Data Mining Still Needs a Clue to Be Effective
Washington Post (06/19/06) P. A8; Gugliotta, Guy
Over the past two decades, the capability of data mining techniques has
improved dramatically, though it remains uncertain if they have progressed
to the point where they will be of significant aid to security agencies in
their fight against terrorism. Data mining experts are skeptical if the
NSA will be able to extract meaningful data from its repository of some 2
trillion phone call records without a meaningful lead. The most effective
approach would be to trace the calls of suspected terrorists to build a web
of contacts, rather than looking for suspicious call patterns by mining raw
data. That strategy would almost inevitably intrude on the records of
law-abiding citizens, wasting time while raising troublesome privacy
concerns, experts warn. "When they look at a map of phone numbers, they
have no idea what's going on," said Valdis Krebs, a data mining expert.
"It might not be a bad person you find; it may be that the soccer team and
the softball team are calling the same pizza parlor." At his confirmation
hearing as CIA director, former NSA director Michael Hayden told the Senate
that analysts use targeting to search the database, suggesting that the
agency is looking for specific phone numbers of suspected terrorists to
develop a communication pattern that ensnares other suspects. The strategy
of starting a search with a known telephone number is very much in line
with traditional police work, where investigators begin with a hard fact
and work backward to find the information needed to form a case. Going in
the other direction, analysts could use sophisticated computers to detect
unusual patterns in a massive database to identify potential suspects,
though experts warn that such a method would be likely to produce false
positives. Some experts believe that pattern making can still be a useful
intelligence tool, though it would require analysts of extraordinary talent
to detect meaningful patterns without creating false positives.
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ICTs -- the Glue That Binds Future Research
IST Results (06/19/06)
The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics is
leading the Beyond-the-Horizon project, an initiative exploring new
directions for research in information and communication technologies
(ICT). "ICTs provide the glue that binds together multiple themes in
European research. The time to address this multiplicity of themes and
their inter-relationships is now," said Dimitris Plexousakis, the project's
scientific coordinator. In addition to creating a roadmap for ICT
development, the project will also identify the intersection with other
disciplines and explore the opportunities for cross-fertilization. Such an
interdisciplinary approach can shift government and corporate policy, in
addition to bringing about major technological breakthroughs in fields as
far-reaching as psychology and materials science. The continued scaling of
chip sizes, for instance, will require advances in both materials and chip
design, in addition to alternative computing techniques, such as quantum
computing, notes Plexousakis. The program is also finding models in the
biological world for new methods of processing information and dealing with
increasingly complex systems. The Beyond-the-Horizon project is
specifically targeting high-risk, high-reward research, going further than
previous ICT roadmap projects. The project divided its work into six areas
of concentration: pervasive computing, nanotechnology, security,
intelligent systems, software-intensive systems, and technologies inspired
by the biological world. Plexousakis says the project's most important
discovery has been the value of interdisciplinary research, citing the
symbiotic relationship that ICT enjoys with the biological sciences. "The
need for interdisciplinary research if we are to make progress is far
greater than we imagined at the beginning of the project," he said.
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Research Explores Data Mining, Privacy
Associated Press (06/17/06) Bergstein, Brian
With the recent disclosure about the extent of the government's
surveillance programs raising a fresh spate of privacy concerns, computer
scientists are beginning to explore data mining techniques that would
protect individuals' identities. Researchers claim that by using
cryptography, they can protect the names and other identifying details of
call records while still enabling intelligence agencies and private
businesses to comb through massive databases. That way the government
could use computers to compare airline passenger registries with terrorist
watch lists while shielding the passengers' names from individual agents,
for example. The government has been using encryption for years, though
the focus has primarily been to protect classified information, rather than
to conceal individual identities. Even the Pentagon's Total Information
Awareness program, a highly controversial and now-defunct initiative, used
anonymizing technologies, though they have since been dropped while other
parts of the program are still in tact. Panels appointed to consider the
implications of data mining have routinely endorsed anonymizing
technologies, and researchers have been developing systems that include
technologies such as record anonymization, user audit logs to keep track of
who has accessed the records, and other privacy applications. Simply
removing a caller's name is not enough, claims Latanya Sweeney of Carnegie
Mellon University, whose research has shown that records listing birthdate,
gender, and ZIP code can be used to identify 87 percent of Americans.
