The nation's demand for skilled cybersecurity professionals continues to rise. The UMBC Cybersecurity Graduate Program will hold an information session from 6:00pm to 7:30pm on Thursday 21 March in room 102 of the Information Technology and Engineering Building (ITE). Participants will learn how our masters and certificate programs can help you get started or advance in this thriving industry, meet the Graduate Program Director and learn more about our program’s curriculum and flexible class schedules. We are now accepting applications for Fall 2013 with a deadline of 1 August, 2013. RSVP for the Cybersecurity information session online to reserve a seat.

UMBC is certified as a Center for Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education (CAE) as well as a Center of Academic Excellence in Research (CAE-R) sponsored by the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security (DHS). View or download our fact sheet for a summary of the cybersecurity programs.

Reinventing the Classroom:
creating a new course and a space to teach it

Professor Harry Lewis

Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science
Harvard University

12:00-2:00 ITE 456, UMBC

slides (ppt); talk (video); discussion (video)

TALK AND LUNCH: 12:00-1:00. Lunch courtesy of Dr. Warren DeVries, Dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology. RSVP on my.umbc.edu by Monday, February 25 to reserve a spot. Email requests from outside UMBC to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

DISCUSSION: 1:00-2:00. The community is invited to stay after the talk for an open discussion and conversation with Professor Lewis and your UMBC colleagues about designing new classroom spaces for active learning and the flipped classroom approach.

For decades my lectures kept getting better, my enrollments kept going up, and the number of warm bodies in the lecture hall kept going down. So I decided to try something entirely different, a "flipped classroom." Students watched lectures over the Internet at night in their rooms, and spent class time solving problems under supervision in small groups. The subject matter was discrete mathematics, which is well suited to this pedagogical style, but the class was so successful that it is being adapted for use in other Harvard courses. I will report on some of the conceptual and practical problems I encountered, including the creation of a new teaching space, which had to be cheap to construct and adaptable in use since the experiment might have failed.

Harry Lewis is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, where he has taught since 1974. He is uncertain whether he should be proud of his role in launching the careers of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom dropped out of Harvard shortly after taking his course. From 1995-2003 Lewis served as Dean of Harvard College. In this capacity he oversaw the undergraduate experience, including residential life, career services, public service, academic and personal advising, athletic policy, and intercultural and race relations. He is a long time member of the College’s Admissions Committee.

For more information, see his article Reinventing the Classroom in the Fall 2013 issue of Harvard Magazine.

CSEE professor Anupam Joshi–director of the new UMBC Center for Cybersecurity–has been invited to give a keynote talk at the Security & Privacy Symposium. The symposium will take place at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur India from February 28 to March 1. His talk is entitled “A Semantically Rich approach to Cybersecurity”.

The objective of the symposium is to bring together students, faculty, and researchers from across India to discuss the growing field of security and privacy. Dr. Joshi joins a dozen fellow scholars who will discuss topics including emerging security and privacy challenges and privacy and security in online social media.

Dr. Joshi is an Oros Family Professor of Technology. He has been a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (CSEE) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) for more than a decade, teaching courses in Mobile Computing, Security, Social Media, and Operating Systems at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

His own research interests deal with Intelligent Networked Systems, with a focus on Mobile Computing. He has recently received a grant from NSF’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, a three year project to investigate how to better manage security and privacy constraints while querying semantically annotated linked data sources. The project, Policy Compliant Integration of Linked Data, is a collaboration with researchers at M.I.T. and the University of Texas at Dallas.

UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal

Paper form digitization for information systems strengthening and socio-economic development in developing countries

Huguens Jean

3:00pm Tuesday, 5 March 2013, ITE346, UMBC

In developing countries, people are now more likely to have access to a mobile phone than clean water, making cellular based technology the only viable medium for collecting, aggregating, and communicating local data so that it can be turned into useful information. While mobile phones have found broad application in reporting health, financial, and environmental data, many data collection methods still suffer from delays, inefficiency and difficulties maintaining quality. In environments with insufficient IT support and infrastructure, and among populations with limited education and experience with technology, paper forms rather than electronic methods remain the predominant means for data collection. To meet the digitization needs of paper driven data collection practices, this thesis proposes the development and study of a software platform that automatically converts unknown paper forms into digital structured data and uses human intelligence when necessary to improve its performance.

