Governor’s Summer Internship Program Fellowship

This fellowship program introduces Maryland’s “best and brightest” college students to the rewards and challenges of working within Maryland state government. Students are paid a stipend of $3000.

The fellowship has 4 components:

Experience - Fellows are placed at a government agency full-time, 4 days a week, under the mentorship of a senior-level professional

Exploration - Fellows attend an orientation and seminars to strengthen their understanding of the functions of state government and policy making

Exposure - Fellows attend meetings, events, field trips, and networking opportunities to connect with Maryland’s leaders 

Practice - Fellows work together in groups to put their knowledge and skills into practice, researching and preparing a policy analysis and recommendation to present to the Governor

Eligibility criteria for fellows

·         Rising Junior or Senior

·         Attending a Maryland institution OR a current Maryland resident attending an out-of-state institution

·         GPA 2.7 or above

·         Available May 31-August 11, 2017

2017 GSIP Important Dates:

    December 5- Applications Live

    March 1- Application Priority Deadline

    March 15- Application Deadline

    April 15- Applicants Notified

    May 31-June 2- Orientation

    June 5- Opening Celebration

    August 10- Closing Celebration

To apply go to: http://publicservicescholars.umbc.edu/apply-to-gsip/

Walter Sondheim Jr. Maryland Nonprofit Leadership Program

The Sondheim Nonprofit Leadership Program introduces Maryland’s undergraduate and graduate students to the nonprofit sector.  Fellows are paid a stipend of $3,000 for their participation in the program.

The Fellowship Has 4 Components:

Experience - Fellows are placed at a nonprofit organization full-time, 4 days a week, under the mentorship of a senior-level professional

Exploration - Fellows attend an orientation and seminars to strengthen their understanding of the functions of nonprofits and examining community needs and social challenges

Exposure - Fellows attend meetings, events, field trips, and networking opportunities to connect with Maryland’s leaders

Practice - Fellows work together in groups to put their knowledge and skills into practice, researching a challenge impacting Maryland and design an innovative way to address the challenge

Eligibility criteria for fellows:

·         Rising Junior or Senior, or graduate student

·         Attending a Maryland institution OR a current Maryland resident attending an out-of-state institution

·         GPA 2.7 or above

·         Available May 31-August 11, 2017

2017 Important Dates:

    December 5- Applications Live

    March 1- Application Priority Deadline

    March 15- Application Deadline

    April 15- Applicants Notified

    May 31- June 2 Orientation

    June 5- Kickoff Celebration

    August 9- Closing Celebration

To apply go to: http://publicservicescholars.umbc.edu/apply-to-snlp/

Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) Fellows Program

The Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) Fellows Program exposes Maryland’s college students to careers in the state sector within Maryland’s integrative transportation system.  Fellows of all majors are placed in full-time assignments in one of MDOT’s units, mentored by senior-level administrators.

With the knowledge gained at their placements, and through seminars, trips, and networking, fellows research and create a proposal to solve a transportation challenge.  The program is administered by the Shriver Center in conjunction with the Office of the Secretary of Transportation.

Fellows are paid a stipend of $3,500 for their participation in the program. 

The fellowship has 4 components:

Experience - Fellows are placed in an MDOT office and perform substantive work, full-time for 8 weeks under the mentorship of a senior-level professional

Exploration - Fellows attend an orientation and seminars to strengthen their understanding of the functions of state government and policy making

Exposure - Fellows attend meetings, events, field trips, and networking opportunities to connect with Maryland’s leaders

Practice - Fellows put their knowledge and skills into practice, researching and proposing a solution to a transportation challenge.

