Denise Meringolo was teaching her graduate-level Introduction to Public History course in the spring of 2015 when Freddie Gray died in police custody and city residents responded with protest, marching in the streets of Baltimore. The events of that time didn’t just make national headlines, they also sparked difficult conversations in homes, offices, community centers, and classrooms across the city about equality, representation, and safety.

Knowing that history is often told through official documents and representatives, Meringolo, an associate professor of history at UMBC, felt an urgency to help the local community control and document the story of their experience, and she initiated the crowdsourced story and image collection platform BaltimoreUprising2015.org.

“Museums are often not very democratic places,” Meringolo notes, explaining that their collections processes and guidelines often reinforce the voices and experiences of wealthy, white people rather than broader communities in all their diversity. In contrast, the Baltimore Uprising digital collection puts decisions into the hands of the public.

The project offers individuals the opportunity to upload their own materials and decide what they want to become part of the accessible public record. The collection, built and managed in partnership with Joe Tropea, Maryland Historical Society digital projects specialist, now includes 3,000 images, oral histories, and written accounts, and that number continues to grow.

Recognizing the significant potential of this work to have a lasting impact, The Whiting Foundation has awarded Meringolo a $50,000 Public Engagement Fellowship to teach historical understanding through the “Preserve the Baltimore Uprising” project. Meringolo is one of just seven scholars to receive Whiting fellowships in 2018. The recipients represent the diversity of thought and research in the humanities, from history, literature, philosophy, and anthropology to gender studies, and they engage numerous different communities across the United States, particularly groups underrepresented in the humanities.

“The Whiting Fellowship Program is among the nation’s foremost awards for civically engaged research and scholarship,” says Scott Casper, dean of UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. “Dr. Meringolo’s recognition highlights the importance of her work preserving the archive of the Baltimore Uprising, a signal example of UMBC’s collaboration with communities in greater Baltimore.”

In this next phase of the project, Meringolo seeks to ensure the collection grows and is accessible as a resource for Baltimore City teachers and students. “This is an opportunity to share methods and best practices in conducting oral histories and relevant historical research with the next generation of public historians and their teachers,” she says. Through this work, she hopes to highlight community-based understandings of “the historical roots of racial injustice, economic equality, and social and political unrest in Baltimore.”

Over the next year, Meringolo will collaborate with campus and community partners in this work. As part of the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Centers initiative, Frank Anderson, assistant director of the Choice Program, will lead the UMBC Shriver Center Choice education team in connecting the project with community partners and developing related youth-centered enrichment programs.

Community organizer Denise Griffin Johnson and Lee Boot, director of UMBC’s the Imaging Research Center, will support the initiative in creating story circles programs to guide student scholars in formulating and answering critical questions as they develop their stories. This arts-based component of the project will use materials assembled in the digital collection with and interviews Lee Boot and visual arts graduate students filmed with student protesters after the Baltimore Uprising.

“The work, I believe, will reflect, in particular, the young voices of tomorrow,” says Griffin Johnson. “I believe this action and work is instrumental in capturing the hearts, minds, and voices of people who embrace a community identity of self and others.”

Meringolo’s original collaboration with the Maryland Historical Society will expand to include oral history and interview techniques support by Joe Tropea. Thinking about conservation of the project for future community members, Lindsey Loeper, UMBC special collections archivist, will help the team develop a long-term plan to manage the digital collection.

Meringolo expects to conclude her Whiting Fellowship in a way that carries through her project’s initial vision: doing collaborative public history that honors and amplifies community voices. Participating Baltimore City students will present their research at a neighborhood branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library.

Ultimately, the project all comes down to the “public” in “public history.” “I want to remind Freddie Gray’s community that the collection exists,” says Meringolo. “That it is theirs.”

Header image: Denise Meringolo. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

The prime minister and minister of public health were in deep discussion about how to solve a major health pandemic, but their situation room wasn’t at the United Nations or in a parliament building, it was in a conference room. The state actors were UMBC students and, fortunately, the pandemic was actually an exercise in public affairs crisis management.

The UMBC School of Public Policy recently participated in its first National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA)-Batten Student Simulation Competition. Representing UMBC were Erica Peery, M.P.P. ‘18, public management; Rebecca Postowski ‘16, geography and environment systems and political science, M.P.P. ‘19, environmental policy, and David Anguish ‘12, political science and modern languages linguistics and intercultural communication, M.P.P. ‘18, public management.

UMBC’s students competed at the Washington, D.C. campus of the Carnegie Mellon University Heinz College of Information Systems, Public Policy, and Management, alongside students from the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of Maryland, College Park, broken up into multi-university teams of 5-6 students each. Among the other 560 participants were students at competition sites in nine U.S. states as well as in China, Colombia, Egypt, Hungary, and South Korea. 