We begin by identifying a high-level system architecture for dealing with infrastructure constraints and human resources limitations. We then break the architecture into its integral pieces and organize them into three distinct functional and interacting stages: data collection, data conversion, and crowdsourcing. In the collection phase, we focus on visually detecting structurally identical form instances and transmitting the images of their raw input data to a remote server. During this phase, we present a novel framework for identifying specific form types by generating a multipart template for unknown forms and decomposing the form identification problem into three distinct tasks: similar image retrieval, learning, and duplicate matching. The conversion phase uses a mixture of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and human annotations techniques to convert images into digital information and group structurally identical forms in their respective database table. In crowdsourcing, we investigates how to use low-end smartphones for collecting training information to improve OCR related tasks and verify the accuracy of converted input values. We pay special emphasis on identifying natural interaction forms that lower the technical and knowledge threshold for local residents. Furthermore, because crowdsourcing can also provide money to the mobile workers of its micro-tasking platform, we concurrently explore how systems that facilitate collaboration between humans and machines for improving the quality of intelligent information systems can be used a vehicle for delivering socioeconomic opportunities to developing countries.

Committee: Dr. Timothy Oates (Chair), Dr. Janet Rutledge, Dr. Fow-Sen Choa, Dr. Jesus Caban

The World Bank’s Development Prospects Group (DECPG) is looking for a top-tier undergraduate student with a passion for software development to work on a part-time basis during the school year. The selected individual will play a significant role in designing, developing, testing, and launching various innovative software tools for World Bank economists. These projects are critical to DECPG’s operations and have the potential to be highly visible within The World Bank.

The selected candidate will be expected to work part-time during the school year, with the potential to continue on a full-time basis as a short-term consultant over the summer.  The location is 1818 H Street N.W., Washington, D.C.

Background

DECPG provides information, analysis and advice on the impact of trends in the world economy on developing countries, develops and documents the Bank's views on the state of the world economy, and produces some of the Bank's leading publications, including the Global Economic Prospects, the Global Development Horizons, and the Global Monitoring Report.

Selection Criteria

• Pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in computer science, information systems, or computer engineering
• Demonstrated self-starter (Have you started your own business? Do you contribute to open source projects in your spare time?)
• Have a working knowledge of the .NET framework (preferably VB.NET). However, we are more interested in strong programming fundamentals than in knowledge of any particular programming language
• Basic understanding of database design and operation; familiarity with SQL (ideally either MySQL or MSSQL)
• Strong understanding of programming design patterns and data structures
• The ideal candidate will have some exposure to the fundamentals of macroeconomics, statistics, or econometrics. However, this is not required.
• Good interpersonal skills and ability to work in a team environment
• Must be self-motivated and inspired to learn
• Ability to deal sensitively in multi-cultural environments and build effective working relations with colleagues
• Effective verbal and written communication skills

Due to the high volume of resumes that we normally receive, we will only be able to contact short listed candidates. Please send all resumes to David Horowitz (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) with the subject "Application for STC 2013"

Code.org is a non-profit foundation dedicated to growing computer programming education. They believe computer science and computer programming are liberal arts that are important for everyone to know and that should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra. Their goal is that every student in every school has the opportunity to learn how to code.

They have released a video that features celebrities from the worlds of technology and entertainment to encourage students to learn computing skills. An article on Mashable describes the video’s content.

Entrepreneurs like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Square founder Jack Dorsey and Microsoft founder Bill Gates open up about how they got started coding. Zuckerberg says he started coding when he was in sixth grade because he wanted to make “something that was fun for myself and my sisters.” Bill Gates started coding in his teens and wrote a program to play tic-tac-toe.

As the video shows, it’s not just techies who code. Chris Bosh from the Miami Heat says he took programming classes in college and singer Will.I.Am says he’s taking coding classes right now.

“When I was in school, I was in this after school group called the Whiz Kids,” Bosh says in the video. “When people found out, they laughed at me, you know all these things. I’m like, ‘I don’t care, I think it’s cool, I’m learning a lot and some of my friends have jobs.’”

Will.I.Am adds: “Here we are, 2013. We all depend on technology to communicate, to bank, information, and none of us know how to read and write code.”

Reps from Facebook, Dropbox, Valve and other companies tout the perks of working in their offices and what they look for when hiring. “Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find,” Zuckerberg says. “The whole limit in the system is there just aren’t enough people who are trained in these skills today.”

The code.org site links to many resources, including short videos in different lengths (1, and 9 minutes) that can be shown in classes to encourage children to learn how to program.

