The UMBC at Shady Grove Cybersecurity Program Presents

Cybersecurity as a Team Sport – Understanding Counsel’s Role

Allison Bender J.D.

6:00-8:00pm Wednesday, 4 April 2018

The Universities at Shady Grove
Building III (Camille Kendall Academic Center) Room 4230
9636 Gudelsky Drive, Rockville, Maryland 20850
Directions/Parking

In this presentation by seasoned incident response counsel, Allison Bender, you will gain a risk-informed perspective on the role of counsel in cybersecurity governance and incident response. Also, learn strategies for more effective communication and cooperation with other cybersecurity stakeholders (e.g., IT, IT Security, HR, Communications, business leaders, senior executives and the board); and take away practical tips for prioritizing efforts that help tame the chaos of cybersecurity incident response while maintaining privilege as appropriate.

Allison Bender counsels Fortune 50 companies and startups in a range of industries on cybersecurity and privacy matters in the U.S. and internationally. Drawing from her roots in government, national security, and R&D, she helps clients navigate legal issues associated with emerging technologies and aids clients in strategically managing legal, financial, and reputational cybersecurity risks. Allison translates technical, operational, legal, and policy issues to create practical solutions for clients’ legal challenges. Her cybersecurity and national security preparedness counseling is informed by over 80 incident response efforts. When drafting corporate policies and considering product design options, Allison’s advice is seasoned in the management of breaches involving personal data, intellectual property, payment card information, export controlled technical data, and other regulated information. Her experience also extends to counseling on cybersecurity and national security due diligence in mergers and acquisitions, vendor management, and transactions. From DHS, Allison brings experience in incident response as well as cybersecurity policy, information sharing, liability, and incentives. She was the primary operational legal counsel for the federal response to the Heartbleed vulnerability, the USIS-KeyPoint data breach, and the Healthcare.gov data breach.

Hosts: Dr. Behnam Shariati (*protected email*) and the UMBC Graduate Cybersecurity Association at USG

The UMBC Graduate Cybersecurity Association at USG is an organization created and managed by UMBC Cybersecurity graduate students at Shady Grove. The mission of Cybersecurity Association is to promote the study of Cybersecurity and to raise Cybersecurity awareness and knowledge in the community through panel discussions, conferences, and Cyber competitions. Also, the Cybersecurity Association aspires to create a supportive and positive learning environment in which every member has the opportunity to network, learn, and grow.

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UMBC ACM Student Chapter Entreprenuership Talk

Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Dr. Neil Rothman
Graduate Program Director for Professional Programs in Engineering
12.00-1.00pm Friday,​ 30 ​March 2018, ITE​​237, UMBC

There is a misconception that entrepreneurs only create start-up companies based on a new technology or product idea or that entrepreneurship is risky. We will discuss what entrepreneurship really means and how entrepreneurs can identify opportunities to create value.

Dr. Neil Rothman, Professor of the Practice and Graduate Program Director for Professional Programs in Engineering, came to UMBC as a Lecturer in 2012. Dr. Rothman has a BS in Biomedical Engineering and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University. Prior to UMBC, Dr. Rothman spent over 30 years in the medical device industry, focused on product development and manufacturing, and held senior technical management positions in organizations from start-ups to large multinationals. He uses his extensive industry experience to provide a professional engineering practice perspective to all of his courses. Most recently, he was the Vice President of Advanced Research and Technology Development at BrainScope Company, Inc., leading the creation of technologies for the diagnosis of traumatic brain injury and other neurological conditions.

Prior to joining BrainScope, Dr. Rothman was the VP of Research and Development for Infinite Biomedical Technologies (IBT), and led the development of EEG based systems for detection of asphyxic brain injury and seizures in critical care applications. Other positions included Project Manager for GE Healthcare’s Maternal and Infant Care Division, VP of Operations for Metasensors (a startup company developing a microfluidic system for respiratory gas analysis), Director of Engineering for IGEN International (manufacturer of systems for high throughput drug screening, food testing, and clinical diagnostics), and Senior VP and Chief Technical Officer for CardioLogic Systems (manufacturer of automated systems for cardiopulmonary resuscitation and cardiac assist). He also held a variety of positions at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Black & Decker’s medical products division. Dr. Rothman is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and recently received his 25th patent.

