Academics and software engineers from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, and Southampton have established the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI), which will partner with about 30 to 40 research communities across the United Kingdom to develop ways to keep their software current and to help them develop it to meet new requirements. SSI will optimize strategies for sustaining software and provide communities with best practices for improving it for future users. “The issue at the moment is that there are no coordinated ways of sustaining important research software once it comes to the end of its funding,” says SSI director Neil Chue Hong. “The creation of the SSI will ensure that important software is sustained so that it can continue to contribute towards high quality research.”
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Websense researchers have developed FireShark, software that automatically monitors malicious activity on Web sites. Websense researcher Stephan Chenette says the experimental system scans the Web, identifies the source of embedded content in Web pages, and determines whether any code on a site is acting maliciously. FireShark then creates a map of interconnected Web sites and looks for potentially malicious content. FireShark, which maps nearly one million Web sites and servers per day, decodes the HTML, Javascript, and other code embedded in each Web site, looking for the ultimate source of content. “When you graph multiple sites, you can see their communities of content,” Chenette says. Websense researchers plan to release a plug-in for Firefox that will reveal the content hubs that a site is linked to.
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Tsukuba University engineering students have developed Yotaro, a baby humanoid robot designed to teach young people about parenting. Yotaro’s face is made out of soft translucent silicon and is backlit by a projector connected to a computer to simulate sneezing, sleeping, and smiling, while a speaker emits sounds such as giggling or crying. Sensors detect physical contact and can change the robot’s mood based on the frequency of the touches. Yotaro also simulates a runny nose with a water pump that releases body-temperature droplets of water through the nostrils. Meanwhile, the University of Osaka recently unveiled a robot that mimics a crawling baby as part of a research project to study the way humans learn to move and speak. The Osaka robot has 22 motors and 90 tactile sensors and microphones located near the eyes and ears. When told to move forward, the baby-bot will wave its legs and arms, gradually learning which movements will enable it to push itself up and crawl, says Osaka professor Minoru Asada.
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A North Carolina State University (NCSU) research team led by professor Robert Rodman has developed a computer model that accelerates the voice identification process without sacrificing accuracy. Existing computer models take several seconds or longer to compare acoustic profiles and identify a speaker, which is too long for the technology to be widely used, according to Rodman. “In order for this technology to gain traction among users, the response time needs to improve without increasing the error rate,” he says. The researchers modified existing computer models to make the authentication process work more efficiently. “This is part of the evolution of speech authentication software, and it moves us closer to making this technology a practical, secure tool,” Rodman says.
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An online chat channel is more likely to survive over time when the community is heterogeneous, or when it has turnover and new members continue to join the group, according to researchers at the University of Haifa and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The team surveyed 282 chat channels begun on the same day over the course of six months. The survey found that the greater the turnover among members, the more likely a chat community will sustain itself over time. Moreover, chat groups are more likely to survive when they have a higher number of messages between members from the first day of activity through the end of its second week. The researchers also found that chat communities that have an irregular ratio between the number of messages and the number of members after two weeks are more likely to survive. “The present study shows that prediction of an online community’s survival chances cannot be based on quantitative data relating to the size of the group or even to its growth rate alone,” says Haifa’s Daphne Raban. “A social predictor, on the other hand, can much better predict its chances.”
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