The Threat is Real

Sherri Ramsay
Director, NSA/CSS Threat Operations Center

10:00am Friday 22 April 2011, 229 ITE

Sherri Ramsay, the Director of the National Security Agency's National Threat Operations Center, will present an overview of contemporary issues in cybersecurity entitled "The Threat is Real". The NSA Threat Operations Center monitors the operations of the global network to identify network-based threats and protect U.S. and allied networks.

Sherri Ramsay serves as the Director of the National Security Agency/Central Security Service Threat Operations Center, an organization operating under Signals Intelligence and Information Assurance authorities simultaneously to establish real-time global network awareness and threat characterization. Ms. Ramsay most recently served in the Information Assurance Directorate as Deputy Chief of the Vulnerability Analysis and Operations Group. She began her career at NSA as a computer programmer and served as a Software Acquisition Manager, System Acquisition Manager, and Program Manager for several large-scale programs. She spend a year of extensive leadership training, research and developmental assignments while participating in OPM’s Executive Potential Program.

Ms. Ramsay graduated Magna Cum Laude with General Honors from the University of Georgia in 1977 with a Bachelor of Science degree majoring in Mathematics and Education. She graduated with Honors from the Johns Hopkins University in 1984 with a Masters Degree in Computer Science. In 1992, she graduated from OPM’s Executive Potential Program. She graduated in 1998 form the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University, Ft. McNair, with a Mater’s Degree in National Resource Strategy. Prior to joining NSA, Ms. Ramsay taught high school mathematics. She received the NSA Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 1998 and 2000, the National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Citation in 1998, the Louis Tordella Award in 2003, and the Presidential Meritorious Executive Award in 2009.

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FTP, the File Transfer Protocol, is forty years old today. rfc114, the request for comments that defined the original FTP protocol, was published on April 16, 1971. FTP is one of the oldest Internet standards and remains important today, mostly through its descendants, like SFTP.

Catherine Kuenzel of Northrop Grummon will speak on Your Future in Emerging Technologies as part of the UMBC Visionaries in Information Technology Forum on May 4, 2011. Her talk will cover emerging technologies in health, homeland security, cyber security and renewable energy.

Kuenzel is the the Vice President of Federal Mission Programs for the Civil Systems Division of Northrop Grumman's Information Systems. She has extensive experience in the information technology industry. She is skilled at leading teams that supply a full range of IT solutions to governmental clients, including the National Security Agency and the Department of Defense. Her current team provides services to a wide range of civil enterprise systems, from cyber security to law enforcement to document and records management.

The UMBC Visionaries in Information Technology Forum is an annual, four-part breakfast series created to help elevate the prominence and recognition of Maryland as a critical hub of information and emerging technologies. The forum is free and includes a complimentary breakfast. It will meet May 4, 2011 from 7:30am to 9:00am at the BWI Airport Marriott, 1743 West Nursery Road, Baltimore, MD 21240. Since space is limited, registration is required.

The CSEE Department at UMBC has IT job positions available.  The positions include a Web Administrator and System Administrator.  Full descriptions for each position below.  Details include how to apply and what information is expected to be provided.

Student Web Administrator position.

Duties:

• Engineer solutions to Web-related problems in a UNIX environment.
• Manage Web applications and be able to extend functionality by writing new code.
• Support the users of Web sites/portals.
• Assist in ongoing projects.
• Other duties as assigned.

Requirements:

• Experience with a Linux/UNIX system.
• Program UNIX shell scripts, C/C++, PERL, Python, and/or PHP.
• Understand HTML, CSS, and modern Web technologies.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills.
• Excellent troubleshooting skills.
• Able to quickly learn new skills.
• Able to work well in a group.
• Available to work up to 20 hours/week.
• Active UMBC student.

Desired (will train as needed):

• Major in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Exposed to content management system and revision control system.
• Manage databases and write SQL queries.

Please submit resumes by email to cseeit-jobs AT cs DOT umbc DOT edu . Resumes accepted until the position is filled.  Also provide an example of something cool that you have done with a Web site.

UNIX Student System Administrator position.

