Analytics for Detecting Web and Social Media Abuse

Dr. Justin Ma, UC Berkeley

1:00pm Friday 16 March 2012, ITE 325, UMBC

The Web and online social media provide invaluable communication services to a global Internet user base. The tremendous success of these services, however, has also created valuable opportunities for criminals and other miscreants to abuse them for their own gain. As a result, it is both an important yet challenging problem to detect, monitor, and curtail this abuse. However, the large scale and diversity of these services, combined with the tactics used by attackers, make it difficult to discern one clear and robust signal for detecting abuse. One approach, relying on domain expertise, is to construct a small set of well-crafted heuristics, but such heuristics tend to rapidly become obsolete. In this talk, I will describe more robust approaches based on machine learning, statistical modeling, and large-scale analytics of large data sets.

First I will describe online learning approaches for detecting malicious Web sites (those involved in criminal scams) using lexical and host-based features of the associated URLs. This application is particularly appropriate for online algorithms as the size of the training data is larger than can be efficiently processed in batch and because the features that typify malicious URLs evolve continuously. Motivated by this application, we built a real-time system to gather URL features and analyze them against a source of labeled URLs from a large Web mail provider. Our system adapts in an online fashion to the evolving characteristics of malicious URLs, achieving daily classification accuracies up to 99% over a balanced data set.

Next I will describe our ongoing efforts for creating analytics for detecting social media abuse. Deciding on a universal definition of social media abuse is difficult, as abuse is often in the eye of the beholder. In light of this challenge, we explore a more formal definition based on information theory. In particular, we hypothesize that messages with low information content are likely to be abusive. From this, we develop a measure of content complexity to identify abusive users that shows promise in our early evaluations.

In addition to our own experiments in the lab, this work has found success in practice as well. Companies serving hundreds of millions of users have adopted these ideas to improve abuse detection within their own services.

Justin Ma is a postdoc in the UC Berkeley AMPLab. His primary research is in systems security, and his other interests include applications of machine learning to systems problems, systems for large-scale machine learning, and the impact of energy availability on computing. He received B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Maryland in 2004, and he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC San Diego in 2010.

Host: Anupam Joshi
See http://csee.umbc.edu/talks for more information

Google is running an Android Camp this summer where 30 selected students will attend an all-expense-paid program at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, July 22-28.

The camp will include an interactive and collaborative curriculum focusing on a practical introduction to developing applications for Android and will explore the concepts behind Android, the framework for constructing an application, and the tools for developing, testing, and publishing software for the platform. Students will also get the opportunity to enjoy technical talks by Googlers, and social activities around the Bay Area.

To be eligible, you must be a current freshman or sophomore majoring in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related area and have at least a year of proven Java development experience.  The application deadline is March 11.

For more information and to apply, see the 2012 Google Android Camp site.

Building and Testing Distributed Systems

Dr. Charles Killian
Purdue University, Computer Science

1:00pm Friday, 2 March 2012, ITE325 UMBC

Building distributed systems is particularly difficult because of the asynchronous, heterogeneous, and failure-prone environment where these systems must run. This asynchrony makes verifying the correctness of systems implementations even more challenging. Tools for building distributed systems must often strike a compromise between reducing programmer effort and increasing system efficiency. In my research, we strive to introduce a limited amount of structure and limitations to implementations to enable a wide range of analysis and development assistance. Most prominently, we have built the Mace language and runtime, which translates a concise, expressive distributed system specification into a C++ implementation. The Mace specification importantly exposes three key pieces of structure: atomic events, explicit state, and explicit messaging.

