UMBC CYBR MPS students Zack Rich and Jeff Scheier (pictured) are interns at the NIST National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) in Rockville, MD.

On October 15, 2014, they presented NCCoE use case projects to leading cybersecurity experts from both the private and public domains at the NCCoE’s fall Open House on education and workforce development.

Zack’s project aims to simplify the risk analysis and standards mapping for the health IT sector to create a bridge between security technologies and government standards recommendations. Jeff’s project focuses on providing a foundation for e-commerce businesses to implement easy and low cost network security systems.

Both students are enrolled in UMBC’s graduate cybersecurity program at the Universities at Shady Grove campus. CSEE lecturer and Assistant CYBR GPD Ben Shariati (also pictured) is the academic advisor for students in the NCCoE internship program.

Ridgeback Internship

Ridgeback Network Defense, Inc. is seeking motivated interns to assist with building a cybersecurity device.

• Paid position, 90 day duration, 20-30 hours per week, starting late November or December.
• The location would be in the UMBC CyberHive on the UMBC campus.
• Expertise in C++ is a must. All other criteria are highly desirable.
• Educational attainment is of minimal importance compared to all other criteria.

Criteria for Candidate Selection

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• Highly skilled at C++ (minimum requirement, must have significant expertise)
• Knowledge of, or experience with, low-level systems programming (e.g., has written a device driver for an operating system)
• Understanding of various AI techniques (e.g., has implemented a computer opponent in a game)
• Understanding of various pattern recognition techniques (e.g., has written software to perform data transformation or analysis)
• Affinity for hacking (the traditional sense of the term; e.g., programs microcontrollers as a hobby)
• High degree of initiative (e.g., regularly learns new subjects or engages in technical projects outside of school)
• High degree of self-confidence (e.g., enjoys projects in unfamiliar fields)
• Achievement or goal oriented (e.g., sets and works toward specific objectives)

Contact Thomas Phillips (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) with any questions or inquiries.

POSITION: Verisign Labs Internships; Summer 2015

Verisign is the entity responsible for running .COM and .NET, two of DNS’ root instances, and a number of other top level domains; answering 80+ billion queries daily. Not just a leader in the domain industry, the company is also a prominent provider of DDOS protection and a suite of security services.

Verisign Labs, founded just a few years ago, is the operational research lab that generates insights from this wealth of Internet-scale routing and security data. Proprietary data sets, a computing infrastructure built for ‘big data’, and a diverse team of expert researchers are among our most prominent assets.

We are seeking highly motivated summer interns to work with our research scientists on existing and emerging topic areas in our research portfolio. Interns work closely with one or more mentors on a well-defined topic area. Past years’ intern work has resulted in internal product advancements, intellectual property (i.e., patents), and externally facing conference/journal publications. Given Verisign’s broad business capabilities and the diversity of our scientists’ expertise, the Lab seeks interns from a breadth of disciplines. Current projects include DNS privacy/security/stability, large-scale data analytics, DDoS defense, reputation and behavioral modeling, NLP over domain names, and future Internet design — and this is just a small sampling of the topics that our researchers tackle.

In addition to research work, interns participate in programming that embraces the technical, business, and social opportunities the summer provides. These include technical talks, research huddles, social events, and an intern-specific speaker series. The summer concludes with a poster session that gives interns an opportunity to present their work to Verisign’s thought and business leaders.

Verisign Labs is located in Verisign, Inc.’s global headquarters, in Reston, Virginia. The office is in Reston Town Center, an exciting cultural area with a great social atmosphere and close to plenty of outdoor activities. Reston is just about 20 miles from Washington, DC (with metro access), and is a great place to spend an exciting summer doing cutting edge research and relaxing in (and around) the nation’s capital.

Responsibilities:

• Work with technology and business leaders to identify pertinent research questions.
• Perform research tasks under the guidance of a Verisign thought leader.
• Document and present research results in appropriate forums (internal and external).

Qualifications:

• Current enrollment in a US-based PhD or MS degree program in Computer Science or a related field; PhD students are preferred.
• Availability for ~12 weeks of summer 2015 and a willingness to relocate to Reston, VA for that period. There is some flexibility with respect to start dates and duration.
• Involvement in applied/operational research; publications are a significant plus (send a complete CV).
• Experience in one or more of the following technology areas:
  • Internet infrastructure and application protocols, including TCP/IP, DNS, BGP, and HTTP.
  • Internet security and privacy, including DDoS, DNSSEC, and authentication.
  • Internet profiling and measurement, including crawling and content analysis.
  • Applied machine-learning, especially the extraction of metadata and NLP features.
  • Big data technologies (Hadoop, Hive, Pig) and statistical analysis.
  • Strong interpersonal and communications skills.

LEARN MORE here

APPLY DIRECTLY here

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UMBC will play an exciting role in strengthening our nation’s cybersecurity infrastructure through a new Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) announced this week. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) awarded a contract to operate the center to the MITRE Corporation, which will partner with the University System of Maryland (USM) to carry out the center’s goals. UMBC and the University of Maryland, College Park are collaborators with MITRE and Anupam Joshi, director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity, will serve in a leadership role for UMBC.

