CSEE professor Nilanjan Banerjee was interviewed at the Microsoft Faculty Summit on UMBC research that is developing sensors that can be sewn into textiles such as clothing or bedding and used control devices though gestures. Professor Banerjee is working with colleagues Ryan Robucci, Chintan Patel and Sandy McCombe-Waller (UMB) and students to prototype the hardware sensors and software components that can be part of an Internet of Things environment.

With support from Microsoft, their experimental systems are using Microsoft’s Lab of Things platform for research on connected devices in homes and other spaces. One of the use cases driving the research is helping people with limited mobility lead more independent lives by enabling them to control the environment. Buz Chmielewski, who became a quadriplegic after a surfing accident, is helping the team test and refine the system and its usability.

By voice vote, the US House of Representatives passed HR 5031, the STEM Education Act of 2014, to define STEM education to include computer science, and to support existing STEM education programs at the National Science Foundation.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, … For purposes of carrying out STEM education activities at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Environmental Protection Agency, the term “STEM education” means education in the subjects of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, including other academic subjects that build on these disciplines such as computer science.

UMBC was cited as a university with one of the “Top 15 Affordable Computer Science Degree Programs“. The program came in as number ten based on five key points of comparison extracted from several data sources.

“We’ve identified five key points of comparison that will enable prospective students to see differences and similarities between what are the top schools, and what are the accessible, affordable, but still high quality options. The five data points are Acceptance Rate, Graduation Rate, Recognition, Tuition, and Return on Investment. The schools are listed in order of least to greatest return on investment, because this will allow students to see what they can expect in terms of the economic value of their education. For information about sources, see the note at the end of this article.”

UMBC offers a broad range of strong undergraduate and graduate degree programs in the computing disciplines including computer science, computer engineering, cybersecurity, electrical engineering, information systems, human-centered computing, healthcare information systems, and bioinformatics. These programs currently have more than 3,000 students enrolled. Together, they give rise to an intellectually rich and diverse community of faculty, staff and students supported by a world-class computing infrastructure.

Northpoint is a free online fundraising tool that helps schools, teams, and organizations
raise money and awareness with apparel and promotional products. Founded in 2010, NP is undergoing a
significant revamp, integrating several new online user interface (UI) tools that will increase efficiency and
participation. Northpoint is seeking additional team members to support development of integral parts of the
website and mobile applications. Northpoint’s existing team currently consists of a web developer, web
designer, and project manager. Most of the Northpoint team members live in different areas of the country,
and for that reason, most correspondence is conducted through phone, email, and video conference.

The chosen web developer(s) should be self-sufficient and have experience with:

• Web-based CMS (Content Management System) (i.e. Joomla)
• PHP
• JQuery
• Ajax
• Databases
• PHP Sessions
• MVC – Model-View-Controller style programming
• CSS

As a growing company, development responsibilities may vary or change, but this is a part-time position. The
chosen web developer should be flexible, able to allot time the necessary amount to this effort, and produce
high-quality work. The development responsibilities will be discussed in more depth after initial
correspondence.

Due to high expectations of the position, integral involvement in the growth of the company, and necessary
commitment to the company’s success, compensation will be in the form of equity (i.e. ownership) and/or
royalties of Northpoint Fundraising, LLC. Terms and conditions shall be discussed and agreed upon prior to
beginning any work.

If you are interested in this opportunity or have questions, I encourage you to contact me at
Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. as soon as possible. Please include a statement of qualifications/résumé (not
required), and a reference to any applicable websites or projects that would support qualification for this
position (not required, but may be requested).

UMBC CSEE Professor Marie desJardins will be a guest on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi show from 12:00 to 1:00pm tomorrow, Tuesday, June 17, 2014. She will be one of three experts discussing Coding and the Computer Science Conundrum with Kojo and callers. Listen live over the air on WAMU (88.5 mhz) or online.  After she broadcast, you can hear it on the segment’s page or download it from their podcast archives.

The program’s description is:

“For years following the dot-com bust, computer science enrollment plunged steadily, prompting hand wringing over America’s competitiveness in technology and innovation. But a nationwide push to bring coding to classrooms, plus rapid innovation in apps and communications, has prompted a 13.4% jump in computer science majors in the 2012-13 academic year alone. But retaining those budding programmers — especially females and minorities — remains a significant challenge. Kojo explores local and national efforts to boost computer science competency, and learns how educators are revamping computational learning to give it relevance far beyond the classroom.”

The expert guests are:

• Pat Yongpradit, Director of Education, Code.org
• Marie desJardins, Prof. of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
• Janice Cuny, Program Director of Computing Education, National Science Foundation

Listeners can ask questions or make comments during the show via Twitter (@kojoshow) or phone (800-433-8850).

Innovations in Cybersecurity Education Workshop

University of Maryland, Baltimore County
9:30 – 4:30 Tuesday, 24 June 2014

Innovations in Cybersecurity Education is a regional workshop on cybersecurity education at all levels, from Kindergarden through post-graduate. It will include discussions about cyber competitions, hands-on exercises, educational games, and integrating cybersecurity throughout the curriculum. There will be an opportunity to experience hands-on cyber defense exercises and to play new computer security education games, including SecurityEmpire developed at UMBC.

The workshop is free and open to the public — all are welcome to attend. This workshop will to be of interest to educators, school administrators, undergraduate and graduate students, and government officials.

Please see the links above for the schedule and location and register to help us plan for the number of participants.

The workshop is organized by Dr. Alan T. Sherman with support provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant 1241576.

