National Cybersecurity Virtual Career Fair, Friday 9/17

5th annual National Cybersecurity Virtual Career Fair

1pm-4pm Friday, September 17, 2021

The 5th annual National Cybersecurity Virtual Career Fair, sponsored by National Cybersecurity Training and Education (NCyTE) Center and the CAE in Cybersecurity Community, is right around the corner! The career fair brings together students and alumni from over 300 institutions across the Nation designated as Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity with employers offering internships, temporary, part-time, and full-time employment. This year, the National Cybersecurity Virtual Career Fair will take place on Friday, September 17th, 2021, from 1 pm to 4 pm ET.

Students, alumni, and faculty – Register here to set up an account for live-day access on September 17, 2021

Each year, the number of undergraduate and graduate students and alumni participating in this event continues to grow. Participants come from a variety of disciplines, including cybersecurity, security studies, computer science, engineering, math, physics, and project management. Students from CAEs in Research (CAE-R), Cyber Defense (CAE-CD), and Cyber Operations (CAE-CO) are invited to participate for FREE.

Students and alumni can submit resumes before the virtual career fair begins to allow employers to view resumes before the career fair. Students can participate in workshops leading up to the National Cybersecurity Virtual Career Fair to help them build their resume and interview skills. 

This event is facilitated by the organization and open to the general public. It is not hosted or organized by UMBC.

CSEE alumna Patricia Ordóñez featured in People of ACM interview

Professor PatriciaOrdóñez

CSEE alumna Patricia Ordóñez featured in People of ACM interview

Every month ACM, the oldest and largest professional society devoted to computing, features an interview with two of its nearly 100,000 members from more than 100 countries. In July, UMBC CSEE alumna Patricia (Patti) Ordóñez in its People of ACM series. Dr. Ordóñez received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2012 for a dissertation jointly supervised by Professors Tim Oates and Marie desJardin on Multivariate Time Series Analysis of Physiological and Clinical Data.

After receiving her Ph.D. in 2012, she joined the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedra as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2017. She has continued doing research on applying machine learning to problems in the healthcare domain and now focuses on using visual analytics, data mining, machine learning, visualization, and human-computer interaction to medicine and assistive technologies. One of her research goals is to help medical providers create better diagnosis and treatment plans by learning from the data of previous patients with similar conditions.

Dr. Ordóñez followed a nontraditional path to earning her Ph.D. in Computer Science. After getting her undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University, she worked for many years as a math and Spanish K-12 teacher and also as a part-time technical trainer for computing courses. She has been very active in supporting efforts to diversify the field of computing. She is is the Program Chair for the 2021 CMD-IT/ACM Richard A. Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference also the Co-chair of ACM’s Diversity and Inclusion Council.

Read more about her experiences in the ACM interview.

UMBC and Georgia State receive $3M NIMH grant to improve data-driven diagnosis of mood disorders

Tulay Adali, fourth from left, with the members of her lab. Photo courtesy of Adali.

UMBC and Georgia State receive $3M NIMH grant to improve data-driven diagnosis of mood disorders

UMBC and Georgia State University have received a $3 million five-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for research supporting the diagnosis of mood disorders. Tulay Adali, professor of computer science and electrical engineering (CSEE) and distinguished university professor, will lead UMBC’s portion of the research, which will receive about $870,000 in support.

Mental illnesses and mood disorders are complicated and can be challenging to identify, says Adali. Diagnoses are often made based on symptoms that a person experiences, rather than using quantifiable measures, and descriptions of symptoms can be quite variable and subjectively observed and evaluated. 

The research team hopes to improve doctors’ ability to diagnose mood disorders through more quantitative, consistent measures. They will develop dynamic approaches to understanding how the continuously changing state of the brain is affected by mental illness. And their recommendations will include data from a range of sources, to more accurately reflect the complexity of mental illness.

Adali will work with her former graduate student Vince Calhoun, Ph.D. ‘02, electrical engineering. Calhoun is currently the director of the Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReENDS) at Georgia State University. Adali and Calhoun have worked together on multiple research grants in the past. 

In this project, the UMBC group led by Adali will focus on diagnostic methods, particularly the use of medical imaging data, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Adali and her team will develop multivariate data-driven models to help capture changes over time and space. They will apply these models to large datasets to evaluate their performance as diagnostic tools. The researchers will assess the reproducibility and replicability of the methods that are developed.

