E-Voting Systems 'Hacked' for Flaws
San Jose Mercury News (CA) (07/23/07) Harmon, Steven
As part of a "top-to-bottom" review ordered by California's Secretary of
State Debra Bowen, several computer scientists recently finished two months
of testing to see if the state's touch-screen voting machines should be
certified for use in the upcoming elections. The testing included general
hacking and attempts to manipulate the voting systems. Bowen is expected
to give a report on Aug. 3, six months before the Feb. 5 presidential
primaries, but election officials are worried that there may not be enough
time if the systems are determined to be vulnerable. The level of testing
Bowen's hackers put the machines through is unprecedented and went farther
than any other state or federal testing of electronic voting machines,
according to Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation.
"Previous testing looked at whether the systems work the way vendors said
they're supposed to work," Alexander says. "It didn't include scenarios
that would crop up in real elections, such as a software attack or the
taking down of a polling place through technical manipulation." County
registrars are worried that the decertification of any of the machines
could lead to a shortage of machines on election day and some criticized
the testing process as unnecessary. "Show me where the systems have
actually been hacked and where votes have been changed," says Contra Costa
Country registrar and California Association of Clerks and Election
Officials president Stephen Weir. "There's no evidence of it." Weir also
says the tests did not account for the defenses that clerks set up to
prevent security breaches. For information on ACM's e-voting activities,
visit
http://www.acm.org/usacm
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Humans Narrowly Beat Computer in Poker Battle
Middle East Times (07/25/07)
Computer scientists are lauding the performance of the artificial
intelligence program Polaris in a poker competition against the best poker
players in the world, even though it lost. Machines are able to regularly
defeat humans in chess, checkers, and backgammon, but poker is viewed as
more of a challenge because of its psychological nature, which involves
intentional deception, the influence of unpredictable emotions and chance,
as well as mathematics. Phil Laak and Ali Eslami narrowly defeated Polaris
by 570 points in the fourth and final game, after one draw, and a victory
each for them and the machine. Darse Billings, lead architect of the
Polaris team at the University of Alberta, says the program played
exceptionally well. "I wouldn't be surprised if we can beat them
tomorrow," Billings says, whose team will continue to improve Polaris.
Eslami, a former computer consultant, says he has never had a more
exhausting match. "I'm surprised we won ... it's already so good it will
be tough to beat in the future." The championship took place during an
artificial intelligence conference in Vancouver that was attended by
approximately 1,000 scientists.
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From UF and IBM, a Blueprint for "Smart" Health
Care
University of Florida News (07/24/07) Hoover, Aaron
New technology from the University of Florida and IBM creates what is
being called the first roadmap for the widespread deployment of "smart"
medical devices that, for example, monitor a person's blood pressure,
temperature, respiration rate, and any other important medical information.
Electronically monitoring patients could eliminate the need for many
visits to the doctor, which can be difficult for the elderly or sick, and
could help doctors determine which patient should receive treatment first.
"We call it quality-of-life engineering," says University of Florida
professor of computer science and lead researcher on the project Sumi
Helal. The project provides the technological foundation for a company to
manufacture and sell smart, networked, and user-friendly devices. "UF and
IBM both see the need and the opportunity to integrate the physical world
of sensors and other devices directly into enterprise systems," says IBM's
Richard Bakalar. "Doing so in an open environment will remove market
inhibitors that impede innovation in critical industries like health care
and open a broader device market that's fueled by uninterrupted
networking." Helal previously created several devices that can provide
care givers with information on a patient's activity and over health
indicators, including a microwave that can monitor the salt content of food
and a device that records how many steps a person takes, but these devices
needed to be installed by a team of engineers. To create a device that is
ready to use out of the box, Helal created middleware based on open
standards that "self integrates" to provide a standard connection for any
health care device to use. "When you bring it in to the house and plug it
in, it automatically provides its service and finds a path to the outside
world," Helal says.
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Submissions Sought for Reconfigurable Computing
Workshop
HPC Wire (07/18/07)
A workshop on High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing Technology and
Applications will be held in conjunction with SC07, and submissions of
papers on high-performance reconfigurable computing (HPRC) related topics
will be accepted through Sept. 15, 2007. Topics of interest include
architecture of HPRC devices and systems; languages, compilation
techniques, and tools for HPRC; algorithms, methodology, and best practices
in application development for HPRC; applications of HPRC in science and
engineering; and trends and latest developments in HPRC. The best papers
could be included in a special issue of the ACM Transactions on
Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS). The workshop is scheduled
for Nov. 11, in Reno, Nev., and will give academic researchers and industry
representatives a chance to learn more about trends and developments, and
establish a research agenda for the years to come.
