The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presents the exhibition Out of Rubble, which reacts to the wake of war — its realities and its representations. The rubble that each war leaves behind shapes today and tomorrow — physically, psychologically and spiritually. Responding to a wide range of violent encounters taking place over four continents, Out of Rubble presents works by seventeen artists and architects from over ten countries who consider its causes and consequences, its finality and future, moving from decimation and disintegration to the possibilities of regeneration and recovery. Featured artists and architects include: Taysir Batniji, Lenka Clayton, Andrew Ellis Johnson, Susanne Slavick, Monica Haller, Sara Pellegrini and DAAR, Simon Norfolk, Jennifer Karady, Heide Fasnacht, Wafaa Bilal, Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz, Enrique Castrejon, Rocio Rodriguez, elin o’Hara slavick, Osman Khan, Hirokazu Fukawa, Jane Dixon and Samina Mansuri. The exhibition is curated by Susanne Slavick, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

The exhibition’s opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 2, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.   The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm and is located in the Fine Arts Building. Admission is free. For complete information, click here.

On Saturday, March 28 at 4:00 p.m. in the Concert Hall, as part of the Department of Music’s Jazz Festival, the Maryland All State Jazz Band presents high school students from around the state performing big band jazz. Complete information is available by clicking here.

On Friday, March 27 at 7:30 p.m. in the Concert Hall, as part of the Department of Music’s Jazz Festival, the UMBC Jazz Faculty Ensemble will perform an eclectic concert of creative, improvised music. Members include trumpeter Tom Williams, vibist Mike Noonan, guitarist Tom Lagana, pianist Harry Appelman, bassist Tom Baldwin, drummer Scott Tiemann, and saxophonist Matt Belzer. Complete information is available by clicking here.

UMBC’s Department of Theatre presents These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich, directed by Nyalls Hartman. Performances will be presented March 26 through 29 in the Black Box Theatre in the Performing Arts and Humanities Building.

An emotionally-gripping story of survival, These Shining Lives chronicles the strength and determination of the women who worked at the Radium Dial Clock Company in Ottawa, Illinois during the 1920s and 1930s. Based on true events, the play dramatizes Catherine Donahue’s race against time and the bittersweet triumph of the women of Radium Dial as they stand up against oppression and injustice to hold the famous clock maker accountable for its negligence involving radium poisoning. Touching, wistful, and beautifully tragic, These Shining Lives turns back the hands of time and reminds us today that we must remain ever-vigilant in the fight against injustice to protect our own lives and the lives of those we love.

Complete information is available here.

UMBC’s 2015 MFA candidates in the Intermedia + Digital Arts (IMDA) program — Tim (Silouan) Bubb, Chanan Delivuk, Kata Frederick, Jason Hughes, Meghan Marx and Victor Torres — are featured in Incidental Matters, an exhibition presented jointly at Jordan Faye Contemporaryand Maryland Art Place (MAP) (both at 218 West Saratoga Street), and Current Gallery (421 North Howard Street). The exhibition is sponsored by UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC), Department of Visual Arts, and the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, in partnership with the Bromo Arts and Entertainment District. The exhibition continues on display through April 10.

An Opening Reception will be held simultaneously at all three spaces on Thursday, March 26, from 5 to 7 pm. At MAP, Victor Torres will perform from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.; at Current Gallery, Kata Frederick will perform a drawing from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m.; and at Current Gallery Chanan Delivuk will perform an oral history beginning at 6:30 p.m.

Complete information about the exhibition is available by clicking here.

UMBC Cyber Defense Lab

Blind Hashing; a new way to secure
passwords against offline attack

Jeremy Spilman

Founder/CTO of TapLink

11-12 Friday 27 March 2015, M/P 101, UMBC

Industry best practice is to secure passwords using a tunable hashing algorithm; pick the right hashing algorithm, tune its cost factors so it runs slowly and makes optimal use of your hardware, and it’s possible to protect very strong passwords from being cracked. However when average password strength and login latency requirements face off against bot-nets and GPU powered dictionary attacks, the vast majority of passwords are easily cracked. Blind hashing entangles password hashes with a massive pool of random data, so large it cannot be stolen over the network. A simple protocol allows any number of sites to share a centralized petabyte-scale data pool, amortizing the cost for defenders, while protecting low-entropy passwords with minimal run-time cost. Blind hashing can also be used as a general-purpose PBKDF to protect against brute-force attacks, and providing the opportunity to add server-based access policies and revocability to the key derivation process. Following his talk, Jeremy will be happy to discuss potential research opportunities with the company for students interested in developing new implementations of blind hashing for password-based authentication and encryption services.

Jeremy Spilman is the Founder and CTO of TapLink, a startup company that is developing systems using its patented Blind Hashing technique, which can completely protect passwords against offline attack, even if the password database is stolen. He was a double major in Computer Science and Economics at Brandeis University.

Summarizing Information in Big Data: Algorithms and Applications

Dr. Fei Liu

School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

12:00p Friday, 27 March 2015, ITE 325b

Information floods the lives of modern people, and we find it overwhelming. Summarization systems that identify salient pieces of information and present it concisely can help. In this talk, I will discuss both algorithmic and application perspectives of summarization. Algorithm-wise, I will describe keyword extraction, sentence extraction, and summary generation, including a range of techniques from information extraction to semantic representation of data sources; application-wise, I focus on summarizing human conversations, social media contents, and news articles. The data sources span low-quality speech recognizer outputs and social media chats to high-quality content produced by professional writers. A special focus of my work is exploring multiple information sources. In addition to better integration across sources, this allows abstraction to shared research challenges for broader impact. Finally, I try to identify the missing links in cross-genre summarization studies and discuss future research directions.

Dr. Fei Liu is a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, member of Noah’s ARK. Fei’s research interests are in the areas of natural language processing, machine learning, and data mining, with special emphasis on automatic summarization and social media. From 2011 to 2013, Fei worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Bosch Research, Palo Alto, California, one of the largest German companies providing intelligent car systems and home appliances. Fei received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2011, supported by Erik Jonsson Distinguished Research Fellowship. Prior to that, she obtained her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science from Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Fei has published over twenty peer reviewed articles, and she serves as a referee for leading journals and conferences.

Host: Nilanjan Banerjee and Mohamed Younis