Earlier this week, UMBC CyberDawg Christopher Gardner took first place out of approximately fifty competitors at Booz Allen Hamilton's Kaizen Capture The Flag event held at the Jailbreak Brewing Company in Laurel, MD.

The event focused around navigating through a series of progressively harder cybersecurity obstacles. The challenge's theme centered around a narrative that competitiors were assisting the FBI in finding and then defusing a bomb. Competitors needed to complete a series of increasingly harder challenges to locate clues and other information, such as examining an Android .apk to find a wireless access point password, finding the login page for an website's administration panel, and gaining access to a web server's log directory.

Congratulations again to Christopher and to all of the CyberDawgs who competed!

Interested in joining the CyberDawgs? Contact Julio Valcarcel (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) for more information — they’re always looking for new members heading into the 2015-2016 season!

In today's Baltimore Sun, CSEE's Rick Forno offers some early thoughts on yesterday's announced data breach at CareFirst, which affects 1.1 million insurance customers.

According to company officials, attackers gained access to names, birth dates, email addresses and insurance identification numbers. However, the database did not include Social Security or credit card numbers, passwords or medical information.

The information also could be sold on what is known as the dark web, parts of the Internet that cannot be found by search engines, and combined with other data, said Richard Forno, director of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County's graduate cybersecurity program.

"The information they got may or may not be useful directly, but it could help a bad guy get more clues about a person's identity," he said. "That could be useful to an adversary."

In many cases, data breaches can be larger than originally apparent, Forno added.

"As time goes on and the investigation continues, you never know if you'll find other leads that may change your initial assumptions," he said.

The UMBC Game Developers Club will hold its annual Summer Game Jam Friday, June 5 to Sunday June 7 in the GAIM lab in Engineering 005. The game jam theme is Art and Code out of a Hat.

There will be one "hat" from which a team will pull three random art assets, and another "hat" from which they will pull three random code samples. Then, the team must use as many of those six items as possible in their game!! Here's the catch: At some point, you'll have to decide on a game idea and form a team around it.

If you pull from the hats before you make the idea, you have to use four of the six items. If you pull from the hats after you form the idea and team, you only have to use two of the items. The team that receives an item is free to do whatever they want with the art and code they receive.

Fall 2015 - Education Department Intern (9274875)

Maryland Historical Society

Deadline: 07/31/2015

The Education Department at the Maryland Historical Society is offering a part-time internship position. This intern will be expected to deliver onsite interactive tours and workshops for both K-12 student and adult groups.

Summer 2015 - Program Assistant (9274619)

The Center for Leadership Innovation

Deadline: 06/05/2015

The Center for Leadership Innovation (TCLI) seeks 4-6 Program Assistants to assist in conducting Internet searches, data entry and other administrative tasks for a national awards competition.  The period of performance is up to eight weeks during the months of July and August 2015.  This is a paid internship; the range of the hourly rate is $9.00 - $10.00.

Legal Internship (9274592)

Murthy Law Firm

Deadline 07/31/2015

Immigration Law Firm in Owings Mills, MD seeks a detail-oriented, self-motivated individual for a salaried part-time legal intern position. The intern assists attorneys and paralegals in preparation and filing of immigration cases.

Program Intern (9274554)

American International Health Alliance

Deadline: 05/22/2015

The American International Health Alliance (AIHA) is a nonprofit organization working to advance global health by helping communities and nations with limited resources build sustainable institutional and human resource capacity.

Summer Research Intern (9274557)

Maryland Center on Economic Policy

Deadline: 06/19/2015

The Maryland Center on Economic Policy (MDCEP) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that advances innovative policy ideas that foster broad prosperity. We believe that every Marylander should be able to achieve their full potential and more!

Fall 2015 - NASA Journalism and Multimedia Internship (9274500)

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Deadline: 06/01/2015

NASA invites students working towards degrees in journalism, communications, media relations, science writing, interactive journalism, or broadcast journalism, to participate in our science storytelling program - before you graduate. You'll gain on the job experience as you work with a leading team of writers and multimedia producers to create and share content from some of NASA's most exciting missions.

Human Resources Internship (9274730)

Aerotek

Deadline 05/30/2015

Aerotek currently has an internship opportunity within the Internal Recruiting / Human Resources Department. This would be a full-time, paid internship based at the corporate office in Hanover, MD.

Summer 2015 - Video Production Intern (9274677)

Merkle Inc.

Deadline: 05/22/2015

Merkle's People Department (or what you might call HR) is looking for a highly energized, enthusiastic, Baltimore student who is looking to put their videography skills to practice. The Video Production Intern will work closely with People Department leaders and executives to assist in the organization, development, and execution of Merkle’s People Department video projects.

Lead Instructor for Musical/Classical Theatre Summer Intensive (9274193, 9274192)

Spotlight Theatre

Deadline: 07/10/2015

Musical Theatre Lead Instructor will be responsible for teaching Voice/Vocal Technique & Methods and for Upper School Musical Theatre, students as well as directing performance piece (redacted Musical or showcase) for final performance. MT Lead will also teach music reading or other music related workshops. Will be responsible for coordinating with Teaching Artists (Combat, Movement, Dance, Make-up, etc.) on issues and needs of performance piece. Will be assisted by one Teaching Assistant (College intern).

Compensation will be discussed in Interview.

Classical Theatre Lead Instructor will be responsible for teaching Acting Methods and Theatre Styles/History (for Upper School Classical and Musical Theatre students) as well as directing performance piece (redacted Shakespeare) for final performance. Will be responsible for working on language and dialogue with students and coordinating with Teaching Artists (Combat, Movement, Make-up, etc.) on issues and needs of performance piece. Will be assisted by one Teaching Assistant (College intern).

Compensation will be discussed in Interview.

Transforming big data into smart data:
deriving value via harnessing volume, variety
and velocity using semantics and semantic web

Professor Amit Sheth
Wright State University

11:00am Tuesday, 26 May 2015, ITE 325, UMBC

Big Data has captured a lot of interest in industry, with the emphasis on the challenges of the four Vs of Big Data: Volume, Variety, Velocity, and Veracity, and their applications to drive value for businesses. In this talk, I will describe Smart Data that is realized by extracting value from Big Data, to benefit not just large companies but each individual. If my child is an asthma patient, for all the data relevant to my child with the four V-challenges, what I care about is simply, "How is her current health, and what are the risk of having an asthma attack in her current situation (now and today), especially if that risk has changed?" As I will show, Smart Data that gives such personalized and actionable information will need to utilize multimodal data and their metadata, use domain specific knowledge, employ semantics and intelligent processing, and go beyond traditional reliance on Machine Learning and NLP. I will motivate the need for a synergistic combination of techniques similar to the close interworking of the top brain and the bottom brain in the cognitive models. I will present a couple of Smart Data applications in development at Kno.e.sis from the domains of personalized health, health informatics, social data for social good, energy, disaster response, and smart city.

Amit Sheth is an Educator, Researcher and Entrepreneur. He is the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, an IEEE Fellow, and the executive director of Kno.e.sis – the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing a Wright State University. In World Wide Web (WWW), it is placed among the top ten universities in the world based on 10-year impact. Prof. Sheth is a well cited computer scientists (h-index = 87, >30,000 citations), and appears among top 1-3 authors in World Wide Web (Microsoft Academic Search). He has founded two companies, and several commercial products and deployed systems have resulted from his research. His students are exceptionally successful; ten out of 18 past PhD students have 1,000+ citations each.

Host: Yelena Yesha, yeyesha2umbc.edu