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Antique Engines Inspire Nano Chip
BBC News (07/24/07) Fildes, Jonathan
U.S. researchers have designed a nano computer that casts aside modern
high-speed silicon chips in favor of a computing idea that was first
proposed nearly 200 years ago. In a paper published in the New Journal of
Physics, the scientists said the mechanical computer would be built from
nanometer-sized components and could be used in places that would damage
silicon components. "What we are proposing is a new type of computing
architecture that is only based on nano mechanical elements," says
University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Robert Blick, one of the authors
of the paper. "We are not going to compete with high-speed silicon, but
where we are competitive is for all those mundane applications where you
need microprocessors which can be slow and cheap as well." The tiny,
hypothetical computer could be built out of ultra-hard material such as
diamond or piezoelectric material, which changes shape when exposed to an
electrical current. Unlike current computers, which use the movement of
electrons on circuits to solve problems, the nano mechanical computer would
use the push and pull of tiny parts to perform calculations. The military
is interested in a nano mechanical computer because, unlike electronic
silicon computers, nano mechanical devices would not be vulnerable to
electromagnetic pulses that would disable traditional computing systems.
The researchers also believe that nano mechanical chips would be better at
maintaining Moore's law than silicon chips because they run much cooler
than silicon. The University of Southampton's Michael Kraft says nano
mechanical research may lead to hybrid chips because nano mechanics consume
less power, which is becoming increasingly important for mobile devices.
"The battery is the big bottleneck, so anything that reduces the power
consumption is a real advantage," Kraft says.
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A Baby Step for Computer Learning
ScienceNOW (07/23/07) Cevallos, Marissa
Stanford University researchers have developed a program that is able to
determine vowel categories from human sounds. James McClelland, a
cognitive neuroscientist, and colleagues had in mind the ability of infants
to sort out vowel sounds on their own as they pursued the project, which
involved the use of so-called neural networks. The researchers recorded 30
mothers reading aloud to their infants, then fed the audio clips into a
computer and limited the categories to "beet," "bait," "bit," and "bet"
vowel sounds, but did not tell the neural network how many categories there
would be. The neural network analyzed thousands of sound clips to
determine the number of categories, then quickly placed them into the vowel
categories. According to a report this week in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, the program placed the vowel sounds into the
four categories more than 80 percent of the time. With a more powerful
neural network, McClelland wants to develop a program that can "lip-read"
by analyzing sounds and a picture of a mouth.
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UI Professor Seeks to Harness Strength of Amoeba Into
Computer Cores
News-Gazette (07/23/07) Kline, Greg
University of Illinois professor of electrical and computer engineering
Rakesh Kumar believes that the single-celled amoeba may be a good model to
base how super-fast computers handle parallel processing. Kumar's "amoebic
computing" is a way to take better advantage of the growing number of cores
in computer processors. As technology advances, single-core processors are
being replaced by multi-core processors. The problem, however, is that
because humans think sequentially, they also program that way, so only one
task is being processed at a time. Kumar's solution looks to the amoeba to
improve processing speed. An amoebic computing system could, like the
amoeba, replicate tasks waiting to be processed and run them on other cores
as needed. The idea is to break sequential programs into component parts,
or services, and send them to available cores instead of having them wait
in line. In addition to replication, amoebic computing mimics the amoeba's
ability to adapt to its environment. For example, the system would be able
to change how it manages tasks as new ones surface and old ones are
completed, in the same way an amoeba can change its shape in response to
the conditions around it. The system could also send work to the processor
that would be most advantageous, be it the closest processing space, or one
with more available resources. It could even set aside or create new space
to handle tasks as needed, much like how the human brain handles tasks.
