The Human Resources (HR) Department and the Professional Staff Senate Subcommittee on Work/Life Balance have collaborated to bring greater awareness to flexible work arrangements available to staff.   As part of this exciting collaboration, we have also added more features to the existing HR Work/Life Balance  website highlighted below.

• ·         Alternative Work Arrangement FAQ’s (Frequently Asked questions)
• ·         Examples of Alternative Work Arrangements

These resources are also available on the PSS Work/Life Balancewebsite.  The HR Department and PSS will offer brown bag sessions on Alternative Work Arrangements.  The first session will be held October 27, 2017, from Noon to 1:00pm in The Commons, Room 331.  We hope that you will join us for what we anticipate will be an informative and engaging session.  Refreshments will be served. Sessions are open to all staff.  Supervisors and Managers are encouraged to attend.

For additional questions regarding these sessions, or flexible work arrangements contact the HR Department at http://hr.umbc.edu/support/.

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

Context-dependent privacy and security management on mobile devices

Prajit Kumar Das

8:00-11:00am Tuesday, 22 August 2017, ITE325b, UMBC

There are ongoing security and privacy concerns regarding mobile platforms which are being used by a growing number of citizens. Security and privacy models typically used by mobile platforms use one-time permission acquisition mechanisms. However, modifying access rights after initial authorization in mobile systems is often too tedious and complicated for users. User studies show that a typical user does not understand permissions requested by applications or are too eager to use the applications to care to understand the permission implications. For example, the Brightest Flashlight application was reported to have logged precise locations and unique user identifiers, which have nothing to do with a flashlight application’s intended functionality, but more than 50 million users used a version of this application which would have forced them to allow this permission. Given the penetration of mobile devices into our lives, a fine-grained context-dependent security and privacy control approach needs to be created.

We have created Mithril as an end-to-end mobile access control framework that allows us to capture access control needs for specific users, by observing violations of known policies. The framework studies mobile application executables to better inform users of the risks associated with using certain applications. The policy capture process involves an iterative user feedback process that captures policy modifications required to mediate observed violations. Precision of policy is used to determine convergence of the policy capture process. Policy rules in the system are written using Semantic Web technologies and the Platys ontology to define a hierarchical notion of context. Policy rule antecedents are comprised of context elements derived using the Platys ontology employing a query engine, an inference mechanism and mobile sensors. We performed a user study that proves the feasibility of using our violation driven policy capture process to gather user-specific policy modifications.

We contribute to the static and dynamic study of mobile applications by defining “application behavior” as a possible way of understanding mobile applications and creating access control policies for them. Our user study also shows that unlike our behavior-based policy, a “deny by default” mechanism hampers usability of access control systems. We also show that inclusion of crowd-sourced policies leads to further reduction in user burden and need for engagement while capturing context-based access control policy. We enrich knowledge about mobile “application behavior” and expose this knowledge through the Mobipedia knowledge-base. We also extend context synthesis for semantic presence detection on mobile devices by combining Bluetooth, low energy beacons and Nearby Messaging services from Google.

Committee: Drs. Anupam Joshi (chair), Tim Finin (co-chair), Tim Oates, Nilanjan Banerjee, Arkady Zaslavsky, (CSIRO), Dipanjan Chakraborty (Shopperts)

The post PhD defense: Prajit Das, Context-dependent privacy and security management on mobile devices appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

UMBC also celebrates Anne Brodsky‘s new appointment as interim director of MIPAR and special assistant to the dean for social sciences.

“I’m excited to join the wonderful MIPAR staff, help MIPAR continue its critical role in supporting public policy and the social sciences at UMBC, and explore next steps MIPAR can take to advance the cutting edge scholarship and community engagement being done in this area by our faculty, staff, and students,” she shares.

Brodsky received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park in clinical and community psychology, and joined UMBC’s faculty in 1997. She is a professor of psychology and served as associate dean in UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences from 2012–2016.

In 2016-17 Brodsky participated in the prestigious American Council on Education (ACE) fellows program. She was one of just 29 fellows from across the nation to participate that year, selected for their tremendous potential as leaders in higher education. Upon the announcement of her ACE fellowship, she shared, “I am particularly interested in issues of access, inclusion, participation, and retention at all levels of the university, as well as initiatives to promote the co-equal synergy of STEM, the social sciences, and all the liberal arts – a synergy that is necessary to contribute to changes in the real world that serve to enhance the university’s value to the community.”

Brodsky is a community/clinical psychologist whose teaching, research, and practice focus on individual and community resilience in relation to violence, poverty, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. She has worked with both immigrant and nonimmigrant communities in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. area, particularly with single, low-income mothers. She has also traveled extensively throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan for research, and works in the U.S. to raise awareness of the experiences of Afghan women. She is the author of With All Our Strength: The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (Routledge, 2004).

Excerpt from article originally posted on UMBC News: Susan Sterett and Anne Brodsky begin new social science leadership roles at UMBC

Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Our advising offices are located in ITE 202-206. Email and telephone contact information is available here.

Our advising offices are located in ITE 202-206. Email and telephone contact information is available here.