Scholar Visit Day 2018: Dates and Panel Times

To participate, please click on the button below and submit your information. Please note, you do not need to participate in all three events - any one of the three would be fine!

Sign Up at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdA8pwda944egK4AltDoRyv9ZflYWuBCExzo879cW0Zge8a8g/viewform

UMBC's 22nd Annual Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD) is April 25, 2018

Have mentor-led research or creative work to present? Present a powerpoint, poster, display your artwork, digital story, video game, film, choreography, engineered prototype, spoken word performance, musical composition... get creative!

Application Deadline:
This MONDAY, Feb. 26, 2018 at 5pm.

Applying is easy- submit a 200-word abstract and mentor support form!

Go to: ur.umbc.edu/urcad

Questions? aprilh@umbc.edu

UMBC’s first-ever Black and Gold Rush Giving Day is setting out to have a major impact, raising funds to support UMBC students today and building community connections for the future.

Beginning at midnight on Wednesday, February 28, 2018, UMBC will embark on a marathon day of giving. A first for the UMBC campus, the goal of Giving Day is to secure as many donors as possible in a 24-hour period. With an ambitious goal of 350 donors, UMBC is relying on the entirety of Retriever Nation to make it a reality.

“Giving Day is an embodiment of what we’re capable of,” says UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski. “UMBC is over 70,000 alumni strong, with thousands of faculty, staff, family members, and friends who are such an important part of our story. We’re calling on this entire Retriever family to join us in celebration on Giving Day, and to show what we can achieve together in support of our students.” President Hrabowski will take over UMBC’s Twitter account in the midst of the excitement on February 28.

“Black and Gold Rush will be a special day for our close-knit community,” says Joanne Meredith, director of annual giving. “Every gift makes a difference. Deciding how to show our support—whether it’s a gift to athletics, student organizations, or academics—is a wonderful chance to reflect on and share what at UMBC has most impacted our lives.”

Thirteen causes have been identified as areas of support for the inaugural Giving Day. Donors are encouraged to choose one or more of these causes to contribute to during the day. One option, the Stay Black and Gold Student Emergency Fund, directly supports students who find themselves in moments of financial stress, who just need a little extra support to complete their degree. This fund embodies the sense of community generosity behind the entire Black and Gold Rush project.

“Giving Day represents a wonderful opportunity for the entire UMBC community to show its Black and Gold Pride. By making a gift, thanking someone for their generosity, or sharing stories about the impact that giving has had, everyone can be a part of this exciting event,” says Greg Simmons ’04, vice president of institutional advancement.

In honor of Black and Gold Rush, all Retrievers are invited to wear black and gold on February 28. To help support the cause, the UMBC Bookstore will offer 30% off UMBC logo merchandise the day before, on February 27.

Join in the celebration of UMBC spirit on February 28 by stopping by Lower Flat Tuesdays, which will serve as Giving Day headquarters. There, UMBC groups Mama’s Boys, The Stilettos, and Major Definition will perform and WMBC will host a live online broadcast, with plenty of giveaways.

Adding some extra energy to the festivities will be a competitive Giving Day ambassador challenge. Over the past several weeks, community members have been signing up to serve as social media ambassadors, boosting awareness about Giving Day across Retriever Nation. During Giving Day itself, participants will be able to watch their progress on a leaderboard to see which ambassadors have helped generate the most clicks and donations for their UMBC causes. Prizes will be awarded to the top three finishers.

Whether in class or at the office, walking around Hilltop Circle or studying abroad, all members of Retriever Nation can follow Giving Day live on February 28 on UMBC’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram (@UMBClife), and Snapchat (@UMBClife), and post their own thoughts on why supporting students is such a core UMBC value using #UMBC and #blackandgoldrush.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Experimentally Measuring the Circuit Complexity
of One-Way Boolean Functions

Brian Weber, CSEE, UMBC

12:00–1:00pm, Friday, 23 February 2018, ITE 229

I present preliminary results from an exhaustive search for one-way functions in certain classes of small Boolean functions.   One-way functions are functions that are easy to compute but hard to invert.  They are vital for cryptography, yet no one has proven their existence for arbitrary input sizes.  For any bounded circuit model of computation, it is possible to search exhaustively over all possible Boolean functions of restricted size and thereby determine for the searched class the maximum disparity between the complexity of any function and its inverse.  Throughout, we assume a circuit model in which each gate has fan-in 2 and fan-out 1.

