An Advocate for Students

On Friday, July 11, UMBC junior Joshua Michael was sworn in as the University System of Maryland’s (USM) student regent.

Michael, who is studying political science and secondary education, says he has a passion for public education and has already served as a student representative or intern at a variety of institutions. He was the UMBC representative to the USM Student Council, a student commissioner on the Maryland Higher Education Commission and a student member of the Maryland State Board of Education. Michael also spent two summers as an intern in the Maryland State Department of Education’s Office of Academic Policy.  

“We are extremely proud of Josh,” said President Freeman Hrabowski. “It is a tremendous honor to be named student regent, and Josh has demonstrated exceptional leadership skills and dedication to academic issues. He will be a strong advocate for all USM students.”

As a member of the Board of Regents, Michael will be directly involved with a number of issues, including accessibility and affordability in the USM. He is excited about working with student leaders at campuses throughout the System. “It is important to ensure that all students have a voice and access to resources,” he said. “We need to present a unified student voice on System and statewide issues.”

Michael added that he was pleased with the student response to the letter writing campaign to legislators during last year’s Special Session. “Students realized they can make an impact. It will be important to continue to express the needs of students to our representatives.”

After graduation, Michael says he would like to teach social studies and mathematics at a Baltimore City middle school. A member of UMBC’s Honors College and Pi Kappa Phi fraternity, this summer he is working as an intern at UMBC’s Shriver Center and coaching lacrosse for an intramural team of 9th and 10th graders.

Michael was nominated to the Board of Regents by Governor Martin O’Malley and confirmed in March by the Maryland Senate. He will serve a one-year term. As USM’s governing body, the Board of Regents is responsible for the system’s academic, administrative, and financial operations. In addition, the board formulates policy and appoints the USM chancellor and the presidents of the system’s 13 institutions.

Michael can be reached at joshmichael@umbc.edu.

Learn more about how UMBC undergraduates get involved on campus and off at www.umbc.edu/undergraduate.

(7/11/08)

© 2007-08 University of Maryland, Baltimore County � 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250 � 410-455-1000 �

The Workshop

UMBC faculty started the summer with a five-day workshop in using digital storytelling in their classes. Ten participants in the "Train the Trainers" experience received intensive training in the creative and technical aspects of teaching digital storytelling in a variety of contexts. Ten additional participants had an opportunity to create stories during a two-day mini workshop aided by their own "personal trainer." The Center for Digital Storytelling returned for the third year to conduct the workshop. Here are the stories produced during the week.

This short video tells the story of the workshop itself.

The project is organized by the New Media Studio with additional funding from OIT.

The Stories

Protecting Privacy, Preventing Terror

What do your credit history, medical records and Flickr photo streams have in common with the 9-11 Commission?

A new, six-campus research effort, led by UMBC and funded by a five-year, $7.5 million Department of Defense grant sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, hopes to turn the 9-11 Commission’s recommendations for better sharing of classified intelligence data into a workable, secure technology network.

What makes the project unusual is that the researchers hope their work will both help prevent future terror attacks and boost information security and privacy for average citizens.

Many pieces of the 9-11 plot puzzle weren’t recognized until after the attacks due to inability or reluctance by intelligence agencies to share information. The 9-11 Commission Report recommended that the traditional U.S. intelligence culture of “need to know” be shifted to “need to share.” The challenge is getting the right information shared with the right people or agencies, while making sure that classified intel doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, foreign or domestic, or be misused.

The project is led by principal investigator and UMBC computer science professor Tim Finin, whose ebiquity research group specializes in deep data mining, security, privacy and new research frontiers of the Web, blogs, Twitter, social media and other areas. According to Finin, the new project should prove useful beyond the DOD sphere.

“There are plenty of real-world problems that we can work on that are not classified, such as balancing patient privacy with making sure the right doctor in an emergency can quickly access their medical records,” Finin said.

“Many of the principles of this research can apply to everyday scenarios where information is shared with the right people and protected from the wrong people, such as your location as determined by your cell phone, pictures from the family photo albums on Flickr or the details of your credit history.”

The UMBC team is partnered with researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Purdue University, University of Michigan, University of Texas at San Antonio and University of Texas at Dallas. The grant was awarded as part of the Department of Defense’s Multi-disciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program.

“We want to create the science behind the idea of need to share,” said Anupam Joshi, a key member of the ebiquity group and frequent research partner of Finin. “We’ll be weighing what should be shared with whom and asking if we can balance the utility of sharing something with the risk of its getting disclosed,” said Joshi.

The project will develop new ways for organizations and individuals to express policies for sharing information that can be automatically understood and enforced by information systems.  Such policies will go beyond existing data access control mechanisms and ‘digital rights management’ schemes in their power to include a wider range of situational constraints and the ability to specify limitations on how the data can be used.

Several other UMBC computer science faculty members will lend their datamining and information security expertise to the effort, including Hillol Kargupta, Yelena Yesha and Alan Sherman. Earlier this year, the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security renewed UMBC’s designation as a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research for its focus on IT security research.

(7/7/08)

© 2007-08 University of Maryland, Baltimore County � 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250 � 410-455-1000 