The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Council, the DI decision-making council composed of administrative representatives from all DI conferences, voted on March 30 to give eligibility relief to all spring student athletes whose seasons were canceled due to the COVID-19 outbreak. For the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s (UMBC) baseball, softball, men and women’s lacrosse, and track and field athletes, the vote means the possibility of returning to compete for an additional year.

The NCAA normally gives student athletes five years to complete four seasons in each competitive season (i.e the fall, winter and spring). For spring student athletes, that means they have five years in college to compete in four spring seasons. However, this vote gives student athletes an additional year to complete those four seasons. This is particularly important to spring student athletes that have already used up their five years of NCAA eligibility but have not competed in four spring seasons.

Many winter student athletes that did not complete their championship seasons were also hoping for eligibility relief but did not receive it.

In a letter to the council, a committee of student athlete representatives from the Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) in the Power 5 conferences (Atlantic Coast Conference, Pac-12, Big 10, Big 12, Southeastern Conference) recommended “that eligibility relief be given to all athletes in spring sports, as well as to athletes in winter sports that qualified for post-season, and were unable to complete the entirety of their season.”

America East’s DI Council representative and Athletic Director for Stony Brook University, Shawn Heilbron stated that he took the student athletes’ letter into great consideration when voting. However, in the end, he believed it best to only give spring student athletes eligibility relief.

“Winter student athletes did not meet existing legislative criteria for waivers,” Heilbron said.

Swimming and diving is one of the winter sports whose NCAA Championships were cancelled. Sophomore UMBC swimmer Madeleine Songer wishes the DI Council had voted to give eligibility back to winter student athletes.

“Sponsorship is rather hard to come by in swimming, so a lot of current seniors relied on the training from NCAA teams to prepare them for this Olympic cycle,” Songer said. “Now with the Olympics being pushed back for an entire year, it is looking like some athletes will not have the support they depended on having from college swimming to be able to train. It will be difficult for them to continue training when they may now have to find a job to support themselves.”

In addition to eligibility relief, the vote increased the NCAA scholarship limit for the 2020-2021 school year. All NCAA DI sports have a limit to how many scholarships it can offer student athletes, or how many “counters” a team can have. For instance, the NCAA scholarship limit for baseball is 27 counters. The vote increases this limit for all spring sports to account for returning student athletes on athletic scholarships.

However, this increased limit does not mean that all returning student athletes will get their prior athletic scholarships. While the NCAA upped the limit, it is still up to the individual universities to finance their student athletes’ scholarships.

Michelle Hosick, the NCAA’s Associate Director of Communications, explained that the council’s vote did lift restrictions on universities’ use of the Student Assistance Fund for scholarship funding. This fund is normally used for educational purposes and basic needs such as clothing. While opening this fund to athletic scholarships helps schools, it is up to the individual DI conferences if it can be used for athletics.

For many universities, finding room in their annual budget to maintain these scholarships even with the NCAA’s help will prove difficult.

Brian Barrio, UMBC’s Athletic Director, explained that the current unprecedented health crisis will greatly affect UMBC’s athletic budget for the 2020-2021 school year. Barrio expects UMBC’s funding from the NCAA to be 700,000 dollars short. Barrio also assumes UMBC and UMBC Athletics will have less money from Maryland’s state government due to the pandemic’s impact on the state’s tax revenue.

Refunding UMBC students’ athletic fees was also a big hit to the Athletic Department’s annual revenue. Despite the tough position it puts UMBC Athletics in, Barrio fully supports the refund and believes the Athletic Department will find another means of maintaining the standard of UMBC Athletics.

“Nobody in our department is panicking. We’re taking it one day at a time,” Barrio said. “In every crisis is an opportunity.”

Just two days after students were forced to depart the University of Maryland, Baltimore County campus due to the impending COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Amy Froide took to myUMBC to post about historic journaling — “the more mundane, the better,” she wrote.

In her post, Froide, who is the chair of UMBC’s history department, encouraged students to keep journals to chronicle their experiences.

“If we don’t have accounts by individual, average people, the question is what then would people write the history of this event on?” Froide said, in a later interview.  

