-
Charles Thacker wins Turing Award
Inventor Charles Thacker wins computer industry's most prestigious award for his contributions to the field; Thacker built a prototype of a desktop computer, called the Alto, which featured a number of innovations that have since become commonplace: a television-like screen, a graphical user interface, and a WYSIWYG text editor; Thacker was also co-inventor of the Ethernet networking technology
-
New group calls for holding vendors liable for buggy software
The group released draft language it advises companies to incorporate into procurement contracts between user organizations and software development firms; SANS Institute, Mitre also release 2010 list of Top 25 programming errors
-
Oak Ridge develops powerful intrusion detection systems
The attack analysis program uses machine learning to increase effectiveness; ORCA effectively sits on top of off-the-shelf intrusion detection systems, and its correlation engine processes information and learns as cyberevents arrive; the correlation engine supplements or replaces the preset rules used by most intrusion detection systems to detect attacks or other malicious events
-
-
NAS: selling vast federal helium reserves is a mistake
Helium is used in airships, space rockets, nuclear missiles, IT hardware, enormous magnetic particle cannon dimension portals, MRI brain probes, and deep-diving breathing gases; U.S. annual helium use amounts to 650 million cubic feet; in the U.S. federal helium reserve in Texas, though., more than 35 billion cubic feet are stored; Congress wants this vast amount sold by 2015, scientists say it is a bad idea
-
U.S. scientists get free cloud free access
Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) will provide free access to cloud computing resources for select NSF-funded researchers for the next three years; those selected will get to use remote Microsoft Azure data centers full of Windows/Dell servers and storage so that they can run compute-intensive algorithms on masses of data
-
Computer spots behavior patterns
New cognitive computational system recognizes and predicts human behavior; applications for the system could include intelligent surveillance and accident prevention
-
-
DHS invites Kiwi research cooperation
A DHS representative visited New Zealand to explore research collaboration with New Zealand institution; of special interest to DHS is work done at the Human Interface Technology (HIT) Lab at Canterbury University about finding new ways of interacting with large amounts of data, particularly unstructured data -- enabling zettabytes (10 to the power 21 bytes) of data to be economically represented in ways that make patterns such as clusters of similarity and outliers readily appreciable by the human eye.
-
MIT wins DARPA's red-balloon competition
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA on Saturday launched ten red weather balloons in unannounced locations in the United States; the first team of spotters to identify the locations of the balloon received $40,000 in prize money; MIT researchers found a clever way to recruit hundreds of spotters, and the MIT team won
-
Computer scientists report progress on world-simulation tool
Computer scientists say that advances in different fields now make modeling of world events more realistic as an aid in high-level decision making
-
U.S. Army funds a new discipline: Network Science
The U.S. Army gives Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York State $16.75 million to launch the Center for Social and Cognitive Networks; the new center will link together top social scientists, neuroscientists, and cognitive scientists with leading physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers in the search to uncover, model, understand, and foresee the complex social interactions that take place in today’s society
-
New antiterror technology tool uses human logic
A new interactive image-based software can be used on touch-screen table-top displays and other large-screen systems better to manage the huge amounts of data collected in connection with alleged terrorist plots
-
Bridges of the twenty-first centuryOregon's bridges to be readied for the Big One
There are 2,671 bridges in Oregon's highway system; researchers develop a computer model which, for the first time, gives state authorities bridge-by-bridge estimates of damage, repair cost, and traffic delay costs associated with a shattering western Oregon quake; the new tool would allow engineers to prioritize which of the state's bridges should get seismic upgrades
-
U.S. Navy's PANDA technology to detect "deviant" ships
There are tens of thousands of ships on the high seas every day, carrying millions of containers, entering and leaving hundreds of ports in dozens of countries; monitoring this vast amount of traffic to make sure that none of the containers is carrying WMDs is humanly impossible; Lockheed Martin has developed the PANDA Maritime Domain Awareness program to help the U.S. Navy and intelligence community keep a closer eye on the global maritime traffic
-
JASON says computer models cannot predict terrorist events
Pentagon advisory panel concludes that extreme terrorist events such as the 9/11 attacks cannot be predicted by computer models because the data re too sparse; “it is simply not possible to validate (evaluate) predictive models of rare events that have not occurred, and unvalidated models cannot be relied upon”
-
Hidden hardware threatsThe brief
Vetting a chip with a hidden agenda is not easy, and chip makers cannot afford to test every chip; also, today only Intel and a few other companies still design and manufacture all their own chips in their own fabrication plants; other chip designers -- including LSI Corp. and, most recently, Sony -- have gone "fabless," outsourcing their manufacturing to off-shore facilities known as foundries
The Long View
DARPA seeks deep-learning AI to cope with flood of information
The growing use of UAVs to loiter over enemy territory and send images and streaming videos back to HQ has created a glut of information; DARPA seeks a better, deeper, and more layered artificial intelligence to help the intelligence community cope with the avalanche of information coming in
No end in sight for Moore's Law
Moore's Law lives! Worries that reduction in transistor size to below ~20 nm would create heating and quantum effects so severe that such transistors will not be of practical use (read: an end to Moore's Law) are misplaced; researchers show the Moore's Law will obtain for a while yet
Good code, bad computations: A computer security vulnerability
Beware of return-oriented programming -- that is, if you want to make sure your computer or server is not tricked into undertaking malicious or undesirable behavior