With a few additional contextual annotations, we show how we can support intra-node parallel event processing of these atomic events while still preserving sequenal event consistency—even using variably available computing resources distributed across a cluster. By leveraging these three structural elements, we have further built tools such as a model checker capable of detecting liveness violations in systems code, a performance tester, and an automated malicious protocol tester. Recent research has also explored applications of these key structures in legacy software, that has produced a log anaysis tool that can detect performance problems, and a malicious fault injector that can discover successful performance attacks. Mace has been in development since 2004 and has been used to build a wide variety of Internet-ready distributed systems both by myself and by researchers at places such as Cornell University, Microsoft Research (Redmond, Silicon Valley, and Beijing), HP Labs, UCLA, EPFL, and UCSD. This talk will give an overview of my research, presenting the execution model and its checker, support for event parallelization, and our more recent testing tools.

Charles Killian is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2011, as well as an HP Open Innovation award. In 2008 he completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego under the supervision of Amin Vahdat. Before transferring to UCSD in August 2004, he completed his Masters in Computer Science from Duke University with Amin Vahdat. His systems and networking research focuses on building and testing distributed systems, and bridges this research with software engineering, security, data mining, and programming languages. Since 2004 he has implemented the Mace programming language and runtime, built numerous distributed systems, and designed MaceMC, the first model checker capable of finding liveness violations in unmodified systems code and 2007 best paper award at NSDI. Chip has built many additional tools and enhancements since then, including performance testing, work on parallel event processing, automated attack discovery, and data mining logs to discover performance problems.

By the end of 2012, Google plans to unveil their latest addition to the tech world: a pair of android-based digital glasses, reports the New York Times. With a built in camera, the glasses will monitor the wearer’s surroundings and present them with relevant information about nearby businesses, or information about friends who might be nearby. Like smartphones, the glasses will harness third-party 3G or 4G for internet access. The glasses are being developed by the Google X team based out of a top-secret lab in Google headquarters where the company’s top-minds have been thinking up plans for futuristic products like space elevators and driverless cars.

Priced about the same as a smartphone—$250 to $600—the glasses are reported to have the rugged and futuristic look of a pair of Oakley Thump glasses. The proposed navigation system for the glasses will be a series of subtle head nods.

A PCWorld article shed a not-so-favorable light on the proposed Google product, saying that glasses could be potentially hazardous if worn while driving. The glasses, like other mobile devices, also raise questions about personal security and the potential of Google harnessing “Big-brother”-like influence over its customers. It’s likely, too, that the product is bound to cause concern about the health implications of having a small screen sitting only a few inches from your eye.

FSO-MANETs: Free-Space-Optical Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Dr. Murat Yuksel
Computer Science and Engineering
University of Nevada, Reno

1:00pm Monday 27 February 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

The recent proliferation of wireless technologies and choices available to user applications has triggered a tremendous wireless demand, and wireless nodes are expected to dominate the Internet soon. Reports show that usage of mobile Web and WiFi by smartphones is increasing sharply, with more than 80% of their data consumption landing on WiFi points, and this statistic does not even include a major smartphone brand, the iPhone. Accommodating this exploding wireless demand with cellular capacity does not seem possible in the long run. As the radio spectrum (RF) spectrum is getting scarcer and saturated by recent innovations in attaining high spectral efficiency gains such as hierarchical cooperative MIMO, we urgently need innovations that will enable leveraging of new wireless spectrums and substrates in order to respond to the exploding mobile wireless traffic demand. Further, the capacity gap between RF wireless and optical fiber backbone speeds will remain huge because of the limited availability of RF spectrum. Enabling optical spectrum in wireless communications is the needed revolution for ultra-high-speed mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) of the future.

