talk: Designing Quantum Resistant KeyExchange Protocols with CPSA, 12-1 Fri 4/15, online

With developments in quantum computers and algorithms, quantum-resistant key exchange protocols are needed to replace our existing vulnerable protocols

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Designing Quantum Resistant Key
Exchange Protocols with CPSA

Dr. Edward Zieglar, CSEE, UMBC

12–1 pm, Friday, 15 April 2022
online via WebEx

With developments in quantum computers and algorithms, the public-key systems that we rely upon for secure network communication will become vulnerable to exploitation. Quantum-resistant key exchange protocols are needed to replace our existing vulnerable protocols. Much of the work has focused on developing new mathematical problems that are conjectured to be quantum-resistant as replacements for our current public-key algorithms. We took a different approach, looking to an old secret-key agreement protocol developed by Leighton and Micali at MIT for the Clipper Chip symmetric encryption system. We will present our analysis of the Leighton-Micali key agreement protocol, weaknesses we uncovered with the Cryptographic Protocol Shapes Analyzer (CPSA), and verification of a new protocol based on their ideas that corrects deficiencies in the original protocol.

Dr. Zieglar is an expert in protocol analysis and computer security at the National Security Agency. He is an adjunct faculty member at UMBC and a member of the UMBC Protocol Analysis Lab. Dr. Zieglar earned his Ph.D. in computer science from UMBC working under Dr. Sidhu. Email:

Host: Alan T. Sherman, . Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681. The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays 12-1 pm. All meetings are open to the public. Upcoming CDL Meetings: April 29, Ian Blumenfeld (UMBC), May 13, Enka Blanchard (Digitrust Loria, France).

talk: Formal Methods Analysis of the Session Binding Proxy Protocol, 12-1 Fri 4/1

Session Binding Proxy protocol aims to prevent session hijacking by binding the application session to the underlying network session

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

A Formal Methods Analysis of the Session Binding Proxy Protocol

Kirellos N. Abou Elsaad, UMBC

12-1 pm, Friday, 1 April 2022, via WebEx

Proposed by Burgers, Verdult, and Eekelen in 2013, the Session Binding Proxy (SBP) protocol intends to prevent session hijacking by binding the application session to the underlying network session (i.e., binding the session token to the SSL/TLS shared key). We present a formal methods analysis of SBP using the Cryptographic Protocol Shapes Analyzer (CPSA). Our analysis reveals that SBP relies critically on the successful establishment of a secure SSL/TLS channel, which can be undermined using well-known attacks. Also, we find that SBP allows for the partial hijacking of a session using a tailgating attack. In this attack, the adversary uses the server to inject and execute malicious code inside the client’s browser to extract the session token and forge a valid state-changing request to the server. This attack is not neutralized by SBP because the request contains a valid session token and is sent over the client’s existing SSL/TLS channel.

Kirellos N. Abou Elsaad is a master’s student in computer science at UMBC working under Dr. Sherman and a member of the Protocol Analysis Lab (PAL). email:

Host: Alan T. Sherman, . Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681. The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays 12-1 pm. All meetings are open to the public. Upcoming CDL Meetings: April 15, Edward Zieglar (NSA); April 29, Ian Blumenfeld (UMBC); May 13, Enka Blanchard (Digitrust Loria, France).

Prof. Matuszek receives prestigious NSF CAREER award for robotics research

Matuszek’s new CAREER award focuses on how robots can learn to understand how speech refers to objects and environments when dealing with diverse end-users.

Prof. Cynthia Matuszek receives prestigious
NSF CAREER award for robotics research

CSEE professor Cynthia Matuszek received an NSFCAREER award to support her research on improving the ability of robots to interact with people in everyday environments. The five-year award will provide nearly $550,000 in funds to support research by Dr. Matuszek and her students in the Interactive Robotics and Language lab.

The CAREER award is part of the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program and is considered one of NSF’s most prestigious grants.  It supports faculty members beginning their independent careers and who have “the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.”  One of the program’s central goals is to help early-career faculty “build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.”

Dr. Matuszek joined UMBC in 2014 after receiving her Ph.D. at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she was co-advised by Dieter Fox and Luke Zettlemoyer.  Before beginning her graduate studies, she was a senior research lead at Cycorp.

