The UMBC Cybersecurity Masters in Professional Studies (MPS) program will offer the following courses over the Summer 2013 session:
CYBR 620: Introduction to Cybersecurity
CYBR 621: Cyber Warfare
CYBR 691: Special Topics in Cybersecurity: Application Security Principles/Practices
Each class will meet one or two days a week in the late afternoon or evening, depending on the length of the session where the course is offered.
For those living in Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia, Frederick, MD, and points west, UMBC's Cybersecurity MPS will launch at the Universities at Shady Grove (USG) in Fall 2013. Courses offered the first semester at that campus will be:
CYBR 620: Introduction to Cybersecurity
CYBR 623: Cybersecurity Law & Policy
The deadline to apply for Fall 2013 admission to the UMBC Graduate Cybersecurity Program is August 1, 2013.
UMBC Training Centers announced new Cybersecurity Academy certificate programs that provide highly-focused skills training and practical experience to address the cyber workforce training needs of the military, the intelligence community, federal civilian agencies, and the commercial sector in the Mid-Atlantic region. The Cybersecurity Academy includes four non-credit certificate programs: Cyber Foundations, Cybersecurity, Cyber Development and Cyber Operations. These certificate programs combine multiple skills training and hands-on problem solving guided by expert instructors to create high-impact learning. The skills mastered in the programs prepare participants with immediate, on-the-job effectiveness to tackle real-world situations.
The UMBC Review is a journal for undergraduate research done at UMBC. CMSC and CMPE majors who have recently finished a research project or paper or plan to do so before the fall should consider submitting it for volume 15, which will be published next April. The Review publishes papers in all disciplines, including the computing sciences.
Papers may be submitted at any time between now and 13 September 2013 for consideration in the next volume. Students graduating this spring or summer are eligible to submit papers on work completed as an undergraduate. See the table of contents of the current issue to get an idea of the range and length of published papers.
If you are interested, fill out this online form to get additional information.
UMBC's cyber defense team, the Cyber Dawgs, will host an interdisciplinary talk and screening of the film Game of Pawns at 7:00pm on Tuesday, April 30, 2013 in room 102 of the ITE building (LH8). The film is a true story of an American student who was recruited by the Chinese government to infiltrate a U.S. intelligence agency.
The event is sponsored and run by InfraGuard, an organization that acts as a partnership mediator between the FBI and US businesses. The talk will be nontechnical and will present an overview of the dangers that might arise when dealing with foreign businesses or representatives. It should be of interest to students considering studying abroad, pursuing international relations or business, or anticipating working for a government agency.
Baltimore Chapter of Electron Devices and Solid-State Circuits
Quantum Engineering of Semiconductor Atomic Structures for Biosensing
Dr. Manijeh Razeghi
Center for Quantum Devices
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Northwestern University
5:30pm Tuesday, 30 April 2013
206 Technology Research Center, UMBC
5:30pm social hour, talk begins at 6:15pm. Free but please RSVP to by Monday, April 29
Nature offers us different kinds of atoms, but it takes human intelligence to put them together in an elegant way in order to realize functional structures not found in nature. III-V semiconductors are made of atoms from column III (B, Al, Ga, In, Tl) and column V (N, As, P, Sb, Bi) of the periodic table, and constitute a particularly rich variety of compounds with many useful optical and electronic properties. Guided by highly accurate simulations of the electronic structure, modern semiconductor optoelectronic devices are literally made atom by atom using advanced growth technology such as Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) and Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD). Recent breakthroughs have brought quantum engineering to an unprecedented level, creating light detectors and emitters over an extremely wide spectral range from 0.2 µm to 300 µm. Nitrogen serves as the best column V element for the short wavelength side of the electromagnetic spectrum, where we have demonstrated III-nitride light emitting diodes and photo detectors in the deep ultraviolet to visible wavelengths. In the infrared, III-V compounds using phosphorus, arsenic, or antimony from column V with indium, gallium, aluminum, or thallium from column III can create lasers and detectors based on quantum-dot (QD) or type-II superlattice (T2SL). These are fast becoming the choice of technology in crucial applications such as environmental monitoring and space exploration. Last but not least, on the far-infrared end of the electromagnetic spectrum known as the terahertz (THz) region, III-V semiconductors offer a unique solution of generating THz waves in a compact device at room temperature. Continued effort is being devoted to all of the above areas with the intention of developing smart technologies which meet the current challenges in environment, health, security, and energy. This talk will highlight contributions to the world of III-V semiconductor nano-scale optoelectronic devices from deep UV to THz.
Dr. Manijeh Razeghi received the Doctorat d'État es Sciences Physiques from the Université de Paris in 1980. After heading the Exploratory Materials Lab at Thomson-CSF (France), she joined Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, in the fall of 1991 as the Director of the Center for Quantum Devices, where she created undergraduate and graduate programs in solid-state engineering. Dr. Razeghi pioneered the development and implementation of major modern epitaxial techniques such as MOCVD, VPE, gas MBE, and MOMBE for the growth of entire compositional ranges of III-V compound semiconductors. She is on the editorial board of journals such as the Journal of Nanotechnology and the Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, and is an Associate Editor of the Opto-Electronics Review. Dr. Razeghi is on the International Advisory Board for the Polish Committee of Science, and is an Adjunct Professor at the College of Optical Sciences of the University of Arizona in Tucson. She ha s authored or co-authored more than 1000 papers, over 30 book chapters, and fifteen books, including the textbooks Technology of Quantum Devices and Fundamentals of Solid State Engineering, 3rd Edition. Two of her books, MOCVD Challenge Vol. 1 (1989) and MOCVD Challenge Vol. 2 (1995), discuss some of her pioneering work in InP-GaInAsP and GaAs-GaInAsP based systems. [The MOCVD Challenge, 2nd Edition (2010) represents the combined updated version of Volumes 1 and 2]. Dr. Razeghi holds 50 U.S. patents and has given more than 1000 invited and plenary talks. Her current research interest is in nanoscale optoelectronic quantum devices. Dr. Razeghi is a Fellow of MRS, IOP, IEEE, APS, SPIE, OSA, and the International Engineering Consortium (IEC), a Fellow and Life Member of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), and a member of the Electrochemical Society, ACS, AAAS, and the French Academy of Sciences and Technology. She received the IBM Europe Science and Technology Prize in 1987, the Achievement Award from the SWE in 1995, the R.F. Bunshah! Award in 2004, and multiple best paper awards.
