The GovConnect conference seeks college sophomores, juniors and seniors interested in cybersecurity to apply for free admission to its showcase event:

   GovConnects' 6th Annual Cyber Conference: Migration to the Cloud:
   Vulnerabilities and Challenges/ Opportunities and Solutions
   Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab Kossiakoff Center, 
   Wednesday, 17 June 2015, 9:00-5:00

Resumes are currently being accepted by GovConnects for a one day internship that provides free attendance.  Participation options: 8:00am–12:00noon or 12:00noon — 4:00 pm.
 
GovConnects, a program of the Howard County Chamber of Commerce, is the organizer of this event. Over 300 industry and government professionals are expected to attend the all-day conference. Student interns will be provided with breakfast and lunch. Parking is free and there is no charge for internship participants.
 
Keynote speakers are Dmitri Alperovitch, Co- Founder and CTO of CrowdStrike Inc., and LTG (R) Rhett Hernandez, Chair, Army Cyber Institute.  The conference has multiple paths of interest including breakout sessions in Mobile IT, Insider Threat, Health IT, and FedRAMP. Interns will be able to attend a breakout session of choice and have access to the who's who of the conference cyber speakers. Tech Talks will feature new products and ideas pitched by companies and judged by a panel of industry experts including representatives from Leidos, Ciena, Honeywell, Dell Federal, and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.
 
Cyber 6.0 is an excellent opportunity for technical candidates (For example, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Engineering, but not limited to these fields.) to meet and interact with industry and federal government officials. Conference sponsors have agreed to review internsÕ resumes for potential employment eligibility, if interested.
 
Several sponsors have current programs in place that support technical students close to graduation in obtaining federal clearances.
 
The opportunity to attend the conference, gain valuable information about the trends/forecasts for cybersecurity issues and technology, and meet companies, speakers and potential employers is a day well spent!
 
If you are interested in attending, explore the conference details and send your resume to Tom Sabia, Conference Intern Coordinator at  Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. or Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

The GovConnect conference seeks college sophomores, juniors and seniors interested in cybersecurity to apply for free admission to its showcase event:

   GovConnects' 6th Annual Cyber Conference: Migration to the Cloud:
   Vulnerabilities and Challenges/ Opportunities and Solutions
   Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab Kossiakoff Center, 
   Wednesday, 17 June 2015, 9:00-5:00

Resumes are currently being accepted by GovConnects for a one day internship that provides free attendance.  Participation options: 8:00am–12:00noon or 12:00noon — 4:00 pm.
 
GovConnects, a program of the Howard County Chamber of Commerce, is the organizer of this event. Over 300 industry and government professionals are expected to attend the all-day conference. Student interns will be provided with breakfast and lunch. Parking is free and there is no charge for internship participants.
 
Keynote speakers are Dmitri Alperovitch, Co- Founder and CTO of CrowdStrike Inc., and LTG (R) Rhett Hernandez, Chair, Army Cyber Institute.  The conference has multiple paths of interest including breakout sessions in Mobile IT, Insider Threat, Health IT, and FedRAMP. Interns will be able to attend a breakout session of choice and have access to the who's who of the conference cyber speakers. Tech Talks will feature new products and ideas pitched by companies and judged by a panel of industry experts including representatives from Leidos, Ciena, Honeywell, Dell Federal, and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.
 
Cyber 6.0 is an excellent opportunity for technical candidates (For example, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Engineering, but not limited to these fields.) to meet and interact with industry and federal government officials. Conference sponsors have agreed to review internsÕ resumes for potential employment eligibility, if interested.
 
Several sponsors have current programs in place that support technical students close to graduation in obtaining federal clearances.
 
The opportunity to attend the conference, gain valuable information about the trends/forecasts for cybersecurity issues and technology, and meet companies, speakers and potential employers is a day well spent!
 
If you are interested in attending, explore the conference details and send your resume to Tom Sabia, Conference Intern Coordinator at  Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. or Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

CSEE professor Cynthia Matuszek was interviewed on her research on gender bias in online images associated with occupations by the CBC Spark radio program on technology trends.

The research was published in a recent paper, Unequal Representation and Gender Stereotypes in Image Search Results for Occupations, that was recognized as a best paper in the 2015 ACM CHI Conference. This conference is considered the most prestigious in the field of human–computer interaction, and is one of the top ranked computer science conferences.

Professor Matuszek does research on robotics and natural language processing and combines these two interests to build better human-robot interaction systems and to study the underlying problem of grounded language acquisition, i.e., how robots (and people!) can extract semantically meaningful representations of human language by mapping those representations to the noisy, unpredictable physical world in which they operate.