Froide explained that a historical account based only on President Donald Trump’s press conferences or Maryland governor Larry Hogan’s press conferences or even an elementary teacher’s day-to-day life during public school closures would be incomplete.

“To build up a whole picture you need many perspectives,” Froide said.

The concept of historic journaling has existed for centuries. In fact, one of the earliest instances of European historic journaling, A Journal of the Plague Year, was written almost sixty years after the bubonic plague struck London. Writer Daniel Defoe amassed different contemporary accounts and research from those affected by the plague to finish the journal, and while not technically a firsthand account, Defoe’s journal is widely regarded as an accurate portrayal of life during the plague.  

“There’s been an impetus to chronicle and write things down since the 1600s,” Froide said.

More recently, the mass observation experiment in the 1930s, 40s and 50s conducted by three former Cambridge University students aimed to record everyday life in Britain, and those findings helped shape British public policy.

Now, amidst the coronavirus pandemic, historians like Froide are urging others to begin writing the primary sources of the future. 

Chronicling Coronavirus

For Conor Donnan, mass observation is about allowing those who are not typically viewed as the primary sources of history to have a voice.

Growing up in a poor neighborhood in Belfast, Ireland, Donnan was interested in why he could read books detailing Ireland’s history but could not get a sense of the lives of those who grew up like him. 

As Donnan graduated from college and went on to complete his master’s degree at UMBC, he began to seek the intersection between academia and change-making and credits his time at UMBC as providing him with the means to connect the two.

“I’m a really big fan of dialogue, and I don’t think history is a research inquiry,” he said. “It’s a dialogue.”

Now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, Donnan is hoping to encourage that dialogue with the help of fellow Ph.D. candidates Sarah Yu and Jennifer Yip Yuk Lum and their project Coronavirus Chronicles. 

The publicly sourced database asks people from around the globe to submit diary entries about their experiences and feelings during the pandemic. The team is also collecting poetry, song lyrics, pictures and videos. Additionally, they plan to expand into the realm of TikTok, according to Donnan.

Donnan is hoping that Coronavirus Chronicles is able to reach people from marginalized backgrounds or communities, so that their voices can be elevated during and after this pandemic. 

“What we find in history is that the voices of the majority of people are not observed, so you don’t really get the stories of the poorest of society, you don’t get the stories of women as much, transgender people, you don’t really hear stories from people of different races, different sexualities. What you see, in a historical sense, is that you miss things,” Donnan said.

Currently the database has received a couple hundred diary entries, but Donnan believes that by the end of the pandemic they will receive a couple thousand.

“As a society, we’re not one story,” he continued. “We’re a collection of different stories. It’s a tapestry.”

Collecting in Quarantine 

For Allison Tolman, vice president of collections at the Maryland Historical Society, mass observation is about letting people know they are not alone.

The goal is to help people “feel seen,” Tolman said. “If we can do that, we feel like we’re helping our community.”

With the launch of a new initiative called “Collecting in Quarantine,” the historical society hopes to record stories from the homefront, but also from the business perspective in order to “collect the data in different ways,” Tolman said. 

Maryland is, according to Tolman, a “good state” to be collecting experiences in, since it is so close to Washington, D.C. Additionally, the Maryland Historical Society has a rich history of documenting different kinds of phenomena through observation. It houses collections of letters from the Spanish flu of 1918 to the Annapolis yellow fever epidemics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  

Tolman said that the historical society is trying to get participation from all across Maryland, so that they can “capture the different lives people are living right now,” she said. 

These experiences will help future historians — and future generations — understand the nuances of life during the coronavirus pandemic. 

One account that has been posted to the Maryland Historical Society’s blog details one woman’s experiences walking her dog while maintaining proper social distancing. Another finds a man at Safeway, staring down a freezer section full of shrimp from China in an otherwise depleted store. 

These accounts, said Tolman, seem mundane to us now, but in one hundred years, they will provide context and a real world account of how government orders and anxiety affected us. 

“We need to be thinking about who comes after us,” Tolman said. 

“I’m looking out the window and there’s literally nobody,” sophomore guard Silvia Ferreiros of the women’s basketball team said. “It’s like a ghost town.”

