For more than a quarter of a century, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has been considered the foremost authority on the American critic and journalist H.L. Mencken as well as the editor of his works.

Mencken was born and lived his entire life in Baltimore where he was long associated with the Baltimore Sun papers along with editing two of the nation’s most distinguished literary magazines – The American Mercury and The Smart Set.  He was also the author of The American Language.

Ms. Rodgers is the author of a critically acclaimed biography – “Mencken: The American Iconoclast” – published by Oxford University Press in 2007. She also edited “Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters: The Private Correspondence of H.L. Mencken and Sara Haardt.” In addition, she edited Mencken’s six-part “Prejudices” series in their most recent and definitive edition (Library of America). She is also the editor of “The Impossible H.L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories” published in 1991.

Most recently, Ms. Rodgers edited the definitive “H. L. Mencken: The Days Trilogy, Expanded Edition: (Library of America)” published last year. Mencken’s memoirs, which began in the 1940s as installments in The New Yorker, included more than 200 never-before-published pages of his notes.  There is no single American writer and critic more knowledgeable about “the sage of Baltimore.”

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers will speak on March 31 at 8:30 a.m. in PAHB 428 (Advanced Journalism Seminar).  Visitors are welcome.

Enhancing System Security and Privacy with Program Analysis

Yinzhi Cao

Columbia University

12:00-1:00pm Tuesday, 31 March 2015, ITE 325b, UMBC

Cyber security and privacy have brought the attention from the general public these days. Melissa Hathaway, who advised both President Obama and President Bush, estimated in a report that governments and consumers lost $125 billion annually to cyber-attacks, including losses in tax revenue. In this talk, from the perspective of program analysis, I will discuss the security and privacy of two important computer systems: Web browser and Android system. In the first part, I will introduce how to prevent and detect drive-by download attacks, which penetrate the boundary of a browser principal. In particular, I will present JShield, a vulnerability-based detection engine that is more robust to obfuscated drive-by download attacks, when compared to various anti-virus software and most recent research papers. In the second part, I will introduce EdgeMiner, the first automatic tool that creates summaries of Android framework in the form of callback and registration pairs. With the summaries, existing static analysis system can correctly construct a control flow graph with hidden control flow dependencies introduced by callback methods.

Yinzhi Cao is a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University. He earned his PhD in computer science at Northwestern University. Before that, he obtained his B.E. degree in electronics engineering at Tsinghua University in China. His research mainly focuses on the security and privacy of web, smart phones, and machine learning. He has published more than ten papers at various security conferences, such as Oakland, NDSS, ACSAC and DSN. His JShield system has been adopted by Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunication company. In the past, he served as a program committee member for IEEE CNS’14 and web chair for AsiaCCS SESP’13. Previously, he also conducted research at SRI International and UC Santa Barbara as a summer intern.