This position will provide computer hardware, software, and network support for the operational needs of the CSEE department at UMBC.  The CSEE computer infrastructure is extremely diverse, dynamic, and challenging. This position will be part of a technical team of experts, who support over 700 user accounts and over 600 Linux, Solaris, Windows, and MacOS machines in office, data center, and research environments.  The computers range from individual desktops to production servers which run 24 hours per day (such as Web portals, email, and database servers).

Are you the resource who people come to when they have a computer problem? Do you find fixing computers easy?  Do you run your own server?  Do you like learning new skills, making people happy, and gaining a sense of accomplishment?  If you relate to these attributes, this is a great opportunity for you.

Duties:

• Engineer solutions to problems in a UNIX environment.
• Support desktop and server computers for end-users (operational staff, graduate students, and faculty) and networking needs through the installation and configuration of computer hardware and software.
• Support the daily operations and maintenance of the CSEE computing and networking facilities (such as accounts, printers, applications, etc.).
• Support real/virtual server environment and real/virtual disk storage systems
• Assist in ongoing projects.
• Other duties as assigned.

Requirements:

• Experience with one or more types of Linux/UNIX system.
• Program UNIX shell scripts, C/C++, PERL, Python, and/or PHP.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills.
• Excellent troubleshooting skills.
• Able to quickly learn new skills.
• Able to work well in a group.
• Available to work up to 20 hours/week (up to 40 during summer or breaks).
• Active UMBC student.

Desired (will train as needed):

• Major in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Familiar with the CSEE Department's computing environment.
• A working knowledge of Sun/Oracle Solaris/OpenSolaris operating system and/or Windows.

Please submit resumes by email to cseeit-jobs AT cs DOT umbc DOT edu . Resumes accepted until the positions are filled.  Also provide an example of something cool that you have done with UNIX/Linux.

UMBC will host a three-day in-service training workshop for 35 Maryland high school computer science teachers sponsored by Google. The UMBC CS4HS Workshop will be held 17-20 July 2011 at UMBC's campus in suburban Baltimore.

Workshop attendees will have the opportunity to share ideas for energizing the teaching of computer science in Maryland high schools and to forge new relationships among each other and with university faculty members. A few key high school and state administrators will also be invited to participate. The workshop is being organized by CSEE Professor Marie desJardins.

A $50 registration fee will cover all meals and on-campus housing during the event. A reduced-rate block of hotel rooms will be reserved for participants who would prefer to stay off campus (off-campus housing is not reimbursable). Online registration will be available on 1 May 2011 and close on 1 July 2011. Send inquiries to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

CSEE Professors Tim Finin and Anupam Joshi are helping to organize a symposium this fall on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges that will be held in Arlington Virginia sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. The symposium will address the technical and social challenges involved in publishing public government data in ways that make the meaning more explicit and enable reuse.

Websites like data.gov, research.gov and USASpending.gov aim to improve government transparency, increase accountability, and encourage public participation by publishing public government data online. Although this data has been used for some intriguing applications, it is difficult for citizens to understand and use. The symposium will explore how AI technologies such as the Semantic Web, linked data, information extraction, statistical analysis and machine learning can be used to make the knowledge embedded in the data more explicit, accessible and reusable. The symposium’s location of Washington, DC will facilitate the participation of U.S. federal government agency members and enable interchange between researchers and practitioners.

Dissertation Defense

Towards Relational Theory Formation
from Undifferentiated Sensor Data

Marc Pickett

10:00am Monday, 18 April 2011
ITE 325b, UMBC

Human adults have rich theories in their heads of how the world works. These theories include objects and relations for both concrete and abstract concepts. Everything we know either must be innate or learned through experience. Yet it's unclear how much of this model needs to be innate for a computer. The core question this dissertation addresses is how a computer can develop rich relational theories using only its raw sensor data. We address this by outlining a "bridge" between raw sensors and a rich relational theory. We have implemented parts of this bridge, with other parts as feasibility studies, while others remain conceptual.

