The first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering was awarded to five people who made major contributions to the development of the internet and the WWW: Louis Pouzin, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreesen each played a significant part in the development of the technology.

The UK government initiated the QE Prize as a companion to the Nobel prizes to raise the profile of engineering and recognize outstanding advances that have changed the world and benefited humanity.

"Louis Pouzin, Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf made seminal contributions to the protocols (or standards) that together make up the fundamental architecture of the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee created the worldwide web (WWW) which vastly extended the use of the Internet beyond email and file transfer. Marc Andreessen wrote the Mosaic browser that was widely distributed and which made the WWW accessible to everyone. His work triggered a huge number of applications unimagined by the early network pioneers."

Doctoral students, postdocs and established researchers working in the intersection of technology and social systems might consider applying to the 2013 Digital Societies and Social Technologies Summer Institute, 7/28 to 8/1 at the University of Maryland College Park.

"MOOCs, Education and learning; personal health and well-being; open innovation, eScience, and citizen science; co-production, open source, and new forms of work; cultural heritage and information access; energy management and climate change; civic hacking, engagement and government; disaster response; cybersecurity and privacy – these are just a few problem domains where effective design and robust understanding of complex sociotechnical systems is critical. To meet these challenges a trans-disciplinary community of scholars has come together from fields as wide ranging as CSCW, HCI, social computing, organization studies, information visualization, social informatics, sociology, information systems, medical informatics, computer science, ICT for development, education, learning science, journalism, and political science."

Lodging, meals, and other onsite costs will be covered for all Summer Institute participants. Applications are due by April 5.

Doctoral students, postdocs and established researchers working in the intersection of technology and social systems might consider applying to the 2013 Digital Societies and Social Technologies Summer Institute, 7/28 to 8/1 at the University of Maryland College Park.

"MOOCs, Education and learning; personal health and well-being; open innovation, eScience, and citizen science; co-production, open source, and new forms of work; cultural heritage and information access; energy management and climate change; civic hacking, engagement and government; disaster response; cybersecurity and privacy – these are just a few problem domains where effective design and robust understanding of complex sociotechnical systems is critical. To meet these challenges a trans-disciplinary community of scholars has come together from fields as wide ranging as CSCW, HCI, social computing, organization studies, information visualization, social informatics, sociology, information systems, medical informatics, computer science, ICT for development, education, learning science, journalism, and political science."

Lodging, meals, and other onsite costs will be covered for all Summer Institute participants. Applications are due by April 5.

Doctoral students, postdocs and established researchers working in the intersection of technology and social systems might consider applying to the 2013 Digital Societies and Social Technologies Summer Institute, 7/28 to 8/1 at the University of Maryland College Park.

"MOOCs, Education and learning; personal health and well-being; open innovation, eScience, and citizen science; co-production, open source, and new forms of work; cultural heritage and information access; energy management and climate change; civic hacking, engagement and government; disaster response; cybersecurity and privacy – these are just a few problem domains where effective design and robust understanding of complex sociotechnical systems is critical. To meet these challenges a trans-disciplinary community of scholars has come together from fields as wide ranging as CSCW, HCI, social computing, organization studies, information visualization, social informatics, sociology, information systems, medical informatics, computer science, ICT for development, education, learning science, journalism, and political science."

Lodging, meals, and other onsite costs will be covered for all Summer Institute participants. Applications are due by April 5.

UMBC will host a free two-day workshop April 11-12 for faculty, researchers, and students from all disciplines who are interested in learning how to incorporate high performance computing, advanced data analysis, modeling and simulation and data visualization into their teaching and research.

The workshop will be given by representatives from XSEDE, an NSF-sponsored distributed resource for high performance computing and data storage that is available for UMBC faculty and students to use for their research. The workshop will be held in room 120 of the Meyerhoff Building on the UMBC campus, starting at Noon on Thursday April 11 and ending at 4:00pm on Friday, April 12.