Career Opportunities in Cybersecurity and
the Information Assurance Directorate

Neal Ziring
Technical Director, Information Assurance Directorate
National Security Agency

1:00pm-2:00pm Friday, 15 May 2015

ITE-325b (CSEE Dept Conference room)

Mr. Ziring will discuss career opportunities in cybersecurity and what NSA's Information Assurance Directorate does.

Neal Ziring is a technical director in the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD) at NSA. The IAD provides cryptographic, network, and operational security to protect and defend national security systems. Previously, Mr. Ziring was a technical director for the Vulnerability Analysis and Operations Group, which provides technology evaluations, defensive operations, and secure configuration guidance for the DoD and the IC. During that time, he served as security architect for two major NSA mission systems programs, collaborated with NIST on the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP), and led analyses of cloud computing and IPv6. Before joining the NSA in 1989, he worked at AT&T Bell Labs. He has a BS in EE and an MS in Computer Science from Washington University.

Career Opportunities in Cybersecurity and
the Information Assurance Directorate

Neal Ziring
Technical Director, Information Assurance Directorate
National Security Agency

1:00pm-2:00pm Friday, 15 May 2015

ITE-325b (CSEE Dept Conference room)

Mr. Ziring will discuss career opportunities in cybersecurity and what NSA's Information Assurance Directorate does.

Neal Ziring is a technical director in the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD) at NSA. The IAD provides cryptographic, network, and operational security to protect and defend national security systems. Previously, Mr. Ziring was a technical director for the Vulnerability Analysis and Operations Group, which provides technology evaluations, defensive operations, and secure configuration guidance for the DoD and the IC. During that time, he served as security architect for two major NSA mission systems programs, collaborated with NIST on the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP), and led analyses of cloud computing and IPv6. Before joining the NSA in 1989, he worked at AT&T Bell Labs. He has a BS in EE and an MS in Computer Science from Washington University.

Career Opportunities in Cybersecurity and
the Information Assurance Directorate

Neal Ziring
Technical Director, Information Assurance Directorate
National Security Agency

1:00pm-2:00pm Friday, 15 May 2015

ITE-325b (CSEE Dept Conference room)

Mr. Ziring will discuss career opportunities in cybersecurity and what NSA's Information Assurance Directorate does.

Neal Ziring is a technical director in the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD) at NSA. The IAD provides cryptographic, network, and operational security to protect and defend national security systems. Previously, Mr. Ziring was a technical director for the Vulnerability Analysis and Operations Group, which provides technology evaluations, defensive operations, and secure configuration guidance for the DoD and the IC. During that time, he served as security architect for two major NSA mission systems programs, collaborated with NIST on the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP), and led analyses of cloud computing and IPv6. Before joining the NSA in 1989, he worked at AT&T Bell Labs. He has a BS in EE and an MS in Computer Science from Washington University.

Spring 2015 IS Distinguished Lecture 
Department of Information Systems

Opinion Mining, Machine Learning and Big Data

Dr. Philip Bourne
Associate Director for Data Science
The National Institutes of Health

10:00am Tuesday, 5 May 2015, ITE 456, UMBC

Philip E. Bourne is the Associate Director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health. Formally he was Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Industry Alliances, a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank and an Adjunct Professor at the Sanford Burnham Institute.

Bourne's professional interests focus on service and research. He serves the national biomedical community through contributing ways to maximize the value (and hence accessibility) of scientific data. His research focuses on relevant biological and educational outcomes derived from computation and scholarly communication. This implies algorithms, text mining, machine learning, metalanguages, biological databases, and visualization applied to problems in systems pharmacology, evolution, cell signaling, apoptosis, immunology and scientific dissemination. He has published over 300 papers and five books, one of which sold over 150,000 copies.

Bourne is a Past President of the International Society for Computational Biology, an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Society for Computational Biology and the American Medical Informatics Association.  His awards include: the Jim Gray eScience Award (2010), the Benjamin Franklin Award (2009), the Flinders University Convocation Medal for Outstanding Achievement (2004), the Sun Microsystems Convergence Award (2002) and the CONNECT Award for new inventions (1996 and 1997).

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

A Semantic Resolution Framework for Integrating
Manufacturing Service Capability Data

Yan Kang

10:00am Monday 27 April 2015, ITE 217b

Building flexible manufacturing supply chains requires availability of interoperable and accurate manufacturing service capability (MSC) information of all supply chain participants. Today, MSC information, which is typically published either on the supplier’s web site or registered at an e-marketplace portal, has been shown to fall short of interoperability and accuracy requirements. The issue of interoperability can be addressed by annotating the MSC information using shared ontologies. However, this ontology-based approach faces three main challenges: (1) lack of an effective way to automatically extract a large volume of MSC instance data hidden in the web sites of manufacturers that need to be annotated; (2) difficulties in accurately identifying semantics of these extracted data and resolving semantic heterogeneities among individual sources of these data while integrating them under shared formal ontologies; (3) difficulties in the adoption of ontology-based approaches by the supply chain managers and users because of their unfamiliarity with the syntax and semantics of formal ontology languages such as the web ontology language (OWL).