Sweeney developed a solution with an irreversible hash function that
cryptographically converts data into random letters and numbers. Sweeney
designed her system to help the government track the homeless, using
algorithms to ensure that one person's name would not be translated into
identical code from multiple shelters.
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Joe Costello to Keynote Monday Opening of Design
Automation Conference
Business Wire (06/12/06)
Orb Networks Chairman Joe Costello will kick off this year's Design
Automation Conference (DAC) with a keynote address entitled "iPod or
Iridium: Which One Are You Going to Be?" Costello, the former CEO of
Cadence Design Systems, says the EDA industry is investing heavily in
multimedia technologies, with companies working to position themselves as
leading suppliers of gaming and entertainment applications. Co-sponsored
by ACM/SIGDA, the DAC has traditionally focused on specific technologies
and design issues, but Costello's speech will provide a macro perspective,
identifying the broad consumer trends that are reshaping the industry.
Costello will ask his audience if they are moving in the right direction
with their own projects, challenging them to assess how attuned they are to
what their customers really want. Costello will give his address on
Monday, July 24, and admission will be free for all conference attendees as
part of the DAC's Free Monday Program. For more on DAC, or to register,
visit
http://www.dac.com/43rd/index.html
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Workers Must Ensure That IT Skills Meet Business
Requirements
Computing (06/15/06) Flood, Sally
Although the United Kingdom is producing nearly three times the number of
IT graduates that it did 10 years ago, firms are increasingly looking to
outsource graduate-level positions to overseas workers. The Confederation
of British Industry (CBI) reports that China and India are both producing
far more graduates in technical fields than the United Kingdom. "We are
beginning to see U.K. companies saying it makes sense to source graduates
internationally, particularly from China and India," said the CBI's John
Cridland. "The declining numbers of U.K. students isn't yet a crisis, but
it will haunt us unless we address it now." Part of the problem is that
graduates from U.K. universities often lack the skills in demand among
businesses, and that university education today is too general, according
to Denise Plumpton, who chairs the Infrastructure Forum. Many graduates
are disappointed with their own education as they find that without the
necessary grounding in basic mathematics and science that it is difficult
to compete with their foreign counterparts. U.K. companies report that
they are less interested in a candidate's academic background than they are
with practical experience and a well-rounded background. The picture for
up-and-coming U.K. tech professionals is not all sour, as demand for
professionals in fields such as VoIP, Linux, and Microsoft Office has been
on the rise, as has the number of IT management positions, largely
propelled by government projects. While salaries for strictly technical
positions have dropped, demand for IT professionals with business skills
has been increasing. Professionals with project management skills are also
expected to be a hot commodity in the coming years, as are candidates with
experience negotiating contracts. The emphasis on business skills does not
entirely negate the value of technical expertise, particularly in hot
fields such as wireless networking, security, and network management.