At the core of this bridge is Ontol, a system that constructs a conceptual structure or "ontology" from feature-set data. Ontol is inspired by cortical models that have been shown to be able to express invariant concepts, such as images independent of any translation or rotation. As a demonstration of the utility of the ontologies created by Ontol, we present a novel semi-supervised learning algorithm that learns from only a handful of positive examples. Like humans, this algorithm doesn't require negative examples. Instead, this algorithm uses the ontologies created by Ontol from unlabeled data, and searches for a Bayes-optimal theory given this "background knowledge".

The rest of the dissertation shows in principle how Ontol can be used as the "workhorse" for a system that finds analogies, discovers useful mappings, and might ultimately create theories, such as a "gisty" theory of "number".

Committee:

• Tim Oates, Associate Professor, UMBC
• Tim Finin, Professor, UMBC
• Rob Goldstone, Professor, Indiana University
• Sergei Nirenburg, Professor, UMBC
• Matt Schmill, Research Faculty, UMBC

Linux will be twenty years old this summer. On August 26, 1991 Linus Torvalds posted a message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup that started like this.

"Hello everybody out there using minix. I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

What resulted has been truly astounding.  We congratulate Linus Torvald, the Linux Foundation and the entire Linux community for their contributions to computer science and the world.

I am not sure when we began to use Linux here at UMBC.  Most of the machines running Unix in our labs in the 1990s were from Sun or SGI, so we used Solaris and Irix.  Sometime in the early 2000s we started replacing the SGIs with Intel boxes and switched to Linux.

The Linux Foundation is celebrating the 20th anniversary and commissioned this nicely done video that tells the story of Linux in under four minutes.

Check out their Linux 20th Celebration page for more information about Linux, its history and how pervasive it has become.

The UMBC's Fifth Digital Entertainment Conference will be held on Saturday, April 30th. Every year, the UMBC Game Developer's Club invites speakers from area game companies to share their knowledge and experience. One of the strenghts of the UMBC program in Graphics, Animation and Interactive Media (GAIM) is its strong ties to game development studios in the Maryland, DC and Northern Virginia area.

This year's event is sponsored by Zynga, the studio that developed Farmville and many other Facebook games. It will feature speakers from Zynga, Firaxis, Pure Bang, and Dream Rock Studios. Here is the schedule.

• 10:00am Greg Foertsch, Project Art Director at Firaxis
• 11:00am Ed Zavada, Programmer at Dream Rock Studios
• 12:00pm Lunch
• 01:00pm Eric Jordan (UMBC 2007), Programmer at Firaxis
• 02:00pm Ben Walsh, CEO of Pure Bang Games
• 03:00pm Barry Caudill, Executive Producer at Firaxis
• 04:00pm Michelle Menard, Designer at Zynga

The DEC will be held in Lecture Hall 5 in the Engineering and Computer Science building. Admission is free and the conference is open to everyone.

Congratulations to the CSEE undergraduate students and groups who will be presenting posters on their research as part of the Fifteenth Annual UMBC Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day. UCRAD features research, scholarship, and creative work carried out by UMBC undergraduates.

• Natée Johnson, X-Ray Study of Nano-Scale Superlattice Materials, 3:15pm-3:30pm, UC 310, Mentor: Dr. Fow-Sen Choa
   
• Sheriff Jolaoso, Spectrogram Analysis and Evaluation and Brainwave Appreciation of Music, 10:00am-12:30pm UC Ballrooom, Mentor: Dr. Fow-Sen Choa
   
• Morgan Madeira and Rachel Sweeton, Finding Communities through Social Media, 10:00am-12:30pm, Mentor: Dr. Anupam Joshi
   
• Ross Pokorny, 12:30pm-3:00pm, UC Ballroom, TweetCollector: A Framework for Retrieving, Processing, and Storing Live Data from Twitter, Mentors: Dr. Timothy Finin and Dr. Anupam Joshi
   
• David Shyu, Patient Identification and Diagnosis Using Fourier Analysis and Beam Forming of Multi-electrode Brain Wave Signals, 12:30pm-3:00pm, Mentors: Dr. Fow-Sen Choa and Dr. Elliott Hong
   
• UMBC Game Developers Club, Innovations in Computer Game Development, 12:30pm-3:00pm, Mentor: Mr. Neal McDonald