The government sponsors fewer than 50 FFRDCs across the country, and all are designed to tackle complex, long-term problems of significant national interest. According to NIST, this is the first center that is “solely dedicated to enhancing the security of the nation’s information systems.” The contract to operate the FFRDC has a maximum amount of $5 billion over 25 years.

“Securing our cyber infrastructure requires government, industry, and higher education to work closely together, and this center makes that powerful collaboration possible,” says UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski. “Further, it solidifies Maryland’s role as the hub of cybersecurity in our nation.”

Maryland hosts a large number of federal agencies and companies on the cutting edge of cybersecurity, and the USM is nationally recognized for its research and education programs in the field. This vital combination means that the State of Maryland is uniquely positioned to successfully nurture this research and development center.

U.S. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski congratulated the USM and MITRE on this opportunity, saying, “This new center unites the knowledge of the government with the know-how of the private sector to develop cyber technology solutions needed to protect dot-com entities and make our cyber infrastructure more resilient.”

UMBC’s Anupam Joshi says, “While national security interests are usually central to the security conversation, this center will also work to meet the cybersecurity needs of individuals and businesses in a variety of sectors, such as healthcare and energy. Individuals and small and medium-size businesses constitute a major part of the nation’s cyberinfrastructure, but can lack the resources and technical expertise to respond effectively to cyber threats.”

This new FFRDC will support the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE), which NIST, the state of Maryland, and Montgomery County, Md., established in 2012 to help businesses secure their data and digital infrastructure by bringing together information security experts from industry, government, and academia. It will further the NCCoE’s goal to foster public-private collaborations to identify and solve today’s most pressing cybersecurity challenges.

“This new FFRDC supporting NIST’s NCCoE will be a major addition to Maryland’s existing strengths in cybersecurity,” says Karl Steiner, Vice President for Research at UMBC. “I am delighted about this new strategic collaboration with our colleagues at College Park and at MITRE, and about the opportunities to further expand and apply our scientific capabilities in an area of such critical importance.”

To learn more about this new collaboration, see the announcement from NIST and the joint announcement from MITRE and the USM.

Embodied Interaction: Systems, Experiments, Models

Rob St. Amant
North Carolina State University

1:00pm Friday, 10 October 2015, ITE 325b

Over the past several years, engineering models for human-computer interaction — models that predict and explain performance in quantitative terms–have received increasing attention. In this talk, I’ll give an overview of experimentation and modeling work in my lab, in the areas of mobile interaction, augmented reality, and accessibility. Our research attempts to provide insight into emerging areas of HCI, where interaction goes beyond conventional desktop user interfaces to encompass the influences of physical body movement and cognitive strategies on performance.

Robert St. Amant is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at North Carolina State University; his degrees are from Johns Hopkins and the University of Massachusetts. He is on the editorial board of the Oxford Series on Cognitive Models and Architectures, and he is a former member of the steering committee for the ACM Intelligent User Interfaces conference. His current research is on human-computer interaction and cognitive modeling; past topics have included intelligent user interfaces, exploratory data analysis, and animal tool use. In 2012 his popular science book, Computing for Ordinary Mortals, was published by Oxford University Press.

Host: Tim Oates, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Last weekend, over 170 college and high school students converged upon UMBC for the second hackUMBC hackathon. This free event, spanning 24 continuous hours, brought students together to create, make, or otherwise “hack” together new technology projects, either individually or as a team. As with many hackathons, there was no limit to the type of technology students could work on — hackUMBC 2014 projects ranged from developing mobile apps and assistive/wearable technologies to applied virtual reality representations of cyberspace, a ‘smart’ autonomous tank, and reverse-engineering (and then porting to Linux) the Myo command protocol. The sky was the limit in terms of ideas and skill levels — indeed, many attendees were first-time “hackers” looking to learn programming or engineering concepts in an inclusive and fun environment.

Following opening ceremonies and brief remarks by the sponsors and UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski, participants took over the second floor ITE classrooms Saturday-into-Sunday before moving into the UC Ballroom to showcase their products before a panel of judges. Prizes were awarded for the most innovative, polished, complex, and useful ideas/technologies.

hackUMBC 2014 was well-supported by corporate sponsors, including Raytheon, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, MITRE, and ClearEdge Solutions, among others. Campus partners included the Alex Brown Center for Enterpreneurship and the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Additional support, participant encouragement, and round-the-clock motivational energy was provided by Mike Swift, chairman of Major League Hacking.

hackUMBC was organized and run by Michael Bishoff (Junior, CMPE), Randi Williams (Junior, CMPE), and Minhaz Mahmud (Senior, CMSC). CSEE’s Dr. Rick Forno serves as faculty advisor.

Special thanks to the UMBC volunteer judges Dr. Charles Nicholas, Shawn Lupoli, Geoff Weiss, and the many student volunteers who assisted in making the event a success.