• Thwarting Obfuscated Malware via Differential Fault Analysis 
  Guillermo Suarez-Tangil, Juan E. Tapiador, Flavio Lombardi, and Roberto Di Pietro describe how detecting malware in mobile applications is increasingly complex as malware developers are better able to hide or obfuscate malicious components. Alterdroid is a dynamic-analysis tool that compares behavioral differences between an original app and numerous automatically generated versions of it containing carefully injected modifications.
  
• RootGuard: Protecting Rooted Android Phones
  Though popular for achieving full operation functionality, rooting Android phones opens these devices to significant security threats. Yuru Shao, Xiapu Luo, and Chenxiong Qian describe how RootGuard offers protection from malware with root privileges while providing user flexibility and control.
  
• Smart AppStore: Expanding the Frontiers of Smartphone Ecosystems
  According to Félix Gómez Mármol, Gregor Rozinaj, Sebastian Schumann, Ondrej Lábaj, and Juraj Kačur, Smart AppStore offers five important features for today's smartphone users: biometric authentication, multilevel authorization, gesture recognition and navigation, user-tailored reputation scores, and identity management.
  
• Securing the "Bring Your Own Device" Paradigm
  The current mobile application distribution model cannot cope with the complex security requirements of the emerging "bring your own device" (BYOD) paradigm. Alessandro Armando, Gabriele Costa, Luca Verderame, and Alessio Merlo explain how a secure metamarket architecture supports the definition and enforcement of BYOD policies and offers a promising prototype implementation tested under realistic conditions. 
  
• Security in the Firefox OS and Tizen Mobile Platforms
  Olga Gadyatskaya, Fabio Massacci, and Yury Zhauniarovich explore how emerging mobile platforms Firefox OS and Tizen are learning from Android's security successes and trying to avoid its limitations. Although these platforms offer largely novel solutions, they can still learn from one another.
  

The Conquer site provides resources for undergraduate students interested in research, graduate school, and research careers in computing-related fields. It also provides resources for faculty mentors, looking to engage and advise undergraduates in research and prepare them for graduate school in computing fields. The site is maintained by the Computing Research Association, an organization (of which our department is a member!) with the mission to enhance innovation by joining with industry, government and academia to strengthen research and advanced education in computing.

Specific topics of interest to undergraduate students that are covered are:

• What is computing research
• Finding research opportunities
• Undergraduate research awards
• Why go to graduate school?
• The graduate school application process

Ph.D. Dissertation proposal

Creating a Collaborative Situational-Aware IDPS

Lisa Mathews

11:00am Tuesday, 10 June 2014, ITE 346

Traditional intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPSs) have well known limitations that decrease their utility against many kinds of attacks. Current state-of-the-art IDPSs are point based solutions that perform a simple analysis of host or network data and then flag an alert. Only known attacks whose signatures have been identified and stored in some form can be discovered by most of these systems. They cannot detect “zero day” type attacks or attacks that use “low-and-slow” vectors. Many times an attack is only revealed by post facto forensics after some damage has already been done.

To address these issues, we are developing a semantic approach to intrusion detection that uses traditional as well non-traditional sensors collaboratively. Traditional sensors include hardware or software such as network scanners, host scanners, and IDPSs like Snort. Potential non-traditional sensors include open sources or information such as online forums, blogs, and vulnerability databases which contain textual descriptions of proposed attacks or discovered exploits. After analyzing the data streams from these sensors, the information extracted is added as facts to a knowledge base using a W3C standards based ontology that our group has developed. We have also developed rules/policies that can reason over the facts to identify the situation or context in which an attack can occur. By having different sources collaborate to discover potential security threats and create additional rules/policies, the resulting situational-aware IDPS is better equipped to stop creative attacks such as those that follow a low-and-slow intrusion pattern. Leveraging information from these heterogeneous sources leads to a more robust, situational-aware IDPS that is better equipped to detect complicated attacks. This will allow for detection in soft real time. We will create a prototype of this system and test the efficiency and accuracy of its ability to detect complex malware.

Committee: Drs. Anupam Joshi (Chair), Tim Finin, John Pinkston, Charles Nicholas, Claudia Pearce, Yul Williams

Mobile Analytics: An Enabler for Urban Lifestyle Applications

Professor Archan Misra

School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University

10-11:00am 24 June 2014, ITE 459, UMBC

This talk will describe various research initiatives related to the theme of “urban mobile analytics and applications”, which utilizes smartphone sensor data from multiple individuals to extract near-real time insights about individual and collective behavior in urban public spaces. A major part of this research is being conducted under the auspices of the LiveLabs Experimentation Platform, a unique urban behavioral testbed effort that enables an ecosystem of industry partners to test advanced context-based applications on a pool of approximately 30,000 real-world users in multiple real-world public spaces in Singapore. Besides describing LiveLabs-related research in areas related to energy-efficient mobile sensing and large-scale mobile analytics (e.g., queuing analytics, group detection and adaptive indoor localization). I will describe the role of such analytics for a couple of novel industry-driven applications: (a) in-store shopper intent monitoring and (b) large-scale mobile crowd-tasking.

Archan Misra is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at Singapore Management University (SMU), and a Director of the LiveLabs research center at SMU. Over the past 14 years (as part of his previous jobs with IBM Research and Telcordia Technologies), he has worked extensively in the areas of mobile systems, wireless networking and pervasive computing, and is a co-author on papers that received the Best Paper awards in EUC 2008, ACM WOWMOM 2002 and IEEE MILCOM 2001. Archan’s broad research interests lie in the areas of pervasive computing and mobile systems, with specific current focus on applying mobile sensing and real-time analytics to understand human lifestyle-driven activities in urban spaces. He is presently an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and the Elsevier Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing and chaired the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC) from 2005-2007. Archan holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park.

Host: Prof. Nirmalya Roy, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.