Dr. Matuszek’s proposal, Robots, Speech, and Learning in Inclusive Human Spaces, addresses the problem of how robots can use spoken language and perception to learn how to help support people.  A description of her project is below.

“The goal of this project is to allow robots to learn to understand spoken instructions and information about the world directly from speech with end users. Modern robots are small and capable, but not adaptable enough to perform the variety of tasks people may require. Meanwhile, too many machine learning systems work poorly for people from under-represented groups. The research will use physical, real-world context to enable learning directly from speech, including constructing a data set that is large, realistic, and inclusive of speakers from diverse backgrounds.

As robots become more capable and ubiquitous, they are increasingly moving into traditionally human-centric environments such as health care, education, and eldercare. As robots engage in tasks as diverse as helping with household work, deploying medication, and tutoring students, it becomes increasingly critical for them to interact naturally with the people around them. Key to this progress is the development of robots that acquire an understanding of goals and objects from natural communications with a diverse set of end-users. One way to address this is using language to build systems that learn from people they are interacting with. Algorithms and systems developed in this project will allow robots to learn about the world around them from linguistic interactions. This research will focus on understanding spoken language about the physical world from diverse groups of people, resulting in systems that are more able to robustly handle a wide variety of real-world interactions. Ultimately, the project will increase the usability and fairness of robots deployed in human spaces.

This CAREER project will study how robots can learn about noisy, unpredictable human environments from spoken language combined with perception, using context derived from sensors to constrain the learning problem. Grounded language refers to language that occurs in and refers to the physical world in which robots operate. Human interactions are fundamentally contextual: when learning about the world, we focus on learning by considering not only direct communication but also the context of that interaction. This work will focus on learning semantics directly from perceptual inputs combined with speech from diverse sources. The goal is to develop learning infrastructure, algorithms, and approaches to enable robots to learn to understand task instructions and object descriptions from spoken communication with end users. The project will develop new methods of efficiently learning from multi-modal data inputs, with the ultimate goal of enabling robots to efficiently and naturally learn about their world and the tasks they should perform.”

talk: CyMOT Cybersecurity Training for Operational Technology in Manufacturing, 12-1 Fri 3/18

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

CyMOT: Cybersecurity Training for
Operational Technology in Manufacturing

Nilanjan Banerjee, UMBC CSEE

12-1 pm Friday, 18 March 2022, via WebEx

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and MxD Learn, the workforce arm of MxD, seeks to collaboratively build Phase I of CyMOT to address the need for cybersecurity for operational manufacturing technology (OT). Leveraging MxD Learn’s previous work identifying the skills and abilities needed in future manufacturing positions and the development and dissemination of training opportunities and career pathways, MxD Learn has partnered with UMBC, a leader in cybersecurity education, to create a curriculum that targets adult learners who are looking to increase their skills at the intersection of cybersecurity and manufacturing. The objective of the curriculum program is to provide current workers with learning opportunities that result in certification(s), giving them the tools necessary to execute careers in cybersecurity in manufacturing, and increasing the security of U.S. manufacturers from cyber attacks. This talk will describe the CyMOT Phase I pilot.

Dr. Nilanjan Banerjee is a professor of CSEE at UMBC. His area of expertise is in cybersecurity in manufacturing and physiological sensing.


Host: Alan T. Sherman, . Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681. The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays 12-1 pm. All meetings are open to the public. Upcoming CDL Meetings: April 1, Kirellos Elsaad (UMBC); April 15, Edward Zieglar (NSA); April 29, Ian Blumenfeld (UMBC); May 13, Enka Blanchard (Digitrust Loria, France).

talk: Ted Selker on Voting Technology, 12-1, Fri 3/4

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Voting Technology

Ted Selker

Research Professor
UMBC CSEE Department

12–1 ET Friday, 4 March 2022 via WebEx

Traditionally most votes are lost in registration, voting ballot design problems, and polling place operations, causing long lines and possibly mail-in ballot fraud. This talk will describe voting-process problems and technological problems, and some possible solutions for voting improvement. Voting disenfranchisement is much higher for people with perceptual, physical, and cognitive disabilities. More than 14% of registered voters are in danger of increased errors due to dyslexia, and more than 6.5% due to short-term memory problems. We will describe and demonstrate technologies we are making that help disabled people and improve voting universally as well.

