The Daily Record recently named President Hrabowski and Alum Diane Bell-McKoy ’73, sociology, in their 2014 list of Influential Marylanders.

Influential Marylanders celebrates people who have made significant impacts in their fields and continue to be leaders in Maryland. Winners are chosen in the categories of civic leadership, communications, education, finance and more.

Bell-Mckoy, President and CEO of Associated Black Charities, was selected in the civic leadership category, while Dr. Hrabowski was chosen for his work as UMBC’s president in the education category. Dr. Hrabowski will also be inducted into the Circle of Excellence, as it is his third year as an Influential Marylander.

Congratulations, President Hrabowski and Diane Bell-Mckoy!

Facebook is paying much more for WhatsApp than it did for Instagram, but it’s getting more, too.

On Wednesday, Facebook announced the latest move in its quest for mobile social domination: it plans to buy popular messaging app WhatsApp for $16 billion in a cash and stock deal.

Many school districts up and down the East Coast and in the Midwest have been forced to cancel several school days this winter, and some districts in the Northeast have already announced students will forgo part of their spring breaks to make up for lost time.

Public Policy Professor and Graduate Program Director Dave Marcotte was cited in two recent articles in The Atlanta Journal Constitution and Bloomberg Businessweek for a study he did on the impact of winter weather on schools.

“Dave Marcotte, in a 2010 online article for Education Next, found that each additional inch of snow reduced the percentage of third-, fifth-, and eighth-grade students on math assessments by from one-half to seven-tenths of a percentage point,” reads the Bloomberg Businessweek article.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution article cites Marcotte’s research while examining the impact on learning a significant loss of time due to snow days can have on students.

“To put that seemingly small impact in context, Marcotte reports that in winters with average levels of snowfall (about 17 inches) the share of students testing proficient is about 1 to 2 percentage points lower than in winters with little to no snow,” the article stated.

You can read about Marcotte’s research in The Atlanta Journal Constitution here and Bloomberg Businessweek here.

Efficient Secure Multi-party Computing and Its Applications

Dr. Yan Huang
University of Maryland, College Park

1:00-2:00pm Monday, 24 February 2014, ITE 325b, UMBC

Secure Multiparty Computation offers cryptographically strong guarantees on the secrecy of data used in collaborative computing among untrusted parties. It has many important applications ranging from peer-to-peer secure auction to privacy-preserving data mining. In this talk, I will present my experience in making secure computation practical. I will also share my vision on how to blend modern cryptography, programming languages, and artificial intelligence research to solve interesting cyber-security problems.

Dr. Yan Huang is a research associate at the University of Maryland and the Maryland Cybersecurity Center. Dr. Huang is interested in developing secure protocols, with applications in private collaborative data mining, secure cloud computing, and cyber-physical systems. His research combines techniques from systems, cryptography, and programming languages to build secure systems. He is the creator of FastGC, a practical secure computation software framework, which has been downloaded more than 500 times and used in several research projects by both academia and industry labs world-wide. Dr. Huang graduated from University of Virginia with a Ph.D in Computer Science in 2012.

Political Science Professor Thomas Schaller writes in his latest op-ed published in The Baltimore Sun that while polls show Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown with a commanding lead in the Democratic primary for governor, continuing with a mistake-free campaign will be the key to victory in June.

Schaller writes Attorney General Douglas Gansler and Del. Heather Mizeur, Brown’s opponents in the race, haven’t gained traction statewide and are competing for votes in Montgomery County while Brown has gained widespread support.

“Mix in a string of union endorsements and the backing of Gov. Martin O’Malley, U.S. senators Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin, half of the state’s U.S. House delegation, and scads of state legislators and county officials, and there’s little doubt Mr. Brown is the party establishment’s choice,” Schaller writes.

In his column titled “Slow and steady wins the race for Brown,” Schaller argues even with strong backing from the Democratic establishment, Brown should focus on not making any major missteps in the months ahead.

“That said, and given the large chunk of undecided Democrats, Mr. Brown’s task is simple: Don’t blow it. As sometimes happens, being perceived as inevitable is no guarantee of inevitability,” Schaller added.

You can read the full op-ed in The Baltimore Sun here.