In the latest essay for his Race Stories column in The New York Times, Maurice Berger, research professor at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, examines Dawoud Bey’s intimate and powerful 2007 portrait of Barack Obama prior to becoming president. The essay is being co-published by the Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art. “The photograph depicts its famously private and introspective subject only months before he was to step into the abyss of presidential politics. And it defines him free of the stereotypes and myths that have come to characterize his presidency,” observers Berger.

Read “Meditation on President Obama’s Portrait” and view the photograph at the New York Times Lens blog.

Berger’s Race Stories column has featured several essays centered upon race and photography, including Malcolm X as image maker, Ken Gonzales-Day, images of emancipation, the photographs of Deborah Will, and the civil rights work of James Karales.

Walk In Advising Hours July 28th - August 1st
Got a question? Need registration clearance? Stop on by! 

Monday, July 28th
10am-11:30am

Tuesday, July 29th
10am-11:30am

Thursday, July 31st
1:30pm-3pm

Friday, August 1st
By appointment only

Advisors are also available by appointment.

MS Thesis Defense

Android Malware Detection and Classification
using Machine Learning Techniques

Satyajit Padalkar

10:30am Wednesday, 30 July 2014, ITE 325b

Android is popular mobile operating system and there exists multiple marketplaces for Android applications. Most of these market places allow applications to be signed using self-signed certificates. Due to this practice there exists little or very limited control over the kind of applications that are being distributed. Also advancement of Android root kits are increasingly making it easier to repackage existing Android application with malicious code. Conventional signature based techniques fail to detect such malware. So detection and classification of Android malware is a very difficult problem. We present a method to classify and detect such malware by performing a dynamic analysis of the system call sequences. Here we make use of machine learning techniques to build multiple models using distributions of syscalls as features. Using these models we predict whether given application is malicious or benign. Also we try to classify given application to specific known malware family. We also explore deep learning methods such as stacked denoising autoencoder algorithms (SdA) and its effectiveness. We experimentally evaluate our methods using a real dataset of 600 applications from 38 malware families and 25 popular benign applications from various areas. We find that a deep learning algorithm (SdA) is most accurate in detecting a malware with lowest false positives while AdaBoost performs better in classifying a malware family.

Committee: Drs. Anupam Joshi (chair), Tim Finin and Charles Nicholas

One of the things that makes UMBC great is how wonderful our alumni, students, faculty, and staff are. Because of these amazing people, UMBC often finds itself “in the news,” so each week, we’ll be sharing with you a round-up of the most newsworthy achievements from our community.

• Roy Meyers, Political Science on MarylandReporter.com
• Leslie Morgan, Sociology and Anthropology, in The Baltimore Beacon
• Nicole King, American Studies, in City Paper
• Thomas Schaller, Political Science, Op-Ed in The Baltimore Sun
• Paul Smith, Chemistry, in The Baltimore Sun

Read more great news here!

In an op-ed published July 24 on MarylandReporter.com, Political Science Professor Roy Meyers writes about a proposed bill that would allow U.S. corporations to avoid taxes when they repatriate profits that are now booked overseas, if they purchase bonds that would be used to build infrastructure.

In his column, Meyers writes that the bill deserves scrutiny, noting: “[the bill] would create the American Infrastructure Fund (AIF) and capitalize it with up to $50 billion. That money would be used to finance infrastructure projects that pass benefit-cost tests.”

He adds, “the projects would be expected to pay the AIF back, meaning that the infrastructure projects most likely to be financed through the AIF would be those where it would easy to charge tolls. The AIF is thus somewhat duplicative of the existing Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act program, and like various proposals to create an ‘infrastructure bank.’ Assuming that the bank would spend $10 billion a year for five years, it would add a small amount of funding for federal investment.”

To read Meyer’s full column on MarylandReporter.com, click here.

An article published in the August 2014 edition of The Baltimore Beacon newspaper examines the struggles and challenges caregivers can face while caring for elderly family members. The article covers topics ranging from finding support and treatment for caregivers’ own health to caregiver stress and benefits.

Leslie Morgan, professor of sociology and co-director of the UMBC/UMB Ph.D. program in gerontology, was interviewed for the article and said the subject of caregiver stress has been a focus of research for almost three decades.

“This is a time when you and your loved can be together and get closer,” Morgan said, “when hopefully, you’ll have the time to say things you might not otherwise have said, and to show your affection for each other.”

You can read the complete article titled, “Ups and downs of caregiving,” by clicking here.

Nicole King, an associate professor of American studies, recently published an essay as part of an ongoing series in the “City Folk” section of City Paper profiling UMBC graduate student Chanan Delivuk. King met Delivuk through her work in the Filbert Street Community Garden in Curtis Bay earlier this year.

Delivuk is a community gardener and artist who uses new media to explore everyday stories in her art practice. The profile describes Delivuk growing up in the Curtis Bay neighborhood and how it provided a strong sense of place for her as she left town to go to college and eventually graduate school. King writes about Delivuk developing an interest in art while in college and her planned trip to Croatia this summer to further explore her Croatian heritage.

The compelling profile ends with a powerful quote from Delivuk as she is describing her home of Curtis Bay: “I will always live here because I love it so much,” she says. “I want to walk out on a busy street, with sirens going off, and people walking, and a lot going on. There’s something about this city that’s so unique.”

To read King’s full article in City Paper titled, “Conservation Artist: Chanan Delivuk has deep roots in Curtis Bay,” click here.