Dr. Ted Selker is an entrepreneur inventor who also mentors innovation. Ted spent five years as director of Considerate Systems research at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley and in developing the campus’s research mission. Prior to that, Ted spent ten years as an associate professor at the MIT Media Laboratory, where he created the Context Aware Computing group, co-directed the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and directed the Industrial Design Intelligence future for product design project. Prior to that, his successes at targeted product creation and enhancement at IBM earned him the role of IBM Fellow. Ted’s work birthed successful products ranging from notebook computers to operating systems. It accumulated numerous awards, patents, and papers and has often been featured in the press. Ted is co-recipient of the Computer Science Policy Leader Award for Scientific American 50, the American Association for People with Disabilities Thomas Paine Award for his work on voting technology, and the Telluride Tech Fest Award.

Host: Alan T. Sherman, . Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681. The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays 12-1pm. All meetings are open to the public. Upcoming CDL Meetings: March 18, Nilanjan Banerjee (UMBC); April 1, Kirellos Elsaad (UMBC); April 15, Edward Zieglar (NSA); April 29, Ian Blumenfeld (UMBC); May 13, Enka Blanchard (Digitrust Loria, France)

Ukraine conflict brings cybersecurity risks to US homes, businesses

Regular Americans could find themselves targets of Russian cyberwarfare.

 

Ukraine conflict brings cybersecurity risks to US homes, businesses

Richard Forno, University of Maryland, Baltimore County


All cybersecurity is local, regardless of the world situation. That means it’s personal, too – in Americans’ homes, computers and online accounts. As violence spreads thousands of miles away from the U.S., my strong recommendation is that all Americans remain vigilant and check on their own cybersecurity.

While organizations reinforce their cybersecurity posture during this period of geopolitical tension, I also suggest people regularly ensure their computer, mobile devices and software are updated, double-check that all passwords are secure and all key accounts are protected by two-factor authentication. Beware that phishing attacks may increase, seeking to trick people into clicking links that grant attackers access to computer systems. These are a few simple steps that can help increase one’s cybersecurity preparedness both now and for the future.

Recent Russian-linked cyberattacks, including against energy pipelines, federal government services, and attacks on local governments, first responders, hospitals and private corporations, show the potential for Russian cyber warriors to put U.S. civilians at risk. All these entities should be more vigilant over the coming days.

In the days before Russia invaded Ukraine, a series of cyberattacks disrupted Ukrainian government and business websites – despite Ukraine’s cyberdefense teams’ being prepared to defend against them.

With many Americans working from home because of the pandemic, the U.S. is more vulnerable than it might have been otherwise: Home networks and computers are often less protected than those at an office – which makes them enticing targets.

Russian cyber capabilities, and threats from Russian President Vladimir Putin, mean that what might look like random technical glitches on personal computers, websites and home networks may not be accidental. They could be precursors to – or actual parts of – a larger cyberattack. Therefore, ongoing vigilance is more crucial than ever.

[Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter.]The Conversation

Richard Forno, Principal Lecturer, Cybersecurity and Assistant Director, UMBC Cybersecurity Center, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Summer internships at the Army Research Lab in MD

The Army Research Laboratory (ARL) is the U.S. Army’s corporate research laboratory and is headquartered at the Adelphi Laboratory Center in Adelphi, Maryland.

Summer internships at the Army Research Lab for undergraduate and graduate students


The Army Research Lab (ARL) is offering approx. 12 paid summer team intern projects for UMBC and University of Maryland students. You will work on-site at ARL in teams of 3-5 interns with a mentor for 10 weeks over the summer of 2022, tentatively from June 6 thru August 12, 2022.

Internship opportunities are offered in the six topics that are described below. ARL will create specific projects within each topic that leverage the skills and experience of the students that are selected for the topic. Multiple teams may be selected for a single topic and some topics may not be supported if there is insufficient interest from applicants.