For Ferreiros and other University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) international student athletes, going home meant facing the gravity of the COVID-19 outbreak. After UMBC’s decision to move to online learning for the rest of the spring semester, the Athletic Department urged all international student athletes like Ferreiros to return home to avoid the risk of getting stuck in the United States indefinitely.

Ferreiros left the United States on Thursday, March 26 to get back to her hometown of Lugo, Spain. She returned to a country that has over 90,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of April 1 and is under a strict lockdown that permits residents to leave their homes for brief dog walks, grocery store and pharmacy trips, and other “essential” travel. Unlike the United States, the Spanish government does not allow residents outside for exercise.

Ferreiros’ dog gives her a reason to steal a few moments of fresh air every day. She uses the walks to see her friends, waving to them from the street as they stand in their doorways or their windows. The interactions are brief since police patrol the streets of Lugo and other Spanish cities to enforce the lockdown. Anyone caught outside for nonessential reasons can be fined up to €30,000, or 34,400 U.S. dollars.

Besides a large fine, people outside for nonessential reasons face social pressure from those in their homes to obey the lockdown.

“If they [people] see somebody who doesn’t have a dog or that doesn’t look like they were working on something from the windows, people start, like, booing and stuff,” Ferreiros explained.

The patrols and the social pressure give Ferreiros only a few minutes to wave at her friends before people start questioning what she is doing. While she does try to talk to her friends and family over FaceTime and WhatsApp, the exchanges do not feel the same as physically seeing them. 

“It’s hard because you can not, you know, see your friends or anything,” Ferreiros said. “I’ve been here for one week and I haven’t seen my granddad.”

Unlike Ferreiros, who has the luxury of getting to go outside, sophomore guard Paula Rubio of the women’s basketball team has not left her house for over a week and a half. Living in a small apartment with no yard or balcony, Rubio has not felt fresh air since she got back to her home in Madrid, Spain.

Madrid has over 32,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of April 1. What used to be a major tourism hub, Rubio explained, is now quiet and tense as people wonder when the lockdown will end.

Rubio tries to not think about her lack of fresh air and the pandemic outside. Instead, she is using the lockdown to focus on herself. 

“I can just stay in my room and just focus on myself and not think about all the things that are going on outside,” Rubio said.

By establishing a routine that alternates between reading, school work, meditation and workouts, Rubio takes the situation in Madrid day by day. The routine stops her from overthinking and making herself anxious, she says. It also helps her to retain some of the independence she felt in college, despite her 24-hour close quarters confinement with her parents.

Junior midfielder from the men’s soccer team and international exchange student Byrom Mee is not as cooped up as Rubio or Ferreiros.

Mee returned to London, England on Saturday, March 15, a week before the United Kingdom put in place their lockdown. When he landed in London, he was surprised at how relaxed the social distancing practices were. There was no signage or any information regarding the virus, he says.

“The only way I would have known about it was because of the women handing out leaflets,” Mee said.

However, as the death toll rose in the United Kingdom, the British Parliament put the country under lockdown. Unlike Spain’s lockdown, the U.K.’s allows Mee to go outside for an hour a day for exercise. Even that hour outside helps him stay positive, he says. He is currently borrowing a neighbor’s bike and doing the men’s soccer team’s at-home strength routine to keep him active.

“If I haven’t done any exercise during the day, I don’t feel like I’ve achieved much,” he said.

Despite doing the men’s soccer team strength workouts, Mee will not be returning to UMBC this fall. Mee only attended UMBC for a year as a part of his American Studies degree from Swansea University. He will return to Swansea this fall to graduate and play on their varsity soccer team. 

With such a sudden departure from UMBC, Mee left the U.S. unsure of the next time he would return or the next time he would see his now-former teammates.

“It’s a bit of a shame sort of ending like this,” Mee said. “I was looking forward to the last couple of months.”

To keep his spirits up and to put himself in the best shape possible for his final year at Swansea, Mee signed up to be a National Health Service Volunteer Responder. These volunteers help deliver groceries and medications, take people to the hospital and transport equipment to hospitals. He received his ID on Monday and enjoys riding his borrowed bike around town, staying in shape while helping those with underlying conditions.

