CSEE Alumna Jeehye Yun (BS CS, 1997) has been selected by the UMBC Alumni Association as the 2013 Outstanding Alumnus from Engineering and Information Technology. The 2013 awards will be presented on Thursday, October 10 at an awards ceremony in the Albin O. Kuhn Library on the UMBC campus.

Jeehye Yun is the founder and CEO of Secured Sciences Group (SSG) where she is responsible for the strategy and operations. SSG is located in UMBC’s Research and Technology Park and specializes in compliance streamlining with service focus areas in Independent Verification and Validation, Cybersecurity and software engineering. Ms. Yun took the company from a single commercial service contract to four million per year in revenue from 2004 to 2009.

Before founding the company, she served as Director of Computing Facilities at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) where she managed the teams supporting infrastructure of research labs, including the Institute’s Global Land Cover Facility, High Performance Computing Lab, Clustered Computing resources, Visualization and experimental networking labs. Ms. Yun also managed staff supporting UMIACS technical and business computing.

CSEE faculty and staff will also remember Jeehye from her work with DoIT, where she worked as a systems programmer and administrator as an undergraduate. She also developed and taught a course on Information Security for the department as a part-time instructor after finishing her undergraduate degree.

Next Friday UMBC will host the Third Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning (MASC-SLL). This is a one day, student run event that brings together students, postdocs, faculty and researchers from universities in the Mid-Atlantic area doing research on speech, language or machine learning.

This year MASC-SLL will be held from 10am to 5pm on Friday 11 October on the seventh floor of the Albert O. Kuhn Library. The program includes more than 30 posters, eight short talks, three breakout sessions and a panel. More than 100 students and postdocs from 13 universities are expected to participate. Seven projects involving UMBC students will be presented.

The event was organized by a student committee including five PhD students: Snigdha Chaturvedi (UMCP), Ben Johnson (UMBC), Michael Paul (JHU), Jennifer Sleeman (UMBC) and Bryan Wilkinson (UMBC). They were supported by a program committee of 14 additional students from seven universities in the middle-Atlantic region.

The first MASC-SLL colloquium was held in 2011 at Johns Hopkins University and the second in 2012 at the University of Maryland, College Park. This year the colloquium was made possible with the generous support of the UMBC Provost office, UMBC Graduate School, the UMBC College of Engineering and Information Technology and the UMBC CSEE Department.

We look forward to welcoming MASC-SLL participants and hearing about their research.

UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance

Quantum Computing and Cybersecurity

John Seymour

Noon-1:00 Friday, 4 October 2013
Cyber Defense Lab, room 228 ITE, UMBC

This talk will be a brief introduction to the topic of quantum computing for the computer scientist interested in cybersecurity. It will begin with a light summary of the fundamental quantum algorithms and move to discuss the recent advances in quantum computing, including the D-Wave quantum optimizer, University of Bristol’s new quantum chip, quantum programming languages, and more. Finally, it will introduce some current research questions and projects residing in the intersection of quantum computing and cybersecurity.

John Seymour is a Ph.D. student in the UMBC computer science graduate program. As a UMBC undergraduate, he was a triple major — Computer Science, — Mathematics and Philosophy. He is currently working on three research projects: evaluation of a detection protocol for Man-in-the-Middle attacks, a web-based game for teaching students basic concepts of internet security, and integration of social media with internet voting to facilitate collaborative decision making.

Host: Dr. Alan T. Sherman, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

CSEE research professor Karuna Joshi received a $100K grant to develop an advanced prototype for a cloud service broker from the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO). The software system will help companies and organizations negotiate for, select and procure cloud computing services based on a description of their needs and preferences.

TEDCO was created by the Maryland State Legislature to facilitate the transfer and commercialization of technology from Maryland’s research universities and federal labs into the marketplace and to assist in the creation and growth of technology-based businesses in Maryland.

Dr. Joshi’s project will build on a novel framework she developed as part of her PhD dissertation for automating the process lifecycle of cloud services. She designed technology that allowed users to compare different cloud services and determine which were best suited for their needs. Her initial prototype demonstrated a system that could negotiate for and procure storaage services from a provider like Amazon Web Services.

