UMBC's Mock Trial made UMBC history when they participated for the first time in the American Mock Trial Association's Regional Tournament and one of the teams has now won a bid to participate in the Opening Round Championship Series (ORCS), to be held this weekend in DC. If all goes well there, UMBC will move on to the National Championship Tournament. 

Honors College sophomore Dylan Elliott, a history major and Humanities Scholar and officer in the Honors College Council (HCC), was named All Region Attorney in the regionals last month and is a member of the team going forward to ORCS. He was quoted in The Retriever Weekly as saying, "Accepting the bid to ORCS and making history has been surreal — it is definitely one of the proudest moments of my life so far. To be the first team from UMBC to put everything together and lift an ORCS Bid trophy has been a dream come true. We’ve made an indelible mark on the history of our program, for the better. Although our program, in its brief history, has boasted some very talented witnesses and attorneys, no team has been able to do something like this. That’s something that can never be taken away from us.”

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

 Towards Large-Scale Measurement of Vulnerabilities
and Design of Usable New Systems

Prof. Chuan Yue
University of Colorado Colorado Springs

12:00-1:00 Monday, 23 March 2015, ITE325b, UMBC

Security and privacy vulnerabilities are pervasive in computer and network systems. In my research group, we aim to accurately measure and analyze the vulnerabilities of Web, Cloud, and Mobile systems on a large scale; we also aim to design usable new systems that provide better security and privacy protection to millions of users. In this talk, I will first present our research on analyzing the vulnerabilities of popular Web browsers’ built-in password managers and some third-party browser-and-cloud-based password managers. Next, I will present a framework for automatic detection of information leakage vulnerabilities in JavaScript-based browser extensions including password managers. I will explain why it is very challenging to accurately and automatically analyze JavaScript-based browser extensions, justify why our static and dynamic combined approach is practical and appropriate, and further discuss how we may increase the capabilities of this framework to automatically measure and analyze JavaScript related security and privacy vulnerabilities on a large scale. Finally, I will discuss some of our current and future projects on security and privacy research and education, for example, one project is on measuring users’ susceptibility to sophisticated and highly insidious phishing attacks.

Chuan Yue is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. His current research focuses on Web, Cloud, and Mobile Systems Security and Privacy. He received his B.E. and M.E. degrees in Computer Science from Xidian University, China, in 1996 and 1999, respectively, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary in 2010. He worked as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs China, Lucent Technologies for four years from 1999 to 2003, mainly on the design and development of the Web-based Distributed Service Management System for Intelligent Network.

For more information and directions: http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks.

A recent article in Nature outlines the debate surrounding a movement to establish the Anthropocene as a new global epoch. The Anthropocene refers to the part of the world’s history where humans significantly impact earth systems.

In the article, Erle Ellis, geography and information systems, argues against the current effort to formalize the Anthropocene as an epoch. He states, “We should set a time, perhaps 1,000 years from now, in which we would officially investigate this. Making a decision before that would be premature.”

Click here to read, “Anthropocene: The human age” in Nature.

UMBC has been awarded a new MDCCC AmeriCorps VISTA project for 2015-2016!  

The project will ask the MDCCC AmeriCorps VISTA to work at both UMBC and with our community partner, BCCC's Refugee Youth Project to create a college access mentoring program for high school students who attend RYP.  

See link here!