UMBC faculty, alumni and corporate partners discuss cybersecurity and industry challenges

Cybersecurity is regularly a headliner in the news, especially when personal information stored online has been compromised, whether through a breach, hack, or threat. On Thursday, December 7, UMBC hosted experts from industry and academia at the National Press Club to discuss the cyber challenges professionals face, and how those groups can work together to prepare future generations of cybersecurity professionals.

Scott Shane, a reporter with The New York Times, led the discussion with five panelists representing industry, small business, and higher education. “I think it’s fair to say the internet was built without adequate attention to security,” stated Shane, who writes about cyber and information attacks regularly. “It’s almost like somebody who starts a bank with branches all over the world, and after it’s up and running and has millions of account holders, suddenly starts to think about safes, locks on the doors and bulletproof glass. I think that’s sort of the stage that we’re at right now.”

UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski and Anupam Joshi, professor and chair of computer science and electrical engineering, and director of the Center for Cybersecurity at UMBC, were joined by alumni and partners who have been working on the challenge of educating the workforce together. Hrabowski explained that there are currently about 350,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs, and that number is expected to continue to grow. By 2021, it is anticipated that there will be approximately three million job openings in cyber-related fields.

Over the course of his professional career, Nigel Faulkner, chief technology officer at T. Rowe Price, has experienced the emergence of technology and many changes. “As the CTO of a medium-large company, cyber is a defensive investment for us. The best thing that can happen is nothing happens,” Faulkner said, adding that he is always thinking about whether the company is investing enough, doing the right thing, and making the right connections in the industry to keep clients’ information safe.

As president and founder of TCecure, LLC, and cybersecurity academic innovation officer for University System of Maryland (USM), Tina Williams ’02, computer science, shared the importance of building security into technology from the beginning, rather than adding these features on at the “tail end of a development cycle.” Not only does her company handle security, they also monitor threats and risks that can compromise the technology’s health. In her role at USM, Williams represents the system as a whole to integrate academia and academic research, relationships, and resources into what’s taking place nationally, at the Federally Funded Research and Development Centers.

As head of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity, Joshi explained that UMBC is combating these national challenges by partnering with industry and government leaders to conduct research that addresses specific real-world needs that benefit both. Collaborative relationships, such as UMBC’s work with Northrop Grumman and T. Rowe Price, is one way that UMBC is working to cultivate the next generation of cybersecurity talent.

As an alumna of UMBC and a current employee at Northrop Grumman, Lauren Mazzoli ’15, computer science and mathematics, M.S. ’17, computer science, a systems engineer in the Future Technical Leaders Program at Northrop Grumman, discussed her experience in the Cyber Scholars Program. The Cyber Scholars Program works to increase the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in the field. Mazzoli explained that her experience at UMBC, in the Cyber Scholars Program, and working alongside mentors on and off-campus led her to be involved with continuing to encourage women to pursue careers in cybersecurity. “For me it’s been a product of the relationship between academia and industry, that have allowed me to find my own career path, and at the same time help others find theirs,” she explained, noting her passion for helping students consider careers in cybersecurity and related fields.

“We know there’s a huge workforce that we need and we can’t fill that pipeline. So yes, we need more women, yes, we need students of all backgrounds, but we need diversity of thought, experience, education, and problem-solving skills,” said Mazzoli, adding that it is important for students to know from a young age that cybersecurity is a field they can pursue.

Adapted from a UMBC News article article written by Megan Hanks Photo by Abnet Shiferaw ’11, visual arts.

The post UMBC faculty, alumni and partners discuss cybersecurity and industry challenges appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Please mark your calendar and have your Chemistry & Biochemistry faculty, research staff, office staff and any graduate students save the date of Friday, December 15 for the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences' Holiday Party.  The timeframe is 3 to 5 pm and is an open house style event so guests may drop in as their schedule permits.   Thanks for sharing this information with your colleagues.

Cybersecurity is regularly a headliner in the news, especially when personal information stored online has been compromised, whether through a breach, hack, or threat. On Thursday, December 7, UMBC hosted experts from industry and academia at the National Press Club to discuss the cyber challenges professionals face, and how those groups can work together to prepare future generations of cybersecurity professionals.