Opening Ceremonies…

UMBC’s Sekar Kulandaivel (Junior, CMPE) talks about his summer internship at Northrop Grumman and what his team was able to “hack” together for the company…

UMBC President Hrabowski…

Hard at work through the day, night, and following morning…

Many attendees came prepared…

Showcase & Judging on Sunday …

For more information on hackUMBC visit the club’s website or contact the club at Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

(photos by MLH and/or Rick Forno)

Each year, the UMBC Alumni Association presents awards to honor alumni for their professional and personal achievements and service to the University. The 2014 awards will be presented on Thursday, October 9, 2014, at an awards ceremony in the Performing Arts and Humanities Building on the UMBC campus.

This year’s Alumna of the Year for Engineering and Information Technology is Claudia Pearce (’89 M.S. in Computer Science and ’94 Ph.D. in Computer Science) who is currently the Senior Computer Science Authority at the NSA. In her time at the NSA, Pearce has created development programs for computer science and information technology new-hires to NSA, a short-course series on high-end topics in CS and IT, a summer intern program and organized a distinguished lecture series. In addition, she has created a computer science grants program with the National Science Foundation, for computer science education and outreach. She has also served on the Advisory Board of the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology.

Prior to becoming the NSA’s Senior Computer Science Authority, Pearce served as the Chief of Knowledge Discovery Sciences, where she directed a research team that created Knowledge Discovery applications.

From 2000-2003, Pearce was part of the Senior Technical Development Program. While involved with this program, Pearce collaborated with organizations such as the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and Magnify Research, Inc., on topics such as “applications of data mining techniques to natural language processing.” As a Senior Computer Scientist from 1985-2000, Pearce conducted research in the area of databases and information retrieval systems.

Pearce received a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Florida in 1973, graduating with High Honors and a Phi Beta Kappa distinction. She received an M.S. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Florida in 1974. In 1989 she received an M.S. in Computer Science from UMBC.  She also received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMBC in 1994.

Pearce has described UMBC’s campus atmosphere as “very collegial.” She goes on to describe her decision to attend UMBC vs. College Park, explaining that, “[When] I came to UMBC…it seemed like a really friendly place. It was very small at the time, so it seemed like it was accessible…whereas College Park was this really big, almost overwhelming kind of environment. And I liked the small environment, the close-knit environment that you get at UMBC.”

Pearce is currently involved in research at UMBC. Earlier this year, she helped to organize a workshop sponsored by the NSF and the Department of Defense, titled “Beyond Watson: Predictive Analytics and Big Data.”

The research that inspired the Beyond Watson workshop ties into questions that are relevant to information retrieval systems. Questions such as “how do you find the right documents out of very large collections of text?” and “what are the kinds of languages, tools, techniques, infrastructure [needed]…to build our own Watson?” Pearce notes that she’s “always been interested in databases, and in particular text and natural language databases, and this notion of answering questions.” Furthermore, information retrieval systems was the topic of her Ph.D. dissertation.

Claudia lives with her husband Jonathan Cohen in Glenwood, MD. She is “an avid snow skier, quilt maker and trumpet player.”

On September 18, students from UMBC’s Graduate Cybersecurity Program joined others from Penn State, Penn State Harrisburg, and the Dickinson College of Law at the U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership and Development to participate in a scripted wargame considering the strategic aspects of cybersecurity during the 2014 Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence Symposium.

Students were provided the opportunity to be decision makers in one of six entitites ranging from DHS, DoD, and DoJ to state government and private sector organizations. The morning scenario required students to ascertain the roles and responsibilities of “their” agencies/organizations, their capabilities and liabilities, and decide who they should collaborate with to ensure that appropriate actions were taken and actionable information was conveyed appropriately. During the afternoon session, students considered whether acts of war were committed, decided what the appropriate steps were to counter those acts, and which agencies should be in the lead. The day concluded with a plenary session where each student group discussed their approach to the real-world scenario faced that day.

UMBC graduate cybersecurity students taking part in the event include Mark Lewis, Charles Swassing, Rina Chios, Chris Day, Sara Purdum, Michael Sterrett, Kristian Behel, and Joe Kirik (not pictured).

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UMBC’s involvement was coordinated by CYBR faculty member Bill Waddell, who is the Director, Mission Command and Cyberspace Division and General George S. Patton Chair of Operations Research and Analysis Center for Strategic Leadership and Development at the US Army War College.

The Baltimore Code Craftsmanship meetup group will hold its monthly meeting at 6:30pm on Thursday, September 18 at Betamore (1111 Light St.) in Baltimore (map). The meetup is for the students and software developers in the Baltimore area that care about the quality of their work and want to practice and improve their programming skills, share what they know and learn new things from others.

The meetup is a hands on coding user group with no presentations. Each meeting will be a dojo where we will go through a challenging software craftsmanship exercise that focuses on clean code, test-driven development, design patterns, and refactoring. We will pair up and practice on a kata in order to learn and apply the values, principles, and disciplines of software craftsmanship. It’s also a great way to meet others in Baltimore’s computing community to network and find out about internships and jobs.

The September meeting will go through the next Test-Driven Development (TDD) exercise focusing on solutions using pair programming, test-driven development, clean code and refactoring.

Come with your laptop equipped with your favorite programming and unit testing environment. Be prepared to pair up, code, learn, share and have fun!

Join the meetup and register to attend Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. .