Both undergraduate and graduate engineering and science students are encouraged to apply, including Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior, Masters Candidates, and Ph.D. Candidates. Interns will be paid a fixed stipend for the 10-week internships of $9,000 for undergraduate students and $12,000 for graduate students. No additional funding for travel or lodging is available.  Interns will work on Army sites and hence are limited to U.S. citizens and will be required to comply with Army COVID-19 requirements and provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination.

APPLY via UMBCworks RIGHT AWAY, position 9336592

If you don’t have an approved resume on UMBCworks, upload one and send Christine Routzahn () an email message. She will approve it so you can apply ASAP.

Applicants should submit a one-page resume and 1-2 page cover letter that describe relevant education, projects, and work experience. Include your GPA in your resume or cover letter, a statement of your goals for the internship, and identify up to three topics that are of interest to you. ARL prefers candidates with a GPA of 3.0 or better.

Applications will be sent to the Army Research Lab every Friday. Each week selected applicants will be contacted to schedule a short virtual interview and conditional offers will be made to successful applicants on a rolling basis.  We will stop accepting applications when we reach 36 so it is to your advantage to apply early.   Applicants with conditional offers will need to successfully complete a background check prior to obtaining their final offer.

Topics   

  • 2022A – Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology
  • 2022B – Ground & Air Robotics & Autonomy
  • 2022C – Image Understanding for UAVs
  • 2022D – Novel New Energy Sources
  • 2022E – Quantum Information and Sensing
  • 2022F – Co-design of Structural Materials and Components 

Topic 2022A – Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology Topic Area

Locations: Adelphi, MD and potentially fieldwork at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD 

With the advent of synthetic biology, it becomes possible to not only harness the natural world but evolve and reprogram biological systems ushering in a new wave of biotechnological advances.  In this student research experience, teams working in the biotechnology and synthetic biology research topic area will undertake multidisciplinary research to impact a variety of Army materials, from the assembly of novel biohybrid systems and biocomposites, to material maintenance and protection, and finally, the introduction of degradative processes.  This work will require students to customize and optimize natural biological systems for material applications by developing strategies to access, understand, and tailor biological components from the environment through informatics and performance screening, genetic engineering, and bio/abio integration.  Through this work, students will learn how to apply diverse skillsets in microbiology, biomolecular, chemical, material and engineering sciences, integrated with bioinformatics, modeling, and a creative mentality toward designing and engineering biology across molecular, organismal, and biosystem levels for the advancement Army material technologies.

Skills desired:  students with bioengineering interest – chemical or biomolecular lab experience will be helpful. Potential specific research areas:

  • Genetically-programmed functional biohybrid systems: Students will gain experience in implementing bioengineering approaches to tailor both organisms and device infrastructure.
  • Bioprospecting for novel enzymes towards polymer degradation: Students will gain experience in identifying and isolating novel organisms and metabolic pathways that have naturally evolved to degrade different type of polymers from contaminated soils and water.
  • Building synergistic relationships to inhibit corrosive bacteria: Students will gain experience in identifying naturally and designer microbial communities that controls the rate of corrosion.
  • Microfluidic High-Throughput Screening (HTS) Tools for Synthetic Biology: Students will gain experience in performing high-throughput DNA transfer using droplet fluidics to engineer military-relevant microbes, and development of continuous-flow devices.
  • Bacterial Melanin for Advanced Protection:  Students will gain experience in the development of surface modification workflows, chemical characterization, analysis of effects on miscibility within polymer matrices, and testing the resulting properties of the melanized composites. 

Topic 2022B – Ground & Air Robotics & Autonomy   

Locations: Adelphi, MD and fieldwork at Middle River, MD

While state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle navigation techniques can sometimes allow autonomous vehicles to perform particular styles of navigation in particular environments, they are typically only able to do so after a time-consuming process of experimentation and manual tuning by skilled roboticists. These existing approaches may not scale to situations where environments and desirable navigation styles may not be known in advance and skilled roboticists and/or tuning time may not be available. ARL’s research aims to fill a broad set of knowledge gaps to move air and ground autonomy towards more robust, less brittle, autonomy.