Scott Shane, a reporter with The New York Times, led the discussion with five panelists representing industry, small business, and higher education. “I think it’s fair to say the internet was built without adequate attention to security,” stated Shane, who writes about cyber and information attacks regularly. “It’s almost like somebody who starts a bank with branches all over the world, and after it’s up and running and has millions of account holders, suddenly starts to think about safes, locks on the doors and bulletproof glass. I think that’s sort of the stage that we’re at right now.”

UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski and Anupam Joshi, professor and chair of computer science and electrical engineering, and director of the Center for Cybersecurity at UMBC, were joined by alumni and partners who have been working together on the urgent need to build the cybersecurity workforce. Hrabowski explained that there are currently about 350,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs, and that number is expected to continue to grow. By 2021, it is anticipated that there will be approximately three million job openings in cyber-related fields.

Over the course of his professional career, Nigel Faulkner, chief technology officer at T. Rowe Price, has experienced the emergence of technology and many changes. “As the CTO of a medium-large company, cyber is a defensive investment for us. The best thing that can happen is nothing happens,” Faulkner said, adding that he is always thinking about whether the company is investing enough, doing the right thing, and making the right connections in the industry to keep clients’ information safe.

As president and founder of TCecure, LLC, and cybersecurity academic innovation officer for University System of Maryland (USM), Tina Williams ’02, computer science, shared the importance of building security into technology from the beginning, rather than adding these features on at the “tail end of a development cycle.” Not only does her company handle security, they also monitor threats and risks that can compromise the technology’s health. In her role at USM, Williams represents the system as a whole to integrate academia and academic research, relationships, and resources into what’s taking place nationally, at the Federally Funded Research and Development Centers.

As head of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity, Joshi explained that UMBC is combating these national challenges by partnering with industry and government leaders to conduct research that addresses specific real-world needs that benefit both. Collaborative relationships, such as UMBC’s work with Northrop Grumman and T. Rowe Price, is one way that UMBC is working to cultivate the next generation of cybersecurity talent.

As an alumna of UMBC and a current employee at Northrop Grumman, Lauren Mazzoli ’15, computer science and mathematics, M.S. ’17, computer science, a systems engineer in the Future Technical Leaders Program at Northrop Grumman, discussed her experience in the Cyber Scholars Program. The Cyber Scholars Program works to increase the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in the field. Mazzoli explained that her experience at UMBC, in the Cyber Scholars Program, and working alongside mentors on and off-campus led her to be involved with continuing to encourage women to pursue careers in cybersecurity. “For me it’s been a product of the relationship between academia and industry, that have allowed me to find my own career path, and at the same time help others find theirs,” she explained, noting her passion for helping students consider careers in cybersecurity and related fields.

“We know there’s a huge workforce that we need and we can’t fill that pipeline. So yes, we need more women, yes, we need students of all backgrounds, but we need diversity of thought, experience, education, and problem-solving skills,” said Mazzoli, adding that it is important for students to know from a young age that cybersecurity is a field they can pursue.

Banner image: Tina Williams, center, talking with Anupam Joshi, left, audience members during the Cyber Press Event at the National Press Club. Photo by Abnet Shiferaw ’11, visual arts. 

Alex La Noire ’19, financial economics, recently attended the annual NCAA Student-Athlete Leadership Forum in Washington, D.C. As a member of the soccer team and a student highly dedicated to service both to his campus and to his Latino community, the junior right-back was tapped to represent both the America East conference and UMBC in mid-November.

The NCAA Student-Athlete Leadership Forum’s annual event celebrates the diverse athletes who have made an impact on their campus and who strive to better themselves and their teams. Since its inception in 1997, the Leadership Forum has given over 5,000 student-athletes the opportunity to network and grow, both professionally and personally.  

La Noire has amassed an impressive resume of both philanthropic and athletic accomplishments since arriving at UMBC. He was a recipient of the America East Helping Hands Award this past summer for his dedication to community service and commitment to academic rigor. As a walk-on member of the soccer team in his sophomore year, La Noire established himself as a campus and community leader.

“At a young age, I always took it upon myself to try and bring the teams I’ve played on closer together. I learned you can still be a leader even if you don’t have the captain title,” he said.  

In addition to traveling to Panama last spring with Global Brigades, an alternative spring break trip focused on service, La Noire was also part of the group that founded the branch project, Business Brigades. While service at UMBC is important to La Noire, he also focuses a large amount of his time on endeavors that hit closer to home. Since 2009, he has served as a Latino Student Fund Ambassador, a program that tutors underprivileged Latino students and a program that La Noire directly benefited from growing up. He attributes the program with “getting me to where I am today.”

