UMBC’s Cybersecurity Graduate Program Director Dr. Rick Forno and Homer Minnick, Director of UMBC Training Centers’ Cyber Academy, were featured in a recent Daily Record article examining how local universities support the cybersecurity education and training needs of corporate, military, and intelligence employers.

More information:

UMBC’s Graduate Cybersecurity Program

UMBC Training Centers Cyber Academy

Ph.D. Proposal

Increased Autonomy with Robotics for Daily Living

Kavita Preethi Krishnaswamy

5:30pm-7:30pm, Tuesday, 9 December 2014, ITE 325B

Live Webcast: http://goo.gl/5JmjlR or http://youtu.be/qu8S6IUsCa0

Robotic technologies can provide people with disabilities invaluable tools to perform activities of daily living (ADLs). Few studies have investigated how effective and accessible the control of robotic aids is for people with severe physical disabilities with respect to their needs and current facility with technology. Though present-day robotic aids can help people with disabilities with important daily living tasks, there is still room for improvement.

What has been needed, and heretofore unavailable, is a self-directed transferring, repositioning, and personal care robotic device that is capable of increasing independence for people with physical disabilities without the assistance of caregivers. This thesis proposal will serve as the base of the research study to design and develop self-directed transferring, repositioning, and personal care robotic systems with a focus on accessible user interfaces for control that are feasible for persons with severe physical disabilities. The interface should allow local and remote control, and thus must be aware of network constraints to ensure safe and accurate control.

Committee Members: Dr. Tim Oates (Chair), Dr. Dan Ding, Dr. Tim Finin, Dr. Charles Nicholas, Dr. Yelena Yesha

UMBC has a total of nine open full-time positions for computing faculty including five tenure track professors, a professor of the practice and three lecturers.

UMBC’s Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department is seeking to fill five positions for the coming year. They include two tenure track positions in Computer Science, up to three full-time lecturers. See the CSEE jobs page for more information.

The College of Engineering and Information Technology has a position for a full-time lecturer or Professor of Practice to focus on the needs of incoming computing majors through teaching, advising, and helping develop programs in computing. This person will work closely with faculty in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department and Information Systems Department.

UMBC’s Information Systems department is accepting applications for three tenure track faculty positions in data science, software engineering and human-centered computing.

UMBC has a total of nine open full-time positions for computing faculty including five tenure track professors, a professor of the practice and three lecturers.

UMBC’s Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department is seeking to fill five positions for the coming year. They include two tenure track positions in Computer Science, up to three full-time lecturers. See the CSEE jobs page for more information.

The College of Engineering and Information Technology has a position for a full-time lecturer or Professor of Practice to focus on the needs of incoming computing majors through teaching, advising, and helping develop programs in computing. This person will work closely with faculty in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department and Information Systems Department.

UMBC’s Information Systems department is accepting applications for three tenure track faculty positions in data science, software engineering and human-centered computing.

PhD Dissertation Proposal

A quantum approach to the graph isomorphism
and knot classification problems

Omar Shehab

11:30am Monday, 08 December 2014, ITE 346

Simulating physics on a quantum computer can be reduced to solving mathematical problem using quantum mechanics. In this PhD dissertation proposal, I present two important mathematical problems to be investigated using quantum mechanical techniques. In the case of the first problem, the Graph Isomorphism problem, I, with another co-researcher, Kenneth M Zick, are able to present a quantum annealing algorithm with promising result. I am proposing to extend this idea so that we could study the Hamiltonian complexity of graph isomorphism. I propose to transform our previous work, the compact objective function, into a k-local Hamiltonian problem and investigate quantum adiabatic algorithms to solve it. In the case of the second problem, classification of knots, I present a mathematical framework with two restricted problems solved using quantum annealing. The restricted problems are defined for unknots embedded in two dimensional integer lattice. I propose to generalize them to higher dimension and complexity. I present how I envision to continue the rest of the study while writing the dissertation.

Committee: Drs. Samuel J. Lomonaco Jr. (chair), Alan T. Sherman, Yanhua Shih, William Gasarch

Dr. Stephen Freeland, an astrobiologist from the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, thinks that convergent evolutionary pressures are strong and that we are bound to run into other human-like creatures out in the universe. Dr. Kevin Omland, evolutionary biologist from the Department of Biological Sciences, challenges that claim and counters with the observation that evolution works rather unpredictably and thinks that the lifeforms that we will encounter in space will be beyond our imagination as intelligence is just one possibility.

