Vienna University of Technology researchers have developed the “deanonymization” attack as a way to reveal the identity of Internet users based on their interactions in social networks. The attack uses social networking groups as well as traditional browser history-stealing tactics to single out specific users. The researchers focused on Germany’s Xing business social network and Facebook and matched stolen browsing histories with social network group members to identify users. “It is the combination of history stealing and group information that is novel,” says Vienna University post-doctoral researcher Gilbert Wondracek. Criminals could use the deanonymization method for targeted attacks, which only requires that the victim visit a malicious Web site that contains the attack code. There is no fix for the attack, but users can turn off their browsing history or use a private-browsing mode to minimize the risk.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor Carole Palmer says data curation is an important part of supporting and advancing research. “This is especially important in data-intensive science, where the power of discovery lies in applying computational approaches to large, aggregated data sets,” Palmer says. She says researchers need to plan around data-management requirements from the beginning of their projects, and to think in terms of a data set’s lifecycle. The biggest hurdles to overcome in collecting, curating, and managing data over a long period of time involve cost and labor. Even with the Internet and search engines, data stored online does not last nearly as long as data preserved in print. “We’re just beginning to do the research needed to guide how we build large-scale, multidisciplinary data repositories and collect and manage data in ways that add value and promote sharing and integration across laboratories, institutions, and disciplines,” Palmer says.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

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.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Tom Mitchell, head of Carnegie Mellon University’s Machine Learning Department, says that advances in machine learning could bring about a transformation in psychology and neuroscience. Mitchell says that his group has trained an algorithm to study functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of a person’s brain activity and determine what object they are thinking about. “We can look inside your brain when you see the color red, and we can look inside my brain when I see the color red, and we can ask, ‘Is it or is it not the same pattern of neural activity?’ ” he notes. Mitchell speculates that people could conceivably be networked to exchange information so that one person can tell what the other is thinking. He observes that a number of researchers are developing brain-computer interfaces that can enable the decoding of a person’s thoughts. This could be particularly useful for “locked in” patients who are speech- and mobility-disabled.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

University of Jaen (UJA) telecommunications engineers have developed a method to automatically detect and identify musical notes in an audio file and generate sheet music. The system can identify notes from different instruments, musicians, types of music, or recording studio conditions. “We propose an automatic system to detect and transcribe musical notes for one-instrument musical signals which, unlike other methods, is capable of adapting to the music scene,” says UJA’s Julio Jose Carabias. “Automatic music transcription has many practical applications for musicological analysis and is of enormous assistance, for example, in recovering musical content, separating audio sources, and codifying or converting audio files.” The researchers’ method converts WAV music files into MIDI files, which makes it possible to visualize the sheet music and listen to the result. “Another advantage of this method is that it does not require prior training with a musical database,” Carabias says.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Researchers at the Freie Universitat Berlin’s Artificial Intelligence Group have developed eyeDriver, software that enables users to steer a car with their eyes. The driver wears a helmet that features two cameras. One camera is pointed at the driver’s eyes and captures their movements, and the other camera points forward. The data is transmitted in regular intervals to an onboard laptop computer, where the eyeDriver software converts the data into control signals for the steering wheel. The software can calculate the position of the pupil in the eye, as well as the position in the scene that the user is looking at. The software has two modes. In “free ride” mode, the driver’s gaze direction determines the desired position of the steering wheel. In “routing” mode, the software steers autonomously unless an intersection or fork in the road appears. In that case, the car stops and the driver must select the desired route.
View Full Article

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

Spammers are paying people in countries such as India, Bangladesh, and China to pass Web security tests known as CAPTCHAS, which ask Web users to type in a string of semi-distorted characters to prove they are humans and not spam-generating robots, according to Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn. He says thousands of people in developing countries, primarily in Asia, are solving these puzzles for pay. The completed CAPTCHAS help spammers open new online accounts to send junk emails. However, Internet company executives say the threat of spammers paying people to decode CAPTCHAS is not a major concern. They note that Web sites use several tools to verify accounts and maintain security. Some sites may send confirmation codes as text messages, which then must be entered into a separate verification page before new email accounts are activated. “Our goal is to make mass account creation less attractive to spammers, and the fact that spammers have to pay people to solve CAPTCHAS proves that the tool is working,” says Google’s Macduff Hughes.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Robert Harle, assistant director of research at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, says the closed philosophy of devices such as the iPhone discourages the kind of tinkering that encouraged generations of computer scientists in the past. “People can use their iPhone…but they don’t want to delve into it, they don’t want to understand the depths behind it,” Harle says. “And I have a sneaking suspicion this is partly because we’ve got to the stage now with computing, computer science, [information technology], whatever you like, that it’s now such a black box, such a complex thing, that you can’t really fiddle in the same way as people used to.” Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory averages about 80 new students a year, down from 150 several years ago. In response, the school has launched a new Web site to promote the study of computer science, and is participating in open days and regional student conferences. Students also are not getting enough computer science education in grade school, which is bringing down university computer science enrollment numbers, and in turn, giving kids the wrong idea of what computer science is, Harle says.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute have developed Minput, a proof-of-concept miniature input device that provides mouse control and optical tracking for handheld devices. Minput features a 1.5-inch liquid-crystal display taken from a wristwatch originally developed to allow users to watch TV or movies, and two optical sensors. The researchers say Minput can be operated anywhere, including the surface of a table, on a user’s leg, or on the palm of a user’s hand. Users can manipulate Minput and control different programs via gestures such as flicking and twisting. For example, turning it like a knob would adjust the volume and sliding it left and right would change songs. Another modality functions like a virtual window, and users can slide Minput over photographs, text documents, and Web pages to interact with them. Minput also offers cursor control, which functions like a mouse for playing simple games.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Finding young women to fill tech jobs continues to be a problem for the German information technology (IT) industry, according to a new study from German technology and telecoms association Bitkom and research firm Forsa. Women accounted for 9 percent of the 40,500 trainees in the sector in 2009, down from 14 percent in 2001. Meanwhile, just 15 percent of students pursuing computer science studies at universities last year were women. The industry still has to contend with negative perceptions, such as those about the workload and opportunities for advancement, says Bitkom’s August-Wilhem Scheer. “Many preconceptions can be easily corrected,” Scheer says. “The image of the lonely programmer who spends his nights in a basement and cannot find a partner is really dated.” The industry continues to hold Girls’ Days to get more young women interested in IT and communication technology, and companies have begun to implement their own programs for attracting female employees.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com