Workshop participants get information on gaining access to XSEDE resources and hands on training one a topics including computational thinking, parallel computing, scientific visualization, research data management, using Unix and adding computational science to curricula. The XSEDE resources are a natural "next step" for applications that have outgrown the cluster computing facilities available at UMBC, such as HPCF and MC2.

While the workshop is free, you must pre-register online — start by creating an account via the SIGN IN link. Registration closes on March 25 and space is limited, so if you are interested, register as soon as possible.

For more information about the workshop and XSEDE, see the workshop flier or contact Andrew Raim (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ), Linda Akli (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) or Prof. Ian Thorpe (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ).

Teaching & Research with Mathematica 9 and Wolfram|Alpha Pro

2:30-3:45 Tuesday, 9 April 2013, 401 Math/Psyc Building, UMBC

This talk by staff from Wolfram will illustrate capabilities in Mathematica 9 that are directly applicable for use in teaching and research on campus. Topics include the folowing

• Free-form linguistic input & predictive interface features
• 2D and 3D visualization
• Dynamic interactivity & On-demand scientific data
• Example-driven course materials
• Symbolic interface construction
• Statistics & Data anaylsis
• Digital Image Processing, Parallelization, and Control Systems functionality

The new Wolfram|Alpha Pro website will be featured, demonstrating the following capabilities.

• built-in CDF interactivity
• automatic creation of interactive models
• ability to upload data (spreadsheets, data, text) for instant and
• thorough analysis
• step-by-step solution guide to many problems
• specialized keyboard for mathematical and scientific symbols
• export results to over 60 formats

Current Mathematica users will benefit from seeing improvements and new features of Mathematica 9 as well as Wolfram|Alpha Pro but prior knowledge of Mathematica is not required.

"Shafi Goldwasser of MIT and the Weizmann Institute of Science and Silvio Micali of MIT were names as the winners of the 2012 ACM A.M. Turing Award. Working together, they pioneered the field of provable security, which laid the mathematical foundations that made modern cryptography possible. By formalizing the concept that cryptographic security had to be computational rather than absolute, they created mathematical structures that turned cryptography from an art into a science.

Their work addresses important practical problems such as the protection of data from being viewed or modified, providing a secure means of communications and transactions over the Internet. Their advances led to the notion of interactive and probabilistic proofs and had a profound impact on computational complexity, an area that focuses on classifying computational problems according to their inherent difficulty.

The ACM Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing," carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc."

…more…

UMBC's Training Centers is offering a new Certificate in Cyber Operations that is designed to help move participants from a basic competence with computers and technology up to the level of a competent, entry-level professional as a Cyber Analyst or Operator.

Homer Minnick, the Training Centers' director for Cybersecurity training, will host a free webinar on the certificate program from 12:00-1:00pm on Wednesday March 27, 2013. It will include the following topics.

• What is the Cybersecurity Academy?
• Is the Certificate in Cyber Operations right for me?
• How does the Certificate in Cyber Operations contrast with other certifications from UMBC Training Centers?”
• What are the education and experience eligibility requirements?
• Which industry certifications are included in this program?
• What is the value this certification brings to my organization?
• How do you apply for the program?
• What is the next step? Where do I get more information?

  If you are interested in participating, please register online for the free webinar.

Privacy and Security in Online Social Media (PSOSM)

Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK")
Assistant Professor
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, India

10:30-12:00 Monday, March 11, 2013, ITE 325b, UMBC

With increase in usage of the Internet, there has been an exponential increase in the use of online social media on the Internet. Websites like Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Orkut, Twitter and Flickr have changed the way Internet is being used. There is a dire need to investigate, study and characterize privacy and security on online social media from various perspectives (computational, cultural, psychological). Real world scalable systems need to be built to detect and defend security and privacy issues on online social media. This talk will give you a preview of what we do at PreCog in the area of PSOSM. I will describe briefly some of the cool ongoing projects that we have: ChaMAILeon, PhishAri, Twit-Digest, U2P2, and OCEAN. Much of our research work is made available for public use through tools or online services. Our work derives techniques from Data Mining, Text Mining, Statistics, Network Science, Public Policy, Complex networks, Human Computer Interaction, and Psychology.

