Made possible by a sponsorship from Google, the University of Maryland, the alma mater of Google Co-Founder and President Sergey Brin, today announced the creation of a new cybersecurity seminar series that will feature a diverse group of speakers from industry, academia, and government, addressing a broad range of topics related to cybersecurity, including technology, policy, and economics. Google has committed to a three-year sponsorship series, which will feature three seminars per semester, with a total of six per year, that will examine the impact that cybersecurity threats and protective measures are having on privacy, identity, social networks, business and national security.
The new series will be organized by the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC-squared), a multidisciplinary initiative at the University of Maryland aimed at research, education, and technology development in cybersecurity. MC-squared brings together faculty experts from engineering and computer science with colleagues from across campus in fields such as information sciences, business, public policy, social sciences and economics, mirroring the comprehensive perspective of the new seminar series that places special emphasis on “the human factor” of cybersecurity.
The series will kick off with a special talk by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google and the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocol, on Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 5:00 p.m. on the University of Maryland’s College Park campus. The title of his talk will be “Can We Make the Internet Safer?” and the event will be held in the Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building Rotunda.
The second seminar will be held on Thursday, April 21, at 5:00 p.m., and will feature Martin Roesch, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Sourcefire and inventor of the open source Snort Intrusion Prevention system. Roesch’s talk will be “Intrusion Detection and Network Security Perspectives From A Veteran.”
The third and final spring seminar will be held in June. An announcement regarding the speaker, date, and location will be made in late April.
The University of Maryland offers an ideal location for seminars about the nation’s growing needs in cybersecurity. The State of Maryland leads the nation in information technology jobs and more than half of the nation’s Internet traffic passes through the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. The region is also home to U.S. Cyber Command and key federal agencies that focus on national cybersecurity, along with many area companies specializing in information assurance.
“This important sponsorship will allow us to bring a wide variety of distinguished speakers from across the nation to speak about the importance of cybersecurity and its impact on our society,” said Prof. Patrick O’Shea, Co-Director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center and Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Maryland. “We are very grateful to Google for supporting our new cybersecurity seminar series.”
Guests can register to attend seminars and learn more at www.cyber.umd.edu.