Contact *protected email*  with questions and follow facebook page http://goo.gl/eoMAbw for event updates

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 Student staff member, Samiksha Manjani, takes a deeper look at the impact of makeup microaggressions.

I normally hate getting ready to go out with girls; or well, I hate putting on my makeup in front of other girls. Instead, I’ll put it on in my own house and then go to my friend’s house to “get ready” aka just to put on a dress. I started to do this after having the same interaction time after time with various friends. It goes something like this:

Me standing in front of the mirror, happily doing my sparkly silver smokey eye, tongue out (because you can never put mascara on with a closed mouth).

“Wow! your eyeshadow looks amazing!”

“Thank you!! I really like smokey eyeshadow looks.” At this point, I’m feeling super awesome about how I’m looking and my makeup when…

“Yeah, I mean, I don’t even know how to put on makeup. I just do whatever, you know. I don’t even wear makeup,” she says dismissively.

Aaaaaand there it is.

Her comment may seem like an honest admission of not knowing how to put on makeup, but it’s not that simple; especially when I’ve gotten similar responses from other girls. If you don’t already know what I’m talking about, allow me to explain: this “compliment” implies that she is somehow better than me because she doesn’t wear or know how to put on makeup; this insinuates that I need makeup because I’m not confident enough to go without it. Simply put, if I wear makeup, I’m not naturally attractive enough.

What makes the situation worse is that, at that moment, I can feel the need to justify myself building up. I know I don’t owe anyone an explanation. I also know that my decision to wear or not to wear makeup doesn’t make me any more or less of a woman, but instead I say,  

“Oh, yeah I mean I don’t really know how to put on makeup either. I barely wear it…”

Knowing damn well I’m lying. I didn’t watch countless MUA (“makeup artist”) Instagram and Youtube videos to act like I didn’t know how to put on makeup. Plus, my friend had the sharpest winged eye I had ever seen. How could she say she didn’t know how to put on makeup?

Other times, especially when I’m talking to guys about makeup, they’ll say, “Oh! I like you better without makeup” or “You look better than girls who wear makeup, I don’t like girls that cake on.”

Am I supposed to say thanks?

To be clear, I’m perfectly happy with the way I look when I wear makeup and when I don’t. I don’t think my value is somehow better or worse depending on whether I wear makeup. Likewise, I don’t think I’m suddenly better than other girls because of my decision to wear or not to wear makeup. Some days I just want to sparkle (literally)!

After having the same exact encounter time after time, and being inadvertently shamed for knowing how to do my makeup… I stopped going to get ready at my girlfriends. I stopped feeling comfortable in what was supposed to be an empowering environment.

Why couldn’t I enjoy putting on a full face some days and having a fresh face on others?

See the Full Comic Here

It may seem really small or that I’m being overly sensitive, but that’s exactly how microaggressions make you feel. A microaggression is a negative statement directed at a subordinated group; it can be intentional or unintentional. Although microaggressions are essentially micro, their accumulated impact can be quite large (here’s a video to better explain). At the Women’s Center, we like to refer to the impact of microaggressions as a “death by a thousand cuts.” The first time you experience a microaggression, it may not get you down too much, but after hearing either the same one or similar ones so many times, it’ll get to you.

It’s not just the microaggression itself that hurt, the hurt doubled because it was coming from other women. Women that should have been allies. I couldn’t understand,

Why were women perpetuating these unrealistic dichotomies onto each other? Why couldn’t we both be great in whatever we were doing?