Having parents who emigrated from Peru to the United States in the 1990s, La Noire feels especially strongly about giving back to the Latino community and honoring his roots. His connection to his heritage and his love of soccer collided recently after Peru’s 2-0 upset against New Zealand to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, their first appearance since 1982. “It was such a big deal to my family and friends for Peru to finally make it that we decided we had to do something crazy if they won. We all decided to dye our hair blond to commemorate the occasion.”

La Noire feels that his family values are directly responsible for his philanthropic ideals. “My parents were immigrants turned American citizens. We’ve lived through some struggle and even though we’re in a better position now, my parents never hesitate to help their family and friends. They instilled that in me. You can achieve so much but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t pass it on. I can only do so much but hopefully, the person after me can do more.”

After attending the Leadership Forum, La Noire walked away with the confidence to grow his efforts as a member of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC), already putting plans into motion for how to implement some of the ideas sparked by the conference.

“We are very proud of Alex and his role with the NCAA leadership forum. His role as a leader on our team on and off the field continues to evolve and I am excited about working with him going forward,” said Pete Caringi, men’s soccer coach.

Banner image: Photo courtesy of UMBC men’s soccer team. Photo courtesy of Alex La Noire.

On November 16, Brian Carroll and Christiana Sasser ‘18, mechanical engineering, rose at 3:45 a.m. to drive to Lancaster, PA. After a briefing, they, a student from Millersville University, a pilot, and a technician took to the skies in a research airplane. Carroll, a student in the atmospheric physics Ph.D. program, had used detailed weather forecasting to meticulously plan the route to track a cold front passing through the area. Onboard instruments would collect data about how it affected the local air mass all along the way.

The plane chased the cold front across Atlantic City, NJ and then out over the ocean. But weather can be fickle, even with the best-laid plans.

“We never caught the cold front,” recalls Carroll. “We had to decide in the moment how we were going to salvage this and make it a decent research flight.” They did—the group instead focused their data collection on exploring differences in the planetary boundary layer (PBL) over water, the coastline, and farther inland. The PBL is the lowest layer of the atmosphere and can be anywhere from several hundred to 2,000 meters from Earth’s surface.

Carroll and Sasser’s flight was one of 14 student-led flights that occurred as part of a two-week, NSF-funded educational program led by Millersville University with UMBC, Penn State University, and Rutgers University as research partners and the University of Wyoming King Air aircraft and crew as hired support. Far from being a disaster, their flight met the initiative’s goal to provide experiential learning opportunities. It showed the group “how the science gets done in real life,” Carroll says. “It’s not an idealized problem of ‘Here’s this wonderful data set, you need to get something out of it.’ We needed to improvise with what was going on while we were in the air, and we now know about a lot of very real, small issues that we wouldn’t know about otherwise.”

The third UMBC student participant, atmospheric physics graduate student Zhifeng Yang, participated in a second UMBC-led flight with Carroll on November 11. Belay Demoz, director of UMBC’s Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology and professor of physics, and Zhibo Zhang, associate professor of physics, supported the students.

In all, 175 students participated in the program, which was intended to serve as a springboard for students’ research projects while giving them hands-on experience with the instruments and process required for in-flight data collection. The resulting data cache was immense: Instruments on the aircraft measured a few dozen variables every second for 40 total flight hours, in addition to data collected by 50 weather balloons and two ground stations. The instruments included two Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems (one pointing skyward and one toward Earth), sensors to detect gases such as methane and carbon dioxide, and tools to measure temperature, humidity, wind speed, and more.

Demoz, who encouraged his students to get involved with the project, would like to see a similar flight series happen in the future, closer to UMBC. “He’s always pushing students to get as much professional experience as they can,” says Carroll.

Carroll didn’t need the nudge, because “it’s possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Even though aircraft are used often, it’s not often oriented in this give-everybody-a-turn sort of way.” Yang agrees. “It’s a very rare opportunity for us to observe the data in flight,” he says, “and now we know how to use a lot of the instruments that we didn’t know before.”

Carroll will use a similar type of aircraft to collect data for his doctoral research, “so knowing their capabilities and how to deal with them is definitely going to be valuable,” he says. Yang’s research seeks to improve weather forecasting models, so “we need observational data to evaluate the model, so we can adjust it to get better simulation results,” he says.