The debate will take place from 4:00 to 5:00pm on Wednesday, December 3 in Lecture Hall 2 in the Chemistry building on the UMBC campus. It is sponsored by the Biology Council of Majors and is part of their B-Ethical series.

CSEE Professor Anupam Joshi has been named an IEEE Fellow, recognized for his for contributions to security, privacy and data management in mobile and pervasive systems. This designation is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors on individuals with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement. No more than 0.1% of the total IEEE voting membership can be selected in a year.

Dr. Joshi joined UMBC’s faculty in 1998 and currently is the Oros Family Professor of Technology and Director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity. He previously held faculty appointments at the University of Missouri, Columbia and Purdue University. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University and a B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. While at UMBC he has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in operating systems, mobile computing and security. He developed and teaches an Honors College seminar on “Privacy and Security in a Mobile Social World”. He has mentored nine Ph.D. graduates and a large number of M.S. students.

Joshi has made many contributions to the design, analysis and development of intelligent systems for mobile, social and secure computing. Twenty years ago he was one of a handful of researchers who recognized that mobility introduced new challenges for data management, security and privacy over and above those brought about by wireless connectivity. His key insight was to model mobile and pervasive systems as distributed systems that are both open, in that they do not pre-identify a set of known participants, and dynamic, in that the participants change regularly.

He observe that applications on mobile devices require greater degrees of decision making and autonomy as they become increasingly sophisticated and intelligent and can’t always assume connectivity to central servers. Entities in these pervasive computing systems must exchange information about the data and services offered and sought and their associated security and privacy policies, negotiate for information and resource sharing, be aware of their context, and monitor for and report on suspicious or anomalous behavior. Dr. Joshi has addressed these challenges across the stack, from network protocols to data management to policy controlled interactions between autonomous entities.

Much of his research has been done in collaboration with colleagues in industry such as IBM, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman and Qualcomm. It has been funded by not just them, but also NSF, DARPA, AFOSR, ARL, NIST and other federal agencies. Joshi has published prolifically with more than 200 publications in refereed journals and conferences, many of which are highly cited. He has served as the General or Program Chair of many key conferences including the IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics which will be held in Baltimore in May 2015.

The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. Through its 400,000 members in 160 countries, it is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics. Dedicated to the advancement of technology, the IEEE publishes 30 percent of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, and has developed more than 900 active industry standards.

The Fall 2014 Town Hall meeting for Computer Engineering majors will be held at 12 noon this Friday, November 21, in ITE 104. The agenda includes discussion about changes in the program, Spring 2015 registration, the BS/MS program, and undergraduate research opportunities. All CMPE majors are invited.

Please complete the survey before Thursday, November 20 at noon to register your attendance.

Got Linux? If you've ever wanted to try Linux but didn't know where to start, bring your computer to the Linux Installfest this Thursday between noon and 4:00pm at the UMBC Commons Mainsteet.

The UMBC Linux Users Group will hold a Linux Install Fest from Noon to 4:00pm on Thursday, November 20th on Main Street in the Commons. Experts will help you install a free copy of Linux on your computer using any of several options — dual boot, virtual and more. LUG members can also advise you about the hundreds of legal, free apps available for many Linux versions. See the LUG site for more information and pictures from the 2010 LUG Installfest.

UMBC Professors Nilanjan Banerjee and Ryan Robucci were recently featured in a video developed by Microsoft Research. The video showcases Banerjee, Robucci, and UMB professor Sandra McCombe Waller, as they discuss the application of Microsoft’s Lab of Things to the team’s wearable sensing system project. (The Lab of Things is Microsoft’s home automation tool.)

In addition, the video features Arjmand Samuel, Senior Research Manager for Microsoft Research, and Buz Chmielewski, a partial quadriplegic who served as a patient and consultant for the project. UMBC Professor Chintan Patel, not featured in the video, was also involved with this project.

The team’s wearable sensing system project is an example of an inter-disciplinary collaboration between the medical school at UMB, and UMBC’s computer science and computer engineering departments.

Harry Shum, the Executive Vice President of Microsoft, mentioned this project as the next big thing in his keynote address at the 2014 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit.