The Great Escape is an online international multiplayer coding contest being held for 2 weeks from February 6th starting at 12:00 pm EST to February 20th at 5:00 pm EST.

The Great Escape will be a thrilling multiplayer Artificial Intelligence Battle, where students will have to:

• Program the best bot to escape a maze by trapping their ennemies,
• Have their bot fight against other players’ bots in an arena
• Improve their program as they go along until victory!

Participation is 100% online and free. Over 20 coding languages to choose from. International automated rankings + Leaderboard by University. 10+ sponsoring companies offering jobs and internships. Prizes to win: GoPro 4, iPad Mini, and 25+ t-shirts! All skill levels are encouraged to play: no need to be an A.I. Expert to have fun.

The Great Escape is an online international multiplayer coding contest being held for 2 weeks from February 6th starting at 12:00 pm EST to February 20th at 5:00 pm EST.

The Great Escape will be a thrilling multiplayer Artificial Intelligence Battle, where students will have to:

• Program the best bot to escape a maze by trapping their ennemies,
• Have their bot fight against other players’ bots in an arena
• Improve their program as they go along until victory!

Participation is 100% online and free. Over 20 coding languages to choose from. International automated rankings + Leaderboard by University. 10+ sponsoring companies offering jobs and internships. Prizes to win: GoPro 4, iPad Mini, and 25+ t-shirts! All skill levels are encouraged to play: no need to be an A.I. Expert to have fun.

PhD Dissertation Proposal

Design and Validation of Brain Network
Visualization Techniques: A Unified Approach

Guohao Zhang

Time and Place:
8:00-10:00am, 22 Jan 22 2015, ITE325

We propose a unified approach to understand why and how visualization works, motivated by scientists’ difficulties in obtaining insights from increasingly complex data that involves multi-modality brain networks from structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI and fMRI). Brain scientists are in need of visualization approaches to effectively analysis brain MRI data from different modalities. We design a unified theory expanded upon the classical 2D semiotics for the design and evaluation of brain network visualization approaches. Our research is divided to three-steps. First, we define a taxonomy that includes three dimensions: retinal variable, data continuity, and plane. Second, we demonstrated that this theory carries descriptive power in that we can use it to describe existing visualization techniques for brain imaging visualizations. We then propose five empirical studies to understand and evaluate encoding approaches in structure and functional networks accordingly. The first three studies focus on single modality and the last two studies differences in dual-modality multiplex network comparison based on cohort analyses. Using the results derived from the empirical studies, we present a visual analytics approach for brain scientists to explore cohort and individual brain network to let them answer research questions. We use computational methods to derive relationships from two modalities in cohorts of two modalities, and then represent cohort with uncertainty as well as individual ones for brain scientists to study uncertainty in network analysis.

Committee: Drs. Jian Chen (Chair), Penny Rheingans, Konstantinos Kalpakis, Peter Kochunov (UMB), Niklas Elmqvist (UMCP) and Alexander Auchus (UMC)

UMBC CSEE alumni Don Miner and Brandon Wilson have started a Meetup group for Hadoop users in and around the Baltimore area to discuss Hadoop technology and use cases.

Apache Hadoop is one of the most popular open-source tools used to harness clusters of computers to process, analyze or learn from massive amounts of data. Whether you are new to Hadoop or an experienced user, this is a great opportunity to improve your knowledge and network with others in the Baltimore computing technology community.

The first meeting will be held from 7:00pm to 9:30pm on Thursday, 19 February 2015 at AOL/Advertising.com at 1020 Hull St #100, Baltimore, MD (map). Join the group here.

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!

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%.

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.

Innovate Our World, an Ellicott City, Maryland educational nonprofit, is seeking one or more avid, experienced gamers who can help us on the business side to bring our new Moon game from tech demo status to a successful launch on Steam.

The upcoming 8th Continent game will give players a number of entertaining scenarios racing, exploring, and building on the Moon that will help meet IOW’s educational mission. We envision growing the 8th Continent like Kerbal Space Program through early engagement of the user community. Starting as a single player online game (and Oculus friendly), you will have strong input into how the game evolves and grows to meet player demand.

Candidates should have strong gaming experience, comfortable with emerging technologies, demonstrated success with crowdfunding, ability to use Steam and other forums to gain support, and strong social media skills.

Opportunity starts as an volunteer/internship and could evolve into a compensated position for the right person. Can be done on a part-time/remote basis in conjunction with school or work. Contact Ron (ron AT innovateourworld.org) to discuss. The opportunity begins ASAP.

Innovate Our World, an Ellicott City, Maryland educational nonprofit, is seeking one or more avid, experienced gamers who can help us on the business side to bring our new Moon game from tech demo status to a successful launch on Steam.

The upcoming 8th Continent game will give players a number of entertaining scenarios racing, exploring, and building on the Moon that will help meet IOW’s educational mission. We envision growing the 8th Continent like Kerbal Space Program through early engagement of the user community. Starting as a single player online game (and Oculus friendly), you will have strong input into how the game evolves and grows to meet player demand.

Candidates should have strong gaming experience, comfortable with emerging technologies, demonstrated success with crowdfunding, ability to use Steam and other forums to gain support, and strong social media skills.

Opportunity starts as an volunteer/internship and could evolve into a compensated position for the right person. Can be done on a part-time/remote basis in conjunction with school or work. Contact Ron (ron AT innovateourworld.org) to discuss. The opportunity begins ASAP.