Two UMBC alumni who now work at Google will present a Google information session and two technical talks this coming Wednesday afternoon in the Library Gallery. It's a chance for both undergraduate and graduate students to learn about internship and full-time opportunities at Google. The Googlers are:

• Blazej Bulka is a currently a Senior Software Engineer at Google NYC. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMBC in 2009.
• Robert Banz is a Site Reliability Manager at Google. He received a BS in Computer Science from UMBC in 1995 and worked for UMBC's Department of Information Technology for many years before joining Google.

There will be an opportunity to network and ask questions between talks and an informal happy hour after the talks starting at 5:00pm at Flat Tuesdays in the Commons. Faculty, staff and frinds are welcome to attend the talks and happy hour.

• Noon-1:00pm Google Culture and Careers, Presented by Blazej Bulka and Robert Banz

  Google culture and mission presented by two UMBC graduates who work at Google. Brief history of Google, products and projects, and first-hand relation of how it is to work for Google. The second half of the talk will describe various career opportunities (both for full-time positions and internship), including information about the interview process.

• 2:00-3:00pm Engineering Reliability at Google, Presented by Robert Banz

  Keeping Google services up and running efficiently, reliably, and at scale.

• 4:00-5:00pm Research and Work at Google: Graduate Student Opportunities, Presented by Blazej Bulka

  How to do research and utilize skills learned in graduate school at Google.

• 5:00- Happy Hour at Flat Tuesdays, The Commons

Let Google know you are interested in opportunities and plan to attend some of the sessions by filling out this form.

Enhancing System Security and Privacy with Program Analysis

Yinzhi Cao

Columbia University

12:00-1:00pm Tuesday, 31 March 2015, ITE 325b, UMBC

Cyber security and privacy have brought the attention from the general public these days. Melissa Hathaway, who advised both President Obama and President Bush, estimated in a report that governments and consumers lost $125 billion annually to cyber-attacks, including losses in tax revenue. In this talk, from the perspective of program analysis, I will discuss the security and privacy of two important computer systems: Web browser and Android system. In the first part, I will introduce how to prevent and detect drive-by download attacks, which penetrate the boundary of a browser principal. In particular, I will present JShield, a vulnerability-based detection engine that is more robust to obfuscated drive-by download attacks, when compared to various anti-virus software and most recent research papers. In the second part, I will introduce EdgeMiner, the first automatic tool that creates summaries of Android framework in the form of callback and registration pairs. With the summaries, existing static analysis system can correctly construct a control flow graph with hidden control flow dependencies introduced by callback methods.

Yinzhi Cao is a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University. He earned his PhD in computer science at Northwestern University. Before that, he obtained his B.E. degree in electronics engineering at Tsinghua University in China. His research mainly focuses on the security and privacy of web, smart phones, and machine learning. He has published more than ten papers at various security conferences, such as Oakland, NDSS, ACSAC and DSN. His JShield system has been adopted by Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunication company. In the past, he served as a program committee member for IEEE CNS’14 and web chair for AsiaCCS SESP’13. Previously, he also conducted research at SRI International and UC Santa Barbara as a summer intern.

UMBC Cyber Defense Lab

Blind Hashing; a new way to secure
passwords against offline attack

Jeremy Spilman

Founder/CTO of TapLink

11-12 Friday 27 March 2015, M/P 101, UMBC

Industry best practice is to secure passwords using a tunable hashing algorithm; pick the right hashing algorithm, tune its cost factors so it runs slowly and makes optimal use of your hardware, and it’s possible to protect very strong passwords from being cracked. However when average password strength and login latency requirements face off against bot-nets and GPU powered dictionary attacks, the vast majority of passwords are easily cracked. Blind hashing entangles password hashes with a massive pool of random data, so large it cannot be stolen over the network. A simple protocol allows any number of sites to share a centralized petabyte-scale data pool, amortizing the cost for defenders, while protecting low-entropy passwords with minimal run-time cost. Blind hashing can also be used as a general-purpose PBKDF to protect against brute-force attacks, and providing the opportunity to add server-based access policies and revocability to the key derivation process. Following his talk, Jeremy will be happy to discuss potential research opportunities with the company for students interested in developing new implementations of blind hashing for password-based authentication and encryption services.

