UMBC, SAIC, the National Cyber Security Alliance, the Tech Council of Maryland, and the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development have joined to hold the Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference on October 21-22, 2001. The event is designed to increase cyber awareness as a career choice in Maryland, improve the appreciation for cyber oriented curriculum in college and high schools, and convey cyber defense as a sport to increase interest in careers involving cyber security.

The competition will be divided into high school, collegiate and professional divisions. Qualifying rounds take place over the Internet between April and August 2011 using SAIC's Cyber Network Exercise System (CyberNEXS), a scalable training, exercise and certification system.  The top eight teams in each division will meet at the MDC3 event in October for the final round followed by an award ceremony at UMBC. MDC3 participants will also be able to learn from and network with other cybersecurity professionals, researchers, and scholars at the conference, which will include presentations, a career fair and a vendor exhibition.

For more information see this press release and the SAIC MDC3 site.

The UMBC Linux Users’ Group (LUG) will hold it's Spring Installfest on Friday February 18th from 10:30am to 5:00pm on the Commons Main Street. If you've ever wanted to try Linux but didn't know where to start, bring your computer and LUG members can help you install Linus and ensure that your hardware, including wireless, fingerprint reader, and webcam, is working.

At the Spring 2011 installfest, they will be installing Ubuntu version 10.10. If you would like assistance installing a different release or distribution, bring install media.

The installfest is open to anyone ans people with all skill levels, from complete novice to expert, are welcome. It's a great opportunity to meet people in the local Linux community.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Solitons, Self-Induced Transparency,
and Modelocking in Quantum Cascade Lasers

href="http://www.cs.umbc.edu/people/faculty/sergei-nirenburg/">Professor Curtis Menyuk
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00-2:15pm Friday, 18 March 2011, ITE 227, UMBC

Standard semiconductor lasers operate in a limited wavelength range, below about 4 microns. Quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) that operate in the mid-IR and far-IR have important applications to medicine, environmental sensing, and national security. While short pulse lasers (~100 fs) are available for standard semiconductor lasers, that is not the case for QCLs. Standard passive modelocking is hard to do in QCLs because of their long coherence times and short gain recovery times. We propose a fundamentally different approach, based on the self-induced-transparency (SIT) effect, that turns these weaknesses into strengths. Solitons, modelocking, and SIT are all reviewed at the beginning of the talk.

Curtis R. Menyuk was born March 26, 1954. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from MIT in 1976 and the Ph.D. from UCLA in 1981. He has worked as a research associate at the University of Maryland, College Park and at Science Applications International Corporation in McLean, VA. In 1986 he became an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and he was the founding member of this department. In 1993, he was promoted to Professor. He was on partial leave from UMBC from Fall, 1996 until Fall, 2002. From 1996 – 2001, he worked part-time for the Department of Defense, co-directing the Optical Networking program at the DoD Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences in Adelphi, MD from 1999 – 2001. In 2001 – 2002, he was Chief Scientist at PhotonEx Corporation. For the last 20 years, his primary research area has been theoretical and computational studies of lasers, nonlinear optics, and fiber optic communications. He has authored or co-authored more than 220 archival journal publications as well as numerous other publications and presentations. He has also edited three books. The equations and algorithms that he and his research group at UMBC have developed to model optical fiber systems are used extensively in the telecommunications and photonics industry. He is a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the IEEE. He is a former UMBC Presidential Research Professor.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

A Cognitive Architecture for
Simulating Bodies and Minds

Professor Sergei Nirenburg
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00-2:15pm Friday, 18 February 2011, ITE 227, UMBC

This talk is an overview of a cognitive architecture that supports the creation and deployment of intelligent agents capable of simulating human-like abilities. The agents, have a simulated mind and may also be supplied with a simulated body. These agents are intended to operate as members of multi-agent teams featuring both artificial and human agents. The agent architecture and its underlying knowledge resources and processors are being developed in a sufficiently generic way to support a variety of applications. In this talk we briefly describe the architecture and two proof-of-concept application systems we have developed within it: the Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP) system for training medical personnel and the CLinician’s ADvisor (CLAD).We organize the discussion around four specific aspects of agent capabilities implemented in MVP and CLAD: physiological simulation, knowledge management and learning, decision-making and language processing.

This is joint work with Marjorie McShane and Stephen Beale, with contributions from Jesse English, Ben Johnson, Bryan Wilkinson and Roberta Catizone.

