In 2009 a small group took shape at UMBC. A student-run club composed of individuals who shared one common interest: computer and network security. They would meet weekly and discuss the latest cyber-security topics happening and even compete at a national security event, known as the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC). Officially, the UMBC Cyber Defense Team was born, but the group would also come to be known as the UMBC Cyber Dawgs.

Founding member Jorge Teixeira recounted what the early days of the UMBC Cyber Defense Team were like. “The idea started from Jeff Miller, who talked to Prof. John Pinkston,” said Teixeira, “I was sitting in [his lab] when they met to scout for a meeting room/lab.” At the time, Teixeira had done some security research for his MS and had a networking background and wanted to help Miller on what he could.

“We wanted to become an official SGA org but there was a lot of bureaucracy and delays involved, so that didn’t happen right away.” said Teixeira. In Fall 2010, the group competed in CCDC qualifications and went to regionals in mid Spring 2010, boosting the popularity of the group and finally becoming recognized by the SGA by late Fall 2010.

Teixeira also revealed the origins of the name Cyber Dawgs. “The name was coined by Dr. Nicholas in one of our early meetings with him, but the official name was and is UMBC Cyber Defense Team.” Said Teixeira.

“There are no limitations whatsoever with this group.”

Today, the Cyber Dawgs are still around and continue to compete at competitions like the CCDC. They have two faculty advisors, Dr. Charles Nicholas and Dr. Richard Forno, who take a hands off approach to let the club be student run. However, they do help with the logistics of the club and help provide necessary resources.

Bryan Vanek, Computer Science major and Cyber Dawgs club President, runs the day to day operations. While the majority of the group consists of STEM majors, Vanek doesn’t want the Cyber Dawgs to be limited to just people in the security or the computer science field. He actively encourages anyone who has an interest in some area of cybersecurity and a willingness to learn to join the group. “There are no limitations whatsoever with this group.” Vanek said, “We’ll be more than happy to help you along the way!”

Preparing for the yearly CCDC competition is a huge undertaking. The competition focuses on aspects of information assurance and system security, where teams are given a commercial system that they need to protect. In order to do this, security checklists are looked over and good security practices, such as firewall rules and permissions are implemented.

During the competition, a ‘red team’ will attack their system in order to compromise it. Cyber Dawgs have to react in real time, not only trying to close off their connection but cleaning up any damage the red team has done to prevent it from happening again. They have to achieve all of this while keeping any and all required services of that system up.

2015 CCDC

This year, the Cyber Dawgs placed fourth at regionals and the year before that they received first place at regionals, which let them move on to the national competition in Texas where they placed fourth overall.

“As long as people have a desire to learn security, we will be there to support them.”

Anh Ho, a junior Computer Science major and Vice President of Cyber Dawgs, helps plan meetings and events in addition to helping other club members prepare technically for competitions. It’s his 4th year in the club and will be his 3rd year competing. He also helps avoid some of the pitfalls they’ve had in the past when dealing with both club and competition logistics. “These can be simple logistical oversights such as failure to request T-Shirts from SGA [to] technical configurations and what we should do the following year to learn from our mistakes.” said Ho.

He also shares Vanek’s passion in supporting people who take an interest in security. “As long as people have a desire to learn security, we will be there to support them.” said Ho.

Other competitions include cyber Capture the Flags (CTFs). These events can last anywhere between a day or a week with a focus on cyber security as a whole. Some CTFs are more focused on red team activities, such as a reverse engineering and web exploitation. Other CTFs focus on defensive mechanics, like analyzing forensic data and implementing strong security practices on servers.

This is the lab where the Cyber Dawgs use to practice for competitions. From left to right: Julio Valcarcel, Anthony Sasadeusz, Anh Ho, Jorge Teixeira.

Recently, the group participated in UMD’s Cyber Skyline CTF and Booz Allen Hamilton’s Kaizen CTF. “In these competitions, we usually do pretty well,” said Vanek, “we received first place either by an individual or by a team.”

“One of our other missions is to spread the word about how awesome the world of cyber security is…”

The Cyber Dawgs aren’t strictly about competitions. Vanek said, “If we just did [competitions] a lot of new people would get deterred. Thus one of our other missions is to spread the word about how awesome the world of cyber security is by teaching others in whatever way we can.”

During regular club meetings, the group has a large selection of activities that people can choose from to learn more about cyber security. These activities change depending on the semester, so in the Fall the activities are focused more on prepping for CTFs while the Spring semester focuses on CCDC by setting up servers and learning about firewall rules.

Christian Beam, a junior studying Computer Science and serving as club treasurer mentioned how not all meetings are just preparing for competitions. “Some meetings we have guest speakers from the industry to give talks about topics such as reverse engineering, or cryptography.” said Beam.

This image is from a tech talk with the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. After the meeting, the firm networked with attendees and even accepted resumes for internship and job positions.

