MS Thesis Defense

Situation Aware Intrusion Detection Model

Sumit More

9:00am Friday, 27 April 2012, ITE 346, UMBC

Today, information technology and cyber-services have become the foundation pillars of every business and manufacturing industry. The importance of cyber-services and their extensive use by every section of the society has paved the way for cyber-crimes like espionage, politically motivated attacks, credit card frauds, unauthorized infrastructure access, denial-of-service attacks, and stealing of valuable data. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are applications which monitor cyber-systems to identify any malicious activities, generate an alert when such an activity is detected, and redress the problem if possible. Most of the intrusion detection/prevention systems available today are based on rule-based or signature based activity monitoring which detect threats and vulnerabilities by cross-referencing the threat or vulnerability signatures in their databases. These Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) face limitations in detecting newly published attacks or variants of existing attacks. They are also point solutions that focus on a single system/component.

We argue that integrating information coming from multiple data channels can lead to a better threat detection model. Data source of web including blogs, chat-rooms, forums etc. can be a good source of information for upcoming attacks or attacks whose signatures have not yet been tracked for the intrusion detection systems to catch. Semantic integration of the data sources from web, information from IDS/IPS modules at the network and host level, and the expert knowledge can be used to create a ‘Situation Aware Intrusion Detection Model’ which can lead to better intrusion detection and prevention results. In this work, we present such a system which makes use of semantic web technologies to find relationships between the information gathered from the web, sensor data coming from IDS/IPS modules and network activity monitors, and reasons over this data and expert provided rules in-order to detect possibility of a cyber attack.

Thesis Committee: Professors Anupam Joshi (chair), Tim Finin and Yelena Yesha

“Annual conference showcases UMBC’s focus on undergraduate research,” the Baltimore Sun announced this morning. The article highlights the hard work of over 200 UMBC students who participated in this year’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD), from fields as diverse as political science, chemical engineering and visual arts.

URCAD is “like a middle-school science fair, only for college-age people of intimidating drive and intellect,” writes reporter Childs Walker. In addition to providing undergraduates with this opportunity to share their scholarship, UMBC also offers competitive Undergraduate Research Awards of up to $1,500 and publishes a selection of projects in an undergraduate research journal.

Student projects highlighted in the Sun article include Macy Bokhari’s research on “Implications of the Arab Spring on Women’s Rights” and Dagmawi Tilahun and Kevin Tran’s design for low-cost incubators for premature infants. Watch videos of UMBC undergrads talking about their work on the URCAD blog.

3,216 students (30.4% of the undergraduate population) voted in this year’s SGA election, the largest turnout in UMBC history (previous record: last year’s 2,521 votes).

Congratulations to all the newly elected leaders (in bold) and all of the students who had the courage to run. The new officers will be inaugurated at a public ceremony on Wednesday, May 9th, at noon, on the Quad.

PRESIDENT & EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT
Kaylesh Ramu & Kian Larijani — 1417 votes (46.4%)
Nana Asare & David Stonko — 1212 votes (39.7%)
Nate Buechler & Drew Kelly — 402 votes (13.2%)
Write-ins (total) — 41 votes (1.3%)

VICE PRESIDENT FOR STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS
Michelle Kuah — 1978 votes (93.1%)
Write-ins (total) — 151 votes (7.1%)

TREASURER
Chisom G. Ebinama — 1140 votes (54.0%)
Sam Spehr — 915 votes (43.3%)
Write-ins (total) — 65 votes (3.1 %)

SGA SENATE
(Top 11 candidates in bold have been elected)

Hannah Khan — 1096 votes
Fabian Omenankiti — 996 votes
Angela Mensah — 995 votes
Valerie Parks — 915 votes
Max Barnhart — 864 votes
Morgan Russo — 827 votes
Rebecca Behnke — 803 votes
Amaedi Etukudo — 799 votes
Yasmin Wands — 787 votes
Ganesh Mysore — 777 votes
Tyler McCafferty — 776 votes
Jacqueline Scott — 735 votes
Tavien Kimbrough — 712 votes
Ben Garmoe — 685 votes
Write-ins (total) — 79 votes

SGA FINANCE BOARD
(Top 5 candidates in bold have been elected)

Joshua Day — 1207 votes
Damani Lewis — 1201 votes
Macy Bokhari — 1027 votes
Mani Gupta — 1013 votes
Mark Crenshaw — 995 votes
Write-ins (total) — 86 votes

Fred L. Pincus, Professor of Sociology, will retire at the end of the semester after spending 44 years at UMBC. He came to Baltimore from UCLA as a 26-year-old instructor in 1968, the third year of UMBC’s existence. In addition to all the committee work needed to build the department and the university, Pincus taught courses in race relations, social psychology and introductory sociology. He also became very involved in the movement against the war in Vietnam and promoted campus policies to increase the number of African American students on campus. He was an early supporter of Black Studies and Women’s Studies.