Every year, the UMBC Game Developers Club organizes a Digital Entertainment Conference (DEC) with a day of games industry veterans speaking on a variety of topics. This year's is on Saturday, April 27th, starting at 10am in the Engineering Building lecture hall on the UMBC campus.
The DEC is free, open to anyone, and features speakers from Firaxis Games, Zenimax, Pure Bang Games, Bioware Mythic, and Mindgrub. Whether you are a High School student, go to UMBC or another University, or are already working in a different industry, you are sure find interesting information about how the games industry works, how some current developers got started, and what they do. If you are a game developer, you are sure to find High School students, UMBC students and students from other Universities who are interested in jobs in the games industry.
Modeling Individual Nodes In Dynamic Link Prediction
Maksym Morawski
2:00pm Thursday, 25 April 2013, ITE325b, UMBC
The question of how to predict which links will form in a graph, given the graph’s history, is an open research problem in computer science. There are many different approaches to the link prediction problem, one of which involves building a set of features for pairs of nodes and using supervised learning to build a model that predicts when these pairs of nodes will link. Typically, this model is learned over the entire graph. In this thesis, I investigate building this model over each individual node in an attempt to learn the particular ways in which that node behaves before making predictions about it. In addition, research into link prediction to date lacks intelligent ways of utilizing the graph over large timespans. To address this, I introduce a variety of ways to include temporality into the link prediction process by introducing new ways of using existing features.
Committee: Dr. Marie desJardins (Chair), Dr. Tim Oates, Dr. Tim Finin
Heterogeneous architectures can be problematic to program on, particularly when trying to schedule tasks on all available compute resources, overlapping PCI express transfers, and managing the limited memory available on the architectures. In this thesis we propose a workflow system that is capable of scheduling on all available compute resources, overlaps PCI express transfers, and manages the limited memory. A procedure for creating the workflow system is described and two case studies are analyzed.
Image Stitching, which implements the workflow system and achieves two orders of magnitude speedup over an image stitching plugin found in the popular Fiji ImageJ application. Implementing the image stitching algorithm without the workflow system yielded only one order of magnitude speedup over the image stitching plugin.
Out of Core LU Decomposition, which does not implement the workflow system. This case study demonstrates the impact of the PCI express on a problem with a large number of dependencies. A proposed workflow system for this algorithm is provided in Future Work.
Using the workflow system, programmers have a method for scheduling any algorithm on all available compute resources and is capable of hiding the I/O impact by overlapping computation with I/O.
The Cybersecurity Master’s in Professional Studies degree provides students the essential knowledge required to serve in leadership and operational roles throughout the industry. Through the program, students will learn how to analyze cybersecurity risks and assess available countermeasures. The program will expose students to practical managerial and operational considerations needed to conduct cybersecurity activities for large organizations.
In current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research, one of the most active areas involves exploring statistical dependencies among brain regions, known as functional connectivity analysis. Data-driven methods, especially independent component analysis (ICA), have been successfully applied to fMRI data to extract distributed brain networks and offer an opportunity to investigate functional connectivity on a network level, thus at a multivariate level. However, the independence assumption in ICA is neither necessarily nor typically satisfied in real applications and an extension is desirable. Furthermore, most current ICA-based studies focus on the use of temporal information and second-order statistics for functional connectivity analysis. Taking spatial information and higher-order statistics in fMRI data into account is expected to lead to better understanding of the overall brain network connectivity in healthy controls and also in patients with mental disorders, such as schizophrenia.
We develop a dependent component analysis (DCA) framework to generalize the ICA-based connectivity analysis methods by grouping components into maximally independent clusters. First, we define functional network connectivity as the statistical dependence among spatial components, instead of the typically used temporal correlation. Based on this definition, we use a hypothesis test to automatically generate functional connectivity structure for a large number of brain networks. After that, we separate dependent components within a given cluster using prior information, such as sparsity and experimental paradigm information, to achieve a better decomposition. We also combine this DCA-based clustering analysis with graph-theoretical analysis to discover significant group differences in topological properties of functional connectivity structure. To extend the methodologies currently available for functional connectivity, we propose an independent vector analysis (IVA) based scheme to extract and analyze dynamic functional connectivity.
The methods we develop offer advantages for effective and efficient examination of not only static, but also dynamic functional connectivity among different brain networks. We identify significant differences in functional connectivity structure between healthy controls and patients with schizophrenia, which may prove useful to serve as potential biomarkers for diagnosis. We also find task-induced modulations in functional connectivity when comparing different active states in the brain. Furthermore, we observe temporal variability in functional connectivity structure and physiologically meaningful group differences in dynamic connectivity among several brain networks. Our methods can provide insights to understanding of functional characteristics of the brain network organization in healthy individuals and patients with schizophrenia.
Committee: Dr. Adali (Chair), Dr. Morris, Dr. Rutledge, Dr. LaBerge, Dr. Phlypo, Dr. Calhoun, and Dr. Westlake