Senior center Lucrezia Costa of the women’s basketball team has had a much harder time exercising than Mee since coming back to Rome, Italy on Mar. 24. Costa came home to a similar lockdown to Spain’s that does not allow her outside of her property except for a grocery store trip once a week.

“I’ve been trying to buy a treadmill for like five days now, but there’s a shortage because everyone is buying one,” Costa said.

Costa has used running to forget about the coronavirus news since her mother started updating her on Italy’s first lockdown on Mar. 9. Without a means to go outside, she hopes to find a treadmill for sale this week so she can run again.

Despite being unable to run, Costa says classes have helped keep her focused– including her two-hour class that now goes from 9:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. due to Italy’s five-hour time difference. However, she says it is difficult to stay happy after leaving her life in the United States. Even while in the U.S., Costa could not say goodbye to her friends before they left for their own homes because of a two-week quarantine after she came into contact with a UMBC staff doctor that tested positive for COVID-19.

“The hardest thing is just having to quit everything: my life in the U.S., you know, my friends,” Costa said. “And just, you know, drop everything and come here.”

What made things more difficult was an additional two-week quarantine in Italy due to her travel. Besides not being able to see her Italian friends, Costa can not visit her other family despite them living only 200 meters away. The lack of contact makes Costa even miss strangers.

“You don’t know how much you miss people’s, even strangers, contact, just looking at them until it’s taken away,” Costa said.

Returning to their homes in the top 10 countries with the most coronavirus cases, these student athletes faced both the relaxed regulations of the United States as well as their countries’ strict lockdowns. To many of them that now live without the feeling of fresh air or the freedom to go more than a few hundred yards from their home, they hope their friends back in the U.S. take the situation seriously.

“Trust whoever knows more, if it’s the governor or whatever,” Costa said. “If they tell you to not go out, then don’t go out, or limit it to the minimum because it really sucks to be in this situation.”

Investigating the Impact of Device Aging on the Security of Cryptographic Chips

Professor Naghmeh Karimi received a prestigious NSF CAREER award to support her research on Investigating the impact of device aging on the security of cryptographic chips.

CAREER awards are among NFS’s most prestigious awards and are intended to support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Cryptographic chips implement cryptographic functions in hardware for better performance. Despite the significant performance benefits, cryptographic chips can be compromised by the adversaries via monitoring their power-consumption, tampering their logic or placing the chips under stress to generate erroneous outputs to infer sensitive data. The current protections against such attacks do not consider the aging of the devices that can cause a parametric shift of device parameters over time which can compromise device security.

Supported by this five-year award, Professor Karimi and her students will investigate the effects of device aging on the security of cryptographic devices, particularly those with protection against physical attacks, and develop solutions to ensure security when device aging comes into account. Her work will help enable the development of long-lasting security for trusted hardware platforms, and result in aging-resistant security solutions that benefit the society via devices that remain secure over their lifetime.

The post Prof. Naghmeh Karimi receives NSF CAREER award for research on the security of cryptographic chips appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Investigating the Impact of Device Aging on the Security of Cryptographic Chips

Professor Naghmeh Karimi received a prestigious NSF CAREER award to support her research on Investigating the impact of device aging on the security of cryptographic chips.

CAREER awards are among NFS’s most prestigious awards and are intended to support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Cryptographic chips implement cryptographic functions in hardware for better performance. Despite the significant performance benefits, cryptographic chips can be compromised by the adversaries via monitoring their power-consumption, tampering their logic or placing the chips under stress to generate erroneous outputs to infer sensitive data. The current protections against such attacks do not consider the aging of the devices that can cause a parametric shift of device parameters over time which can compromise device security.

Supported by this five-year award, Professor Karimi and her students will investigate the effects of device aging on the security of cryptographic devices, particularly those with protection against physical attacks, and develop solutions to ensure security when device aging comes into account. Her work will help enable the development of long-lasting security for trusted hardware platforms, and result in aging-resistant security solutions that benefit the society via devices that remain secure over their lifetime.

The post Prof. Naghmeh Karimi receives NSF CAREER award for research on the security of cryptographic chips appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.