Warner Brothers is said to have purchased the rights to a script The Imitation Game by screenwriter Graham Moore about British mathematician Alan Turing who made many important contributions to computer science. Leonardo DiCaprio is supposedly interested in playing Turing and is "chasing the project" and Ron Howard is rumored to be interested in in directing. The script is based on the Andrew Hodges' 2000 biography Alan Turing: The Enigma.

Turing is the famous English mathematician who made significant contributions to computer science in the 30s and 40s, including formalizations of computing and algorithms with the Turing machine and early work on Artificial Intelligence. During World War II he was was also a senior member of the British codebreaking and cryptanalysis group at Bletchley Park that broke the codes for the German Enigma machine.

Turing was prosecuted by the British government in 1952 for being a homosexual which is thought to be the cause of his apparent suicide by cyanide poisoning in 1954. In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

When Dr. Rick Forno came to UMBC in the fall of 2010, he came with a plan: a weekend competition at UMBC for students interested in cybersecurity. But, what was originally conceived as a casual Saturday afternoon event, evolved into the Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference (MDC3), a state-wide competition that promises generous scholarships for participating students and, though only in its first year, is already being endorsed by an impressive slew of supporters including President Hrabowski and Governor Martin O’Malley.

Just in time for National Cyber Security Awareness Month, the goal of MDC3 is to “celebrate Cybersecurity in Maryland,” says Dr. Forno, co-chair of the event and the Graduate Program Director, Cybersecurity at UMBC. MDC3 started as a partnership between the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and UMBC, and has now expanded to include the National Cyber Security Alliance, Tech Council of Maryland, and the Maryland Department of Business & Economic Development. When SAIC suggested using CyberNEXS–their cyber training, certification, and exercise model—to simulate compromised computers for students to analyze, MDC3 was born.  

The competition is made up of three rounds, where teams are confronted with a cybersecurity threat or issue that needs to be resolved. Teams fall within three division: High School, College, and Professionals, and are made up of roughly six members. When MDC3’s qualifier rounds kicked off in early September, an impressive 53 teams throughout the state had joined the competition; roughly 15 per division.

The first round presented teams with virtual machines that were plagued by vulnerabilities. Team members were given the task to find and fix as many problems as they could within the given time limit. Round two, which took place on October 1^st, was forensics based. Each team was given a compromised computer hard drive that they had to diagnose and analyze to determine what malicious activity had happened and how.

The final round of the competition will be held at the Baltimore Convention Center on October 21^st and 22^nd. There are currently 24 teams in the competition, 8 per division. The finals will consist of a computer defense exercise for high school students who must defend their systems against active attacks, while college and professional teams will participate in a penetration testing and forensics-oriented event where they examine, attack, and compromise assorted target systems in the exercise environment.  Included in those 24 finalists is UMBC’s own Cyber Defense Team, the Cyberdawgs.

“I really enjoy going to competitions, it gets me hyped and excited,” says Marc Warfield, Cyberdawgs president, a Junior pursuing his B.S. in Information Systems. “Overall I’m happy that we made it to the finals so that we can get more focus and hopefully members.”

In addition to the valuable experience, the competition boasts impressive scholarship awards for student winners courtesy of the National Security Agency (NSA). Competing High School and College students can potentially win $5,000 per person per team (1^st place) or $2,000 per person per team (2^nd place). Dr. Forno credits these generous sums to Caroline Baker, Director of Corporate Relations at UMBC, and the OIA group for their tenacious negotiations with NSA to make these scholarships possible.

The MDC3 finals are tied in with a two-day conference. Panels and lectures will feature topics like cloud computing, careers in cybersecurity, cybersecurity education, and the Cyber Maryland Initiative. The conference features experts in the field including Chris Inglis, Deputy Director of the NSA, Larry Clinton, President of the Internet Security Alliance, and Ira Winkler author of Spies Among Us.

The already explosive success of MDC3 suggests that chances are high for it to develop into an annual staple, which is Dr. Forno’s goal. “The whole idea behind this event was to get people excited and interested and to get people to pursue careers in cybersecurity because there is such a need for it now and going forward,” says Dr. Forno. “It also demonstrates UMBC’s entrepreneurial commitment to fostering cybersecurity and STEM education for Maryland’s current and future workforce.”

Excitement is definitely the response conveyed by teams like the Cyberdawgs. “It was a good learning experience, which is the best thing about these competitions,” says Warfield of the competition so far. But winning, of course, hasn’t been totally ignored. “I’m not going to promise anything,” says Warfield, “but I promise that we are going to try our best and hopefully bring home the championship to UMBC.”

Visit www. mdc3.org for more information and to register for the conference.

Sad news. Rob Pike reports on Google Plus that Dennis Ritchie died at his home this weekend after a long illness. Ritchie created the C programming language and was a key contributor to Unix. In 1983 he received the Turing Award with his long time colleague Ken Thompson for the development of operating systems theory and the implementation of the UNIX. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 and has received many other national and international awards, including the including the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, te National Medal of Technology and the Japan Prize.