Skills desired:  students with interest and some experience in autonomous ground and air systems. Potential specific research areas:

  • Conduct experiments on state-of-the-art, off-road autonomy algorithms; 2) implement and test software components in the ARL Ground Autonomy Software Stack; and 3) design, integrate, and test novel hardware solutions on ARL’s experimental, wheeled robots.
  • Perform target recognition onboard a UAV while simultaneously tracking and determining the geospatial coordinates of objects of interest during the course of a flight.
  • Explore information gathering problem variants where one or more mobile object (or objects) move(s) around the environment, while one or more quad-rotor agents attempt to gather information about the moving object.
  • Develop efficient semantic representations of LiDAR point cloud data for use in distributed multi-agent Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) 

Topic 2022C – Image Understanding for UAVs 

Locations: Adelphi, MD and fieldwork at Middle River, MD

The Army has a strong interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for a variety of applications.  This project seeks to help develop several areas important to UAV performance: 1) artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities for scene perception from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); 2) image understanding algorithms to enable vehicles to gather information about moving objects that its sensors can see; and 3) perform object recognition onboard a UAV while simultaneously tracking and determining the geospatial coordinates of the objects of interest during the course of a flight.  Student team members will be expected to participate in data collections and field experiments at outdoor locations, help develop vision-based algorithms for object detection and activity recognition leveraging both real data and synthetic data/simulators, and perform implementation of algorithms on embedded computing devices such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon for integration onboard UAVs.  Students will begin by implementing classical techniques to serve as gold standards and will transition to new novel techniques.  

Specific project outcomes for students would include:  1) integration of custom-trained object detection classifiers on-board small UAVs;  2) given the ability to detect objects, algorithms to inform how the vehicle should maneuver to better gather information on objects that may be moving in the scene.;  3) detection, tracking, and localization of objects.

Skills desired:  students with interest and some experience in autonomous ground and air system imaging sensing; interest in sensing for robots. Potential specific research areas:

  • Conduct data collections and field experiments to validate algorithms
  • Develop vision based algorithms for object detection and activity recognition leveraging both real data and synthetic data/simulators
  • Implement algorithms on embedded computing devices such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon for integration onboard UAVs
  • Utilize sensors onboard the UAV (cameras, GPS, IMU, laser range finder, etc.) and a 3D terrain map to train the UAV to compute and report the uncertainty associated with object identification and tracking

Topic 2022D – Novel New Energy Sources   

Locations:  Adelphi, MD

The Army is motivated to provide high-performance, portable power sources for its Soldiers.  Such sources will also have significant impact for a variety of commercial applications.  Specific Army applications require the development of electrochemical energy technologies that are not available commercially to enable long-lived, low power sources.  To that end, ARL has several projects involving research in electrolyte, electrode, and semiconductor materials that provide an opportunity for students to solve problems connected with cutting-edge energy source research.  

Students will gain practical laboratory experience by designing/running/validating experiments and will develop hands-on working knowledge of laboratory instrumentation.  Instrumentation will include particle accelerators, EBIC, XPS, SEM, XRD, EDS, and device fabrication and packaging methods,

Skills desired:  students with an interest or some experience in chemistry, physics, electrochemistry, material science & engineering, chemical engineering, or power sources. Potential specific research areas:

  • Energy Conversion of Radioisotope Materials - investigate radiation tolerance of ultra-wide bandgap (UWBG) semiconductor materials to increase the power density of Betavoltaic power sources
  • Low Operation Temperature Solid Oxide Fuel Cell – investigate materials that enable low-operation temperature solid oxide fuel cells with high power density
  • Aqueous and Non-aqueous Electrolytes – students will design a test cell and perform initial experiments on ARL’s new Hiden Analytical online electrochemical mass spectrometer (OEMS)

TOPIC 2022E – Quantum Information and Sensing

Locations: Adelphi, MD, and the University of Maryland at College Park

Because of the extreme potential sensitivity of quantum sensors, they could enable the detection of electromagnetic emissions, underground structures or other emissions from concealed sources that might be currently undetectable. While quantum technologies are still nascent, ARL and the University of Maryland are actively collaborating to create the basis for future sensing capabilities.  ARL has opportunities at varying levels of expertise.  All efforts are done in conjunction with the Quantum Technology Center at UMD.  The nature of these projects lends itself better to individual student efforts in collaboration with ARL scientists and engineers and UMD faculty rather than teams of students.  That said, the students working in the same locations would be expected to share their experiences, discuss challenges they encounter, and potential solutions for those challenges.