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Why We Must Protect Internet Neutrality
Wall Street Journal (06/18/06) P. A11; Wyden, Ron
In response to Steve Forbes' June 12 editorial that net neutrality
regulations would stifle Internet innovation, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)
writes that "net neutrality has been fundamental to the development of the
Internet, and net neutrality protection is critical for the Internet to
continue to meet its innovative promise." The author refutes Forbes'
assertion that proof of discrimination by Internet providers is nonexistent
with examples that include Cox Communications' blockage of customers'
access to the competing Web site craigslist.org. Wyden also counters
Forbes' claim that U.S. consumer broadband services have slipped behind
other countries' offerings because of 1996 Telecommunications Act
regulations that forced telecom companies to supply network access to
rivals. "To the contrary, policies that spurred competition, including
forcing incumbents to provide network access to competitors, are exactly
what drove the rapid broadband deployment in South Korea and Japan," the
congressman contends. Wyden charges that Forbes, along with many other
critics of net neutrality, wrongly compare such regulations to the post
office making consumers pay different rates for regular mail and overnight
delivery. "Rather, net neutrality would protect the person who pays for
overnight delivery from having it take five days for his package to be
delivered because the person receiving it did not pay for receiving
overnight delivery as well," the senator argues. "Internet providers want
to prevent consumers who pay for priority delivery of data from receiving
the data unless Web sites also pay for priority delivery. Net neutrality
protections would prevent them from doing so."
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Web Visionary James A. Hendler Will Lead Tetherless World
Research Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rensselaer News (06/14/06)
Semantic Web pioneer James A. Hendler will leave the University of
Maryland to head the Tetherless World Research Constellation at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute next year. Hendler, currently director of the Joint
Institute for Knowledge Discovery and co-director of the Maryland
Information and Network Dynamics (MIND) Laboratory at Maryland, will join
Rensselaer Jan. 1, 2007, as senior constellation professor. The Tetherless
World Research Constellation is focused on making it easier to access
information at any time and place without being tethered to a specific
computer or handheld device. A tetherless Web would extend the network by
giving computers a better understanding of the meaning and context of
words. Bringing new information resources, such as databases from Internet
business or biology research, to the Web would make it more usable and
searchable, Hendler says. "My research focuses on what might be called
'Web science'--understanding the Web in its full richness, exploring the
underlying technologies that make it work and its social and policy
implications, and developing new technologies to keep the Web growing ever
more useful as it reaches further into our lives," he says. "As a simple
example, imagine being able to search the Web for 'the scene where the guy
throws his hat at a statue and its head falls off' and finding the right
clip from the movie Goldfinger to download to your hand-held video
device."
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Informatics Researchers Study Cell Phone
Disruptions
Indiana Daily Student (06/15/06) Ferenc, Luke
New research from the Indiana University School of Informatics could prove
to be helpful for designers of context-aware telephony. In a study of 20
cell phone users who were randomly called over a period of 10 days,
informatics assistant professor Kay Connelly and computer science doctoral
student Ashraf Khalil found that 57 percent of incoming calls came during
improper times. However, the availability of the receiver was heavily
dependent on the relationship that the individual has with the caller,
according to their study. The researchers found that the cell phone users
had an availability rate of 75 percent for a spouse or significant other,
68 percent for friends, 63 percent for family members, 50 percent for
bosses, 47 percent for colleagues, and 39 percent for unknown calls.
Designers in Europe are currently testing the Wireless Application
Protocol, context-aware telephony technology that will allow people to
provide availability information to callers through a phone interface.
Connelly notes that cell phone users may not want to disclose their status
to all callers, which may lessen the efficiency of the technology. "When
people are concerned about privacy, they will selectively remove contexts
from their disclosure list rather than disclose no context at all," says
Connelly.
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Futuristic Optical System Tackles Image Processing
Network World (06/15/06) Marsan, Carolyn Duffy
Researchers under the direction of the University of California at San
Diego and the University of Illinois are developing an IP-based optical
networking system that will enable scientists to conduct visual analysis of
large volumes of data distributed over multiple locations. The federally
funded project, known as the OptIPuter, is aimed at applications in the
earth, oceanographic, and biological sciences where researchers have vast
troves of images that require analysis. "We are removing bandwidth as an
obstacle in data-intensive sciences," said Maxine Brown, a project manager
for OptIPuter. "With our system, the network is a backplane, not a
network." Scientists in those data-intensive disciplines require
guarantees for bandwidth, latency, and scheduling for their processing
jobs, Brown said in a briefing on the project at the TeraGrid '06
conference in Indianapolis this week. To that end, the OptIPuter is a
giant cluster of computers, with each node connected directly to a
backplane by a 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps Ethernet, functioning essentially as a
parallel computer. Each processor actually represents a cluster of
computers, with large data repositories as memory. Delivered by numerous
dedicated lambdas, conventional IP powers the OptIPuter's motherboard.
