Credibility, Privacy and Policing on Online Social Media

Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK")
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, India

1:00-2:00pm Friday, 14 October 2016, ITE 229, UMBC

• TweetCred, a tool to extract intelligence from Twitter which can be useful to security analysts. TweetCred is backed by award-winning research publications in international and national venues.
• How police in India are using online social media, how we can use computer science understanding to help police engage more with citizens and increase the safety in society.
• OCEAN: Open source Collation of eGovernment data and Networks, how publicly available information on Government services can be used to profile citizens in India. This work obtained the Best Poster Award at Security and Privacy Symposium at IIT Kanpur, 2013 and it has gained a lot of traction in Indian media.
• Given an identity in one online social media, we are interested in finding the digital foot print of the user in other social media services, this is also called digital identity stitching problem. This work is also backed by award-winning research publication.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

An Introduction to the Security
of Software Defined Networks

Enis Golaszewski 

11:15am-12:30pm, Friday, 7 October, UMBC, ITE 229

2016 ADVANCE Distinguished Lecture Series

Against the Odds: How I Became a Computer Scientist

Dr. Claudia Pearce (UMBC MS '89, PhD '94) National Security Agency

4:30-5:30 Tuesday, 11 October 2016 Library and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn

Dr. Claudia Pearce, UMBC Alumna and Senior Computer Science Authority at NSA, shares a personal story of perseverance in her educational, research, and career journey as a computer scientist.

UMBC-ADVANCE is pleased to announce that alumna Dr. Claudia Pearce M.S., '89 and Ph.D., '94 and 2014 UMBC Alumna of the Year in COEIT is our 2016 ADVANCE Distinguished Speaker. Dr. Pearce is currently Senior Computer Science Authority at NSA, a member of UMBC's COEIT advisory board, and involved in collaborative research with our CSEE faculty.

The event will take place on Tuesday, October 11th and we are proud to incorporate this event into UMBC's 50th Anniversary celebrations. As part of this event, Dr. Pearce will deliver a campus-wide talk on her career trajectory at 4:30pm in the Library Gallery followed by a reception.

Analytic approaches to study the chronnectome
(time-varying brain connectivity)

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in moving functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) connectivity beyond simple scan-length averages into approaches that capture time-varying properties of connectivity. In this perspective we use the term “chronnectome” to describe such metrics that allow a dynamic view of coupling. We discuss the potential of these to improve characterization and understanding of brain function, which is inherently dynamic, not-well understood, and thus poorly suited to conventional scan-averaged connectivity measurements.

Prof. Vince Calhoun (EE Ph.D.’02, UMBC) is this year’s distinguished alum in the Engineering and Information Technology category and is the first speaker in our departmental seminar series.

Dr. Calhoun is currently Executive Science Officer at the Mind Research Network and a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of more than 450 full journal articles and over 550 technical reports, abstracts and conference proceedings. His work includes the development of flexible methods to analyze functional magnetic resonance imaging such as independent component analysis (ICA), data fusion of multimodal imaging and genetics data, and the identification of biomarkers for disease. Among other things, he leads an NIH P20 COBRE center grant on multimodal imaging of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression as well as an NSF EPSCoR grant focused on brain imaging and epigenetics of adolescent development. Dr. Calhoun is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), The Association for the Advancement of Science, The American Institute of Biomedical and Medical Engineers, The American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. He is currently chair of the IEEE Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) technical committee.

Host: Tulay Adali

About the CSEE Seminar Series: The UMBC Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering presents technical talks on current significant research projects of broad interest to the Department and the research community. Each talk is free and open to the public. We welcome your feedback and suggestions for future talks.

Organizers: Tulay Adali and Alan Sherman

In recent months, as the U.S. presidential election has approached, concerns over email hacks and the security of voting systems have frequently appeared in the news. Rick Forno, assistant director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity and director of the Cybersecurity Graduate Program at UMBC, recently described to WYPR’s Sheilah Kast that voting machines are just one part of a system that has concerning vulnerabilities.

“I think we have to separate the issue between voting machines and the overall voting process, because the two are related but have very different threat and vulnerability characteristics,” said Forno, who is particularly interested in the voting process and technologies used to collect data, as well as how that data is collected, counted, and reported.

A voting machine might report votes to a laptop across the room at a polling location, and that computer might then share data from the single polling place with a computer in a regional or state hub to be aggregated. In this scenario, Forno wonders how the laptop—as one small but crucial piece in the full chain of data transfer—is protected.

Data can be corrupted at moments when it is moving, and also when it is stationary, he says. “You’re looking at a range of security concerns that start with the individual voting machine in the voting booth, all the way up through the systems that officially record and report out the outcomes of an election.”

Voting machines include computers and other hardware that need to be maintained on a regular basis, much like computers that people use at work or at home. Forno warns that not regularly updating the technologies used in voting systems, can give hackers and researchers the opportunity to identify weaknesses and potential vulnerabilities in those systems.

Listen to the full segment “Cybersecurity and the Ballot Box” on the WYPR website.

Interested in learning more about Google? Come hear it from Googlers and UMBC alumni!