bwtech@UMBC’s Cyber Incubator Wins Award

bwtech@UMBC’s Cyber Incubator won SmartCEO’s 2013 VOLTAGE Award for Emerging Technology Implementer. 

 

From UMBC to the World

Over Spring Break, a group of Chemical, Biochemical and Environmental Engineering students, Aaron Gibson, Dagmawi Tilahun, Kevin Tran, and Don Wong, led by Professor Govind Rao, and accompanied by Dr. Theresa Good and Ms. Geetha Ram, went to India in order to get end user data for a low cost neonatal incubator the team is developing for use in resource-poor environments.

If you listen to the students, they’ll tell you the project started in Professor Rao’s 2011 Sensors class, a senior elective, where students learned that over 340 neonates die an hour in their first week of life, with 99% of those deaths occurring in low and middle income countries. Most of those deaths could be prevented if appropriate technology were available.

Professor Rao challenged the class to develop incubators that would work in these resource limited environments, where electricity might only be available for 8 hours a day, and salaries might be less than $6 a day. A few students from that class have continued to work with Professor Rao on this project funded by National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance which has culminated in the trip to India, where students met with rural health care workers in the Mysore region in Southern India, to ensure that they design a low cost incubator that will meet the needs of the local population. They visited several rural health care providers and have now partnered with an incubator manufacturer (Phoenix Medical Systems) and a health care provider (Karuna Trust) to take the concept to reality. Of course, we couldn’t leave India without seeing a few famous wonders of the world – the trip to the Taj Mahal was a gift from Professor Rao to the students and his colleagues. It was breathtaking.

GES Seminar: Justice Matters

The Department  of Geography and Environmental Systems presents our next seminar of the 2012-2013 academic year, presented by:

Dr. Barbara Allen
Director, Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies
Dept. of Science and Technology in Society
Virginia Tech-National Capital Region Campus (Falls Church)

Justice Matters: Measuring the Success of NGOs in Sustainable Disaster Rebuilding

WHEN: Wednesday, April 10 at noon
WHERE: Sondheim 001

For more information, contact Andrew Miller at miller@umbc.edu.

Rick Forno, Cybersecurity, on The World

Earlier this week, a security research company released a report providing technical documentation and near-certain proof that China is engaging in cyber-espionage activities against the US.  While that’s not exactly a new discovery, it provided a much deeper degree of public information used in presenting its findings.

On Public Radio International’s program, The World UMBC’s Rick Forno discussed the report’s implications.

Forno says he was on the program to discuss American cybersecurity readiness in light of the heightened media interest in cybersecurity following the report’s release.

The fact that the networks and our critical infrastructure systems are still vulnerable after years of analysis and public warnings about their security posture said Forno, “is still very disturbing.”

“Those systems that we view as critical national infrastructures [such as those controlling power and water distribution] he said, “should be separated from the public internet.” But he adds, “When rubber meets the road [in terms of American cybersecurity] I don’t see a lot of improvements.”

The U.S.,” he said, “has the most vulnerable cybersecurity infrastructure on the planet.”

Listen to the interview 

UMBC Chess Team Travels to Maryland State House

Earlier this month UMBC’s chess team was formally recognized on the floor of the Maryland State Senate and the House with a citation from Speaker Pro Tem Adrienne Jones (UMBC, ’76, psychology) UMBC Associate Vice President Lisa Akchin represented Dr. Hrabowski.

The UMBC team then played a friendly match with the members of the Maryland General Assembly Chess Challenge.

“It was a great experience to be recognized by the House of Senate and the House of Delegates. After being awarded we ended up playing for about two hours games with some of the senators, said Sabina Foisor, a member of the team and a graduate student at UMBC.

According to Collin Wojciechowski, a senior and UMBC government relations assistant, the event did not consist of any tournament style play but instead each student played a legislator multiple times. “From what I saw,” says Wojciechowski, “a legislator never won a game.”

Many members of the General Assembly trickled in and out of the room throughout the night, with a few playing only a game and then leaving, but those who were a central part of the tournament and stayed the whole time were:

• Senator Ulysses Currie
• Senator Jamie Raskin
• Senator Bryan Simonaire

“We all had a good time and hope to be able to do it again,” said Foisor.

About the UMBC Chess Team

The UMBC chess team recently tied for first place in the Pan-Am Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship, advancing to the 2013 President’s Cup, known as the “Final Four” of chess.

The UMBC chess team headed into the 2012 Pan-Am Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship with a record nine titles to its name. The competition known informally as the Pan-Am, was held December 27 to 30 in Princeton, New Jersey. Since the tournament began in 1946, dozens of universities throughout the Americas have participated. The Retrievers won their first Pan-Am title in 1996, and then embarked on a five-year title streak from 1998 to 2002.

