Plan to attend the MD/PhD Roadshow on Monday, October 4 at 12 noon in LH 3. MD/PhD program directors from Johns Hopkins, University of Maryland Baltimore, and University of Pennsylvania will be here to meet with students. The event is open to the campus.

Ars Technica has an an article on bad Android apps, Some Android apps caught covertly sending GPS data to advertisers.

“The results of a study conducted by researchers from Duke University, Penn State University, and Intel Labs have revealed that a significant number of popular Android applications transmit private user data to advertising networks without explicitly asking or informing the user. The researchers developed a piece of software called TaintDroid that uses dynamic taint analysis to detect and report when applications are sending potentially sensitive information to remote servers.

They used TaintDroid to test 30 popular free Android applications selected at random from the Android market and found that half were sending private information to advertising servers, including the user’s location and phone number. In some cases, they found that applications were relaying GPS coordinates to remote advertising network servers as frequently as every 30 seconds, even when not displaying advertisements. These findings raise concern about the extent to which mobile platforms can insulate users from unwanted invasions of privacy.”

TaintDroid is an experimental system that “analyses how private information is obtained and released by applications ‘downloaded’ to consumer phones”. A paper on the system will be presented at the 2010 USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation later this month.

TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones, William Enck, Peter Gilbert, Byung-gon Chun, Landon P. Cox, Jaeyeon Jung, Patrick McDaniel, and Anmol N. Sheth, OSDI, October 2010.

The project, Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones has a good overview site with a FAQ and demo.

This is just one example of a rich and complex area full of trade-offs. We want our systems and devices to be smarter and to really understand us — our preferences, context, activities, interests, intentions, and pretty much everything short of our hopes and dreams. We then want them to use this knowledge to better serve us — selecting music, turing the ringer on and off, alerting us to relevant news, etc. Developing this technology is neither easy nor cheap and the developers have to profit from creating it. Extracting personal information that can be used or sold is one model — just as Google and others do to provide better ad placement on the Web.

Here’s a quote from the Ars Technical article that resonated with me.

“As Google says in its list of best practices that developers should adopt for data collection, providing users with easy access to a clear and unambiguous privacy policy is really important.”

We, and many others, are trying to prepare for the next step — when users can define their own privacy policies and these will be understood and enforced by their devices.

Please note: Because of rain, this event will be postponed until Thursday, October 21st at 4 pm.

Thursday, October 14, 2010
4-5 p.m.
Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park

Contact: Thomas Moore
Director of Arts & Culture
410-455-3370
tmoore@umbc.edu

UMBC's Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presents Creative Acts: Site Specific Dance and Music in the Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park, a celebration featuring performance art inspired by the location. The Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park, located on the south side of campus, was established in 2001.

Creative Acts: Site Specific Dance and Music in the Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park features two acts, the first entitled Thirty Oaks, a dance and music collaboration, and the second entitled Songs from a Public Diary, which makes use of writings from comment books left in the park since its inception. The event will end with a talk-back with the performers.

Act One: Thirty Oaks
The first segment of the presentation showcases Thirty Oaks, a site-specific work that celebrates the Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park with dance, music and visual imagery. This project joins choreographer Meghan Flanigan, sound artist Timothy Nohe, and visual artist Antoinette Suiter in a multidisciplinary collaboration involving UMBC dance students and Baltimore musicians. Elements will spring from and be united with the space itself: the dancers will move through, around, and with the trees, weaving a moving sculpture that reflects the patterns of trees and rocks. The musicians will likewise move through the space, creating sounds from a visual score inspired by both Fluxus practices and the shape of the oak leaves in the park. The audience will be scattered among the trees to watch the emerging movements and sounds from their unique perspective.

Thirty Oaks features choreography by Meghan Flanigan, UMBC adjunct faculty member and Imaging and Digital Arts MFA candidate; dance performance by Kate Brundrett, Ravae Duhaney, Josephine N. Kalema, Emily Kimak, Franki Trout; a sound composition for four musicians (Rose Hammer Burt, Tiffany DeFoe, John Dierker, Will Redman) by Timothy Nohe, UMBC associate professor; sculptural costumes and sets by Antoinette Suiter, visual artist and Imaging and Digital Arts MFA candidate. This portion of the event is supported in part by the TKF Foundation.

Act Two: Songs from a Public Diary
Song 1: Dear Lover; Song 2: I Wish He Could See; Song 3: A Day in the Journal

Songs from a Public Diary features musical settings of texts taken from a public journal preserved in the park. For years, students, faculty, staff, and visitors have written in the journal, with entries ranging from letters of appreciation for the beautiful space and its peaceful atmosphere to college trials and tribulations.

Senior UMBC Linehan Artist Scholars and music composition majors Charles Miller and Shane Parks have taken three of these journal entries and set them to music. Inspired by the language, tone, design, and emotion of the posts, the composers sought to capture the rare honesty displayed in the writings.

CADVC Executive Director Symmes Gardner will deliver remarks between the two acts. A talk-back will follow the entire event at 5:15 in the Fine Arts Building Amphitheatre.

General Public Information
Admission is free. Public metered parking is available in the Commons Garage.
UMBC Arts website: http://www.umbc.edu/arts
Phone: 410-455-3188
Rain date: Thursday, October 21st

Directions
-- From I-95 take exit 47B. Take Route 166 toward Catonsville and then follow signs to the UMBC Theatre. Parking is available in The Commons Garage.
-- From I-695, take Exit 12C (Wilkens Avenue) and continue one-half mile to the entrance of UMBC at the roundabout intersection of Wilkens Avenue and Hilltop Road. Turn left and follow signs to the UMBC Theatre. Parking is available in The Commons Garage.
-- Online campus map: http://www.umbc.edu/aboutumbc/campusmap/

Images for Media
High resolution images for media are available online:
http://www.umbc.edu/newsevents/arts/hi-res/

You may view or download this release as a pdf file.