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Intel Scores Speed Breakthrough
Wall Street Journal (07/25/07) P. B4; Clark, Don
Intel researchers say they have developed the first modulator made from
silicon that can encode data onto a beam of light at a rate of 40 gigabits
per second, which the company says is a major milestone on the way to
creating inexpensive optical components that could provide drastically
faster communication speeds. Modulators are necessary when using lasers to
send data down fiber-optic cable. Obtaining speeds of 40 gigabits per
second, which is currently about 40 times faster than the most
sophisticated corporate data networks, requires expensive materials and
available 40 gigabit modulators can cost thousands of dollars. Intel wants
to use the material to create less-expensive components as part of an
effort the company calls "silicon photonics." Intel has been making
increasingly faster silicon-based laser components, including a 1-gigabit
modulator in 2004 and a 10-gigabit modulator in 2006. Intel's photonics
technology lab director Mario Paniccia says, "It's been a phenomenal ride
in terms of the rate of advancement in silicon photonics." Paniccia
described components that could send data between computers or circuit
boards at a rate of one trillion bits per second; data transfer speeds that
are well beyond current demands on computing systems but likely will be
necessary eventually. Paniccia says Intel is committed to commercializing
silicon photonics products by the end of the decade.
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Playing Piano With a Robotic Hand
Technology Review (07/25/07) Singer, Emily
Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have demonstrated that it is
possible to control fingers on a robotic hand by directly tapping into the
brain's electronic signals using a neural interface. To create the neural
interface, researchers recorded brain-cell activity from monkeys as they
moved their fingers. Previous research showed that a particular part of
the motor cortex controls finger movement. The recorded brain activity was
used to create algorithms that decode the brain signals by identifying the
specific activity patterns associated with specific movements. When the
algorithm was connected to the robotic hand and given a new set of neural
patterns, the robotic hand performed the correct movement 95 percent of the
time. These initial experiments were performed "off-line," meaning the
system was receiving pre-recorded neural activity, but the researchers are
planning a demonstration with a live neural feed within the next six
months. Monkeys implanted with an array of recording electrodes will be
connected to a virtual version of the prosthetic arm and monitored to see
how well they can use brain activity to control the virtual hand. The
preliminary results are encouraging, but the scientists know it will be a
long time before the system has the dexterity of a real hand and that a
practical human version of the neural interface is still a long way off.
"We would hope that eventually, we'll be able to implant similar arrays
permanently in the motor cortex of human subjects," says University of
Rochester neurologist and project researcher Mark Schieber. Schieber says
the long-term objective is to get the robotic hand to move however the user
wants it to in real time, but getting the decoding algorithm to understand
unscripted and general movements will be the challenge.
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Graphene Nanoelectronics: Making Tomorrow's Computers
From a Pencil Trace
Rensselaer News (07/23/07)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute associate professor Saroj Nayak, working
with graduate student Phillip Shemella and other students, made a key
discovery that could advance the use of graphene as a possible replacement
for copper and silicon in nanoelectronics. After two years of research and
dozens of computer simulations, the researchers were able to demonstrate
that the length and width of the graphene directly impacts the material's
conduction properties. Graphene has unique electrical properties that
include either metallic or semiconducting behavior. Generally, the process
of synthesizing graphene causes both metallic and semiconductor materials
to be produced, but the researchers' findings create a blueprint that
should allow entire batches of either to be produced as needed. Computer
chips have gotten increasingly smaller over the past decade, but as copper
interconnects continue to shrink, the copper's resistance increases and its
ability to conduct electricity degrades. As a result fewer electrons can
pass through and more electrons get caught in the copper, creating heat
that can hinder a computer chip's speed and performance. Graphene would be
a good choice as a replacement for copper because graphene has excellent
conductivity and has an extremely low resistance, meaning electrons could
pass effortlessly and create almost no heat. It will likely be several
years before graphene interconnects become a reality, but Nayak says
graphene shows serious potential for use in interconnects, transistors, and
as a replacement for silicon as the primary semiconductor used in all
computer chips.
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Q&A: Google Finds R&D Opportunities, Pitfalls
Abroad
IDG News Service (07/23/07) Lemon, Sumner
Kannan Pashupathy, Google's director of international engineering
operations, oversees the company's rapidly expanding network of
international R&D centers. Over the past three years Pashupathy has
increased the number of international research and development centers from
three to more than 20. Pashupathy says Google has made such a rapid push
in establishing international R&D centers because the company is doing
simultaneous releases in multiple languages. The various R&D centers stay
in touch with each other using fairly traditional telecommunications such
as telephone and video, and every center is connected to a corporate
videoconferencing system so teams can constantly engage each other. To
avoid time-zone problems, Google has a simple set of rules that enables it
to avoid distributing work across too many locations that are not
collocated, and to minimize day-to-day communications between teams in
different areas. When hiring people, the company actually looks for people
with strong cultural backgrounds and submits applicants to a test to see if
they will fit culturally. Part of the test is to see if applicants have an
open mind and believe there is a richness in different cultures. Google
avoids the traditional hierarchy and someone who is fresh out of college is
given the same say as a 20-year veteran, which can be difficult for senior
management types who are used to one way of doing business and have a
difficult time adjusting. This free-range and autonomy for new hires has
led to problems, such as when Google released a Chinese software tool that
included a database developed by a competitor, but Pashupathy believes
Google is very innovative in how it manages its employees and as such
everything is a learning experience, for employees and managers.