This year, the Retrievers tied for first place with 3 other Universities: University of Texas, Dallas; Webster University, which had 2 teams; and the University of Illinois. “It was an exciting finish. This was the strongest Pan Am in the history of the event. Twenty – three grandmasters as well as 5 teams rated over 2500 competed,” says Alan Sherman, Director of the UMBC Chess Program.

The UMBC team, all on chess scholarships, is composed of students not only with exceptional chess skills but also with strong academic records, Sherman says. UMBC requires students to maintain a 3.0 GPA to maintain chess scholarships. The Retrievers last won the Pan-Am title in 2009, and took second last year. This year’s team will compete in the 2012 President’s Cup, the “Final Four of College Chess,” to be held in April 6-7, 2013 in Herndon, Va.

Kevin Omland, Biological Sciences, Featured in the Baltimore Sun

“As the Baltimore Ravens’ march to victory in Super Bowl XLVII defied the common wisdom of the sports world, so, too, has an examination of the genetics of their winged namesakes in the western United States led one local biologist to evidence he says defies the common wisdom of his field,” writes reporter Arthur Hirsch in the February 17th edition of the Baltimore Sun.

Hirsch’s story follows the work of Kevin Omland, Professor of Biological Sciences here at UMBC. Omland who has been working for the past 15 years on reverse speciation of ravens.

Vist the Baltimore Sun to learn more about Omland’s work.

Maricel Kann, Translational Bioinformatics

Maricel Kann, assistant professor in the department of biological sciences, recently published a new online book, Translational Bioinformatics on PLOS-CB (first open access book in PLOS.)  

This is a great resource for our students, the textbook is a good introduction to many of the topics in the emerging field of Translational Bioinformatics, and it is free to all, says Kann.

The e-pub file is downloadable from the collection page:

www.ploscollections.org/translationalbioinformatics

It’s also in mobi format for Kindle users. If you don’t have an ipad/tablet/ereader to view the epub or mobi file on, you should be able to view it on Firefox if you download this add-on:  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/epubreader/

UMBC Chess Team Ties for First Place Following the “World Series of Chess”

Credit: Marlayna Demond

“The University of Maryland, Baltimore County chess team tied four other college teams for first place at the Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship on Sunday — maintaining its record as one of two colleges with the most top finishes in the history of the international event,” wrote Kevin Rector in the Baltimore Sun.

The UMBC chess team tied for first place December 30, 2012 in the Pan-Am Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship, advancing to the 2013 President’s Cup, known as the “Final Four” of chess.

The team headed into the 2012 Pan-Am Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship with a record nine titles to its name. The competition known informally as the Pan-Am, was held December 27 to 30 in Princeton, New Jersey. Since the tournament began in 1946, dozens of universities throughout the Americas have participated. The Retrievers won their first Pan-Am title in 1996, and then embarked on a five-year title streak from 1998 to 2002.

This year, the Retrievers tied for first place with 3 other Universities: University of Texas, Dallas; Webster University, which had 2 teams; and the University of Illinois.
“It was an exciting finish. This was the strongest Pan Am in the history of the event. Twenty – three grandmasters as well as 5 teams rated over 2500 competed,” says Alan Sherman, Director of the UMBC Chess Program.

The UMBC team, all on chess scholarships, is composed of students not only with exceptional chess skills but also with strong academic records, Sherman says. UMBC requires students to maintain a 3.0 GPA to maintain chess scholarships.
The Retrievers last won the Pan-Am title in 2009, and took second last year. This year’s team will compete in the 2012 President’s Cup, the “Final Four of College Chess,” to be held in April 6-7, 2013 in Herndon, Va.

Hillol Kargupta, Professor of Computer Science, Wins 2012 10-Year ICDM Highest-Impact Paper Award

Hillol Kargupta, professor of computer science, is the winner of the 2012 10-Year ICDM Highest-Impact Paper Award for the ICDM 2003 paper on “On the Privacy Preserving Properties of Random Data Perturbation Techniques.” Researchers, Souptik Datta (UMBC), Qi Wang (Washington State University), and Krishnamoorthy Sivakumar (Washington State University), were also authors on the paper.

ICDM is the premier international conference on data mining (with an acceptance ratio of approx. 8-12% in the last ten years). The 10-Year ICDM Highest-Impact Paper Award is awarded every year since 2010. The first ICDM was held in 2001.

Josiah Dykstra, Ph.D. Student in Computer Science, Wins Award for Best Case Study

Josiah Dykstra, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science, won the Outstanding Case Study Award for 2012 of the The American Academy of Forensic Sciences, based on his presentation of a paper by Dykstra and his advisor Alan Sherman,
published in the Journal of Network Forensics. Dykstra will accept the award in February at the Academy’s annual meeting.