CSEE faculty Alan Sherman and Dhananjay Phatak and Education Professor Linda Oliva received a research grant from the Department of Defense to create educational assessment tools to improve the teaching of cybersecurity. The one-year funded project is a collaboration with Geoffrey Herman at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The research is being carried out at the UMBC Cyber Defense Laboratory.

The project will create infrastructure for a rigorous evidence-based improvement of cybersecurity education by developing Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATs) targeted at measuring the quality of instruction. The first CAT will be a Cybersecurity Concept Inventory that measures how well students understand basic concepts in cybersecurity after a first course in the field. The second CAT will be a Cybersecurity Curriculum Assessment that measures how well curricula prepared students graduating from college on fundamentals needed for careers in cybersecurity. Each CAT will be a multiple-choice test with approximately thirty questions.

Inspired by the highly influential Force Concept Inventory from physics, the investigators are following a three-step process. In fall 2014, with MS student Geet Parekh, they carried out two Delphi processes to identify an initial set of important and difficult concepts in cybersecurity. The second step will involve interviews with students to uncover their misconceptions about these concepts. In the final step, the team will draft and psychometrically evaluate questions whose incorrect answers are driven by the uncovered misconceptions. Information on the work and its results will be available on the Cybersecurity Assessment Tools web site.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University Of Maryland, Baltimore County

M.S. Thesis Defense

Assessing Confidence in Relation Extraction Systems

Lianjie Sun

2:00ppm Thursday, 27 July 2015, ITE 325b, UMBC

In information extraction, a central and challenging task is extraction of relations. Systems that extract relations from text tend to be very productive, so it is important to quantify confidence or certainty in what is extracted. In this thesis we introduce a framework to assess confidence in relation extraction systems. We trained our system using a logistic regression model based on manually tagged sentences from the New York Times Annotated Corpora. Empirical results based on ROC curves show that our system performs better at computing confidence than previous systems such as Reverb. We conclude with a detailed analysis of the features used in our system and explain how these features might be tailored for use in other relation extraction systems.

Committee: Drs. Tim Oates (chair), Charles Nicholas and Matt Schmill

CSEE professor Jian Chen recently received an award from Department of Defense to to develop new techniques to visualize health informatics data. The award will support two UMBC research students for two years and be done in collaboration with Jesus Caban, Gerard Reidy and Joseph Bleiberg from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center's National Intrepid Center of Excellence.

The research will the support temporal exploration and analysis of traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder from patient cohorts. The group will design interactive visualization to move beyond using a small subset of data from the wealth and breadth of clinical information to improve diagnostic accuracy.

The project will help clinicians obtain new insights about the underlying conditions of patients, analyze complex hidden clinical patterns, and visually explore the correlations between many assessment techniques and imaging modalities including neuroimaging, neuropsychiatric measures, patient history, demographic information, and clinical tests).

Last week, Rick Forno, CSEE's Cybersecurity Graduate Program Director and Assistant Director of UMBC's Center for Cybersecurity, joined Australian security journalist Pat Gray for a lengthy discussion on the Risky Business podcast about the OPM data breach, local reactions, and possible US cybersecurity responses to this significant and far-reaching security incident.

Liz Saloka (UMBC 2017, CompE) is “interning at Innovate Our World, in creating video games." She is a semi-finalist in a Wet Seal model contest. She hopes to impact and inspire young girls in the STEM fields by showing them "smart IS sexy.”

If you haven't submitted a photo for the SWEet Summer Photo, it's not too late we still have a little over a month of Summer left. Simply, take a picture showing us what YOU are doing in the Summer, as a STEM major. Please look at our previous post for the questions. It's SWEet and short, it'll take you only a few minutes!

->Please email all submissions to umbcswe@gmail.com

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook @umbc_swe

Savannah Steinly (UMBC '18 Chemical Engineering, Environmental Track) This summer, she is "participating in the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program in Seattle, WA! For eight weeks, I will explore the city and surrounding areas while learning about conservation, diversity, identity, and about how to become an environmental change-agent. I am so grateful to be able to pursue my passions for both travel and environmental conservation! I am also taking an online Poetry and Fiction course, which will count for my minor in English on the Creative Writing track. I aspire to someday publish my work (and in the ear future, in UMBC’s Bartleby Creative Journal)." She hopes "to combine my interests in technology, sustainability, and creativity by becoming an environmental engineer. I want to devise creative solutions to environmental issues, especially those connected to renewable energy. This program will be a great stepping-stone to do so in terms of gaining knowledge that will alter my perspectives, a network of people with similar passions, and personal and professional mentorship. Moreover, the class will provide me with a structured outlet to develop my creativity and writing skills."

If you haven't submitted a photo for the SWEet Summer Photo, it's not too late we still have a little over a month of Summer left. Simply, take a picture showing us what YOU are doing in the Summer, as a STEM major. Please look at our previous post for the questions. It's SWEet and short, it'll take you only a few minutes!

->Please email all submissions to umbcswe@gmail.com

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook @umbc_swe

 Tulsi Shukla (UMBC '17, ChemE, Bio Track) is celebrating fourth of July with her family and friends. Other than that, Tulsi "goes straight into building a rope system for aerial practice after her interview with a chemical R&D company and before tutoring a neighbor in math." One tip she gives is "to never give up! Just as the saying goes, 'if you didn't succeed the first time, try try again until you do'".

If you haven't submitted a photo for the SWEet Summer Photo, it's not too late we still have a little over a month of Summer left. Simply, take a picture showing us what YOU are doing in the Summer, as a STEM major. Please look at our previous post for the questions. It's SWEet and short, it'll take you only a few minutes!

->Please email all submissions to umbcswe@gmail.com

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook @umbc_swe

Gloria Opoku-Boateng (UMBC, PhD Student, IS) is “interning with Google as UX researcher on one of the software engineering for photos. She hopes that her experience will help her better understand that technology affects billions of lives. She dreams to be a UX researcher working on Healthcare technologies.”

If you haven't submitted a photo for the SWEet Summer Photo, it's not too late we still have a little over a month of Summer left. Simply, take a picture showing us what YOU are doing in the Summer, as a STEM major. Please look at our previous post for the questions. It's SWEet and short, it'll take you only a few minutes!

->Please email all inquiries to umbcswe@gmail.com

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook @umbc_swe