In this talk, I will present our work on exploring the potential for free-space-optics (FSO), a.k.a. optical wireless, in the context of very-high-speed mobile ad-hoc and opportunistic networking. We introduce basic building blocks for MANETs using FSO and present initial prototypes for multi-hop FSO building blocks and protocols operating under mobility. 3-D spherical structures covered with inexpensive FSO transceivers (e.g., LED/VCSEL and photo-detector pair) solve issues relevant to mobility and line-of-sight (LOS) management via availability of several transceivers per node. Such structures facilitate electronic LOS tracking (i.e., “electronic steering”) methods instead of traditional mechanical steering techniques used in FSO communications. By abstracting FSO directionality and LOS characteristics, our work also explores issues relating to routing and localization, and develops layer 3 protocols. FSO has been used at high-altitude communications, and this research enables FSO communications at lower-altitudes and in ad-hoc settings with redundancy of cheap optoelectronic components. This research also contributes to the new application of using solid-state lighting technology due to potential integration of illumination and communication functions in the same devices. Please refer to our project website for further information.

Murat Yuksel is an Assistant Professor at the CSE Department of The University of Nevada – Reno (UNR), Reno, NV. He was with the ECSE Department of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, NY as a Postdoctoral Research Associate and a member of Adjunct Faculty until 2006. He received a B.S. degree from the Computer Engineering Department of Ege University, Izmir, Turkey in 1996. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Computer Science Department of RPI in 1999 and 2002 respectively. His research interests are in the area of computer communication networks with a focus on protocol design, network economics, wireless routing, free-space-optical mobile ad-hoc networks (FSO-MANETs), and peer-to-peer. He is a senior member of IEEE, life member of ACM, and a member of Sigma Xi and ASEE.

Host: Anupam Joshi

Stripe, a San Francisco startup with an online-payment system, is hosting a simple online cybersecurity capture the flag (CTF) challenge. See their blog post for the details.

“The hardest part of writing secure code is learning to think like an attacker. For example, every programmer is told to watch out for SQL injections, but it’s hard to appreciate just how exploitable they are until you’ve written a SQL injection of your own.

We built Stripe Capture the Flag, a security wargame inspired by SmashTheStack’s IO, to help the community (as well our team!) practice identifying and exploiting common security problems.

After completing our CTF, you should have a greatly improved understanding of how attackers will try to break your code (and hopefully will have fun in the process!).”

If you can crack their system, they’ll send you a t-shirt. Since security is important to their business, maybe they will also talk to you about a job.

Engineering Week IEEE Student Branch Seminar
in conjunction with CSEE Graduate Seminar

Brain-Computer Interface Technologies
in the Coming Decades (with Demonstration)

Dr. Kaleb McDowell
Translational Neuroscience Branch Chief
Army Research Laboratory

11:30-12:30 Friday, 24 February 2012, ITE 227, UMBC

As the proliferation of technology dramatically infiltrates all aspects of modern life, in many ways the world is becoming so dynamic and complex that technological capabilities are overwhelming human capabilities to optimally interact with and leverage those technologies. Fortunately, these technological advancements have also driven an explosion of neuroscience research over the past several decades, presenting engineers with a remarkable opportunity to design and develop flexible and adaptive brain-based neurotechnologies that integrate with and capitalize on human capabilities and limitations to improve human-system interactions. Major forerunners of this conception are brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which to this point have been largely focused on improving the quality of life for particular clinical populations and include, for example, applications for advanced communications with paralyzed or "locked-in" patients as well as the direct control of prostheses and wheelchairs. Near-term applications are envisioned that are primarily task-oriented and are targeted to avoid the most difficult obstacles to development. In the farther term, a holistic approach to BCIs will enable a broad range of task-oriented and opportunistic applications by leveraging pervasive technologies and advanced analytical approaches to sense and merge critical brain, behavioral, task, and environmental information. Communications and other applications that are envisioned to be broadly impacted by BCIs are highlighted; however, these represent just a small sample of the potential of these technologies.

Kaleb McDowell (M'08-SM'11) was born in Frederick, MD, USA on July 10, 1970. He has a B.S in operations research and industrial engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA in 1992, an M.S. in kinesiology from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA in 2000, and a Ph.D. in neuroscience and cognitive science from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA in 2003.