The objective of our research is to address the main challenges of ontology-based approaches by developing an innovative approach that is able to extract MSC instances from a broad range of manufacturing web sites that may present MSC instances in various ways, accurately annotate MSC instances with formal defined semantics on a large scale, and integrate these annotated MSC instances into formal manufacturing domain ontologies to facilitate the formation of supply chains of manufacturers. To achieve this objective, we propose a semantic resolution framework (SRF) that consists of three main components: a MSC instance extractor, a MSC Instance annotator and a semantic resolution knowledge base. The instance extractor builds a local semantic model that we call instance description model (IDM) for each target manufacturer web site. The innovative aspect of the IDM is that it captures the intended structure of the target web site and associates each extracted MSC instance with a context that describes possible semantics of that instance. The instance annotator starts the semantic resolution by identifying the most appropriate class from a (or a set of) manufacturing domain ontology (or ontologies) (MDO) to annotate each instance based on the mappings established between the context of that instance and the vocabularies (i.e., classes and properties) defined in the MDO. The primary goal of the semantic resolution knowledge base (SR-KB) is to resolve semantic heterogeneity that may occur in the instance annotation process and thus improve the accuracy of the annotated MSC instances. The experimental results demonstrate that the instance extractor and the instance annotator can effectively discover and annotate MSC instances while the SR-KB is able to improve both precision and recall of annotated instances and reducing human involvement along with the evolution of the knowledge base.

Committee: Drs. Yun Peng (Chair), Tim Finin, Yaacov Yesha, Matthew Schmill and Boonserm Kulvatunyou

Innovations in Cybersecurity Education Workshop

9:30 – 4:30 Friday, 12 June 2015, UMBC BWtech South Campus

Innovations in Cybersecurity Education is a free regional workshop on cybersecurity education from high school through post-graduate. It is intended primarily for educators who are teaching cybersecurity at high schools, colleges, and community colleges. Anyone is welcome to attend, including teachers, students, administrators, researchers, and government officials.

The workshop will highlight master teachers and ongoing educational projects, including an effort at the US Naval Academy to teach cybersecurity to all midshipmen. It will include discussions about cyber competitions, hands-on exercises, educational games, and integrating cybersecurity throughout the curriculum. There will be an opportunity to experience hands-on cyber defense exercises and to play new computer security education games, including SecurityEmpire developed at UMBC.

The workshop is free and open to the public — all are welcome to attend. This workshop will to be of interest to educators, school administrators, undergraduate and graduate students, and government officials. Lunch will be provided. Parking is free.

Please see the links above for the schedule and location and register to help us plan for the number of participants.

The workshop is organized by Dr. Alan T. Sherman with support provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant 1241576.

CSEE Alumna Dr. Claudia Pearce ('89 M.S., '94 Ph.D., Computer Science) has an article Beyond Watson in the Spring issue of UMBC Magazine. Dr. Pearce is a Senior Computer Science Authority at the National Security Agency and recipient of UMBC's 2014 Alumna of the Year Award in Engineering and Information Technology.

The article describes the technologies behind IBM's Watson Deep Question Answering system and it's significance for the development of future intelligent systems.

"Part of the answer may be found in a series of Beyond Watson workshops and other activities involving university, government, and industry partners, including one held at UMBC in February.
          We’re looking at things like natural language, which is at the core of the ultimate computer human interface. Think back to Star Trek, when Spock would say something like: "Computer, what is the probability the Klingons will attack the Enterprise in this sector of the galaxy?" The computer would often engage in a back and forth interaction with Spock, asking for more information or clarification before offering one or more scenarios (and probabilities supporting those scenarios) to aid the crew of the Enterprise in their next move. When we can ask a computer a question and then engage in a dialogue with it in this way, we can freely use computers to their best advantage. This sort of exchange allows us to hone in on an answer (or answers) to our question, supported by knowing both how the information was derived and what level of confidence to place in it.
          Envisioning such a model opens up new vistas. We may not be limited to retrieving existing answers from Wikipedia-like text, but use all available data to elicit answers to non-obvious questions, or to queries that have never been asked. We might also dispense with arcane interfaces that are poorly matched to both the task at hand and the needs of users and consumers."