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Environmental Songlines for IT Systems
IST Results (07/18/07)
Effective public-private collaboration to manage environmental dangers
such as floods and forest fires is often hindered by incompatibility
between IT systems, but the EU-funded ORCHESTRA project seeks to address
this challenge through an IT architecture that defines the interaction of
proprietary IT systems. "You can't expect everyone to throw away their
legacy systems and invest huge resources into a common IT infrastructure,"
explains ORCHESTRA project coordinator and Atos Origin operations manager
Jose Esteban. "ORCHESTRA allows all these different systems to
interoperate with the minimum of investment." The ORCHESTRA architecture's
reference model particularizes a set of functional "modules" or services
and the manner in which they must be "plugged together" to produce
compatible risk management applications. The architecture is oriented
around ISO, W3C, and Open Geospatial Consortium standards, and Esteban
hopes the OGC will adopt the ORCHESTRA reference model as an example of
best practice for interoperability in the risk management domain. The
model has already been adopted by the SANY and DEWS projects in Europe.
Esteban notes that remote interoperability between disparate systems is
currently facilitated by Web services, but says the ORCHESTRA platform's
universal application to any IT technology will keep the architecture
relevant even if the means of enablement changes in the future.
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Evaluations Aim to Advance Translation Technology
NIST Tech Beat (07/20/07) Blair, John
To help American military forces communicate with the local population,
the National Institute of Standards and Technology is evaluating prototype
translations systems for the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency
(DARPA). DARPA's TRANSTAC (Spoken Language Communication and Translation
System for Tactical Use) project is intended to produce real-time, two-way
translation systems, particularly for translating Iraqi Arabic. NIST
recently ran a series of laboratory and outdoor evaluation tests on
prototype systems to determine their abilities in speech recognition,
machine translation, noise robustness, user interface design, and efficient
performance on limited hardware platforms. "Effective two-way translation
devices would represent a major advance in field translators," says NIST
evaluation project leader Craig Schlenoff. During the tests, English
speaking Marines and Iraqi Arabic speakers acted out 10 different scenarios
requiring verbal communication. Participants looked directly at each other
during the question and answer sessions. The conversation was recorded on
the laptop, and background noises were precisely controlled so the system
could be evaluated in a predictable environment. In the outdoor tests,
background noises included other speakers, generators, garage doors,
running vehicles, radio broadcasts, and other simulated conditions. DARPA
hopes that once the technology is fully developed, it will be able to
deploy an automatic translator system in a new language within 90 days of
receiving a request for that language.
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Technology Summer Camp Welcomes Disabled High-School
Students
University of Washington News and Information (07/17/07) Hickey, Hannah;
Bellman, Scott
The University of Washington program DO-IT, which stands for Disabilities,
Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology, will allow more than 50
college bound high-school students with disabilities the opportunity to
participate in an intensive program designed to promote college and career
success. DO-IT program participants will learn about careers in fields
such as technology, science, engineering, and mathematics. "DO-IT scholars
earn about college life by living in a dorm, getting along with a roommate,
participating in academic classes, preparing for challenging careers, and
having fun," says DO-IT founder and director Sheryl Burgstahler. "After
the summer study ends, they communicate via the Internet with their new
friends and are mentored by successful adults with disabilities. Year after
year, they connect through DO-IT activities and are supported as the
transition to college and careers." The DO-IT program targets high-school
sophomores and juniors with disabilities who are interested in attending
college. After attending the summer program, students are loaned
computers, software, and adaptive technology to be used at home on
additional DO-IT activities, including independent projects, and online
interaction with mentors, teachers, and fellow students. "Many successful
DO-IT scholars continue in the program as mentors to younger participants,"
Burgstahler says.