Sophisticated middleware and application toolkits handle the processing
over the clusters. Researchers in Illinois and California have deployed a
prototype of the system on campus, municipal, and statewide optical
networks.
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UNC Charlotte College of IT Seeks Diversity in Computing
Industry
University of North Carolina, Charlotte (06/02/06)
Fearing a shortage of qualified U.S. IT workers, the NSF has awarded the
University of North Carolina, Charlotte, a $2 million grant to help attract
women and minorities to IT. A potential worker shortage is exacerbated by
the perception among college students that IT is a dying industry, a myth
that keeps many from pursuing IT as a career. Many women and minorities
are deterred by the reputation of the IT worker as a solitary misfit who
spends his life bound to a computer, staring for hours on end at a screen
in glassy-eyed silence. "Not so," says Teresa Dahlberg, associate
professor of computer science at UNCC. "The IT industry needs a diverse
range of people with interpersonal skills, not just geeks and coders. We
need people who can solve problems; people with soft skills; people who can
apply social value to computing." The NSF grant comes under the agency's
Broadening Participation in Computing Program, which is striving to boost
interest in computing at all levels of higher education. Assisting with
the program are 10 universities in the STARS (Students and Technology in
Academia, Research, and Service) Alliance, which will be under the
direction of UNCC. The alliance partners will be organized into five
regional hubs that are collaborating on a Student Leadership Corps to serve
as a liaison among faculty, students, industry, and the community. Through
a variety of outreach programs, such as peer mentoring and community tech
support, the corps will attempt to recruit students who would not otherwise
pursue a technical course of study. "Information technology is vital to
our country's success, comprising 14 percent of our nation's exports and a
disproportionate 27 percent share of our GDP growth," said Janet Wylie,
president and CEO of Engineous Software. "We need programs like this to
inform and inspire our young people to take this path in their education
and careers."
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Delivering DVDs in Seconds
Technology Review (06/19/06) Greene, Kate
Japan's NTT DoCoMo has tweaked two technologies to achieve wireless
transmissions of 2.5 Gbps second to a mobile device moving at 20 kilometers
per hour in a demonstration. Even if a fraction of the speed can be
achieved in real-life scenarios, the prototype promises to revolutionize
the use of wireless devices, heralding a day when cell phones supplant PCs,
as is already occurring in some Asian nations. DoCoMo's boosted speed was
made possible by multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) technology that
uses multiple antennas to send and receive data and quadrature amplitude
modulation (QAM), which increase the number of bits that a radio wave
contains. In the demonstration, six antennas and an advanced form of QAM
that adjusted the amplitude and phase of radio waves to 64 varying levels
were used. But real-world use of the technology is hampered a lack of
technical capabilities as well as 4G standards and an unwillingness by
vendors to shell out the money until 3G's potential is reached. Analysts
predict adoption, in the United States at least, is still several years
away but will surely come. "Voice was the killer app for the first and
second generations of phones," says Bill Krenik of Texas Instruments. "For
a while we thought the Internet would be it for the third generation; now I
think we're maturing as an industry and realizing that there really isn't
[another] killer app--with high-speed data, it's a killer experience."
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A Logical Approach to Computer Security
Berkeley Engineering Lab Notes (06/06) Vol. 6, No. 3,Pescovitz, David
Current virus-detection software is not intelligent enough to defend
against today's threats, says Sanjit Seshia, a computer scientist at the
University of California, Berkeley, who is researching the application of
computational logic to model behavioral patterns of viruses and detect new
threats that today's technology could miss. Virus-scanning software
currently matches the signature of an email attachment or an Internet
download with that of known viruses. These packages rely on what is known
as a syntactical approach, which scans code for specific sequences of bits.