The Cyber Dawgs try to reach as many people as possible, whether that involves letting people know about their club meetings through their list serve or attending involvement fest and networking with other groups and clubs that share an interest in cyber security. They reach out to groups like the UMBC Cyber Scholars group to let them know about meetings and encouraging them to get involved.

Chris Gardner joined the Cyber Dawgs in his freshmen year at UMBC in 2014. “I’ve been interested in cyber security for a few years now and was the president of my high school’s security club, so joining the Cyber Dawgs seemed like a natural progression.” said Gardner.

He now helps lead the group in cyber CTFs and has learned a lot about cyber security since he’s been with the group.

The Cyber Dawgs are now working on quite a few projects for the upcoming school year. They plan to update their website with new tools and resources for current and future members. In addition to that, they plan on getting a coach for the CCDC to help them in structure and to show their weak points.

“…great way to give people who are new to cyber security another way to learn.”

In the future, the group wants to host their own CTF event right at UMBC. Vanek said, “This is not only a fun project that we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but it will be a great way to give people who are new to cyber security another way to learn.”

Vanek is proud to be president of the Cyber Dawgs, and is looking forward to all their goals and future as an organization. “I can’t begin to thank everyone enough for all that I’ve learned so far from our experiences together,” Vanek said, “and I truly look forward to what we’re all going to be able to accomplish together in these next few years.”

From left to right: Zack Orndorff, Chris Gardner, Josh Domangue, Julio Valcarcel, Jake Rust, Anh Ho, Christian Beam, Tyler Campbell

For more information, you can check out the Cyber Dawgs through their website.

The Cyber Dawgs send out most of their information through the use of their list server. Just send an email to umbccd-subscribe @lists.umbc.edu using your UMBC email address.

You can also chat with members as well by joining their slack channel using for your UMBC email.

Computer Science PhD Dissertation Defense

Learning Representations and Modeling Temporal Signals:
Symbolic Approximation, Deep Learning, Optimization and Beyond

Zhiguang Wang

1:00pm Tuesday, 31 May 2016, ITE 325, UMBC

Most real-world data has a temporal component, whether it is measurements of natural or man-made phenomena. Specifically, complex, high-dimensional and noisy temporal data are often difficult to model because the intrinsic temporal/topographic structures are highly non-linear, which makes the learning and optimization procedure more complicated. This talk will cover three correlated but self-contained topics to address the problem of representation learning in time series, deep learning optimization, and unsupervised feature learning.

First, I will show how to incorporate ideas from symbolic approximation with simple NLP techniques to represent and model temporal signals. To improve the symbolic approximation to model signals as words, we build a time-delay embedding vector (AKA skip gram) to extract the dependencies at different time scales, which yields state-of-the-art classification performance with a bag-of-patterns and vector space model. A non-parametric pooling/weighting scheme is proposed to extend the methods to multivariate signals

Second, I will show how to encode signals as images to learn and analyze them with deep learning methods. The Gramian Angular Field (GAF) and Markov Transition Field (MTF), as two novel approaches to encode both multi-scale spatial correlation and first order Markov dynamics of the temporal signals as images, are proposed. These visual representations are proved to work well in both visualizations by humans and pattern recognition using deep learning approaches. This work yields state-of-the-art algorithms for temporal data classification and imputation.

Finally, deep learning in image recognition (e.g. pictures or GAF/MTF images) involves high-dimensional non-convex optimization. Such optimization is generally intractable. However, I show how to use a set of exponential form based error estimators (NRAE/NAAE) and learning approaches (Adaptive Training) to attack the non-convex optimization problems in training deep neural networks. Both in theory and practice, they are able to achieve optimality on accuracy and robustness against outliers/noise. They provide another perspective to address the non-convex optimization problem (especially saddle points) in deep learning.

Committee: Tim Oates (Chair), Matt Schmill (Miner & Kasch), Hamed Pirsiavash, Yun Peng, Kostas Kalpakis

Image: Marc Olano during the opening of the 3D Scanning Room at UMBC. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

CSEE professor Marc Olano talked at TEDx Towson on how technology has changed how we think about reality. “New technology has started blurring the lines between the real and the virtual,” he said at the May 5 event.  He focused on how new 3D technologies have evolved and used examples including 3D graphics, virtual reality, video games and 3D printers. Professor Olano ended his talk pointing out that while he had not mentioned science fiction, “I can feel the world of holodecks and replicators on the horizon.”  Read more about his TEDx talk at UMBC News and watch it on YouTube.

Microsoft Student Partners (MSPs) are student technology leaders, empowered to build Microsoft communities on their campus and share their deep knowledge and passion for technology with their fellow classmates.  See here for more information. Apply by 15 July 2016.

Anupam Joshi and Yelena Yesha working with several UMBC students. Photo by Mitro Hood/Feature Photo Service.

UMBC and IBM Research have announced a collaboration to create the Accelerated Cognitive Cybersecurity Lab (ACCL), opening at UMBC in fall 2016. Housed in the College of Engineering and Information Technology and supported with a multi-year commitment from IBM, it will advance scientific frontiers in cybersecurity and machine learning. Anupam Joshi, director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity and chair of the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department, will lead the ACCL.