In this talk, I will focus on the following: (1) Twit-Digest is a tool to extract intelligence from Twitter which can be useful to security analysts. Pro-cursor to this work is published at PSOSM 2012, this work also obtained second best award at IBM ICARE 2012. (2) OCEAN: Open source Collation of eGovernment data and Networks. Here, we show how publicly available information on Government services can be used to profile citizens in India. This work obtained the Best Poster Award at Security and Privacy Symposium at IIT Kanpur, 2013. (3) Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness V 2.0 U2P2, this is one of the largest ever done privacy study in India. This has been in media recently; if you are interested search for #privacyindia12 on Twitter. This work obtained the third Best Poster Award at Security and Privacy Symposium at IIT Kanpur, 2013.

Ponnurangam Kumaraguru ("PK") Assistant Professor, is currently the Hemant Bharat Ram Faculty Research Fellow at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi, India. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His research interests include developing technological and inter-disciplinary solutions to detect and prevent computer crime, in particular, these days be has been dabbling with complex networked systems (e.g. social web systems like Twitter, Facebook, and telephone logs). He is also very passionate about issues related to human computer interaction. As Principal Investigator, PK is currently managing research projects value of about 2 Crores INR. PK is a Co-Principal Investigator in a project that is approved at the Europe Union FP7 which is about 5.3 million Euros. PK has received research funds Government of India, National Science Foundation, industry bodies in India, and International Development Research Centre. He is serving as a PC member in WWW 2013, AsiaCCS 2013 and he is also serving as a reviewer for International Journal of Information Security and ACM's Transactions on Internet Technology. PK’s Ph.D. thesis work on anti-phishing research at Carnegie Mellon University has contributed in creating a successful start-up company, Wombat Security Technologies. PK founded and manages PreCog, a research group at IIIT-Delhi. PK can be reached at Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Dynamically Reconfigurable Layered Filesystem (DLFS)

Dr. John Dorband

Research Associate Professor
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00pm Friday, 8 March 2013, ITE 227, UMBC

The standard filesystem paradigm is based on a hierarchy of directories and files. The Dynamically reconfigurable Layered Filesystem (DLFS) adds a new dimension to filesystem organization that of filesystem layers and the ability to make custom configuration of them. The DLFS filesystem consists of many layers where each layer is mounted transparently on the root, ‘/’, directory. It is dynamic in the sense that every user can have a customizable list of layers that are included in a personalized view of the filesystem. We present in here the concept of a dynamically reconfigurable layered filesystem. We also present how it can be used, such as how it facilitates security and system management.

Dr. John E. Dorband received his PhD in Computer Science from Penn State University in 1985. He worked for NASA GFSC from 1985 until 2007. He currently is a Research Associate Professor at UMBC. Dr. Dorband was one of the builders of the first Beowulf system, constructed at GSFC in the fall of 1994. In the 80’s, he pioneered work in the generalized use of extremely parallel SIMD fixed-routing grid architectures through the use of sorting to implement generalized routing methods. This facilitated such application areas as image processing, graphics rendering, symbolic processing, database operations, and other irregular applications on parallel architectures that lacked generalized routine hardware. Dr. Dorband has been an innovator in the area of parallel programming language paradigms as a means of simplifying the implementation of applications on parallel computers. His professional specialties include designing and prototyping high-performance computer architectures; designing and implementing languages for simplified implementation of applications on parallel computers; designing and implementing algorithms for parallel computers; applying highly parallel architectures to image processing, signal processing, and data processing; and applying highly parallel architectures to computational science.