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On the Trail of Servers Gone Bad
Government Computer News (07/16/07) Vol. 26, No. 17, Dizard, Wilson P. III
Cybersecurity experts say that federal agencies are increasingly pursuing
"honeyclient" technology to detect and analyze Web sites that store and
distribute malware. Honeyclients are virtual machines that travel over the
Web searching for sites that show signs of being infected with malware,
says Mitre computer scientist Kath Wang. Wang says honeyclients "provide
the capability to potentially detect client-side exploits" that can be used
in malware attacks. The exploits on malicious sites often allow the site's
server to capture the visiting computer to be used as part of a bot herd of
zombie computers. Botnet herders then rent out hijacked computers to
launch spam and other attacks, with prices ranging from a few cents a month
for a home computer to several dollars a month for a computer inside a
corporate network. Wang says online criminals are already starting to
install honeyclient avoidance technology on malicious servers, so Mitre,
which operates six autonomous honeyclients, is building a honeyclient
prototype that mimics human behavior by displaying the same delays and
bandwidth footprint as a human visitor. The Department of Homeland
Security's assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications Greg
Garcia says his department has received more than 21,000 reports of
cyberincidents through May of this fiscal year, as opposed to only 24,000
for the entire 2006 fiscal year. Garcia says DHS will be working more
closely with Information Technology and Communications information sharing
and analysis centers. "Increasingly, we are finding that IT and
communications are one and the same," he says.
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True Random Number Generator Goes Online
PressEsc.com (07/18/07) Panditaratne, Vidura
Academics and members of the scientific community will not be able to
accurately predict the next number that comes out of the Quantum Random Bit
Generator Service (QRBGS). The QRBGS is unlike the random number
generators of most computers, which employ different algorithms to choose a
number from large databases that use methods such as rolling the dice to
compile their numbers. Such random number generators deliver essentially
pseudo-random numbers, but QRBGS uses photon emission, the unpredictable
quantum process, to produce true random numbers. QRBGS makes use of a fast
non-deterministic random bit generator, and its random quality comes from
the quantum physical process of photonic emission in semiconductors,
followed by detection from the photoelectric effect. Developed by
computer scientists at the Ruder Boskovic Institute (RBI) in Zagreb,
Croatia, QRBGS has been made available online, connected by computer
clusters and GRID networks, free of charge. Potential applications include
advanced scientific simulations, cryptographic data protection, security
applications, and virtual entertainment.
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How to Forecast the Future
Computerworld (07/16/07) Vol. 41, No. 29, P. 32; Melymuka, Kathleen
Seasoned forecaster Paul Saffo explains that forecasting "gives a context
for decision-makers to act in the face of uncertainty." He says
forecasting should be a concern of CIOs because they play a central role in
corporate strategy enablement, and the tools they employ are undergoing
changes that are commensurate with the pace of Moore's Law. Saffo says
intuition can be informed through forecasting, and he cites the value of
the "cone of uncertainty" visual aid as helpful in forecasting in that it
forces one to consider all potential outcomes. The forecaster defines wild
cards as an occurrence or trend whose likelihood is either very low or
unquantifiable, and he uses the timetable of quantum computing's arrival as
an example of a wild card. Saffo notes that change only has the illusion
of rapidity because people tend to ignore precursors. "Most ideas take 20
years to become overnight successes," he exclaims. Saffo recommends that
CIOs keep an eye on sensor technology, which he predicts will become the
source of most information over the next decade. Information, in other
words, will become ubiquitous.
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Petascale Era Will Force Software Rethink
HPC Wire (07/20/07) Vol. 16, No. 26, Sexton, Jim
A key challenge of the petascale age is designing software that aligns
well to petascale architectures so that previously unsolvable scientific
and business problems can be tackled by the community, writes Jim Sexton,
lead for IBM Blue Gene applications at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
Although Sexton projects that Moore's Law will continue to progress
through the petascale era, he notes that "performance increases will now
come through parallelism and petascale systems will deliver performance by
deploying hundreds of thousands of individual processor cores." The
inherent programming challenge involves the concurrent management of
algorithmic and systems architectures, which Sexton likens to "a creative
art form." He points out that justifying the investment needed to sponsor
the construction of a complete parallel programming infrastructure from the
ground up requires more programs to be running on parallel systems and
yielding significant results. The community will need to see a definite
cost/benefit to parallelism so that mainstream/commercial adoption can be
encouraged. Mindful of this goal, the Scientific Discovery Advanced
Computing Discovery program is setting up nine Centers for Enabling
Technologies to address major petascale computing problems. Mainstream
adoption of petascale computing could also be helped along by industrial
applications, Sexton speculates.
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