"It turns out that current virus scanners are quite easy to fool," Seshia
says. "Malware writers obfuscate their code so that a signature that works
today won't work tomorrow for what's essentially the same virus. So
anti-virus companies are always trying to track the latest variants of
viruses and worms and making sure people download the latest signatures to
keep their definitions of viruses up to date." Seshia and his colleagues
are developing semantic algorithms that interpret the meaning of the code
to detect even well-disguised malware. "We're trying to develop a more
behavioral definition of what it means to be malicious," Seshia says.
"Perhaps it deletes files on your hard drive or duplicates itself and
emails copies to everyone in your address book." By defining a virus's
behavioral structure, the researchers created a template that can represent
a wide array of programs. The algorithm compares the template with a set
of unknown instruction sequences and scans for red flags. Seshia is also
exploring the application of computational logic to hardware design.
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Code Breaking New Ground
Government Computer News (06/12/06) Vol. 25, No. 15,Beizer, Doug
To ensure that government agencies are using the most sophisticated
encryption technologies available, the Defense Department and the National
Security Agency have implemented an ongoing program called the
Cryptographic Modernization Initiative. "In the encryption world--probably
on a timeframe of every seven to 10 years--there's a need for new
encryption algorithms," said SafeNet Chairman Anthony Caputo. "Because
every year the enemy or hackers' tools are getting better, so periodically
you have to increase the strength of the encryption algorithms." The main
objectives of encryption are to keep data confidential, authenticate the
sender of a message, and to ensure that the data have not been altered.
The Advanced Description Algorithm, which has a 128-bit fixed block, has a
key size of 128, 192, or 256 bits. Defense Department encryption
technologies use hardware that encrypts a sender's message and then
translates it for the recipient. The NSA has authorized SafeNet to develop
a classified version of the SafeEnterprise Sonet Encryptor with a network
speed of 10 Gbps. While typical Internet applications rely on
software-based encryption, it is widely recognized in the cryptography
community that hardware encryption is more secure, because hardware
protects both the algorithm and the encryption key. The government
requires encryption to protect sensitive information such as tax records,
though some are now looking to apply the technology to e-voting systems.
One of the technologies that the NSA has been encouraging companies to
develop is a cryptography technology called elliptical curve, which is
patterned after the algebraic structure of elliptical curves.
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Bridging Technologies for More Accessible Wireless
Services
IST Results (06/16/06)
The End-to-End Reconfigurability consortium, comprised of 32 mostly
European members, aims to make emerging wireless technologies interoperable
for seamless communications across disparate networks at minimum cost to
vendors and maximum ease for consumers. "We are working to build bridges
between technologies, so that users can roam freely between services and
environments they want to access, anywhere, anytime," says project manager
Didier Bourse of Motorola. "The consortium is working to optimize
networks' use of resources through advanced radio resource and flexible
spectrum management. For example, they could move GSM or UMTS access to
another frequency band, to improve efficiency," which could take 10 to 15
years to achieve. Bourse says the consortiums' work will impact the future
design of radio telephones capable of automatically downloading new device
management settings to upgrade configurations. The project is part of the
Wireless World Initiative funded by the IST.