In his 1985 dissertation at MIT, Steven Boyack carried out the first such search.  For any positive integers n and M, let F_n,M denote the set of Boolean functions with n inputs and Moutputs. Using circuit size as the complexity measure, Boyack searched the space of every combinatorial function in F_3,3 by searching each of 52 equivalency classes of functions in this space.  He found that every function class in this space has an identically sized inverse.  He was able to prove that functions do exist with more complex inverses outside the space he searched, but not by more than a constant factor.

In spring 2017, using circuit depth as the complexity measure, I searched all injective functions up to F_8,8 whose coordinate functions are in F_2,1.  A coordinate function in this context refers to the function that computes an individual output bit.  In addition, I searched up to F_4,4 allowing coordinate functions in F_3,1.  In the space I searched, the most one-way function has fixed depth of 1, and an inverse depth exactly equal to the input size of the function. That is, for each 2 < n < 9, the hardest inverse in the space I searched has a depth of n, where n is the number of input bits. In addition, a search space allowing a larger fan-in for the coordinate functions did not yield functions less invertible than were found in the original search space.

Brian Weber is a senior BS/MS computer engineering student and SFS scholar at UMBC.  He hopes to extend the work presented here into his Master’s thesis next year.  Email: *protected email*

Host: Alan T.  Sherman, *protected email*Support for this research was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant 1241576.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays.  All meetings are open to the public.

The post talk: Circuit Complexity of One-Way Boolean Functions, 12pm Fri 2/23, ITE229 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Experimentally Measuring the Circuit Complexity
of One-Way Boolean Functions

Brian Weber, CSEE, UMBC

12:00–1:00pm, Friday, 23 February 2018, ITE 229

I present preliminary results from an exhaustive search for one-way functions in certain classes of small Boolean functions.   One-way functions are functions that are easy to compute but hard to invert.  They are vital for cryptography, yet no one has proven their existence for arbitrary input sizes.  For any bounded circuit model of computation, it is possible to search exhaustively over all possible Boolean functions of restricted size and thereby determine for the searched class the maximum disparity between the complexity of any function and its inverse.  Throughout, we assume a circuit model in which each gate has fan-in 2 and fan-out 1.

In his 1985 dissertation at MIT, Steven Boyack carried out the first such search.  For any positive integers n and M, let F_n,M denote the set of Boolean functions with n inputs and Moutputs. Using circuit size as the complexity measure, Boyack searched the space of every combinatorial function in F_3,3 by searching each of 52 equivalency classes of functions in this space.  He found that every function class in this space has an identically sized inverse.  He was able to prove that functions do exist with more complex inverses outside the space he searched, but not by more than a constant factor.

In spring 2017, using circuit depth as the complexity measure, I searched all injective functions up to F_8,8 whose coordinate functions are in F_2,1.  A coordinate function in this context refers to the function that computes an individual output bit.  In addition, I searched up to F_4,4 allowing coordinate functions in F_3,1.  In the space I searched, the most one-way function has fixed depth of 1, and an inverse depth exactly equal to the input size of the function. That is, for each 2 < n < 9, the hardest inverse in the space I searched has a depth of n, where n is the number of input bits. In addition, a search space allowing a larger fan-in for the coordinate functions did not yield functions less invertible than were found in the original search space.

Brian Weber is a senior BS/MS computer engineering student and SFS scholar at UMBC.  He hopes to extend the work presented here into his Master’s thesis next year.  Email: *protected email*

Host: Alan T.  Sherman, *protected email*Support for this research was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant 1241576.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays.  All meetings are open to the public.

The post talk: Circuit Complexity of One-Way Boolean Functions, 12pm Fri 2/23, ITE229 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

The Education Apprentice functions as a critical member of the Education Department. This position is a part-time position designed to help individuals learn, grow, and contribute as an arts educator and administrator. This position is ideal for a focused and passionate young professional seeking next level experience.