I realized that these microaggressions between women were essentially internalized sexism caused by heterosexist patriarchy. Under patriarchal norms, women’s value is dependent on their attractiveness to men. As feminist theorists suggest, when women internalize heterosexist patriarchy and associate their source of worth, identity, and strength with men, they’re compelled to compete with each other for the attention of men. Essentially, we turn on each other when our value is tied to men.

However, we don’t have succumb to it.  Maybe instead of feeling intimidated by women who inspire us, we could feel empowered by them.

I recently came upon Shine Theory at the Women’s Center and think it’s a phenomenal way to reframe female competitiveness. Created by Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow, Shine Theory prescribes that “when you meet a woman who is intimidatingly witty, stylish, beautiful, and professionally accomplished, befriend her.”’ Friedman and Sow contest that “surrounding yourself with the best people doesn’t make you look worse by comparison. It makes you better.”

When we apply Shine Theory to the makeup debacle, we can acknowledge if our friend is better at something than us, but also that it doesn’t reflect a deficit in ourselves. Maybe I did know how to do a smokey eyeshadow look when my friend didn’t, and that doesn’t mean I have to use makeup to feel more attractive. Likewise, her decision to not wear makeup doesn’t mean that she is inherently more attractive, valuable, or confident than me. Wearing makeup skillfully doesn’t add or detract value from a person. It just means you wear makeup. 

So the next time you’re around a powerful woman that you perceive is rocking something better than you, befriend them instead of feeling self-conscious.

UMBC launches Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics to tackle data-intensive challenges from disease tracking to online privacy

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected UMBC to lead a new $3 million research partnership that will deploy next-generation computing hardware to solve major infrastructure challenges. UMBC will launch the Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA) through a five-year grant from the NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC) program, receiving $150,000 in support for each of the next five years. The remaining funds will support collaborative research with partner institutions North Carolina State University; Rutgers University, Newark; and Rutgers University, New Brunswick; and Tel Aviv University. Two affiliated sites at University of California, San Diego, and University of Utah will also participate in the collaboration.

IUCRCs are long-term partnerships among universities, corporations, and government agencies that leverage an initial investment from NSF to catalyze primary support from the public and private sectors. CARTA anticipates the current NSF support will lead to additional public and private sector research funding through agency and industry partners.

Through CARTA, UMBC faculty and students will work on projects tackling concerns of national and global significance. One of the initial projects will integrate massive and diverse data sets—from peer-reviewed publications to live meteorological data to social media posts—to better track the origin and spread of highly infectious diseases worldwide. Another project will focus on cloud data privacy and protection, developing policy-based, semantically-rich approaches that can better ensure that approved users can safely access the data they need, including effectively tracking the provenance of data.

Yelena Yesha, distinguished professor of computer science and electrical engineering, will serve as CARTA director and is the principal investigator on the grant. Yesha will work with UMBC faculty, including Karuna Pande Joshi, assistant professor of information systems, who will serve as the UMBC site director, and Milton Halem, research professor of computer science and electrical engineering, as well as the site directors at the affiliated CARTA institutions.

CARTA will build upon the success of UMBC’s Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research (CHMPR), which was originally established in 2009 to address productivity, performance, and scalability issues in the development of advanced computing technologies applied to concerns of national significance, from genomics to climate change. The new center will expand the scope of the research conducted, while continuing the IUCRC’s mission to grow strong partnerships among academic institutions and corporations.

“CARTA will usher in the era of accelerated real-time analytics by effectively utilizing innovative technologies such as cognitive computing, machine learning, and quantum computing to address our nation’s global competitive challenges in health security, disaster mitigation, and the emerging artificial intelligence revolution,” Yesha explains.

“CARTA brings the talents of students and faculty from seven institutions into a partnership with industry and government agencies that will enable realization of smarter smart systems and more responsive information technologies,” says Keith J. Bowman, dean of UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology. Explaining that this work has the potential to have a dramatic impact, he notes, “Decreasing the barriers to accelerated real-time analytics will foster greater adoption and performance for new data-intensive technologies.”

Adapted from a UMBC News article by Megan Hanks. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

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