The lab will build on UMBC’s prior research on AI, high performance computing, data visualization and cybersecurity and work IBM researchers to apply IBM’s cognitive computing systems and tools, including the Watson computer system.

You can read more about the new partnership from IBM’s press releases (here and here), UMBC’s announcement and other new media (e.g., here).

IT & Engineering Alumni Happy Hour
6:00–8:00pm Tuesday, 14 June 2016

Union Jack’s, 10400 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia MD 21044

Join fellow graduates of the College of Engineering and Information Technology and those who now work in those fields for a networking happy hour. Enjoy fabulous food and drinks on us while connecting with other IT&E Retrievers. Sponsored by the UMBC Alumni Association. RSVP by June 6 here. Questions? Contact Amy Dalrymple at Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Cognitive Computing and Visualization at IBM Research/RPI CISL

Dr. Hui Su, IBM Research

10:00-11:00am, Thursday, 19 May 2016, ITE 325b

Dr. Hui Su will talk about Cognitive and Immersive Systems Lab, a research initiative to develop the new frontier of immersive cognitive systems that explore and advance natural, collaborative problem-solving among groups of humans and machines. This lab is a collaboration between IBM Research and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Su will talk about why the research for human computer interaction is extended to build a symbiotic relationship between human beings and smart machines, what research is going to be important to build immersive cognitive systems in order to transform the way professionals work in the future.

Dr. Hui Su is the Director of Cognitive and Immersive Systems Lab, a collaboration between IBM Research and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has been a technical leader and an executive at IBM Research. Most recently, he was the Director of IBM Cambridge Research Lab in Cambridge, MA and was responsible for a broad scope of global missions in IBM Research, including Cognitive User Experience, Center for Innovation in Visual Analytics and Center for Social Business. As a technical leader and a researcher for 19 years at IBM Research, Dr. Su has been an expert in multiple areas ranging from Human Computer Interaction, Cloud Computing, Visual Analytics, and Neural Network Algorithms for Image Recognition etc. As an executive, he has been leading research labs and research teams in the US and China. He is passionate about game-changing ideas and fundamental research, passionate in speeding up the impact generation process for technical innovations, discovering and developing new linkages between innovative research work and business needs.

Host: Jian Chen (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. )

America is ‘dropping cyberbombs’ – but how do they work?

Richard Forno and Anupam Joshi

Recently, United States Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work publicly confirmed that the Pentagon’s Cyber Command was “dropping cyberbombs,” taking its ongoing battle against the Islamic State group into the online world. Other American officials, including President Barack Obama, have discussed offensive cyber activities, too.

The American public has only glimpsed the country’s alleged cyberattack abilities. In 2012 The New York Times revealed the first digital weapon, the Stuxnet attack against Iran’s nuclear program. In 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released a classified presidential directive outlining America’s approach to conducting Internet-based warfare.

The terms “cyberbomb” and “cyberweapon” create a simplistic, if not also sensational, frame of reference for the public. Real military or intelligence cyber activities are less exaggerated but much more complex. The most basic types are off-the-shelf commercial products used by companies and security consultants to test system and network security. The most advanced are specialized proprietary systems made for exclusive – and often classified – use by the defense, intelligence and law enforcement communities.

So what exactly are these “cyberbombs” America is “dropping” in the Middle East? The country’s actual cyber capabilities are classified; we, as researchers, are limited by what has been made public. Monitoring books, reports, news events and congressional testimony is not enough to separate fact from fiction. However, we can analyze the underlying technologies and look at the global strategic considerations of those seeking to wage cyber warfare. That work allows us to offer ideas about cyber weapons and how they might be used.

Read more @ The Conversation and also on the Scientific American Web site.

UMBC Information Systems Department

Predicting Demographics and Affects in Social Networks

Dr. Svitlana Volkova
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

11am Friday, 13 May 2016, ITE 459

Social media predictive analytics bring unique opportunities to study people and their behaviors in real time, at an unprecedented scale: who they are, what they like and what they think and feel. Such large-scale real-time social media predictive analytics provide a novel set of conditions for the construction of predictive models. This talk focuses on various approaches to handling this dynamic data for predicting latent user demographics, from constrained-resource batch classification, to incremental bootstrapping, and then iterative learning via interactive rationale (feature) crowdsourcing. In addition, we present the relationships between a variety of perceived user properties e.g., income, education etc. and opinions, emotions and interests in a social network.

Svitlana Volkova received her PhD in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. She was affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing and the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence. Her PhD research focused on building predictive models for sociolinguistic content analysis in social media. She built online models for streaming social media analytics, fine-grained emotion detection and multilingual sentiment analysis, and effective annotation techniques via crowdsourcing incorporated into the active learning framework. She interned at Microsoft Research in 2011, 2012 and 2014 at the Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning and Perception teams. She was awarded the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2010 and the Fulbright Scholarship in 2008.