Eligibility Criteria:

·         Rising Junior of Senior in Fall 2017

·         Attending a Maryland institution or are a Maryland resident

·         GPA 2.7 or above

·         Available Friday, March 31 for interviews

·         Available June 9-August 4, 2017

2017 Important Dates:

    December 3- Applications Live

    March 1- Application Priority Deadline

    March 15- Application Deadline

    March 31- Fellow Interviews

    June 10- Opening Kickoff and Orientation

    June 13- First Day of Internship

    August 5- Closing Celebration

To apply go to: http://publicservicescholars.umbc.edu/apply-to-mdot/

For more information, please email Hannah Schmitz: publicservicescholars@umbc.edu

Securing Networks by Detecting Logical Flaws in Protocol Implementations

Dr. Endadul Hoque
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Northeastern University

12:00pm Wednesday, 22 February 2017, ITE 325b, UMBC

Implementations of network protocols are integral components of various networked computing systems, spanning from Internet-of-Things (IoT) to enormous data centers. Research efforts to defend these implementations by introducing new designs for security and advocating best practices in secure programming are not always feasible, nor effective. Even rigorous analysis of the design of a protocol is not sufficient, as indicated by the frequent reports of bugs discovered in protocol implementations after deployment. Hence, it is crucial to develop automated techniques and tools to help programmers detect logical flaws in actual implementations of protocols.

In this talk, I will first present an automated compliance checker to analyze operational behavior of a protocol implementation for detecting semantic bugs, which cause the implementation fail to comply with its specifications. Next, I will present an automated testing tool to analyze robustness of a protocol implementation against malicious attacks mounted to degrade its runtime performance (e.g., throughput). Finally, I will conclude with several directions for future research to aid the development of secure networked systems.

Endadul Hoque is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2015. His research revolves around practical cybersecurity problems in the networking domain. His current research focuses on leveraging program analysis and formal verification techniques to create automated analysis tools for ensuring secure and reliable operations of networked systems. During his PhD, he received the Graduate Teaching Fellowship award in 2014 and the Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship award in 2015. His research on automated adversarial testing has also been integrated into course curriculum at Purdue University for teaching secure distributed systems programming.

The post talk: Securing Networks by Detecting Logical Flaws in Protocol Implementations appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

A Semantically Rich Approach to Automating Big Data and Cloud

Dr. Karuna Joshi
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

12:00pm Monday, 20 February 2017, ITE 325b, UMBC

With the explosion of Big Data and the growth of data science, there is an urgent need to automate the data lifecycle of generation, ingestion, analytics, knowledge extraction, and archival and deletion. With a promise of rapid provisioning, scalability and high computing capability, cloud based services are being adopted as the default computing environment for Big Data analytics.

To effectively manage their data on cloud, organizations need to continuously monitor the rules/constraints and performance metrics listed in a variety of legal contracts. However, these documents, like Service Level Agreements (SLA), privacy policy, regulatory documents, etc., are currently managed as plain text files meant principally for human consumption. Additionally, providers often define their own performance metrics for their services. These factors hinder the automation of steps of the data lifecycle, leading to inefficiencies in using the dynamic and elastic elements of the Data+Cloud ecosystem and require manual effort to monitor the service performance. Moreover, Cloud-based service providers are collecting large amounts of data about their consumers including Personally Identifiable Information (PII) like contact addresses, credit card details, bank account details, etc. They are offering customized service level agreements which indicate how such data will be handled. To see whether these agreements meet individual or corporate requirements, or comply with statutory constraints, currently involves significant human effort.

In this talk, we present the semantically rich approach that we have developed to automatically extract knowledge from large textual datasets, specially legal documents, using text analytics and Semantic Web technologies. We describe the OWL ontologies that we have developed, and the techniques to extract key terms and rules from textual legal documents. We will also illustrate application of our work in domains such as education, healthcare and cybersecurity.