“I am especially excited about our proposal to identify homogeneous subgroups of subjects in a completely data-driven manner from neuroimaging data,” says Adali. “We hope this will enable us to better define subtypes of mental disorders and will help inform effective and personalized forms of therapy.” 

This story was adapted from a UMBC News article written by Megan Hanks.

UMBC partners with UMD, Army Research Lab to advance AI and autonomy through $68M collaboration

Professors Nirmalya Roy, left, and Aryya Gangopadhyay. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

This post was adapted from a story was written by UMBC News staff that first appeared on news.umbc.edu.

From surveillance tools to autonomous machines, countries around the world are ramping up their military artificial intelligence (AI) assets. Such robust technologies are necessary to protect the United States from surprise attacks, which occur these days not only on the ground, but also on the cloud.

Advancing AI-based autonomous systems for military use will be the goal for a team of UMBC researchers that has recently been awarded a $20-million subcontract. UMBC will partner with the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), and the DEVCOM Army Research Lab (ARL) on the $68-million, five-year endeavor, which ARL is funding. The goal is to strengthen army AI technology so it is able to meet the demands of today’s national defense.

“The question we’re trying to solve is: Can we design and develop tools, techniques, algorithms, software, and hardware that can work autonomously and make their own decisions, but also collectively, interfacing with human decision-makers?” says UMBC’s principal investigator Aryya Gangopadhyay, professor of information systems. “The landscape of war is changing, and we must build systems that can make human-like decisions in real-time and under real-world pressure.”

The project, AI and Autonomy for Multi-Agent Systems (ArtIAMAS), aims to advance science and technology around three core research areas: collaborative autonomy; harnessing the data revolution; and human-machine teaming. UMBC’s role in the project will center on the second and third research thrusts. 

More specifically, the UMBC team will develop solutions for AI-based networking, sensing, and edge computing — which brings data storage and computation closer to a location — for battlefield Internet of Things (IoT). This will allow them to deliver secure, effective, and resilient U.S. Army assets including AI systems related to search-and-rescue, surveillance, robots, and machinery, and augmenting humans in performing decision-making tasks. 

In addition to Gangopadhyay and Roy, the UMBC team also includes faculty from the Information Systems, CSEE, Mathematics and Statistics and Physics departments, including  Anupam Joshi, Tinoosh Mohsenin, Dmitri Perkins, Sanjay Purushotham, Maryam Rahnemoonfar, Jianwu Wang, and Ting Zhu. The ArtIAMAS cooperative agreement is led by PI Derek Paley, director of UMD’s Maryland Robotics Center.

Read the full story on news.umbc.edu.

UMBC to receive over $63 million in NASA renewal of CRESST II space science consortium

NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft orbits Mars in this visualization. A 2019 research paper in Science led by CSST’s Mehdi Benna mapped Mars’s global wind patterns, the first time that had been done on any planet (including Earth). Visualization courtesy of NASA.

UMBC to receive over $63 million in NASA renewal of CRESST II space science consortium

Adapted from a UMBC News article written by Sarah Hansen.

NASA has committed $178 million to extend support for the Center for Research and Exploration in Space Science & Technology II (CRESST II) through 2027. Founded in 2006 and renewed in 2016, CRESST II is a partnership between NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and four universities. UMBC and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) are the two primary funding recipients, with UMD leading the consortium. CRESST II also supports researchers at Catholic University of America, Howard University, and the Southeastern Universities Research Association.

New UMBC funding to support these projects will be more than $63 million over five years under the CRESST II renewal. Since the last renewal in 2016, the UMBC arm of the partnership, the Center for Space Sciences and Technology (CSST), has focused on offering additional training for budding space scientists. Graduate students with NASA fellowships are co-advised by UMBC faculty and NASA scientists, undergraduates have internship opportunities on-site at Goddard, and post-baccalaureate programs offer recent grads a chance to get more experience before applying to jobs or graduate school. Career workshops are available to all.  

“We’re trying to do more to support their growth, and also prepare them to move on to other things afterwards,” says Don Engel, director of CSST and assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering. “We’re building more infrastructure around career support for our scientists, especially those at earlier levels.”

