The U.K. government has provided a 250,000-pound grant to repair Bletchley Park, where British mathematicians, including Alan Turing, worked to break Germany’s Enigma codes in World War II. The site also is where one of the world’s first programmable computers, Colossus, resides. British prime minister Winston Churchill destroyed all evidence of the secret code-breaking program after the war, due to fears the Soviet Union would discover it, but in 1991 the Bletchley Park Trust, formed by historians and ex-codebreakers, saved the site and opened it to the public. The grant will be used to make repairs to the structure and to buy new computer equipment, but Bletchley Park supporters have more ambitious plans to turn the center into a National Museum of Computing.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

The Adobe Flash plugin has maintained its status as one of the most common ways for developers to create complex interactive Web features irrespective of the browser or operating system used, but experts point to new browser technologies such as the HTML 5 open Web standard as emerging challengers. Whereas Flash introduces additional capabilities to browsers following downloading and installation, the nonproprietary HTML 5 would guarantee that similar functionality is embedded within browsers that adopted it as a standard by default, with no single company controlling it. At the recent South by Southwest Interactive event, industry experts discussed the possibility that HTML 5′s Canvas component–which permits graphics, animation, and interactive features to run inside a browser without any additional plugins–could replace Flash’s own in-browser graphics and animation rendering capabilities. Complicating the competition between Flash and HTML 5 is the lack of support for Flash in Apple’s iPhone and iPad, while HTML 5 does not function on Internet Explorer.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Universidad Politecnica de Madrid researchers have developed self-organizing neural network training and visualization algorithms for remote sensing. The researchers modified the Growing Cell Structures (GCS) model to make their neural network algorithms easier to use to create simplified models of the large volumes of information generated by remote sensors. The project developed several GCS-based multidimensional information visualization methods and network-labeling techniques for semi-supervised and unsupervised classification or multispectral information-based variable estimation processes. Several GCS-adapted measures have been developed to evaluate the quality of the trained network. The technology has been applied across several topics in the remote-sensing field, such as classification of land covers, evaluation of the quality of training areas selection, estimation of the physical variables of aqueous covers, and the analysis of spectral index validity for images with special features.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Jacob Scheuer at Tel Aviv University’s School of Electrical Engineering has developed an information security system that acts as a type of key bearer. The system is designed to transmit the key bearer, a binary code, in the form of 1s and 0s via light and laser rather than numbers. “The trick is for those at either end of the fiber-optic link to send different laser signals they can distinguish between, but which look identical to an eavesdropper,” Scheuer says. The system, which runs on existing fiber-optic and computer technology, makes use of a specially designed laser that can reach more than 3,000 miles without losing key parts of the signal. Scheuer says only the sender and receiver would be able to unlock the shared key code, and notes that the strategy is simpler and more reliable than quantum cryptography. Lab demonstrations showed the use of light pulses to transmit binary lock-and-key information could be absolutely secure.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

A paper by Chinese researchers envisioning a cyberattack on the U.S. power grid has ignited concerns in the United States. The researchers outlined an assault on a small U.S. power grid sub-network that triggers a cascading failure of the entire electrical infrastructure. The paper’s co-author, Chinese graduate engineering student Wang Jianwei, says the research is purely theoretical, and that its intent is to find ways to augment power grids’ stability by investigating potential vulnerabilities. Although some analysts see the paper as a sign that China has an interest in interfering with the U.S. power grid, University of Pennsylvania physicist Reka Albert disagrees. “Neither the authors of this article, nor any other prior article, has had information on the identity of the power grid components represented as nodes of the network,” Albert says. “Thus no practical scenarios of an attack on the real power grid can be derived from such work.” Wang says he chose the United States as a potential target because it publishes data on power grids, and it was the only country he could find with accessible, useful information.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

University of Michigan (UM) researchers are developing near-threshold computing (NTC) technology, which could allow electronic devices to operate at lower voltages than normal. The researchers say that NTC could enable future computer systems to reduce energy requirements by 100 times or more. NTC allows for advanced scaling of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices, while improving energy efficiency. “The major impact of the work is that, for a fixed battery lifetime, significantly more transistors can be used, allowing for greater functionality,” says UM professor Ronald Dreslinksi. NTC also could help decrease power requirements without overturning the entire CMOS framework. Operating at near-threshold voltages could allow devices to require less energy while minimizing energy leakage. The researchers say that NTC could have nearly universal applications in data centers and personal computing. NTC also could be useful in sensor-based systems. By reducing the power requirements by up to 100 times in sensors, NTC could lead to future sensor designs.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Binghamton University (BU) researchers are studying a holistic approach to data centers that could make them much less costly to operate and significantly reduce the carbon footprint for information technology. “The amount of energy we spend running our data centers in the U.S. is about 2.5 percent of the total national energy expenditure,” says BU professor Kanad Ghose. Meanwhile, the number of data centers is growing because of increasing demand for online services. Ghose says that most data centers only run at 40 to 60 percent of their maximum capacity. Cooling the data centers also requires a lot of energy. Ghose and BU professor Bahgat Sammakia are developing ways to spread the workload across all the machines in a network, planning in advance for the workload allocation and the cooling budget. The researchers are planning to set up an experimental data center to improve energy efficiency. Ghose wants to achieve an energy reduction of about 15 percent, which could translate into savings of more than 25 percent.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed a system that can interpret sketches drawn on computer tablets. The sketch-recognition technology grew out of a collaboration with Pfizer, says MIT Ph.D. student Tom Ouyang. “We once visited their labs, and we noticed that on all their whiteboards and even on some of their windows they had all these chemical structures drawn using dry-erase markers, and when we talked to them they mentioned that they used these graphical diagrams all the time,” Ouyang says. The system combines information about the physical appearance of the final sketch with information about how it was drawn. Ultimately, the researchers see the software as part of a larger project to make interactions with computers as natural as interactions with human beings. “We want to interconnect this with some of the other things we’ve done with speech and Web-based lookup so that one could walk up to the whiteboard and sketch a molecule and say, ‘Has anybody published anything like this?’” says MIT professor Randall Davis.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

The Future of Identity in the Information Society (FIDIS) is a network of excellence established to prepare Europe for emerging digital identity issues. “We concluded that it is not one, single concept, but rather it is a host of pieces of information about an individual,” says FIDIS’ Andre Deuker. According to FIDIS, a person’s identity comprises all of the pieces of information that define a particular individual, from their DNA to how they like their coffee. One FIDIS project is photo response non-uniformity, which can identify the camera that took a particular picture by looking at the information underlying a specific image. Other FIDIS initiatives include special radio frequency identity tags and identity management systems (IMSs). FIDIS examined several IMS platforms and created a database for them, with the hopes that it will lead to greater interoperability between systems.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

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.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com