Jeremy Spilman is the Founder and CTO of TapLink, a startup company that is developing systems using its patented Blind Hashing technique, which can completely protect passwords against offline attack, even if the password database is stolen. He was a double major in Computer Science and Economics at Brandeis University.

Summarizing Information in Big Data: Algorithms and Applications

Dr. Fei Liu

School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

12:00p Friday, 27 March 2015, ITE 325b

Information floods the lives of modern people, and we find it overwhelming. Summarization systems that identify salient pieces of information and present it concisely can help. In this talk, I will discuss both algorithmic and application perspectives of summarization. Algorithm-wise, I will describe keyword extraction, sentence extraction, and summary generation, including a range of techniques from information extraction to semantic representation of data sources; application-wise, I focus on summarizing human conversations, social media contents, and news articles. The data sources span low-quality speech recognizer outputs and social media chats to high-quality content produced by professional writers. A special focus of my work is exploring multiple information sources. In addition to better integration across sources, this allows abstraction to shared research challenges for broader impact. Finally, I try to identify the missing links in cross-genre summarization studies and discuss future research directions.

Dr. Fei Liu is a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, member of Noah’s ARK. Fei’s research interests are in the areas of natural language processing, machine learning, and data mining, with special emphasis on automatic summarization and social media. From 2011 to 2013, Fei worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Bosch Research, Palo Alto, California, one of the largest German companies providing intelligent car systems and home appliances. Fei received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2011, supported by Erik Jonsson Distinguished Research Fellowship. Prior to that, she obtained her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science from Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Fei has published over twenty peer reviewed articles, and she serves as a referee for leading journals and conferences.

Host: Nilanjan Banerjee and Mohamed Younis

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

 Towards Large-Scale Measurement of Vulnerabilities
and Design of Usable New Systems

Prof. Chuan Yue
University of Colorado Colorado Springs

12:00-1:00 Monday, 23 March 2015, ITE325b, UMBC

Security and privacy vulnerabilities are pervasive in computer and network systems. In my research group, we aim to accurately measure and analyze the vulnerabilities of Web, Cloud, and Mobile systems on a large scale; we also aim to design usable new systems that provide better security and privacy protection to millions of users. In this talk, I will first present our research on analyzing the vulnerabilities of popular Web browsers’ built-in password managers and some third-party browser-and-cloud-based password managers. Next, I will present a framework for automatic detection of information leakage vulnerabilities in JavaScript-based browser extensions including password managers. I will explain why it is very challenging to accurately and automatically analyze JavaScript-based browser extensions, justify why our static and dynamic combined approach is practical and appropriate, and further discuss how we may increase the capabilities of this framework to automatically measure and analyze JavaScript related security and privacy vulnerabilities on a large scale. Finally, I will discuss some of our current and future projects on security and privacy research and education, for example, one project is on measuring users’ susceptibility to sophisticated and highly insidious phishing attacks.

Chuan Yue is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. His current research focuses on Web, Cloud, and Mobile Systems Security and Privacy. He received his B.E. and M.E. degrees in Computer Science from Xidian University, China, in 1996 and 1999, respectively, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary in 2010. He worked as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs China, Lucent Technologies for four years from 1999 to 2003, mainly on the design and development of the Web-based Distributed Service Management System for Intelligent Network.

For more information and directions: http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks.

UMBC’s Graduate Research Conference Program (GRC) will be held on campus on Wednesday, March 25, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. There will be a variety of presentations for faculty and students (both graduate and undergraduate). Featured events include professional development workshops, a keynote panel, and a research information fair.

Twenty-eight CSEE graduate students will describe their research in oral or poster presentations. Feel free to attend as many sessions as your schedule allows.

Please note that registration is required for both presenters and attendees. Registration is particularly important, in regards to securing a seat for the lunch and for the professional development workshops.

For more information, visit the Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. .

To register, please go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/37th-annual-graduate-researchconference-registration-13201250295.

Please find a link to the program guide and the events flyer listed below:

• GRC 2015 Program
• GRC Featured Events Flyer

Visual Exploration of Big Urban Data

Dr. Huy Yo
Center for Urban Science and Progress, New York University

12:00-1:00pm Thursday, 12 March 2015, ITE 325b

About half of humanity lives in urban environments today and that number will grow to 80% by the middle of this century. Cities are thus the loci of resource consumption, of economic activity, and of innovation; they are the cause of our looming sustainability problems but also where those problems must be solved. Data, along with visualization and analytics can help significantly in finding these solutions.

