The Internet Society (ISOC) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have agreed to work more closely together to promote open technical standards. ISOC also will donate $2.5 million over three years to W3C to aid in its development efforts. “The risk is without open standards, like ISOC and W3C produce, Internet applications that users have available won’t interoperate,” says W3C’s Ralph Swick. W3C will use the ISOC donation to reach out to developers in the startup phase of inventing new technology. Common operating standards are what has allowed the Internet to grow, says ISOC president Lynn St. Amour. “There is no hierarchy or centralized control, so it doesn’t limit any possible futures,” St. Amour says. “We work to make sure it is kept open–that governments don’t put regulatory environments in place that restrict that openness.” The ISOC is currently promoting the adoption of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), a new Internet address standard that likely will eventually replace the IPv4 protocol, which most Internet services use today. IPv6 would address the limited number of remaining addresses in the current standard. Although the technical foundation for IPv6 is ready, ISOC is still trying to have the new standard adopted on devices that connect to the Internet.

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University of Southampton professor David De Roure is a principal researcher for the Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information (SALAMI) project, which is enabling the online analysis of music from around the world. SALAMI is funded by the United Kingdom’s Joint Information Systems Committee, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The project will provide significant analysis of up to 350,000 songs from many time periods, including folk, classical, contemporary, improvised, and live music. “To date, musical analysis has been conducted by individuals on a small scale,” De Roure says. SALAMI will allow for a far wider range of music to be studied than ever before. The project will use a set of algorithms and tools for extracting features from recorded music, with the goal of producing an open source dataset for thousands of musical pieces. De Roure says the data will be an invaluable resource for music scholars, providing perspectives previously unavailable.

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Oklahoma State University (OSU) researchers have published a study on the use of artificial immune systems (AIS) in evolutionary algorithms. By copying the way a living body acquires immunity to disease through vaccination, researchers have designed an AIS to more efficiently solve optimization problems. The results show that the biologically motivated approach is better at exploring a greater amount of space than previous methods. Unlike previous forms of AIS, the OSU system capitalizes on the way that vaccines can improve the performance of the immune system. Vaccines enable immune systems to detect new, weakened antigens and develop a biological memory so they can recognize the same antigen in the future. The researchers drew inspiration from how vaccines work in designing the new AIS. They inject the AIS with certain points in the decision space that act as a weak antigen, or vaccine. When comparing the new algorithm, called Vaccine-AIS, to other types of AIS, the researchers found that Vaccine AIS outperformed the others by locating the optimum point in a plot in fewer evaluations. “AIS was originally designed for data mining, anomaly detection, and the like,” says OSU’s Gary Yen. “Its use as an optimization tool is a very young research area but its performance is drawing interest from researchers.”

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