A scan of the Internet by Columbia University researchers searching for vulnerable embedded devices has found that nearly 21,000 routers, Webcams, and VoIP products are vulnerable to remote attack. They say there could be as many as 6 million vulnerable devices on the Internet. The scan also found that the devices’ administrative interfaces are viewable from anywhere on the Internet, and their owners have not changed the devices’ passwords from the manufacturer’s default. The study scanned networks belonging to the largest Internet service providers (ISPs) in North America, Europe, and Asia, and vulnerable devices were found in significant numbers in all parts of the world. Since starting the project last December, the researchers have scanned 130 million IP addresses and found nearly 300,000 devices whose administrative interfaces were remotely accessible from anywhere on the Internet. Devices with default passwords are most vulnerable, but others are theoretically vulnerable to brute-force password-cracking attacks. The researchers have provided ISPs with their findings, but Columbia professor Salvatore Stolfo says product manufacturers are the real culprits. He says that they need to hide their administrative interfaces by default and give customers clear instructions on how to alter the configuration to protect themselves. Stolfo also says that vendors should be more vocal in encouraging customers to change default passwords.

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Researchers in Barcelona are developing virtual reality spaces that incorporate touch-sensitive tiles and immersive animations. Pompeu Fabra University professor Paul Verschure says his research team has built an experience-induction machine as part of the PRESENCCIA project to understand how humans can exist in physical and virtual environments simultaneously. One of the project’s major challenges was creating a credible virtual environment, which required the researchers to understand how people’s brains construct a vision of the world. “Imagine what we see is sort of rapidly jumping about–that would not be a believable experience for us,” Verschure says. “So that means one thing we have really tried to engineer here also from a psychological perspective is how do I feed this continuity of expectations that our brain is generating about the world.” The researchers say the ultimate goal is to advance human-computer interaction beyond the traditional keyboard, screen, and mouse. “What we’re trying to do is to understand why people behave in a more or less natural way in a virtual reality,” says PRESENCCIA project coordinator Mel Slater. Petar Horki, a student at Austria’s Graz University of Technology, is using PRESENCCIA concepts to create a virtual reality system that uses mind control, allowing the user to simply think about an action to perform that action in the virtual world. “Actually, I’m not doing anything, I’m just imagining I’m doing a brisk foot movement, and by this imagination I can move at least in this virtual room,” Horki says.

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ACM’s International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), sponsored by IBM, challenges students to solve real-world problems using open technology and advanced computing methods in a very short time period. Last year’s competition attracted tens of thousands of students on 7,100 teams from universities in about 90 countries. “The world faces many daunting problems such as pandemic diseases, climate change, water pollution, food safety, finite energy resources, as well as issues with urban management and mass transportation,” says IBM’s Doug Heintzman, ICPC’s sponsorship executive. “At IBM, we believe we have a responsibility to help develop the next generation of technology leaders, help them to understand and tackle these complex business issues.” ICPC executive director Bill Poucher, a professor at Baylor University, says the contest gives students the opportunity to demonstrate their talents and present themselves to top recruiters. “The contest is also a forum for advancing technology in an effort to better accommodate the growing needs of the future,” Poucher says. “At the same time, the competition is a chance for students of similar interests to exchange ideas and peer educate.” Following the regional contests currently underway, finalists will attend the World Finals, which will take place in February 2010 in Harbin, China, hosted by Harbin Engineering University.

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At the second annual ACM SIGGRAPH Asia conference, which takes place December 16-19 in Yokohama, Japan, computer graphics professionals and researchers will demonstrate the most recent developments in graphics. For example, Seoul National University researchers will use high-speed, high-resolution photography to reveal how water breaks into sheets and droplets as it splashes over an object. The researchers built a computer model that focuses on the interface between air and water, allowing it to simulate the complex dynamics of the interface. A team from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has developed a new take on shadow art, which presents users with a seemingly random assortment of objects that, when lit in a certain way, creates a recognizable two-dimensional (2D) shadow. The 2D shadow art uses a computer model to calculate the object shape needed to cast up to three distinct shadows simultaneously. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics say they have developed a program that makes creating reflections far easier than existing methods. Current models produce reflections by tracing the path that virtual light rays take through a model’s three-dimensional space. The Max Planck program enables users to manipulate those rays so the desired effect is created. Meanwhile, researchers at China’s Tsinghua University have developed a photo-editing program that requires users to just roughly sketch and describe images they want to combine and the system then searches through online photo libraries to find, isolate, and reproduce the desired images in a new combined image.

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ACM announced that it is providing institutional library customers with advanced electronic archiving services to help preserve their electronic resources. The services, which will be provided by Portico and CLOCKSS, address the scholarly community’s need for long-term solutions for reliable, secure, and deliverable access to their growing collections of digital content. ACM is providing these services to protect the online collection of resources in its Digital Library, which is used by more than 1 million computing professionals and students around the world. “By partnering with Portico and CLOCKSS, we are able to meet a growing demand in the library community for a trusted, reliable third-party archive, and to ensure that digital collections remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students,” says ACM Group Publisher Scott Delman. “Scientific discovery and the educational process are not possible without reliable access to the accumulated scholarship of the past and secure preservation of the scholarly record, and these agreements are a clear step forward with the relationship between the ACM and the library community.” ACM hopes that the long-term digital preservation of content will make it easier for libraries to free up resources invested in print collections in favor of innovative electronic products and services. Portico preserves material through migration, which involves transitioning content from one file format to another as technology advances and file formats become obsolete. CLOCKSS uses Archive Nodes, which are stored at libraries chosen to be the custodians of the archived materials, and are located throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.