Karuna P. Joshi is a Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research focuses on Data Science and Big Data Analytics, especially legal text analytics; knowledge representation and reasoning; privacy and security of Big Data and Cloud; and cloud enabled Health IT services. She has published over 30 papers, including in journals like IEEE Transactions on Service Computing and conferences like IEEE Big Data and IEEE CLOUD. Her research is supported by organizations like DoD, ONR, NIST, NSF, GE and IBM. She was also awarded the TEDCO MII award for exploring the commercialization of her research. She has been awarded the prestigious IBM PhD Fellowship. She also has over 15 years of industrial experience, primarily as an IT project manager. She worked at the International Monetary Fund for nearly a decade. Her managerial experience includes portfolio/program/project management across various domains. She received the MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from UMBC and bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Mumbai, India.

The post talk: Semantic Approach to Automating Big Data and Cloud, 12pm Mon 2/20 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

The Women’s Center’s Spring Roundtable series has begun! On February 14th, we hosted the first of our three-part roundtable “Underrepresentation of Women in…” series. This roundtable was on “Women in Politics” and focused on the lack of women in the political sphere and the establishment.

For this discussion, our panelists were Political Science professor Lisa Vetter, Language Literacy and Culture student Colonel Ingrid Parker, and student staff member Kayla Smith.

The discussion opened with a question about gendered communication and how to express femininity in a workspace that’s male dominated. Kayla and Colonel Parker both agreed that being a “chameleon,” or being fluid in how they present themselves based on their audience, has worked for them in the past. 

The conversation then turned to Hillary Clinton’s presidential loss. The suggestion was made that the glass ceiling was now higher than it had previously been as a result of someone as qualified as Clinton losing to someone as seemingly unqualified as President Trump. People in politics may be more scared to back women running for office because women don’t seem to get the votes to take office. Therefore the goal of making a woman president is even more elusive. Furthermore, after learning that some women need to be asked more than five times to run for office, there was some concern that Clinton’s loss would discourage more women from entering the political sphere for fear of disappointment; however, Colonel Parker reminded everyone that the next step should be to stay hopeful and push forward no matter what happens. 

When Jess Myers asked about the silencing of Elizabeth Warren on the Senate floor during the confirmation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Kayla pointed out that the silencing of Elizabeth Warren was really the silencing of Coretta Scott King. Kayla went on to explain that, because her feminism is intrinsically connected to her race, it’s impossible for her to ignore the ramifications she faces in the establishment due to being a black woman. 

When the discussion was opened up to the audience, a student asked a question about coping with the effects of mental health when looking at barriers to women in politics. Colonel Parker spoke about the benefits of finding coping mechanisms like eating well, spending time with family, and working out. Kayla suggested finding supportive groups of women to help and uplift you in the face of adversity. Women’s Center Assistant Director Megan Tagle Adams added that it isn’t always enough for their to be more women in a space but that they should also be supportive of women excelling instead of engaging in “mean girl” tactics.

Another audience member asked Kayla what her opinion was on changing the establishment to include women and people of color to which she responded, “It’s important for people to be educated. They need to learn that our government and political system is built on white supremacy, racism, and sexism. Nothing will change until people understand where we started and that those things still play a major role in our system.”

Overall, the subject of women’s underrepresentation in politics is vast and complicated and while we barely scratched the surface in this hour long discussion, we did our best to open the dialogue and get people talking and thinking.

Want more information? Below are some links further discussing women, the establishment, and politics.

• Almost 1 in 5 Congress Members Are Women. Here’s How Other Jobs Compare
• For Women in Politics, the Glass Ceiling Is Now Higher Than Ever
• Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership (an older article but we liked the imagery of the labyrinth; speaks to women + leadership in general)

So has this discussion fired you up? Are you interested in running for office (public, school, or otherwise)? Have you heard about Elect Her? Elect Her is a leadership program that encourages and trains college women to run for student government and future political office

There is an an Elect Her workshop on March 11th from 10:30-3:30 in Fine Arts 011. You will learn how to figure out what your message and platform is, how to craft a communication strategy that works, and you’ll hear from campus and community leaders about what it takes to win. It is going to be a great day!

If you have questions or want to RSVP, contact Dr. Kate. (drabinsk@umbc.edu.)