David Marshall, NASPAA’s director of development, explains that the goal of the simulation “is to prepare public policy students with issues they are going to encounter in the real world.”

As simulation judge Anand Desai, section head of evaluation and assessment capability at the National Science Foundation, shared, “The competition helps policy students think through a broad range of “what if” scenarios, and the more complex and real the simulation feels, the more effective it will be as a tool to prepare participating students.” With this in mind, each competition takes on a significant area of international policy, and this year the focus was pandemic preparedness.

Each team represented a country, where team members simulated roles such as prime minister, minister of finance, and minister of public health. The teams made decisions based on a situation brief and available data. Each step in the game provided participants with a new opportunity to analyze, forecast, collaborate and provide policy recommendations.

The game was designed by the Center for Simulation and Gaming at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, directed by Noah Myung. “Public policy and science go hand in hand,” Myung explains, noting, “We need both to create realistic simulations that can be used across different disciplines and organizations to help create real global solutions by interdisciplinary teams.”

It was that interdisciplinary and global focus that inspired UMBC to join the competition this year. Susan Sterrett, director of UMBC’s School of Public Policy, selected the UMBC members for not only their exceptionally strong academic achievement but also their involvement in interdisciplinary activities.

The teams played four rounds, which also included writing policy briefs and making a final presentation. Postowski’s team advanced to the semifinal round, and she reflects that the simulation experience helped her to more clearly understand the interconnectedness of economic, health, environmental and transportation issues, and the relationship between domestic and international concerns.

“The simulation helps you think broadly and strategically,” the UMBC environmental policy graduate student says. “The key concepts of policy considerations, how they are weighted, considering the stakeholders involved, and measuring those outcomes can be applied to any scenario.”

Banner image by Catalina Sofia Dansberger Duque for UMBC.

By Haibin Zhang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Header photo:SWEviL/Shutterstock.com

As cloud storage becomes more common, data security is an increasing concern. Companies and schools have been increasing their use of services like Google Drive for some time, and lots of individual users also store files on Dropbox, Box, Amazon Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and the like. They’re no doubt concerned about keeping their information private – and millions more users might store data online if they were more certain of its security.

Data stored in the cloud is nearly always stored in an encrypted form that would need to be cracked before an intruder could read the information. But as a scholar of cloud computing and cloud security, I’ve seen that where the keys to that encryption are held varies among cloud storage services. In addition, there are relatively simple ways users can boost their own data’s security beyond what’s built into systems they use.

Who holds the keys?

Commercial cloud storage systems encode each user’s data with a specific encryption key. Without it, the files look like gibberish – rather than meaningful data.

But who has the key? It can be stored either by the service itself, or by individual users. Most services keep the key themselves, letting their systems see and process user data, such as indexing data for future searches. These services also access the key when a user logs in with a password, unlocking the data so the person can use it. This is much more convenient than having users keep the keys themselves.

But it is also less secure: Just like regular keys, if someone else has them, they might be stolen or misused without the data owner knowing. And some services might have flaws in their security practices that leave users’ data vulnerable.

Letting users keep control

A few less popular cloud services, including Mega and SpiderOak, require users to upload and download files through service-specific client applications that include encryption functions. That extra step lets users keep the encryption keys themselves. For that additional security, users forgo some functions, such as being able to search among their cloud-stored files.

These services aren’t perfect – there’s still a possibility that their own apps might be compromised or hacked, allowing an intruder to read your files either before they’re encrypted for uploading or after being downloaded and decrypted. An encrypted cloud service provider could even embed functions in its specific app that could leave data vulnerable. And, of course, if a user loses the password, the data is irretrievable.

One new mobile app says it can keep phone photos encrypted from the moment they’re taken, through transmission and storage in the cloud. Other new services may arise offering similar protection for other types of data, though users should still be on guard against the potential for information to be hijacked in the few moments after the picture is taken, before it’s encrypted and stored.

Protecting yourself

To maximize cloud storage security, it’s best to combine the features of these various approaches. Before uploading data to the cloud, first encrypt it using your own encryption software. Then upload the encoded file to the cloud. To get access to the file again, log in to the service, download it and decrypt it yourself.

This, of course, prevents users from taking advantage of many cloud services, like live editing of shared documents and searching cloud-stored files. And the company providing the cloud services could still modify the data, by altering the encrypted file before you download it.

The best way to protect against that is to use authenticated encryption. This method stores not only an encrypted file, but additional metadata that lets a user detect whether the file has been modified since it was created.

Ultimately, for people who don’t want to learn how to program their own tools, there are two basic choices: Find a cloud storage service with trustworthy upload and download software that is open-source and has been validated by independent security researchers. Or use trusted open-source encryption software to encrypt your data before uploading it to the cloud; these are available for all operating systems and are generally free or very low-cost.

Haibin Zhang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.