The United States is engaged in an international race to develop both cyberweapons and cyberdefenses. Thousands of daily attacks on federal and private computer systems in the United States, some malicious and some testing for weak points in the U.S.’s firewalls, have prompted the Obama administration to review the nation’s strategy. Efforts include developing a highly classified replica of the Internet of the future to simulate what would be needed for the country’s enemies to shut down power stations, telecommunications, and aviation systems. Obama is expected to propose a significantly larger cyberdefensive effort, including the expansion of a $17 billion, five-year program approved by Congress last year, as well as an end to the bureaucratic battle over who is responsible for defending the country’s cyberinfrastructure. However, Obama is not expected to discuss the U.S.’s cyberoffensive capabilities, which has been a major investment area for the nation’s intelligence agencies, as many of these cyberweapons remain classified. The White House declined to comment on whether Obama supports or opposes the use of U.S. cyberweapons. Some exotic cyberweapons under consideration would enable a military programmer to enter a computer server in Russia or China and destroy a botnet, or activate malicious code that is secretly embedded on computer chips when manufactured, enabling the U.S. to take control of an enemy’s computer system.
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European researchers working on the HEALTH OPTIMUM project are using telemedicine technology to enhance healthcare across Europe while lowering its cost. “We set out to prove the sustainability of telemedical services from an organizational and economic point of view,” says HEALTH OPTIMUM project coordinator Claudio Dario. “In our two years of market validation, we found that telemedicine not only gave advantages from an economic point of view, but was very useful for the needs of patients.” For example, Dario says that before the project most head-trauma patients and possible brain-injury patients were transported by ambulance or helicopter to a neurosurgical center, but once diagnosed many patients did not need the center’s specialized care. The HEALTH OPTIMUM project restructured the entire process. An IT infrastructure was established to support remote, full-service neurosurgical consultation using a hub-and-spoke model. Medical recordkeeping practices also were reorganized to enable computed axial tomography images and lab results to move smoothly and securely between specialized centers and peripheral clinics. The new infrastructure means patients no longer need to be transported from an accident site or emergency call location to a specialized center, but instead can be brought to a regular emergency room, where the patient can be stabilized and tests and other medical data can be digitally sent to the specialists, who can decide if the patient needs specialized care. “Our analysis showed that up to 80 percent of transportations have been avoided by this system, achieving a high level of savings,” Dario says. “In addition, by speeding up expert assessment, telemedicine saves lives.”
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Scientists at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence are working on Nepomuk, a project to give computers a human-like capacity to remember. Nepomuk has developed a process that uses semantic technology to support personal information management. Data contained in the traditional computer folder structure are automatically transferred to a personal information model. For example, emails are linked with contact data and images on the hard disk. The resulting connections created between information and concepts are used for storage and search features. For storage, content analysis algorithms create proposals on how new documents should be added to the existing system. The system is similar to a human’s ability to remember the subject of a speech, as well as the face of the person who gave the speech, but not necessarily the person’s name. The brain connects individual elements that it perceives at the same time, and makes associations, such as between conference proceedings and speakers or dates, for example. The new system could help a user find documents related to a subject if they only have a picture of a contact person related to that subject. The semantic network could find the correct documents using the connections from the picture.
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Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin announced that the government would spend more than a tenth of its budget on science and innovation this year. “We have assigned about 1.1 trillion rubles ($36.8 billion), or more than 10 percent of the federal budget, for fundamental and applied sciences, higher education, high-tech medicine, and specialized federal programs,” Putin said. The government increased its science and innovation spending by more than 300 billion rubles in 2009 compared to 2008. The new effort to promote science and innovation includes requiring competition for scientific projects and giving preference to innovative options when the state buys products and services. Separately, Putin announced that Russia has allocated 1.1 billion rubles ($37 million) to develop supercomputer technologies in Russia. Last year Russia launched its fastest supercomputer, Lomonosov, at the Moscow State University’s Research Computing Center. Lomonosov has a peak speed of 420 teraflops and is ranked as the 12th fastest computer in the world.

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Aberystwyth University researcher Stephen Pugh has developed a picture-taking robot designed to look for signs of life on Mars. Pugh is fine-tuning the robot’s onboard panoramic cameras and teaching it to point and shoot at features on the planet’s surface. “I have been looking in particular at how the robotic rover can point its camera at specific targets, such as rocks, without human intervention,” he says. The research’s long-term goal is to increase scientific data for all future planetary missions. “NASA has already found evidence of ice on Mars, but I don’t think rover will find evidence of anything more than water because if it was there I think we would have found it by now,” Pugh says. The researcher is developing software that will enable the robot to discover locations of interest more quickly and to choose targets for pictures by itself, without communicating with scientists on Earth.
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University of the Basque Country (UBC) researcher Markel Vigo recently published his Ph.D. thesis on the Web Accessibility Quantitative Metric (WAQM), a system that automatically measures the accessibility level of a Web page. WAQM can measure the level of accessibility according to the type of disability of each person and automatically create an accessibility report for each Web page. This allows users to conduct an Internet search and have criteria related to their specific disability taken into consideration. The system uses the Unified Guidelines Language to give each Web page a score, which is shown next to the Web page’s link, based on its level of accessibility. Vigo says his system gives people with disabilities more control when carrying out a search on the Internet. WAQM also can create different accessibility grades based on the type of device that is being used. Each user gets a profile based on information about the type of disability, the Internet device of choice, and other factors, and this profile is used to personalize the accessibility report for each Web page.
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Xerox PARC scientist Markus Jakobsson has developed a way to detect malware on mobile devices that can catch unknown viruses and protect a device without draining its battery or straining its processor. The approach relies on having a central server monitor a device’s memory for signs that it has been infected. The system checks a device by shutting down nonvital applications to make sure nothing is running except the detection software and the operating system. If malware is present and active, it will need to use some random access memory (RAM) to execute instructions on the device. The central server contacts the detection software to see if malware is using RAM by measuring how much memory is available. Once a device passes this check, the system can be certain that no malware programs are actively running, at which point it can scan secondary storage for dormant malware. Jakobsson notes the system is designed to find existing malware, and is not a prevention program.
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