In this talk, I will discuss the challenges of visual exploration of big urban data; and showcase our approaches in a study of New York City taxi trips. Taxis are valuable sensors and can provide unprecedented insight into many different aspects of city life. But analyzing these data presents many challenges. The data are complex, containing geographical and temporal components in addition to multiple variables associated with each trip. Consequently, it is hard to specify exploratory queries and to perform comparative analyses. This problem is largely due to the size of the data. There are almost a billion records of taxi trips collected in a 5-year period. I will present TaxiVis, a tool that allows domain experts to visually query taxi trips at an interactive speed and performing tasks that were unattainable before. I will also discuss our key contributions in this work: the visual querying model and novel indexing scheme for spatio-temporal datasets.

Dr. Huy Vo is a Research Scientist at the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), New York University. His research focuses on large-scale data analysis and visualization, big data systems, and scalable displays. He is also a Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering since 2011. He is one of the co-creators of VisTrails, an open-source scientific workflow and provenance management system, where he led the design of the VisTrails Provenance SDK. He received his B.S. in Computer Science (2005) and PhD in Computing (2011) from the University of Utah and was a two time recipient of the NVIDIA Fellowship awards (2009-2010 and 2010-2011).

Host: Jian Chen

Physics, Simulation, and Computer Animation

Professor Adam W. Bargteil
University of Utah

12:00-1:00 Monday, 9 March 2015, ITE325b

Physics-based Computer Animation has revolutionized the world of special effects. I will talk about several success stories including my academy award winning work on fracture, particle skinning, and large-scale splashing liquids. I will also talk about moving beyond cinematic special effects to create tools for artistic authoring of interactive animations and enabling visually predictive simulations that promise to revolutionize industrial design.

Adam W. Bargteil is an assistant professor at the University of Utah. His primary research interests lie in the area of physics-based animation. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley and spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. From 2005 to 2007, he was a consultant at PDI/DreamWorks, developing fluid simulation tools that were used in “Shrek the Third” and “Bee Movie.”

Senior Amazon staff members will give two technical talks on next week on Tuesday, March 3, in the UC Ballroom on topics of great practical interest and utility.

• Lydia Fitzpatrick, Senior Technical Program Manager for Amazon Mobile Business will give a talk on “Web Performance Optimization” from 4:00pm to 5:00pm.

• Leo Zhadanovsky, Senior Solutions Architect for Amazon Web Services will present an “Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS)” from 5:30pm to 6:30pm. The talk with introduce cloud computing and  discuss the various Networking, Compute, Database, Storage, Application, Deployment and Management services that AWS offers. It will demonstrate how to launch a full three tier LAMP stack in minutes, as well as how to setup a simple web server on AWS.  The presentation will also discuss several use-cases, demonstrating how customers such as Enterprises, Startups, and Government Agencies are using AWS to power their computing needs.

The talks will be preceded and followed by an open networking opportunity with Amazon Human Resource representatives. Amazon is interested in students for internships and full-time position who are majoring in Information Systems, Business Technology Administration, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Cybersecurity.

Senior Amazon staff members will give two technical talks on next week on Tuesday, March 3, in the UC Ballroom on topics of great practical interest and utility.

• Lydia Fitzpatrick, Senior Technical Program Manager for Amazon Mobile Business will give a talk on “Web Performance Optimization” from 4:00pm to 5:00pm.

• Leo Zhadanovsky, Senior Solutions Architect for Amazon Web Services will present an “Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS)” from 5:30pm to 6:30pm. The talk with introduce cloud computing and  discuss the various Networking, Compute, Database, Storage, Application, Deployment and Management services that AWS offers. It will demonstrate how to launch a full three tier LAMP stack in minutes, as well as how to setup a simple web server on AWS.  The presentation will also discuss several use-cases, demonstrating how customers such as Enterprises, Startups, and Government Agencies are using AWS to power their computing needs.

The talks will be preceded and followed by an open networking opportunity with Amazon Human Resource representatives. Amazon is interested in students for internships and full-time position who are majoring in Information Systems, Business Technology Administration, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Cybersecurity.