Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and Cornell University are developing PhotoCity, a system that uses graphics algorithms to create three-dimensional (3D) renderings of buildings, neighborhoods, and cities from unstructured collections of two-dimensional digital photos. To improve the quality of the renderings, the researchers plan to combine their system with a social game that permits teams to add images where they are needed to improve the visual models. The researchers also plan to accept public submissions, in an effort to collect 3D renderings of cities such as New York and San Francisco. The emergence of such collaborative systems has great promise for capturing the creative abilities of people and networked computers, says the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Peter Lee.

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Rutgers University (RU) computer scientists have demonstrated how rootkits could surreptitiously instruct a smartphone to eavesdrop on a meeting, track its owner’s location, or rapidly drain the battery. Smartphones “run the same class of operating systems as desktop and laptop computers, so they are just as vulnerable to attack by malicious software, or malware,” says RU professor Vinod Ganapathy. Rootkit attacks on smartphones could be especially effective because smartphone users tend to carry their phones with them all the time, which creates opportunities for attackers to eavesdrop, extract personal information, or pinpoint the users location using the phone’s global positioning system.

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The University of Alberta (UA) computing science department helped Edmonton game developer BioWare solve a pathfinding challenge in one of its videogames. The UA researchers were faced with the challenge of creating pathfinding programming capable of navigating complicated scenarios while minimizing the amount of memory needed. The researchers, led by UA professor Nathan Sturtevant, broke the decision-making process into separate levels, enabling the computer to calculate the steps needed by the character. “One of the things I really wanted to see was that if a character is standing on one side of the game map, would it be possible to mouse click on the farthest point away and watch your character then walk for 10, 20, 30, 40 seconds and get to where you wanted them to go?” Sturtevant says.
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Students at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya’s Castelldefels School of Technology are working with Team FREDNET to place a small robot named PicoRover on the Moon. The robot is equipped with a built-in camera to send images from the lunar surface back to Earth. The prototype uses a spherical design that enables it to move along the lunar surface in low gravity and on uneven surfaces. The team plans to develop a fully autonomous robot capable of moving or stopping on the lunar surface as required. The team has developed controls for the device, which consist of a small computer equipped with Wi-Fi that weighs two grams. The current model is a 12-centimeter ball housing a motor, a battery, a remote control system, and a high-definition camera, all weighing less than 250 grams. The group also is developing antennas for sending the images back to Earth.
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Stanford University researchers are developing the Frankencamera, an open source digital camera that they hope will lead to a computational photography revolution. “Computational photography will change how we do photography,” says Stanford professor Marc Levoy. “It would allow you to fix things that you can’t currently–whether by combining pictures in a different way, or by fiddling with optics so that more is recorded than on a normal camera.” The goal is to turn the camera into a powerful computer, with the ability to change the focus of a shot after it has been taken, take three-dimensional photographs, and convert photographs into drawings, diagrams, or watercolors. Meanwhile, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Ramesh Raskar notes that researchers are already exploring the next step beyond computational photography. For example, Raskar notes that Microsoft is developing software to generate “sense photographs,” which capture the sense of the real experience, not just what the camera and computer are able to record.

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The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) released guidelines that would allow nearly 3 million overseas and military voters to cast votes over the Internet in November. The EAC plan worries cybersecurity experts, election officials, and voting integrity advocates. They note that email messages and voting Web sites are vulnerable to interception or hacking. Congress mandated in 2009 that the EAC develop guidelines for pilot programs to aid overseas voting, including online voting. Most states seek EAC certification of voting technology, and the commission’s Jeannie Layson says “the EAC hopes that the work we do in 2010 will assist states already running pilot programs to improve services for military and overseas voters.” The majority of the 33 states that have developed pilot programs for Internet voting will let voters send completed ballots as an email attachment, while faxes, which are another approved method for sending votes, are increasingly being sent on the Web due to the growing use of voice-over-Internet phone service. Critics say the EAC is circumventing the technical board that is supposed to review new regulations and also may be violating federal law by not allowing enough time for public comment on the guidelines.
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Two hundred biologists and computer scientists gathered at the first-ever Sage Congress have proposed creating an open source model that standardizes and links together thousands of scientific databases worldwide. In the future, such a system could give researchers and scientists access to thousands of raw genetic data samples that could then be connected and used to explain how a disease functions. Sage Bionetworks, a new nonprofit that organized the conference, also plans to build systems that can mimic the human body and help researchers analyze complex interactions among networks of genes. Merck has agreed to pass on some technology from the disbanded Rosetta project, which resulted in one of the fastest supercomputers in the drug industry. Open source technology will likely be used, and projects such as Science Commons are working to overcome the legal, financial, and infrastructural barriers to sharing studies and data.
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Microsoft’s annual TechFair visited Silicon Valley so that Microsoft product teams and local research labs could see the latest developments. One spotlighted TechFair project seeks to supply more data to researchers studying strategies for protecting fish in San Francisco Bay Area waterways by using computers to mash up various data sources and present the results to scientists in an Excel spreadsheet. Microsoft tools are making it possible to more deeply analyze the numerous variables that are weighed in deciding the optimum underlying conditions for migratory salmon. Microsoft research lab director Rick Rashid says the same core system is being used to monitor weather data in Southeast Asia and seismic data in the Swiss Alps. Ensuring that researchers maintain individual privacy when they offer aggregate data was the focus of work by TechFair presenter Cynthia Dwork, who demonstrated a mathematical formula for determining whether a particular data set is likely private or not. Also on display at TechFair was a project investigating the possibility of a smartphone choosing on the fly whether to run parts of a program on the phone itself or transmit the computational work to a remote server or PC.
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A new system for identifying potential Internet threats has been developed by researchers at the University of Texas (UT) at Dallas. Designed to analyze behavioral data, the system monitors network traffic and provides an alert when it notices worrisome deviations in normal activity. “We proposed a novel platform that thoroughly analyzes network traffic behavior to identify potential Internet threats,” says UT Dallas professor Mehrdad Nourani. The technology uses two subsystems that work in parallel to reach a high speed and use memory efficiently, which allows for faster results and optimal use of resources. A bell-shaped curve of normal activity is built, and it can achieve nearly zero false positives and negatives when identifying abnormalities outside the curve. Nourani says the technology also could be used to analyze health data and detect abnormal health issues such as heart arrhythmia, sleep apnea, or epileptic seizure.
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Kavli Institute of Nanoscience researchers have developed a way to use water to quickly transfer layers from one surface to another by exploiting the fact that different materials have different hydrophilicity, a discovery that could lead to lower manufacturing costs for nanoelectronics. The researchers, led by Kavli’s Gregory Schneider and Cees Dekker, developed a solid hydrophobic layer on top of a silicon wafer by dipping it in a solution containing a hydrophobic polymer. They then submerged the wafer in water, which wedged the layers off the silicon base. Intermolecular forces between the graphene and silicon provide a stable attachment and eliminate the need for glue, Dekker says. Repeating the technique several times would allow graphene layers to be built up into a complex nanoelectronic structure. “A [three-dimensional] microelectrode can be designed, layer by layer, using our ‘wedging’ transfer technique,” Schneider says.
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