Skills desired:  Graduate students pursuing Masters or Ph.D. in Quantum Information Science. Undergraduate student – Junior or Senior in physics, CS, EE, or ME. Students with fluency in Python (at the level of http://composingprograms.com ); git; track record of writing software for fun.  Experience with low-level hardware interfaces like Arduino (“bit-banging” in C, rust); VHDL/Verilog; soldering.  Experience with lasers and optics is highly desirable.  Proficiency/programming with analysis software (e.g. Matlab).  Potential specific research areas:

  • Experimental Control – assist with writing quantum control algorithms for quantum science experiments and drivers for laboratory instrumentation (lasers, microwave generators, etc.).
  • Optical nanofiber fabrication – experiments in optical propagation, optomechanics, and quantum optics for these 1D systems.
  • Quantum Random Number Generation (QRNG) – student will learn about and provide a review of existing applications of QRNG and SI-QRNG in classical cryptography and discuss the security improvements available to existing classical networks through the introduction of QRNG and SI-QRNG.  Student will quantify how QRNG and SI-QRNG impact the security of future quantum networks both point-to-point QKD networks and entanglement-based networks.  
  • Solid-state defect characterization – Defect quantification and qualification by photoluminescence (PL) and other magnetic/optical measurements in silicon carbide for quantum technology applications.  Student will work with tunable lasers, cryogenic cooling, and optical systems to collect spectroscopic data on silicon carbide and nitrogen vacancy centers at ARL or at UMD-College Park. 
  • ARTIQ Quantum Control Operating System – Contribute to the development of the ARTIQ quantum operating system, an open source infrastructure for quantum control. A student with strong physics and computer science skills is needed to assist with writing quantum control algorithms for trapped ion qubits and drivers for laboratory instrumentation (lasers, microwave generators, etc.). Skills: undergrad student
  • Instrumentation development for quantum experiments:  Contribute to the development of infrastructure to prototype quantum repeaters based on trapped atomic ions. Our approach includes instrumentation operating at cryogenic temperatures through the design and testing of superconducting resonators, ultra-high vacuum instrumentation, and optical resonators.  Skills: undergrad student

Topic 2022F – Co-design of Structural Materials and Components

Location: Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD

This project aims to build a holistic parts performance model starting with materials, building to the full interdependent part. Project components will encompass modeling of quantitative property relationships utilizing state-of-the-art machine-learning (ML) technologies and tools. ML models will be used to extract cross-property and inverse functions for system-level design. Subtasks may involve computer vision methods, scalar models, graph neural networks, data wrangling, and/or data visualization. Depending on prior experience, students will learn data management workflows to apply pre-trained models (load & clean & fuse data, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to image data, kernel models to scalar data sets), train models (in particular CNNs on image data, support vector and Gaussian process regressions to scalar data), or model development (NN composition from layer types, graph representations of data for graph neural networks and their layer by layer composition).  

Skills desired:  students with interest in materials modeling, some machine learning and neural networks classes. Potential specific research areas:

  • Microstructure analysis for materials property prediction
  • Geometry design for additive manufacturing of structural parts
  • Mechanical property prediction for materials from unit cell and bonding information
  • Hardness prediction from composition

Meet UMBC’s alumni who built the Smithsonian’s Searchable Museum, expanding online access to African American history and culture

National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC)
National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC

The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) is known for its stunning architecture and powerful, immersive exhibits. More than 600,000 visitors experienced the NMAAHC – the newest Smithsonian museum – in the first three months of its opening in Washington, D.C. During the COVID pandemic, the museum wondered how it could best reach audiences unable to visit in person. Enter Baltimore-based tech company Fearless and a team of UMBC alumni bridging computing and the arts.

Fearless, founded by Delali Dzirasa ‘04, computer engineering, led the development of the Searchable Museum to complement the NMAAHC’s “Slavery and Freedom” exhibition. The Fearless and NMAAHC teams worked together to reimagine this exhibit specifically for online audiences.

