Innovations in Cybersecurity Education Workshop

University of Maryland, Baltimore County
BWtech South Campus
9:30 – 4:30 Friday, 12 June 2015

Innovations in Cybersecurity Education is a free regional workshop on cybersecurity education from high school through post-graduate. It is intended primarily for educators who are teaching cybersecurity at high schools, colleges, and community colleges. Anyone is welcome to attend, including teachers, students, administrators, researchers, and government officials. It will highlight master teachers and ongoing educational projects, including an effort at the US Naval Academy to teach cybersecurity to all midshipmen. The workshop will include discussions about cyber competitions, hands-on exercises, educational games, and integrating cybersecurity throughout the curriculum. There will be an opportunity to experience hands-on cyber defense exercises and to play new computer security education games, including SecurityEmpire developed at UMBC.

The workshop is free and open to the public — all are welcome to attend. This workshop will to be of interest to educators, school administrators, undergraduate and graduate students, and government officials. Lunch will be provided. Parking is free.

Please see the links above for the schedule and location and register to help us plan for the number of participants.

The workshop is organized by Dr. Alan T. Sherman with support provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant 1241576.

Meet Isabel – the founder of the UMBC Reach Initiative.

This is a guest post written by UMBC rising junior, Isabel Geisler, who is leading the charge for a new initiative on campus called The Reach Initiative.

When I was 4 or 5 years old, I wanted to be an Astronaut. Mostly, because it was the closest career to being a Jedi, but I also loved space, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and theoretical physics.

I remember one night when I was young my sister and I were waiting for our mother to come home from work.  We were excited because on that night, Nova was doing a special on Quantum Physics. There was one part I remember specifically, where the host is pushing up against a wall and telling the audience how theoretically, if he pushed against the wall long enough for thousands and thousands of years there is a chance that he could just push his arm though the solid wall.

This is obviously a gross over-simplification…but for a 5 year old, this was the closest I could get to magic.

“Quantum Physics: The Fabric of the Cosmos” you can still look up the show today, I even found out that the entire episode is actually from a book by Brian Greene. Last winter, I saw it in a used bookstore, but didn’t buy it because I didn’t think I’d understand it. I don’t know when and why specifically I lost interest in pursuing physics, but I’m guessing it started when I got my first ‘B’ in math and I hate to psychoanalyze myself…but this is how it starts off and ends for many young women who were previously interested in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) fields.

When we look at the STEM fields and look at the proportion of women and men who are pursuing degrees you will find that the majority are men. When speaking of primary education, boys are 6 times more likely than girls to have taken engineering. When speaking of college, the gap gets wider. Despite the fact that roughly 58% of all college students are women, in a computer science class men will outnumber women at a ratio of 8:2. When speaking of professional careers, on average, men will hold about 76% of all STEM jobs. These percentages are reflected across the US –including UMBC- and this does not even begin to include the gaps between Women of Color and their representation in the fields.

The STEM pipeline is the term used to describe this phenomenon. At every gap in this pipeline, for example, elementary school to middle school, we see women dropping out of STEM. Many assert that this is simply because women are not interested in a career that is famous for being unsociable and sterile. This is the wrong assumption.  If we were to look at the experiences of many women in STEM, we would find an ongoing trend of implicit bias, discrimination, and a lack of institutional support. The gross underrepresentation of women in the STEM fields is not only unfair, but it is dangerous.  How can our society expect to be innovative when 50% of our intellectual power is missing from the STEM workforce? 

There have been many successful programs that aim to get women interested in STEM, but very few of them acknowledge the inherent bias in the STEM fields that many women struggle with. In the program that I am leading at UMBC, the UMBC Reach Initiative we do not simply want to encourage young women to enter into the STEM fields, we want to retain them. We want to create a network in a world where sometimes that network is non-existent.

For more on the UMBC Reach Initiative, visit their Facebook page!

The Reach Initiative is a yearlong program mentorship and research program for high school women who are interested in entering the STEM fields based on the research by the American Association for University Women, Girls Scouts, and several independent organizations funded by the National Science Foundation.  In our first semester, we will provide our scholars a chance to explore the STEM fields, but we have also infused gender empowerment into the curriculum, with varying topics from combatting micro-aggressions to consent. During the second semester, the young women in our program will work with her UMBC mentor to create a research project that they can enter into science fairs and that they will present to their peers, families, and UMBC faculty at an end-of-the-year banquet.

We are currently looking for mentors for the young women who have decided to be a part of the program. If you are a passionate women attending UMBC who is pursuing a degree in the STEM fields or Environmental Science you can find the application here and a link to our FaceBook page here if you would like to learn more.

If you find yourself unable to apply as a mentor because you are not pursuing a STEM degree, do not have the time to commit, or are a female student please contact me at my e-mail (geisler3 at umbc dot edu) to learn more about how you can contribute or act as a leader as we pursue this project.

Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal

Real-time Spectral Rendering of Atmospheric Optical Phenomena

Ari Blenkhorn

2:00pm Wednesday, 10 June 2015, ITE 352

Glories, rainbows, and coronas are colorful atmospheric effects which occur when sunlight interacts with cloud droplets. Adding these effects to digital cloud environments will provide increased realism and a greater sense of immersion. Furthermore, these phenomena are the subject of active scientific research.  In both communities, high-resolution real-time rendering is desirable.

The color distribution of these phenomena is typically calculated using the Mie scattering theory, Debye series, or Airy theory. The calculations give the intensity of a single wavelength of light at a single scattering angle. They must be repeated for all desired wavelengths at all desired pixels of the final image.

I propose accelerating the calculations by using general-purpose GPU computing to transform a single-threaded, CPU-based Mie scattering application into a collection of highly-parallel GPU calculations.  I also propose to reduce the number of wavelengths required by using importance sampling, a monte-carlo selection method which concentrates the computing resources on the wavelengths belonging to the most important regions of the visible spectrum.

Planned work includes development of both numerical and perceptually-based image quality metrics, of interest to optical physicists and interactive application developers, respectively. These metrics will guide development of the GPU kernel parallel structure and the selection of a suitable estimator for importance sampling.

Committee: Drs. Marc Olano, Penny Rheingans, Curtis Menyuk, Matthias Gobbert (Mathematics), Raymond Lee (USNA)

The UMBC Cybersecurity Graduate Program will hold a virtual information session at 6:00pm on June 16. Participate to learn about the  program options and find out how a master’s degree or graduate certificate can help you advance in the cybersecurity industry. During the online information session, graduate program director Richard Forno will discuss courses, credit requirements and prerequisites, and admissions processes.

The session will cover cybersecurity programs at both UMBC's Main Campus and UMBC-Shady Grove in Rockville, MD. It will provide an overview of our innovative curriculum, practice-oriented instruction and flexible class schedules, which are designed for working professionals.  You will also learn about admissions, curriculum, class format and the cybersecurity career outlook.

If you would like to participate in the information session, please RSVP online.

HAPP 398 – Health, Environment and Armed Conflict

This class explores the interrelationship between health, the natural environment and armed conflict. Using specific case studies, this course will explore the connections between environment, health, security, conflict, poverty and peacemaking.

UMBC CSEE Ph.D. student Kavita Krishnaswamy was featured in an NSF article Balancing life, health and research.

Balancing life, health and research, graduate student perseveres to increase access for persons with severe disabilities.

Kavita Krishnaswamy's doctoral dissertation defense at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), was fairly typical. Dissertation committee, doctoral candidate, explanatory slides, questions from the committee.

When it was over and time to deliberate, Tim Oates, Kavita's advisor, asked her to leave the room. Because Kavita delivered her presentation via a Beam Smart Presence System (BeamPro), she powered down the computer screen beaming her into the meeting.

This was business as usual for the computer science student whose research involves developing robotic prototypes to transfer, reposition and perform personal hygiene tasks for those with severe disabilities. She is also studying how to improve control over robotic interfaces for these individuals. Her tool kit includes elements of machine learning, artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces and other communication technologies.

You can read the rest on the NSF Discovery site.

We are proud to announce that the annual Critical Social Justice week will be moving to fall semester. We’ll see you Monday October 19th through Friday October 23rd, 2015! Save the date!

CSEE Ph.D. student Alexander Nelson and faculty Ryan Robucci and Nilanjan Banerjee participated in the monthly TechBreakfast MeetUp where they demonstrated the research on developing 'invisible' sensing systems that can be embedded into fabrics.

Their Inviz system, developed in the UMBC Eclipse cluster of laboratories,  uses textile-based capacitive sensor arrays and micro-doppler radars embedded into bed sheets, pillows, wheelchair pads, and clothing, for environmental control and physical therapy for such paralysis patients. The sensors detect gestures regardless of evolving environmental and patient conditions and provides explicit real-time feedback to the user. Using low-cost and ultra-low power capacitive sensing and micro-radars built into headgear, the Inviz system can reduce hospital visits and therapy costs.

You can read more about the work in a paper that was awarded the best demonstration runner-up prize at the 2015 conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom).

Gurashish Singh, Alexander Nelson, Ryan Robucci, Chintan Patel and Nilanjan Banerjee, Inviz: Low-power Personalized Gesture Recognition Using Wearable Textile Capacitive Sensor Arrays, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, IEEE, March 2015.

The Baltimore TechBreakfast is a free monthly demo-style event where entrepreneurs, techies, developers, designers, business people, and interested people see showcases on cool new technology and interact with each other. "Show and Tell for Adults" is how it's sometimes described. Each TechBreakfast begins at 8:00am and goes until 10:00am, although people usually hang around later.