In 1972, Pincus visited the People’s Republic of China. He was excited to see a non-capitalist country and for the next dozen years he learned all he could about China. He developed a course called “Social Organization in the People’s Republic of China,” wrote several articles about Chinese education and served on the editorial committee of New China, a magazine published by the US-China Friendship Association. He also became the China writer and later the education writer for The Guardian, an independent radical newsweekly published in New York.

In the late 1990s, Pincus joined the steering committee of UMBC’s (then) new Language, Literacy and Culture (LLC) doctoral program. He became interested in diversity in the United States in terms of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. He took over the graduate seminar “Constructing Race, Gender and Class” and developed the undergraduate course “Diversity and Pluralism: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.”

Over the years, Pincus published four books and monographs and several dozen scholarly articles on a wide range of topics including the role of community colleges in higher education, race relations, affirmative action, conservative education policy and diversity. Over the course of his career, he has taught between 6,000 and 7,000 undergraduates and several hundred graduate students in applied sociology, LLC, public policy and intercultural communication.

For the past several years, he has also been working on a memoir and has taken creative writing classes through the Gotham Writers Workshop based in New York City.

UMBC thanks Fred L. Pincus for his tremendous service to our community and to the field of higher education over the past 44 years.

* * * *

Have a memory of classes with Dr. Pincus? Share them in the comments below!

This originally appeared in UMBC Insights.

Total Votes Cast in this Election – 3216, the largest vote total EVER in a UMBC SGA election!

Percentage of Undergraduates Voting in Student Elections, 2012:

UMBC: 30.4%
U. Md. College Park: about 15%

Fred L. Pincus, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, will retire at the end of the semester after spending 44 years at UMBC. He came to Baltimore from UCLA as a 26-year-old instructor in 1968, the third year of UMBC’s existence. In addition to all the committee work needed to build the department and the university, Pincus taught courses in race relations, social psychology and introductory sociology. He also became very involved in the movement against the war in Vietnam and promoted campus policies to increase the number of African American students on campus. He was an early supporter of Black Studies and Women’s Studies.

In 1972, Pincus visited the People’s Republic of China. He was excited to see a non-capitalist country and for the next dozen years he learned all he could about China. He developed a course called “Social Organization in the People’s Republic of China,” wrote several articles about Chinese education and served on the editorial committee of New China, a magazine published by the US-China Friendship Association. He also became the China writer and later the education writer for The Guardian, an independent radical newsweekly published in New York.

In the late 1990s, Pincus joined the steering committee of UMBC’s (then) new Language, Literacy and Culture (LLC) doctoral program. He became interested in diversity in the United States in terms of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. He took over the graduate seminar “Constructing Race, Gender and Class” and developed the undergraduate course “Diversity and Pluralism: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.”

Over the years, Pincus published four books and monographs and several dozen scholarly articles on a wide range of topics including the role of community colleges in higher education, race relations, affirmative action, conservative education policy and diversity. Over the course of his career, he has taught between 6,000 and 7,000 undergraduates and several hundred graduate students in applied sociology, LLC, public policy and intercultural communication.

For the past several years, he has also been working on a memoir and has taken creative writing classes through the Gotham Writers Workshop based in New York City.

UMBC thanks Fred L. Pincus for his tremendous service to our community and to the field of higher education over the past 44 years.

The Baltimore Sun’s “Picture of Health” blog today highlights an exciting new online resource developed by UMBC’s Hilltop Institute in partnership with the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The interactive website provides expanded public access to Medicaid data, giving users a clear picture of population health by county.

The site includes maps that reveal the frequency of chronic diseases (like diabetes and asthma), mental health conditions and substance abuse across Maryland’s counties. “These data will help localities plan for health improvement,” said Frances B. Phillips, Deputy Secretary for Public Health Services. Governor O’Malley has also responded positively to the site, commenting on the value of Hilltop’s health data visualization.

On Measure Transformed Canonical Correlation Analysis

Dr. Koby Todros, University of Michigan

2:00pm Wednesday, 2 May 2012, ITE 325b

In this work linear canonical correlation analysis (LCCA) is generalized by applying a structured transform to the joint probability distribution of the considered pair of random vectors, i.e., a transformation of the joint probability measure defined on their joint observation space. This framework, called measure transformed canonical correlation analysis (MTCCA), applies LCCA to the data after transformation of the joint probability measure. We show that judicious choice of the transform leads to a modified canonical correlation analysis, which, in contrast to LCCA, is capable of detecting non-linear relationships between the considered pair of random vectors. Unlike kernel canonical correlation analysis, where the transformation is applied to the random vectors, in MTCCA the transformation is applied to their joint probability distribution. This results in performance advantages and reduced implementation complexity. The proposed approach is illustrated for graphical model selection in simulated data having non-linear dependencies, and for measuring long-term associations between companies traded in the NASDAQ and NYSE stock markets.

Koby Todros was born in Ashkelon, Israel, in 1974. He received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering at 2000, 2006, and 2011, respectively, from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, in the University of Michigan. His research interests include statistical signal processing and estimation theory with focus on association analysis, uniformly optimal estimation in the non-Bayesian theory, performance bounds for parameter estimation, blind source separation, and biomedical signal processing.