Don Engel, director of the Center for Space Sciences and Technology, UMBC’s arm of the CRESST II partnership, in the Imaging Research Center at UMBC. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Engel has also been leading an effort to engage more departments at UMBC in the partnership. Physics is the most involved so far, but researchers in computer science and electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, information systems, and even geography and environmental systems have connected with CSST, meaning the Center spans all three UMBC colleges.

Read the full article on UMBC News.

talk: Thinking Like an Attacker: Towards a Definition and Non-Technical Assessment of Adversarial Thinking, 12-1pm ET 4/30

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Thinking Like an Attacker:
Towards a Definition and Non-Technical Assessment of Adversarial Thinking

Prof. Peter A. H. Peterson
Department of Computer Science
University of Minnesota Duluth

12:00–1:00 pm ET,  Friday, 30 April 2021
via WebEx

“Adversarial thinking” (AT), sometimes called the “security mindset” or described as the ability to “think like an attacker,” is widely accepted in the computer security community as an essential ability for successful cybersecurity practice. Supported by intuition and anecdotes, many in the community stress the importance of AT, and multiple projects have produced interventions explicitly intended to strengthen individual AT skills to improve security in general. However, there is no agreed-upon definition of “adversarial thinking” or its components, and accordingly, no test for it. Because of this absence, it is impossible to meaningfully quantify AT in subjects, AT’s importance for cybersecurity practitioners, or the effectiveness of interventions designed to improve AT. Working towards the goal of a characterization of AT in cybersecurity and a non-technical test for AT that anyone can take, I will discuss existing conceptions of AT from the security community, as well as ideas about AT in other fields with adversarial aspects including war, politics, law, critical thinking, and games. I will also describe some of the unique difficulties of creating a non-technical test for AT, compare and contrast this effort to our work on the CATS and Security Misconceptions projects, and describe some potential solutions. I will explore potential uses for such an instrument, including measuring a student’s change in AT over time, measuring the effectiveness of interventions meant to improve AT, comparing AT in different populations (e.g., security professionals vs. software engineers), and identifying individuals from all walks of life with strong AT skills—people who might help meet our world’s pressing need for skilled and insightful security professionals and researchers. Along the way, I will give some sample non-technical adversarial thinking challenges and describe how they might be graded and validated.

 Peter A. H. Peterson is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where he teaches and directs the Laboratory for Advanced Research in Systems (LARS), a group dedicated to research in operating systems and security, with a special focus on research and development to make security education more effective and accessible. He is an active member of the Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATS) project working to create and validate two concept inventories for cybersecurity, is working on an NSF-funded grant to identify and remediate commonsense misconceptions about cybersecurity, and is also the author of several hands-on security exercises for Deterlab that have been used at many institutions around the world. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles for work on “adaptive compression”—systems that make compression decisions dynamically to improve efficiency. He can be reached at .

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.  All meetings are open to the public. Upcoming CDL Meetings: May 7, Farid Javani (UMBC), Anonymization by oblivious transfer

talk: MeetingMayhem: Teaching Adversarial Thinking through a Web-Based Game, 12-1 ET 4/9

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

MeetingMayhem:  Teaching Adversarial Thinking through a Web-Based Game

Akriti Anand, Richard Baldwin, Sudha, Kosuri, Julie Nau, and Ryan Wunk-Fink
UMBC Cyber Defense Lab

joint work with Alan Sherman, Marc Olano, Linda Oliva, Edward Zieglar, and Enis Golazewski

12:00 noon–1 pm ET, Friday, 9 April 2021
online via WebEx

We present our progress and plans in developing MeetingMayhem, a new web-based educational exercise that helps students learn adversarial thinking in communication networks. The goal of the exercise is to arrange a meeting time and place by sending and receiving messages through an insecure network that is under the control of a malicious adversary.  Players can assume the role of participants or an adversary.  The adversary can disrupt the efforts of the participants by intercepting, modifying, blocking, replaying, and injecting messages.  Through this engaging authentic challenge, students learn the dangers of the network, and in particular, the Dolev-Yao network intruder model. They also learn the value and subtleties of using cryptography (including encryption, digital signatures, and hashing), and protocols to mitigate these dangers.  Our team is developing the exercise in spring 2021 and will evaluate its educational effectiveness.

Akriti Anand () is an MS student in computer science working with Alan Sherman.  She is the lead software engineer and focuses on the web frontend. Richard Baldwin () is a BS student in computer science, a member of Cyberdawgs, and lab manager for the Cyber Defense Lab. Sudha Kosuri () is a MS student in computer science.  She is working on the frontend (using React and Flask) and its integration with the backend. Julie Nau () is a BS student in computer science.  She is working on the backend and on visualizations. Ryan Wunk-Fink () is a PhD student in computer science working with Alan Sherman. He is developing the backend.

