Friday May 10 and Saturday May 11, 2019 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

The United States is comprised of publics. Filtered through media, politics, and social, cultural and economic life, American publics materialize through national, international, state, and local avenues. At what point do they become visible? How do American bodies become public? What are the consequences of these processes?

“Making History Public(s)” will interrogate the creation of publics in the United States, broadly defined. Papers might investigate the making of publics in any number of ways: as citizenry or voting block; as audience or consumer; as the product of, or precursor to political mobilization or disruption; as transnational formation; as agent or passive actor. American publics might be defined spatially or ideologically, shaped through communication, proximity, or knowledge. They might be determined institutionally, informally, or discursively.

At the same time, this conference will investigate the ways in which publics become both producers of, and audiences for historical knowledge. We seek papers that position the historical actor and themselves as part of the active production of history, considering the role of presentation, display, exhibition, and preservation. What is the role of art, visual culture, sound, and material in making history accessible to academic and public audiences, and students? This might also include scholars working in pedagogy, digital humanities, museum studies, mapping, and other fields.

Our keynote speaker is Professor Ellen Noonan (New York University), whose work as historian, media producer, and instructional designer blends historical scholarship with various practices and platforms of public display and education.

Scholars working in all periods of American history, and in various modes of interdisciplinarity are welcomed and encouraged. Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a CV to the conference planning committee at umusgradconference@gmail.com. Proposals are due by Sunday, January 28, 2019.

Distinguished Departmental Seminar

The Web PKI in Theory and Malpractice

Dr. Bruce Maggs, Duke University

11:00am Friday, 7 December 2018, ITE325b

The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for the web was designed to help thwart “phishing” attacks by providing a mechanism for browsers to authenticate web sites, and also to help prevent the disclosure of confidential information by enabling encrypted communications. For users to reap these benefits, however, the parties that implement and operate the PKI, including certificate authorities, web-site operators, and browser vendors, must each perform their roles properly.

This talk focuses on one aspect of the PKI: certificate revocation. The security of a web site hinges on the ability of the site operator to keeps its private keys private. While most operators guard their keys carefully, on occasion software vulnerabilities such as the notorious Heartbleed Bug have put millions of keys at risk. If a web-site operator fears that its private key has been compromised, it should ask its certificate authority to revoke the corresponding certificate. Browsers, however, often do not fully check whether the certificates they receive have been revoked, and mobile browsers never check. There are a variety of reasons for not checking, but the most important are the amount of bandwidth required to download certificate revocation lists in advance, the latency of checking certificates on the fly, and the slow progress of upgrading every web server to support the newer certificate status stapling approach.

This talk presents a new and much more efficient system, CRLite, for pushing the revocation status of every certificate to every browser. CRLite leverages a recent development: although lists of revoked certificates were previously available, Google’s Certificate Transparency project now also provides a log of all unrevoked certificates as well. With both lists in hand, a compact data structure called a filter cascade can be used to represent the status of every certificate with no false positives and no false negatives. CRLite requires a browser to download a 1.2MB filter cascade initially, and then a 40KB update (on average) every day. Our results demonstrate that complete revocation checking is within reach for all clients.

Bruce Maggs received the S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, 1986, and 1989, respectively. His advisor was Charles Leiserson. After spending one year as a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, he worked as a Research Scientist at NEC Research Institute in Princeton from 1990 to 1993. In 1994, he moved to Carnegie Mellon, where he stayed until joining Duke University in 2009. While on a two-year leave-of-absence from Carnegie Mellon, Maggs helped to launch Akamai Technologies, serving as its first Vice President for Research and Development. He retains a part-time role at Akamai as Vice President for Research. In 2017 he won the Best Dataset Award at the Passive and Active Measurement Conference, The Best Paper Award at CoNEXT, a Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security, and the 2017 IEEE Cybersecurity Innovation Award for work that appeared at IEEE Security and Privacy. In 2018 he was part of a large team that received the inaugural SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award for the Akamai CDN.

Supported by UMBC’s Eminent Scholar Mentoring program.

The post talk: The Web PKI in Theory and Malpractice, Prof. Bruce Maggs, 11am Fri 12/7, ITE325 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

The deadline to submit your abstract for the 3-Minute Thesis competition at this spring's Graduate Student Association's symposium is December 5, 2019.

A flyer of the March 27th symposium is attached.

MEMORANDUM

DATE:            December 4, 2018

TO:                  Business Managers/Department Chairs/Center Directors/Faculty

FROM:           Stan Jackson

RE:                 OSP deadlines over the Winter Break, Dec. 21, 2018 – Jan. 2, 2019

________________________________________________________________

This is a special announcement concerning the OSP schedule for reviewing/approving proposals with deadlines to federal and other agencies that occur during Winter Break this year. 

Please note:

1. All proposals with submission deadlines occurring between December 21, 2018 and January 3, 2019 must be fully routed, ready for submission, and released to the OSP office by the close of business on December 17, 2018; and

1. All proposals with submission deadlines occurring between January 3 and 4,, 2019 (the first 3 business days after the break) will be due to OSP by the close of business on December 18, 2018.

This schedule is consistent with our current policy, which requires the submission of complete proposals to OSP at least three business days before the agency submission deadline, since OSP will be closed during the Winter Break. 

The campus closure during Winter Break will cause a heavy workload on OSP staff, so we will enforce our current policy more consistently.  Proposals received after the OSP deadlines specified above will be reviewed on a first come first serve basis and will be submitted only if time permits.  

Thank you for your understanding.

On Friday, March 1, 2019, DoIT's Instructional Technology Team will hold its fourth annual TechFest.  TechFest traditionally brings the campus community together to share and demonstrate ways technology can both support and improve the efficiency of day-to-day activities including academics. This year, participants are in for a double treat as Instructional Technology partners with the Faculty Development Center to bring you day celebrating technology, teaching and learning!  

The Faculty Development Center will also be holding their Symposium sponsored by the Provost's office on the same day which will include a poster session and luncheon with keynote address by renowned speaker Randy Bass.

Key themes for this year’s TechFest include (but are not limited to) the following:

·         Using Learning Technologies for Instruction and Engagement (LTIE)

·         Using Data Collection and Analytics to Inform Instruction, Measure Success, and Prompt Intervention (DCA)

·         Integrating Technology Tools into Best Practices (TBP)

Students, faculty, and staff are all welcome and encouraged to attend.

Are you a student, faculty, or staff member interested in leading a 45-minute workshop session on one of the three themes, presenting a poster on teaching and learning, or providing a brief overview of an instructional technology tool in the Technology Test Kitchen?  Then start planning the abstract for your proposal.  A Call for Proposals will be issued soon.  Past Session topics have included Clickers, Blackboard, iCloud, Accessibility, Phishing, CourseArc, and Lynda.com.  New topics are encouraged and appreciated.

 View the Call for Proposals here.

Submit your proposal by following this link.

For more information about TechFest, be on the lookout for future posts regarding proposal deadlines and event registration.  You can also contact us at techfest19@umbc.edu.