in your program of study, you should consider applying for a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

NSF has opened the application for the 2014 Graduate Research Fellowship Program. These Fellowships give three years of funding to students in research based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics master’s and doctoral programs.

Funds are awarded to the student and can be used in any appropriate program. If you will be applying to graduate programs for next year, you only need describe the insititutions that you plan to apply to.

NSF's Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate is looking for strong applicants in this year’s program. The deadline for submission is November 4, 2013 and the application can be found here.  If you are interested, you should start by talking with your advisor and or other faculty members about the program and how to submit a strong application.

UMBC's Mobile, Pervasive and Sensor Systems Laboratory focuses on three key areas: renewable energy, healthcare applications and mobile phone systems. Their crowdsourcing-based technology for accurate and low cost detection of weed infestations was cited recently as one of the top ten technologies changing farm machinery by Farm Industry News.

D. Saraswat and N. Banerjee, Crowdsourcing App for Precision Agriculture Decision Making, ASABE Annual International Meeting, Dallas TX, August 2012.

The research was begun while Professor Banerjee was at the University of Arkansas, where the complex software system was  implemented by students Brenna Blackwell and Mahbub Rahman, who is continuing his PhD studies at UMBC.

Like the MPSSL Facebook page to follow their work or visit the MPSSL page

The third Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning (MASC-SLL 2013) is a one day event that will bring together faculty, researchers and students from universities in the Mid-Atlantic area doing research on speech, language or machine learning. The colloquium is an opportunity to present preliminary, ongoing or completed work and to network with other students, faculty and researchers working in related fields.

The first MASC-SLL was held in 2011 at Johns Hopkins University and the second in 2012 at the University of Maryland, College Park. This year the event will be held at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in Baltimore, MD from 9:30 to 5:00 on Friday, 11 October 2013. There will be no registration charge and lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Students and postdocs are encouraged to submit abstracts describing ongoing, planned, or completed research projects, including previously published results and negative results. Research in any field applying computational methods to any aspect of human language, including speech and learning, from all areas of computer science, linguistics, engineering, neuroscience, information science, and related fields, is welcome. All accepted submissions will be presented as posters and some will also be invited for short oral presentations. Student-led breakout sessions will also be held to discuss papers or topics of interest and stimulate interaction and discussion. Suggest breakout session topics via easychair.

A full-time postdoctoral research associate position is available in the Ecosynth Project funded by NSF’s Advances in Bioinformatics Program and led by UMBC Professors Erle Ellis and Marc Olano. The Ecosynth project is developing advanced tools for mapping, measuring, and visualizing vegetation in 3D using off-the-shelf digital cameras from the ground and on low-altitude hobbyist aircraft, coupled with open source and new computer vision algorithms. High resolution 3D scanning and spectral imaging are transforming ecological science, forest inventory, carbon monitoring and biodiversity assessment.

Ecosynth makes these advances accessible broadly to ecologists and citizen scientists on demand by means of low-cost portable 3D observing and visualization systems built on publicly available hardware and open-source software. For more information on the postion see the position announcement.

A full-time postdoctoral research associate position is available in the Ecosynth Project funded by NSF’s Advances in Bioinformatics Program and led by UMBC Professors Erle Ellis and Marc Olano. The Ecosynth project is developing advanced tools for mapping, measuring, and visualizing vegetation in 3D using off-the-shelf digital cameras from the ground and on low-altitude hobbyist aircraft, coupled with open source and new computer vision algorithms. High resolution 3D scanning and spectral imaging are transforming ecological science, forest inventory, carbon monitoring and biodiversity assessment.

Ecosynth makes these advances accessible broadly to ecologists and citizen scientists on demand by means of low-cost portable 3D observing and visualization systems built on publicly available hardware and open-source software. For more information on the postion see the position announcement.

A full-time postdoctoral research associate position is available in the Ecosynth Project funded by NSF’s Advances in Bioinformatics Program and led by UMBC Professors Erle Ellis and Marc Olano. The Ecosynth project is developing advanced tools for mapping, measuring, and visualizing vegetation in 3D using off-the-shelf digital cameras from the ground and on low-altitude hobbyist aircraft, coupled with open source and new computer vision algorithms. High resolution 3D scanning and spectral imaging are transforming ecological science, forest inventory, carbon monitoring and biodiversity assessment.

Ecosynth makes these advances accessible broadly to ecologists and citizen scientists on demand by means of low-cost portable 3D observing and visualization systems built on publicly available hardware and open-source software. For more information on the postion see the position announcement.

The 2013 Maryland Cyber Challenge season has begun!

Last week, Challenge co-founder Dr. Richard Forno and other Challenge officials conducted a kick-off orientation webinar  (PDF) outlining the 2013 Challenge, providing a brief overview of the SAIC/Leidos competition environment (CyberNEXS), offering administrative guidance, and answering questions from prospective competitors and team advisors.

Now in its third year, the Challenge is a partnership between UMBC and SAIC/Leidos, in cooperation with the National Cyber Security Alliance, Tech Council of Maryland, and the Governor's CyberMaryland Initiative. The first two years of the Challenge saw over 700 competitors and 115 teams from Maryland competing for over $160,000 in cash prizes, internships, and more. The finals event is held as a major aspect of the CyberMaryland 2013 conference on October 8 & 9 at the Baltimore Convention Center.

Interested teams may register for the competition here.   

The UMBC Game Developers Club will hold its third annual summer game jam this coming weekend. The event will run from 5:00pm Friday August 2, 2013 until 5:00pm Sunday, August 4, 2013 in the GAIM Lab, room 005 in the Engineering building. While there are computers available in the lab, participants are encouraged to bring their personal laptops. If you plan to participate, you can register your interest by joining the Summer Game Jam Facebook event.