Both of them, however, have goals that go deeper than collecting, analyzing, and modeling data. “After I got introduced to this field, and when I realized that this work is very important for human health,” Yang says, “I wanted to do something to make this field better and better.” As for Carroll, “My long-term goals are to save the world and go into space,” he says. “If I enjoy doing math and science, which I do, then it’s good for me to put those skills to use toward helping the greater good and preserving the planet.”

Banner image: The King Air aircraft, ready to fly. Photos by Zhifeng Yang.

Scott Shane, a reporter with The New York Times, led the discussion with five panelists representing industry, small business, and higher education. “I think it’s fair to say the internet was built without adequate attention to security,” stated Shane, who writes about cyber and information attacks regularly. “It’s almost like somebody who starts a bank with branches all over the world, and after it’s up and running and has millions of account holders, suddenly starts to think about safes, locks on the doors and bulletproof glass. I think that’s sort of the stage that we’re at right now.”

UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski and Anupam Joshi, professor and chair of computer science and electrical engineering, and director of the Center for Cybersecurity at UMBC, were joined by alumni and partners who have been working on the challenge of educating the workforce together. Hrabowski explained that there are currently about 350,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs, and that number is expected to continue to grow. By 2021, it is anticipated that there will be approximately three million job openings in cyber-related fields.

Over the course of his professional career, Nigel Faulkner, chief technology officer at T. Rowe Price, has experienced the emergence of technology and many changes. “As the CTO of a medium-large company, cyber is a defensive investment for us. The best thing that can happen is nothing happens,” Faulkner said, adding that he is always thinking about whether the company is investing enough, doing the right thing, and making the right connections in the industry to keep clients’ information safe.

As president and founder of TCecure, LLC, and cybersecurity academic innovation officer for University System of Maryland (USM), Tina Williams ’02, computer science, shared the importance of building security into technology from the beginning, rather than adding these features on at the “tail end of a development cycle.” Not only does her company handle security, they also monitor threats and risks that can compromise the technology’s health. In her role at USM, Williams represents the system as a whole to integrate academia and academic research, relationships, and resources into what’s taking place nationally, at the Federally Funded Research and Development Centers.

As head of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity, Joshi explained that UMBC is combating these national challenges by partnering with industry and government leaders to conduct research that addresses specific real-world needs that benefit both. Collaborative relationships, such as UMBC’s work with Northrop Grumman and T. Rowe Price, is one way that UMBC is working to cultivate the next generation of cybersecurity talent.

As an alumna of UMBC and a current employee at Northrop Grumman, Lauren Mazzoli ’15, computer science and mathematics, M.S. ’17, computer science, a systems engineer in the Future Technical Leaders Program at Northrop Grumman, discussed her experience in the Cyber Scholars Program. The Cyber Scholars Program works to increase the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in the field. Mazzoli explained that her experience at UMBC, in the Cyber Scholars Program, and working alongside mentors on and off-campus led her to be involved with continuing to encourage women to pursue careers in cybersecurity. “For me it’s been a product of the relationship between academia and industry, that have allowed me to find my own career path, and at the same time help others find theirs,” she explained, noting her passion for helping students consider careers in cybersecurity and related fields.

“We know there’s a huge workforce that we need and we can’t fill that pipeline. So yes, we need more women, yes, we need students of all backgrounds, but we need diversity of thought, experience, education, and problem-solving skills,” said Mazzoli, adding that it is important for students to know from a young age that cybersecurity is a field they can pursue.

Banner image: Tina Williams, center, talking with Anupam Joshi, left, audience members during the Cyber Press Event at the National Press Club. Photo by Abnet Shiferaw ’11, visual arts.

Overview: Hopkins Symphony Orchestra is accepting applications for the position of Assistant Conductor and Concert Orchestra Conductor. Hopkins Symphony Orchestra is a program of Johns Hopkins University, Homewood Arts Programs and is the only community orchestra in Baltimore City. Orchestra musicians are Johns Hopkins students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members.

Winter Session Crossover Parking: December 21, 2017 through January 26, 2018.

Students:  In addition to your assigned permit zone, student permits are valid in zones ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’.

Faculty/Staff:  In addition to your assigned permit zone, faculty/staff permits are valid in zones ‘A’ & ‘C’.

*Parking permits are required in all zones during the winter session*