Update 10/14: The New York Times published a story on Ritchie yesterday, Dennis Ritchie, Trailblazer in Digital Era, Dies at 70.

Update 10/15: In Dizzying but Invisible Depth, Jean-Baptiste Queru offers an interesting perspective on "why the mainstream press and the general population has talked so much about Steve Jobs' death and comparatively so little about Dennis Ritchie's".

Update 10/15: Bjarne Stroustrup on the importance of Ritchie’s contributions to our field: They said it couldn’t be done, and he did it.

Sad news. Rob Pike reports on Google Plus that Dennis Ritchie died at his home this weekend after a long illness. Ritchie created the C programming language and was a key contributor to Unix. In 1983 he received the Turing Award with his long time colleague Ken Thompson for the development of operating systems theory and the implementation of the UNIX. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 and has received many other national and international awards, including the including the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, te National Medal of Technology and the Japan Prize.

EE Graduate Seminar

Optical Sensors for Biotechnology and Bioengineering

Yordan Kostov, PhD
Research Associate Professor
UMBC Center for Advanced Sensor Technology

11:30am-12:45pm, Friday 14 October 2011, ITE 231

Interaction of the light with the matter is one of the fundamental interactions in the nature. It is used in a variety of fields, stretching from telecommunications to life sciences. In this talk, the use of luminescence for sensing purposes will be highlighted. In particular, fluorescence spectroscopy will be illustrated. Multiple examples that employ different characteristics of the fluorescence (excitation and emission spectrum, decay time, polarization, and combination thereof) will be given. The presented sensing principles are used for measurements of oxygen, pH, CO2, ethanol, etc. As an optical chemical sensor requires successful interweaving of elements from 5 different scientific areas (analytical chemistry, polymer science, optics, electronics and computer science), the problems and the requirements for system integration are discussed.

Dr. Yordan Kostov received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. with honors in 1987 from Department of Electrical Engineering, Odessa Politechnic Institute, Former USSR. He received a Ph.D. Degree in Electrical/Chemical Engineering from Bulgarian Academy of Sciences for his work in the area of optical chemical sensors and biosensors. After that, Dr. Kostov spent an year as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Technical Chemistry, University of Hanover, Germany. In 1994 he accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biotechincs, Sofia Technical University, Bulgaria. In 1999 he became a post-doctoral fellow at University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, at the Medical Biotechnology Center. He joined the UMBC Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering as a Research Assistant Professor in 2000, and is now Research Associate Professor since 2006. Dr. Kostov also holds a position as an Assistant Director of the Center for Advanced Sensor Technology at UMBC. He is involved in the development of chemical and biochemical sensors for biotechnology, bioengineering and biomedical applications.

Seminar Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

UMBC Alumni Association presents awards each year honoring alumni for their professional and personal achievements and service to the University. This year's Young Alumni Rising Star Award is being given to Delali Dzirasa (’04, Computer Engineering) who is the founder and president of Fearless Solutions, LLC.

While an undergraduate, Delali Dzirasa was a member of the inaugural entrepreneurship classes at UMBC, developing two companies before graduating. Today, he is founder and president of Fearless Solutions, a cybersecurity start-up housed at UMBC’s @bwtech cybersecurity research and technology park.

In addition to making waves in the Maryland cybersecurity community (Dzirasa recently met Maryland governor Martin O’Malley at UMBC’s Advantage Incubator launch), the two-year-old company employs a number of UMBC graduates and current students. In addition to serving as SGA speaker of the senate and helping to plan UMBC’s first Homecoming, Dzirasa also received the following honors as a student: Golden Key Honor Society (2001), Student Ambassador, Presidents Board of Visitors (2003), Most inspiring lead award (2003), USAA All American Scholar Award (2001), and NSBE Torchbearer Award for students possessing a GPA of 3.25 and above (2001). Following graduation, he worked at RABA technologies for fellow alumnus Rob Baruch.

Dzirasa is married to UMBC alumna Letitia Dzirasa ’03, biological sciences, and he has one son, Dominic Williams-Dzirasa. He follows in the footsteps of brothers Mawuli Dzirasa ’00, mechanical engineering, and Dr. Kafui Dzirasa ’01, chemical engineering, in graduating from UMBC. He enjoys giving back to the community within his church.

The 2011 awards will be presented on Thursday, October 14, 2011, at an awards ceremony in the Albin O. Kuhn Library on the UMBC campus. To attend, please RSVP online.

Each year, the UMBC Alumni Association presents awards to honor alumni for their professional and personal achievements and service to the University. The 2011 awards will be presented on Thursday, October 14, 2011, at an awards ceremony in the Albin O. Kuhn Library on the UMBC campus. To attend, please RSVP online.

