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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Researchers at Harvard University and Australia’s University of Queensland have designed and constructed a quantum computer capable of simulating and calculating the behavior of a molecular quantum system. The two photons that function as qubits in a quantum device are entangled, meaning that their states are linked and consistent over distance, thus augmenting the quantum computer’s ability to explore all possible solutions to a complex problem at once. The researchers tasked the computer with calculating the energy levels of the hydrogen molecule. Through simulation of the quantum forces inherent in the electrons of atomic bonds themselves, the computer’s photons accurately nailed the energy levels to within 6 parts per million. This milestone is “great, a proof of principle, more evidence that [a quantum computer] is not pie in the sky or cannot be built,” says University of California, Berkeley professor Birgitta Whaley.
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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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Oxford University researchers have developed the Parallel Tracking and Mapping (PTAM) program, a camera-tracking system for fusing real and three-dimensional (3D) computer-generated visuals. PTAM enables users to project virtual objects or characters into a video stream that appears on real world surfaces. “The blending of real and virtual worlds is common enough in films and television, but is usually achieved by extensive processing of the recorded images or by filming in studios with known objects at fixed locations,” says Oxford professor David Murray. “The PTAM software allows developers to augment a camera’s video stream in real time and in everyday locations.” PTAM builds a map of thousands of features from objects and scenes, tracks accurately and at a standard frame rate, and calculates the camera viewpoint and angle. The technology also could improve global positioning systems and digital compasses, and provide support for satellite, 3G, and Wi-Fi signals.
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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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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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A consortium of European research institutions is working on a new, photonic computing model under the aegis of the PHOCUS project. The system envisioned by the project uses light to communicate, potentially raising energy efficiency far above that of current supercomputers. The reservoir computer concept is inspired by the rapid information processing architecture of the human brain, in which stimuli or inputs are fed into neural networks or reservoirs. Inputs remain detectable in the reservoir for a certain time, and this input memory, coupled with the emerging response of the reservoir, converts the input into a large number of dynamical states of the reservoir, producing a high-dimensional state space. The researchers say that photonic systems could be employed to comprehend and eventually imitate some of the brain’s functionalities. PHOCUS’ ultimate target is photonic deployment of reservoir computing, running at high data rates, as an alternative to supercomputers for operations that require reduced size and less power consumption.

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A panel of experts told U.S. senators at a recent hearing of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that the United States would be defeated in an all-out cyberwar, and reducing this vulnerability will not occur until the government takes a more active interest in safeguarding the nation’s network. Former director of national security and national intelligence Michael McConnell warned that greater government involvement may not happen until after a “catastrophic event” transpires. The focus of the hearing was the Cyber Security Act of 2009, which would oversee organizations and companies that supply critical U.S. infrastructure, mandate licensing and certification for cybersecurity professionals, and sponsor grant and scholarship programs.

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Researchers at the Warsaw University of Technology in Poland have studied the characteristics of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls in an attempt to gain a better understanding of ordinary traffic. Security remains an issue for VoIP calls, which can be hijacked and used to send confidential information over the Internet. Wojciech Mazurczyk and colleagues decided to study ordinary VoIP calls so experts would have a way to compare and contrast regular calls with those that have been embedded with stolen data. VoIP calls can be compromised by changing the order in which the digital packets are sent, or by deliberately delaying certain packets that have embedded data, a technique known as Lost Audio Packet Steganography (LACK). The team’s research shows that packets are not normally re-ordered in a way for hiding data, so attacks that re-order data are not a real threat. However, LACK attacks would be difficult to spot because of the routine loss of data packets.

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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.

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