As part of the TEDCO funded project, Dr. Joshi will develop an commercially viable enhanced cloud broker engine that can be extended to include other services, as well as do more complex matchmaking based on functional and compliance requirements.

UMBC’s intercollegiate Cyber Defense Team (the “CyberDawgs”) once again will be competing in the finals of the Maryland Cyber Challenge (MDC3) taking place on October 9th at the CyberMaryland 2013 conference in Baltimore. All three of UMBC’s teams are in the finals!

Competing against the three CyberDawgs teams will be two teams from UMUC, two from Towson, and one from Indiana Tech.

During the finals, teams will compete in a Capture-The-Flag/King-of-The-Hill hybrid event where they must attempt to gain (and maintain) control of other systems on the network – which are also being targetted by other teams seeking to gain and ‘own’ them as well.

Each member of the first place team will receive a $5,000 cash prize. and members of the second place team each receive $2,000. For the third consecutive year, cash prizes for the students are provided by the National Security Agency in the hopes of furthering students’ cybersecurity education and professional training. (UMBC is a co-founder of MDC3.)

CSEE faculty Richard Forno and Charles Nicholas serve as faculty advisors to the team.

Professor Jian Chen received a research award from the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) Measurement Science and Engineering research grant program to discover new immersive metrology, visualization, and analysis tools for interacting with and understanding multi-valued volumes of large scientific data in immersive display environments.

The research will explore new approaches to integrate scientific and information visualization, optimize information access and precise measurement to recommend good default visualization, study natural and intuitive input modalities including gestural and handheld 3D inputs, and synthesize visualizations to address complex data analysis workflow. The efficacy and insights of these scientific methods will be validated in close collaboration with engineering scientists at NIST.

The research is significant because the methods will be able to address problems in three independent scientific applications at NIST: suspension rheology, body area network and tissue engineering. It will also make possible new forms of scientific research by developing new immersive analysis capabilities, integrating new approaches into experimental research, and for the first time, creating new human-computer interaction techniques to query both scientific and information visualizations to leverage human intelligence.

The award will provide nearly $440,000 over the next five years to support Professor Chen and her students in the DaVinCI (Data Visualization, Computing, and Interaction) lab working on the project.

UMBC Quantum Computation Seminar

Thermal light N-qubits

Yanhau Shih

Physics Department, UMBC

2:30-4:00 Tuesday, 1 October 2013, ITE 325b

This talk will discuss a few recent experiments on Nth-order interference of N independent and incoherent thermal fields from their intensity fluctuation correlation measurement. The observed interference is similar to that of entangled states. These experiments have demonstrated the possibility of producing N-qubits from N incoherent thermal fields.

Yanhua Shih received his B.S. degree in theoretical physics from Northwestern University of China in 1981, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1987. He joined the Faculty of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 1989 and established the Quantum Optics Program at UMBC. He is currently Professor of Physics at UMBC. His research interests include fundamental problems of quantum theory and general relativity.

Organizer: Prof. Samuel Lomonaco, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Autodesk Scaleform, makers of popular user interface libraries for video games, have two positions open in their Greenbelt, MD office:

Graphics/Rendering Engineer:

https://autodesk.taleo.net/careersection/ADSK_gen/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=13WD13966

Software Engineer:

https://autodesk.taleo.net/careersection/ADSK_gen/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=13WD13819

Autodesk Scaleform, makers of popular user interface libraries for video games, have two positions open in their Greenbelt, MD office:

Graphics/Rendering Engineer:

https://autodesk.taleo.net/careersection/ADSK_gen/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=13WD13966

Software Engineer:

https://autodesk.taleo.net/careersection/ADSK_gen/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=13WD13819

Autodesk Scaleform, makers of popular user interface libraries for video games, have two positions open in their Greenbelt, MD office:

Graphics/Rendering Engineer:

https://autodesk.taleo.net/careersection/ADSK_gen/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=13WD13966

Software Engineer:

https://autodesk.taleo.net/careersection/ADSK_gen/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=13WD13819