This year's Alumnus of the Year for Engineering and Information Technology is Ralph Semmel (’92 Ph.D., Computer Science) who is currently the Director of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. As Director, Dr. Semmel leads the nation’s largest University Affiliated Research Center, which performs research and development on behalf of the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other Federal agencies. The Laboratory has more than 5,000 staff members, of whom more than two-thirds are engineers and scientists.

Prior to becoming Director, Dr. Semmel served as the founding Head of APL’s Applied Information Sciences Department and Infocentric Operations Business Area. Dr. Semmel also served in a variety of other executive and senior leadership positions at the Laboratory including Business Area Executive for Infocentric Operations, Assistant Head of the Power Projection Systems Department, Business Area Executive for Science and Technology, Deputy Director of the Research and Technology Development Center, and Supervisor of the System and Information Sciences Group. In addition to his APL responsibilities, Dr. Semmel served from 1997 through 2010 as Chair of the graduate programs in Computer Science, Information Assurance, and Information Systems Engineering for Johns Hopkins University’s Engineering for Professionals program. In 2011, he was appointed Professor of Computer Science at the University. Dr. Semmel also has been program co-chair and on the program committees for several major international conferences, and served on the editorial board of the International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering. He has published more than 40 papers in the areas of artificial intelligence, database systems, and software engineering.

Dr. Semmel also has led and continues to serve on a variety of Government science and technology boards, panels, and committees. Before joining the Laboratory in 1986, Dr. Semmel held leadership and technical positions with Wang Laboratories, MITRE Corporation, and the U.S. Army. Dr. Semmel received a B.S. in Engineering from the United States Military Academy, an M.S. in Systems Management from the University of Southern California, an M.S. in Computer Science from The Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMBC.

Dr. Semmel was the eleventh person to receive a Ph.D. in Computer Science for his dissertation entitled A knowledge-based approach to automated query formulation. His dissertation research, which was supervised by Professor James Mayfield, tackled the difficult problem of enabling people to access and query a large, complex databases without having to master the details of their internal structure and naming conventions. His approach combined a strong theoretical foundation with a collection of novel heuristics to produce a system that solved the problem and also supported effective and practical applications. He evaluated his work on a real database in use at the Space Telescope Science Institute that comprised nearly one hundred interconnected relational tables. This research was forward looking and one of the first to address problems that are just now becoming critical as the scale and availability of data has reached a tipping point. Companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM are now urgently tackling the same problems that Dr. Semmel first define and framed more than twenty years ago.

The Maryland Cyber Challenge & Conference (MDC3) will be held on Friday and Saturday, October 21-22 at the Baltimore Convention Center. See the Web site for the schedule and to register.

The MDC3 is open to anyone who’s interested in advancing, studying or working in the field of cybersecurity, including IT and cybersecurity professionals, corporate and government leaders, college and high school students, teachers, administrators and parents and cyber enthusiasts.

The MDC3 cyber challenge gives teams of high school students, college and university students, and professionals the opportunity to learn more about cybersecurity and develop practical skills for defending computers while competing for scholarships in a fun environment. The MDC3 conference features government and industry leaders, breakout sessions and cyber innovation exhibits for an audience of students, parents and professionals from academia, industry and government.

MDC3 was founded by Science Applications International Corporation and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in partnership with the Department of Business & Economic Development, the Tech Council of Maryland and the National Cyber Security Alliance with the goal of encouraging Maryland students and young professionals to pursue education and careers in cybersecurity.

Google unveiled its new web programming language Dart today. It's described as a "class-based optionally typed programming language for building web applications". Dart has a native virtual machine and can also be compiled into JavaScript, allowing it to run on current browser. Google says it it exploring adding the Dart virtual machine to the Chrome Browser.

Dart's syntax is familiar, if boring, making it easy for current programmers to adapt.

main() {
      var name = 'World';
      print('Hello, $name!');
    }
    

The source code for the Dart to javascript compiler as well as examples and tools is available online in the Dart Google Code Site.

Google hopes that Dart will replace JavaScript as the main built-in scripting language in web browsers. The design goals for the new language are said to include fixing many of Javascript's flaws, better performance, better support for large-scale projects" and improved security features.

WIle Dart doesn't push the programming language envelope, it looks like a welcome improvement over Javascript.

Google unveiled its new web programming language Dart today. It's described as a "class-based optionally typed programming language for building web applications". Dart has a native virtual machine and can also be compiled into JavaScript, allowing it to run on current browser. Google says it it exploring adding the Dart virtual machine to the Chrome Browser.

Dart's syntax is familiar, if boring, making it easy for current programmers to adapt.

main() {
      var name = 'World';
      print('Hello, $name!');
    }
    

The source code for the Dart to javascript compiler as well as examples and tools is available online in the Dart Google Code Site.

Google hopes that Dart will replace JavaScript as the main built-in scripting language in web browsers. The design goals for the new language are said to include fixing many of Javascript's flaws, better performance, better support for large-scale projects" and improved security features.

WIle Dart doesn't push the programming language envelope, it looks like a welcome improvement over Javascript.