He is currently the Chief of the Translational Neuroscience Branch and Chair of the Neuroscience Strategic Research Area at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, USA. Since joining ARL as a Research Psychologist in 2003, he has contributed to over 30 reviewed publications, and has led several major research and development programs focused on neuroscience, indirect vision systems and vehicle mobility. His current research interest focuses on translating basic neuroscience into applications for use by healthy populations in everyday, real-world environments.

Dr. McDowell received Department of Army Research and Development Achievement awards for technical excellence in 2007 and 2009 and the ARL Award for Leadership in 2011.

Host: IEEE UG and Grad Student Branches (cookies drinks available 11:15am)

Exploring the Web, Beyond Document Search

Professor Yi Chen
Computer Science, Arizona State University

1:00pm Friday 24 February 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

Today we rely on Web Search Engines, like Google or Bing, to find relevant documents among trillions or quadrillions of documents on the Web. The Web also contains a vast amount of structured data in a variety of domains, such as travel, products, bibliographies, finance, and social networks. Current Web search engines and web database query interfaces are insufficient to satisfy the diverse search needs of web users. The information discovery processes are further complicated by the prevalence of uncertain data. At the same time, it is infeasible to request a web user to design clean databases and write precise SQL queries. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges, opportunities, and then some of the solutions that we have developed for empowering web users for effective information search on structured data. Furthermore, I will discuss how to enable successful social search so that complex computation tasks can be accomplished by leveraging social computing.

Yi Chen is an Associate Professor in Computer Science and an affiliate faculty in Biomedical Informatics at Arizona State University (ASU). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.S. from Central South University in 2005 and 1999, respectively. Her research interests include keyword search on structured data, learning uncertain data, workflow management and social computing, with applications in Web, social computing and healthcare. She is a general chair for SIGMOD'2012, a PC chair for KEYS’2009 and DBRank’2012. Yi Chen is a recipient of Outstanding Researcher Award in ASU CSE (2011), a Google Research Award (2011), IBM Faculty Award (2010) and an NSF CAREER Award (2009).

Host: Anupam Joshi

Amazon, one of the most innovative and fastest growing technology companies, will hold a technical talk and information session at 7:00pm this Thursday (2/23) for UMBC students interested in full-time positions or internships. The meeting will be in the Skylight Room of the Commons.

UMBC Alumna Akshaya Iyengar (MS CS '11) joined Amazon last year and will talk about what it's like to work at there as a software development engineer. Amazon recruiter Makenzie LaCount will talk about employment at Amazon and accept resumes from students interested in a full time position or internship.

Pre-registration is not required, but come early to enjoy the food and get an Amazon t-shirt.

As we are entering the second semester of the 2011-2012 academic year, we are preparing for changes and new opportunities. Associate Professor Brooke Stephens has retired and we are preparing to interview candidates for two open tenure track positions in Computer Science. CSEE has just received permission to search for a Professor of Practice in Computer Science. In addition to assisting our CS instruction, the Professor of Practice will be affiliated with our Cyber Security Program which is rapidly growing.

In the Kudos department: Professor Tim Finin was named UMBC Presidential Research Professor for 2012; Professor Anupam Joshi was recently appointed as the Oros Family Professor of Technology, a five year endowed professorship; UMBC’s 2012 Alumnus of the Year for Engineering and Information Technology is Ralph Semmel (’92 Ph.D., Computer Science).He is currently the Director of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory; the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has recognized CSEE Professor Marie desJardins as a Distinguished Member for her contributions to the field of computing; Professor Yelena Yesha was awarded the 2011 IBM Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) Faculty Fellow of the Year; the IEEE Signal Processing Society has named Professor Tulay Adali a Distinguished Lecturer.

CSEE was visited during Fall 2011 by ABET as part of the accreditation process for the Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs. Richard Chang, Tim Oates, Chuck LaBerge, and Mohammed Younis guided us through this process.

Have a great Spring Semester. Keep up to date by visiting www.csee.umbc.edu

-Gary