The UMBC CSEE Department invites applications for a non-tenure track, full-time lecturer position to teach a variety of undergraduate computer science courses. Both a demonstrated ability to teach such courses and a strong interest in teaching undergraduates are essential. Applicants must have, or be about to receive, an M.S. or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science or a related discipline. Applications should be submitted by 15 March 2011 and the position will start on 23 August 2011.

Ugandan Gay Rights Advocate David Kato Beaten to Death

Funeral Results in Confrontation Between Gay Rights and Anti-Gay Rights Groups

Violence erupted in Mukono, Uganda at the funeral of gay rights advocate David Kato, two days after the Ugandan activist was beaten to death with a hammer Jan. 26.

The religious rite was punctuated by a denunciation of homosexuality from the pulpit by the pastor, and the refusal of congregants in the village to bury Kato.

“The world has gone crazy,” the pastor said, according to Reuters. “People are turning away from the scriptures. They should turn back, they should abandon what they are doing. You cannot start admiring a fellow man.”

Those statements drew a sharp reaction from a crowd of 300 people that included about 100 gay supporters. Gay activists, some wearing t-shirts with Kato’s picture on them, stormed the podium, grabbing the microphone. ?

Howard Makes Bold Changes

Goal is to promote excellence

This week Howard University's president and Board of Trustees announced major changes to the academic structure of the school. The Academic Renewal Plan – the culmination of two years of meetings, university community input and the hard work by the Presidential Commission on Academic Renewal (PCAR) – was presented to the board by Howard's President Sidney A. Ribeau on Jan. 29 and approved.

“Universities must periodically review and assess themselves to respond to developments in higher education and the changing needs of our nation and the world,” Ribeau said in a statement. “At Howard, we are doing just that. We must maintain the highest standards of academic and administrative excellence.”

The plan consolidates or eliminates many of Howard's degree programs and works to reorganize the university's resources in a way that supports its strategic goals.

While this process was initiated by the board of trustees and President Ribeau, Alvin Thornton, Ph.D., senior advisor to the president on academic affairs and chair of the PCAR committee, was clear that this effort and the resulting recommendations involved all parts of the university community. "These were not presidentially or board determined decisions. These are largely decision that came from the university community," he said.

"These changes will, in essence," said Thornton, "strengthen Howard University, make it much more focused around the strategic areas that the Board of Trustees and the president have identified."

Some of these strategic goals include ensuring high quality undergraduate programs, a continued commitment to the professional schools and a return to a focus on teacher preparation, Thornton said. Others, according to a press release issued by the university, are: to strengthen the commitment to science, technology, engineering and math; encourage increased research, advance Africana and Diaspora Studies to make Howard University the leader in that area of study; augment urban education, business, communications, humanities and visual and performing arts programs; and streamline and focus degree program offerings.
"We have identified specific areas of emphasis,” Ribeau said in a statement, “and we plan to be leaders in those areas.”

Howard currently offers 171 degree programs. As part of this plan, 71 programs – 38 professional programs, 11 graduate programs and 22 undergraduate programs – will be either eliminated or changed. Thornton stressed that students in those programs to be discontinued will have the opportunity to complete their degrees and faculty members in those programs will not lose their positions. "The concept really has a lot on integrity," he said.

In the past Howard, Thornton said, "responded to the national need that our community had and our nation had to educate in all areas of the Black community. ... We cannot continue to do that because of resources and we, frankly, don't have to do that in the same way.

"This renewal program that the board has approved and the president recommended will strategically redesign us and prepare us to move forward for the future."

He added, "We're going to be much more research oriented at Howard University because we believe that's the best contribution we can make to the African-American and national community."

Charles Croom, of Lockheed Martin will talk about "The State of Cyber Security 2011" at the UMBC Visionaries in IT Forum at 8:00am on Wednesday, February 23rd at the BWI Airport Marriott. The event is free but registration requested.

Croom joined Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions as Vice President of Cyber Security Solutions in October of 2008. In this capacity, he shapes the corporation’s cyber security strategy with insight from his 35 years of distinguished service, leadership, and technology experience from the U.S. Air Force. He co-chaired a National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee Task Force on “Strengthening Government and Private Sector Collaboration” which issued a May 2009 report recommending that the President direct the establishment of a Joint Coordinating Center. He currently serves on the Boards of the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and the Internet Security Alliance (ISA).

Croom retired as a U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General, Director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), and the Commander of the Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations in September 2008. While at DISA, he led a worldwide organization of more than 6,600 military and civilian personnel to serve the information technology and telecommunications needs of the President, Secretary of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, combatant commanders, and other Department of Defense stakeholders.