Help shape the future of warfare through cyber operations. It’s what we do in the Asymmetric Operations Department at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL)—a national leader in scientific research and development, located midway between Baltimore and Washington, DC.

The Asymmetric Operations Department supports the U.S. government by applying research capabilities to high-priority problems in cybersecurity, special operations, and homeland protection. Our department has many full-time opportunities available and will be holding a career fair on Wednesday, March 6, 2013, 3:30–8pm

We're seeking individuals with skills and interest in the following areas: Big Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, Communication Systems Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Security, Digital Forensics, Embedded Software Engineering, Identification, Tagging, Tracking, and Location Systems, Information Assurance, Mobile OS and Application Development, Modeling and Simulation, Network Architecture, Network Vulnerabilities and Exploits, Real-Time Software Engineering, Reverse Engineering, Secure Platform Architecture, Sensor Technologies, Situational Awareness and Analysis (Cyber, Global, Bio), Software and System Architecture (Component, Platform, Enterprise), Systems Engineering, Systems Testing and Evaluation, Web Software Development, Wireless Network Engineering and Wireless Security.

Meet our hiring managers at our career fair and find out how your technical experience can help develop the next advances in cyber systems or technologies for special applications.

All positions require a minimum of a bachelor’s degree and the ability to obtain a security clearance. U.S. citizenship is required to obtain a clearance. Preregistration is strongly encouraged. This allows hiring managers to review your resume in advance of the career fair and may result in a preliminary interview on the day of the fair.

The Department of Homeland Security recently established the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Careers and Studies (NICCS) website. It includes information for government, industry, academia, and the general public to learn about cybersecurity awareness, education, careers, and workforce development opportunities. This is an especially useful site for students interested in focusing on cybersecurity as well as anyone who wants to explore possible career and training options involving cybersecurity. The vision of NICCS is to build a national resource to elevate cybersecurity awareness and affect a change in the American public to adopt a culture of cyberspace security and to build a competent cybersecurity workforce.

The week the PBS-distributed Nightly Business Report aired a story on international cyber espionage that featured UMBC's Richard Forno, Associate director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity. The piece, Washington Trade-Secret Theft Enforcement Weighs on Shareholders, discussed how cyber attacks are being used by foreign companies with the help of their governments to steal trade secrets from US businesses.

Dr. Forno was also interviewed on Tuesday on the PRI's The World radio news show about the Mandiant report that traces a wave of cyber attacks on American targets to a Chinese military unit in Shanghai. Forno's interview segment starts at minute 7:30, after the introduction.

The UMBC ACM student chapter is pleased to announce that Metron Aviation will be presenting, next Wednesday (2/27, 12.00 pm in ITE 241), as part our Tech Talk Series. Headquartered in Dulles, VA, Metron Aviation (the ATM subsidiary of Airbus) has pioneered the advancement of Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM), working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to develop the industry’s first Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) platform for optimizing system-wide traffic flow. Metron Aviation fuses advanced science and mathematics with unparalleled air traffic management expertise to provide ground-breaking optimization and collaborative decision making solutions for the world’s leading Air Navigation Service Providers, Airports, Airlines, Logistics and other Service Providers to the Air Transport Industry.

Engineers and Recruiters from Metron Aviation will talk about some of the new and interesting projects they are working on, in the domain of aviation and the airline industry. Further they will also touch upon technical skills as well as soft skills students need to acquire (and be prepared) with to do well in interviews. Topics covered will include, but are not limited to, programming languages students should focus on, resume tips, what to say (and what to not!) in an interview.

More about the speaker : David Rojas, an Systems Engineer / Systems Analyst with Metron Aviation will be presenting at the tech talk. David will give an overview of Metron Aviation and specifics on their key product 'Harmony'. Metron Harmony is an advanced, Integrated Air Traffic Flow Management (I -ATFM) solution with capabilities that provide strategic, pre-tactical and tactical efficiency, post operations metrics and performance analysis of air traffic operations for Air Navigation Service Provider s (ANSP) , aircraft operator s and airport authorities. He will touch upon topics like ATM Modeling and Simulation, Air Traffic Flow Management and Departure Flow Management analysis and system development. David holds an BS in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University. David has over 9 years of experience in Air Traffic Management (ATM) related research, analysis, and product support.

Metron Aviation is especially interested to talk with students in the fields of Computer Science, Aeronautical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Operations Research, Physics. Bring your resumes! Light refreshments will be served. Please RSVP on our events page on Facebook.