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Signals and Noise
National Journal (06/17/06) Vol. 38, No. 24, P. 50; Harris, Shane
The National Security Agency (NSA) has adopted many aspects of Retired
Rear Admiral John Poindexter's much-maligned Total Information Awareness
(TIA) program under the auspices of its Research Development and
Experimental Collaboration (RDEC) project, which demonstrates similar
thinking between Poindexter and former NSA director Michael Hayden, who
were pursuing separate efforts to build early-warning systems to pre-empt
terrorist attacks in response to the 9/11 tragedy. The focus of TIA was
the scanning and mining of Americans' electronic transactions to uncover
signs of terrorist activity, while the purpose of the NSA effort is to
collect millions of Americans' call records and emails to facilitate
warrantless communications surveillance. Both initiatives were the targets
of intense criticism from lawmakers and civil liberties advocates, which
led to Poindexter's resignation as TIA director and later the cessation of
TIA's funding in the Defense Department budget. However, some parts of the
project were allowed to continue using classified funds. NSA joined the
TIA network in late 2002 when officials from both agencies conferred and
realized they shared similar goals. The following year the NSA's Advanced
Research and Development Activity (ARDA) started to assume control of TIA,
jettisoning research into privacy protection and the establishment of audit
trails, but keeping the TIA experimental network under the RDEC name.
Former TIA deputy director Robert Popp acknowledges the plausibility that
some of the TIA-developed tools and technologies could find roles in the
NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.
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Lights Out
Federal Computer Week (06/12/06) Vol. 20, No. 19, P. 32; Robinson, Brian
Although the nation's fiber-optic network is becoming increasingly
important as a communications medium for the government and much of the
U.S. economy, some experts claim it is too insecure to withstand threats
from eavesdroppers or terrorists. Oyster Optics CEO Seth Page says the
nation's fiber infrastructure is vulnerable to hackers who can tap fiber
with common maintenance tools that are available around the world. "This
same equipment with modifications can be used to capture 100 percent of the
voice, video, and data going across the network," Page said. "All you need
to do is get access to the fiber loop serving a particular building." Page
added that even if an organization encrypts data and a hacker does not have
the means to decrypt it, the hacker would simply need to access the
unencrypted packet headers--which contain information about phone numbers,
IP addresses, and the fiber service provider--traveling on the fiber. The
hacker could save the rest of the data and attempt to decrypt it later, he
said. However, other experts say that while tapping fiber certainly is
possible, it is not a simple job. Analyst Frank Dzubeck noted that in
order for a hacker to detect light from a fiber passively, he would have to
use specialty equipment that is not available on the open market. Despite
the concerns of some experts, organizations such as the U.S. Cyber
Consequences Unit (US-CCU)--an independent research group that advises the
Homeland Security Department--do not seem to be worried about the security
of the nation's fiber-optic network. US-CCU did not include the fiber
infrastructure in a recent draft of cybersecurity issues checklist it gave
to DHS, although it will probably investigate the issue later, said US-CCU
Director Scott Borg.
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Engineering Life: Building a Fab for Biology
Scientific American (06/06) Vol. 294, No. 6, P. 44; Baker, David; Church,
George; Collins, Jim
The Bio Fab Group reports that breakthroughs in electronic engineering can
help cultivate the maturation of the biotechnology industry. They point to
the development of a semiconductor chip "fab" system through flexible and
dependable chip fabrication technology, design libraries, and standardized
techniques, which allowed engineers to produce hugely sophisticated and
powerful electronic devices with a wide array of applications. Biological
engineers could similarly design, construct, and manage complex devices
fashioned from organic components by taking a fab approach, and the Bio Fab
Group is working to identify and create a "bio fab's" underlying equipment
and methods. The researchers have devised releasable parallel synthesis
and error correction technologies to greatly enhance the yield,
reliability, speed, and affordability of DNA strand manufacturing; these
technologies could, for example, enable a methodology for synthesizing DNA
and novel proteins that can fight a wide array of diseases more efficiently
and effectively. Bio Fab Group members are also looking for the biological
equivalents of basic electronic circuit elements and collating them into a
library of "BioBricks" that could be used to engineer new and more complex
devices, such as a multicellular system that can sense the presence of
explosives and transmit an alert. "As with semiconductor circuitry, this
approach has the added benefit of allowing us to optimize interactions
between parts and to anticipate bugs," says the Bio Fab Group. "This
ability grows increasingly useful as the constructed systems become
increasingly complex."
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