Professor Gymama Slaughter joined the department as an Assistant Professor in 2010 and established the Bioelectronics Laboratory as a group doing research on Bioelectronics and optimization methods for physical circuit design, low-voltage and biologically inspired computing, sensor-processor integration, and wireless networking and communications. Its current research projects focus on developing sense-and-respond systems for blood metabolites and vital signs as well as volatile organic compounds/gas detection in trauma patients and crowded areas.

Dr. Slaughter has a broad background that makes her uniquely qualified to work in Bioelectronics. She received three degrees from Virginia Commonwealth University: a BS in Chemistry, a MS in Chemical Engineering and a Ph.D in Computer Engineering. Before joining UMBC in August 2010, she was Director of the Center for Biosystems and Engineering and professor of Computer Engineering at Virginia State University.

Visit the new BEL@UMBC Web site to find out more about this new and exciting research group at UMBC.

MS Defense

Exploiting Architectural Techniques for Boosting
Base Station Anonymity in Wireless Sensor Networks

Zhong Ren

2:00pm Thursday, 28 April 2011, ITE 346

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can be deployed to serve mission-critical applications in hostile environments such as battlefield and territorial borders. In these setups, the WSN may be subject to attacks in order to disrupt the network operation. The most effective way for an adversary to do so is by targeting the Base-Station (BS), where the sensor data are collected in the field. By identifying and locating the BS, the adversary can launch attacks to damage or disrupt the operation of the BS. Therefore, maintaining the BS anonymity is of utmost importance in WSNs.

In this thesis we propose three novel approaches to boost the anonymity of the BS nodes to protect them from potential threats. We first explore the deployment of more BS nodes. We compare the BS anonymity of one versus multiple stationary BS under different network topologies. Our results show that having more base-stations can boost both the average and max anonymity of BS nodes. We further provide guidelines on a cost versus anonymity trade-off to determine the most suitable BS count for a network. Second we exploit the mobility of base-stations and explore the effect of relocating some of the existing BS nodes to the lowest anonymity regions. Our results show that having one mobile BS can dramatically boost the anonymity of the network and moving multiple BS does not provide much value. Finally, we propose to pursue dynamic sensor to cluster re-association to confuse the adversary. This can be employed when base-stations cannot safely move.

Committee members:

• Mohamed Younis (Chair)
• Yun Peng
• Charles Nicholas

Congratulations to the record number of CSEE graduate students who will make oral or poster presentations at the 2011 UMBC Graduate Research Conference on Friday April 29th. The presentations will take place in two sessions, one 9:00 to 10:50 and another 11:00 to 12:50. Poster sessions will be on the seventh floor of the library and oral presentations in UC 312. See the GRC site for a program booklet with abstracts and the session schedules.

Oral presentations:

• Yousef Ebrahimi, Increasing Transmission Power for Higher Base-station Anonymity in Wireless Sensor Network
• Zamon Granger, Stabilizing Air Pressure in a Hermetic Environment with Embedded Technology
• Congchong Liu, Optimizing MapReduce Programming Model through Adaptive Load Balance
• Kavita Krishnaswamy, Path planning a robotic arm efficiently
• Varish Mulwad, Generating knowledge from tables
• Darshana Dalvi, Genome-based Clinical Decision Support System
• Ashwini Lahane, Detection of unsafe actions in laparoscopic cholecystectomy surgical videos
• Karuna Pande Joshi, Lifecycle of virtualized services on the cloud
• Jon Ward, ICF: A Physical Layer Metric for Measuring Anonymity in Wireless Sensor Networks
• Theoplis E. Stewart Sr., Smart Grid: What are some underlying implications to overlaying digital technology onto the electric power grids?

Poster presentations:

• Sai Ma, Tom Eichele and Nicolle M. Correa, Hierarchical and graphical analysis of fMRI network connectivity in healthy and schizophrenic groups.
• Shiming Yang , Near Real"time Data Assimilation for the HYSPLIT Aerosol Dispersion Model.
• Yu Wang , A Framework for GPU 3D Model Reconstruction using Structure-from-Motion
• Akshaya Iyengar, Estimating Temporal Boundaries of Events using Social Media Data
• Brice Cannon, Paveen Apiratikul and John Hryniewicz, Characterization of semiconductor optical waveguides
• Brian White Jr., The Mobile Memory
• Xing Chen, Standoff photoacoustic chemical detection using quantum cascade lasers
• Yi Xin, On Gas Detection and Concentration Estimation via Mid-IR-based Gas Detection System Analysis Model
• Robert J. Weiblen, Calculation of the expected bandwidth for a mid-infrared supercontinuum source based on As2S3 chalcogenide photonic crystal fibers
• Pramod Jagtap, Privacy Preservation in Context Aware Geo-social Networking Applications

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