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China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) has unveiled the Tianhe supercomputer, the fastest supercomputer in China. Tianhe runs at 563.1 teraflops on the Linpack benchmark and is theoretically capable of petaflop performance. NUDT president Zhang Yulin says the system is expected to be used to process seismic data for oil exploration, perform bio-medical computing, and help design aerospace vehicles. If Tianhe had been operational for the most recent Top 500 list, it would have ranked as the world’s fourth-most powerful supercomputer. NUDT says that approximately 200 computer scientists worked on Tianhe over two years. The supercomputer was housed at the NUDT campus in Changsha, and is scheduled to be moved to the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin at the end of this year. Tianhe features 6,144 Intel CPUs and 5,120 AMD GPUs. “As far as I know, a combination of CPU and GPU is something new used to make a petaflop computer,” says NUDT professor Zhou Xingming. “After it’s installed in Tianjin, we plan to add hundreds or thousands of China-made CPUs to the machine, and improve its Linpack performance to over 800 teraflops.” Tianhe also could be ranked as the world’s fifth-greenest supercomputer on the Green500 List, which is compiled by researchers at Virginia Tech to rank the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputers.

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University of Washington researcher Babak Parviz has embedded nanoscale-sized circuitry into a contact lens in an effort to create a new kind of heads-up-display (HUD). The lens harvests radio waves to power a light-emitting diode (LED), which would be used to project floating images in front of a user’s eyes. Parviz says that one of the limitations of current HUDs is their limited field of view, but a contact lens could provide a much wider field of view. The circuitry for the contact lens requires 330 microwatts, but does not need a battery. Instead, a loop antenna receives power from a nearby radio source. Parviz says future version of the contact lens could harvest power from a user’s cell phone, potentially as the phone sends information to the lens. Advanced lenses also will have more pixels and an array of microlenses to focus the image so it appears suspended in front of a user’s eyes. He says the lens could be used to view subtitles when someone is speaking a foreign language, directions for an unfamiliar area, captioned photographs, or information for pilots. “A contact lens that allows virtual graphics to be seamlessly overlaid on the real world could provide a compelling augmented reality experience,” says Human Interface Technology Laboratory director Mark Billinghurst.

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Researchers from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) presented the most recent developments in the school’s Learning Societies Lab at a recent symposium at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. ECS’ Mike Wald discussed new features for the lab’s Web-based Synote program, including the ability to synchronize live notes taken via Twitter with synchronized lecture recordings and transcripts created through IBM’s speech-recognition software. E.A. Draffan, also from the ECS Learning Societies Lab, gave a presentation on how people with disabilities will access Web 2.0 technologies as technology continues to evolve. Draffan’s lecture focused on the need to enhance the knowledge of a wider network of informal experts and academic staff to enable them to introduce disabled students to the many Web-based tools that are currently being developed. He says doing so would enable disabled students to further develop their skills and potentially become informal experts capable of sharing the strategies they have developed. “In the past, people used their assistive technologies mainly with desktop computer applications, now they are spending far more time online,” Draffan says. “They also are collaborating and communicating via social networks, blogs, and wikis, which are not always accessible; however, often with the support of friends and tutors, they find workarounds and go on to build their own strategies.”

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Software developed by the Heath-e-Child project is capable of comparing a variety of structured and unstructured data to help identify rare or life-threatening diseases in children and then model the potential progression of those diseases. The software can search and compare patient data from hospitals throughout Europe, allowing doctors to study how patients with similar data at other hospitals were treated and whether treatment was successful. The Health-e-Child system links anonymized databases of patient information from hospitals in Paris, Genoa, Rome, and London, and there are plans to extend the network to 25 hospitals. For unstructured data such as images, the project has developed tools that translate visual information into a machine-readable language. The project’s three-dimensional (3D) registration tool for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and its MRI erosion-scoring system for juvenile idiomatic arthritis have been recognized as major advances. The project’s CaseReasoner tool enables doctors to search thousands of disease diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes to find similar cases. And the CardioWiz tool can be combined with MRI scan measurements to rapidly generate animated 3D models of a patient’s heart that can be used to simulate the effects of heart surgery or drug treatments.

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A key topic at this week’s SC09 supercomputing conference, which takes place Nov. 14-20 in Portland, Ore., is how to reach the exascale plateau in supercomputing performance. “There are serious exascale-class problems that just cannot be solved in any reasonable amount of time with the computers that we have today,” says Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility project director Buddy Bland. Today’s supercomputers are still well short of exascale performance. The world’s fastest system, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jaguar, reaches a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops. Bland says the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is holding workshops on building a system 1,000 times more powerful. The DOE, which is responsible for funding many of the world’s fastest systems, wants two machines to reach approximately 10 petaflops by 2011 to 2013, says Bland. However, the next major milestone currently receiving the most attention is the exaflop, or a million trillion calculations per second. Exaflop computing is expected to be achieved around 2018, according to predictions largely based on Moore’s Law. However, problems involved in reaching exaflop computing are far more complicated than advancements in chips. For example, Jaguar uses 7 megawatts of power, but an exascale system that uses CPU processing cores alone could take 2 gigawatts, says IBM’s Dave Turek. “That’s roughly the size of medium-sized nuclear power plant,” he says. “That’s an untenable proposition for the future.” Finding a way to reduce power consumption is key to developing an exascale computer. Turek says future systems also will have to use less memory per core and will require greater memory bandwidth.

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