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.  All meetings are open to the public.

 Upcoming CDL Meetings: April 23, Peter Peterson (Univ. of Minnesota Duluth), Adversarial thinking; May 7, Farid Javani (UMBC), Anonymization by oblivious transfer

UMBC Cyber Dawgs win 2021 Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition

Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC

Congratulation to the UMBC Cyber Dawgs team, which took first place in the 2021 Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (MACCDC) finals. UMBC’s team was one of eight teams out of an initial 23 that qualified for the final competition. UMBC’s Cyber Dawgs will move on to compete in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NCCDC), which will be held April 23-25, 2021.

The 2021 MACCDC regional final took place online April 1-3 and had teams fighting to protect their networks efficiently and effectively from simulated cyber threats and attacks using a scenario based on the COVID-19 global pandemic for its competition events.

The National Emergency Response Division (N.E.R.D.) is a data science-focused group within the Big Time Health Organization (BTHO), a multinational entity headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland. N.E.R.D. employees have been exceptionally busy dealing with the global health pandemic. As such, they have had to not only shift to work from home, but also expand the number of employees to support the inordinate amounts of data that is flooding each of its eight geographic locations throughout the U.S. Protecting the integrity of the data is critical, but when the data affects the delivery of health services to the public, the job of N.E.R.D. becomes even more mission critical.

The student teams will stand on the front lines of technology, alongside various healthcare providers. The main task at hand will be to ensure that pandemic-related data from state departments of health are accurate and delivered quickly. Information on outbreak locations, promising interventions, efficacy of testing, mortality rates, and other related statistics are critical so physicians, public health officials, and government entities can make informed decisions about resource allocations. Loss or inaccurate information can lead to tragic consequences. Vigilance is a must – be smart, be strong, be safe.

These regional and national competitions attract leading collegiate cybersecurity teams from across the nation. They put teams in situations that mimic scenarios they might encounter working to secure and protect online systems for government agencies and companies. Throughout each challenge, teammates work together to protect their systems from hackers and cyber attacks. At the same time, they keep their networks accessible to the users relying on them. 

The UMBC Cyber Dawgs team won the MACCDC regionals last year and were national champions in 2017. In this year’s MACCDC, George Mason placed second and Liberty University third. Good luck to the Cyber Dawgs as they compete with the winners of nine other regional competitions in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition later this month.

UMBC grad students present new ideas at GEARS Ideathon: 9 April 2021

UMBC GEARS Ideathon

11:30-1:30 Friday, April 9, 2021

GEARS, UMBC’s Graduate Experience, Achievements, and Research Symposium, bring you its first-of-a-kind event IDEATHON that invites graduate students to describe how new or existing problems can be better tackled by using their new idea. Participants will present their ideas to the jury and fellow graduate students in UMBC.  You can participate either individually or in a group of up to three people.

This event will highlight your creative skills and the uniqueness of your idea, which can be social, environmental, IT technology, medical field related, etc. These ideas can be real or hypothetical. You create a three-minute presentation showcasing your idea and how unique it is. Up to $1000 in prize money will be available for the winning ideas. All the participants are eligible for a free UMBC logo Mask, and the first ten participants will get a chance to win UMBC merchandise T-shirts.

Sign up here.

We welcome all department’s graduate students to come to participate and celebrate Graduate week with us on the event day i.e.  9th April 2021. For any queries contact Sulabh Sharma (+14438504311, ) or Jhansi Sankaramaddi (+14109006743, )

ACM career talk: career opportunities in data privacy

Continuing with our Innovation, Collaboration, Job Search, and Career help theme, the ACM UMBC chapter is back again, hosting another session on the coming Friday with Sameer Ahirrao, a Founder and CEO of Ardent Privacy. He will be talking about Innovation, Collaboration, and Career Opportunities in Data Privacy. Find more on how you can get a part-time off-campus or full-time internship under MIPS (Maryland Industrial Partnership) Program with Ardent Privacy.

Join us for insights from him and a Q&A session with Sameer.
See you on Friday, March 16 at 3:00 pm EST on WebeX.  For more information, contact:  .

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