The Smithsonian’s announcement of the new platform notes, “Over a year in the making, the Searchable Museum initiative is one of the museum’s largest digital undertakings, bringing the museum’s evocative content and immersive in-person visitor experience into homes around the world.”

Read more about how Fearless and a team with many UMBC alumni created this platform in this UMBC News article.

talk: Users’ Preferences for Enhanced Misinformation Warnings on Twitter


The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Context, a Red Flag, or Both? Users’ Preferences for Enhanced Misinformation Warnings on Twitter

Prof. Filipo Sharevski
Adversarial Cybersecurity Automation Lab
DePaul University

12–1pm ET Friday, 4 Feb. 2022, WebEx


Warning users about hazardous information on social media is far from a simple usability task. The so-called soft moderation must balance between debunking falsehoods and avoiding moderation bias while avoiding disrupting the social media consumption flow. Platforms thus employ visually indistinguishable warning tags with generic text under a suspected misinformation content. This approach resulted in an unfavorable outcome where the warnings “backfired” and users believed the misinformation more, not less. To address this predicament, we developed enhancements to the misinformation warnings where users are advised on the context of the information hazard and exposed to standard warning iconography.

Balancing for comprehensibility, the enhanced warning tags provide context in regards to (1) fabricated facts; and (2) improbable interpretations of facts. Instead of the generic “Get the facts about the COVID-19 vaccine” warning, users in the first case are warned about “Strange, Potentially, Adverse Misinformation (SPAM): If this were an email, this would have ended up in your spam folder” and in the second case about “For Facts Sake (FFS): In this tweet, facts are missing, out of context, manipulated, or missing a source.” The SPAM warning tag contextualizes misinformation with an analogy to an already known phenomenon of spam email, while the FFS warning tag as an acronym blends with the characteristic communication Twitter behavior with compact language due to the tweets’ length restriction. The text-only warning tags were then paired with the hereto ignored usable security intervention when it comes to misinformation: red flags as watermarks over the suspected misinformation tweets. The tag-and-flag variant provided an option for us also to test user receptivity to warnings that incorporate contrast (red), gestalt iconography for general warnings (flag), and actionable advice for inspection (watermark).

We ran an A/B evaluation with Twitter’s original warnings in a usability study with 337 participants. The majority of the participants preferred the enhancements as a nudge towards recognizing and avoiding misinformation. The enhanced warnings were most favored by the politically left-leaning and to a lesser degree moderate participants, but they also appealed to roughly a third of the right-leaning participants. The education level was the only demographic factor shaping participants’ preferences for the proposed enhancements. Through this work, we are the first to perform an A/B evaluation of enhanced social media warnings providing context and introducing visual design frictions in interacting with hazardous information. Our sentiment analysis towards soft moderation in general, and enhanced warning tags in particular from a political and demographic perspective, provides the basis for our recommendations about future refinements, frictions, and adaptations of soft moderation towards secure and safe behavior on social media.

About the Speaker. Dr. Filipo Sharevski () is an assistant professor of cybersecurity and director of the Adversarial Cybersecurity Automation Lab (https://acal.cdm.depaul.edu). His main research interest is adversarial cybersecurity automation, m/disinformation, usable security, and social engineering. Sharevski earned the PhD degree in interdisciplinary information security at Purdue University, CERIAS in 2015.

Host: Alan T. Sherman, . Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681. The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays 12-1 pm. All meetings are open to the public.

UMBC Computer Engineering major Joshua Slaughter receives Marshall Scholarship

photo of Joshua Slaughter with mentor Chuck LaBerge
Joshua Slaughter with his Computer Engineering mentor Prof. Chuck LaBerge

Computer Engineering major Joshua Slaughter ‘22, M30, has received the Marshall Scholarship, becoming the second student in UMBC history and the first in 29 years to be selected for the prestigious award. Slaughter is one of 41 American students chosen this year from institutions across the country for the Marshall Scholarship, which supports graduate study at institutions in the United Kingdom. He was also a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship.

Slaughter, who is earning his degree in computer engineering, will pursue his Ph.D. in informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His goal is to advance equity in the developing field of personalized medicine.

Read more about his accomplishments and plans and his support from mentors and UMBC programs in this UMBC News article.

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