Researchers in Germany believe organic computing has the potential to solve the problems of urban traffic systems, which rely on sensors and controllers. Using an organic approach, Holger Prothmann of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and colleagues have developed a decentralized traffic control system. “The organic approach is based on industry-standard traffic light controllers,” Prothmann says. The researchers developed an observer/controller architecture, which enables the traffic light to respond to traffic flow and to forward information to traffic lights on nearby roads. Current systems use fixed timers that are unable to respond directly to traffic, and centralized systems are unable to respond optimally to changes in traffic on the roads. Working with colleagues at Karlsruhe and at Leibniz Universitat Hannover, Prothmann tested the decentralized traffic control system on roads in Hamburg, and found that it can reduce vehicle stops, delays, and the time needed to reach destinations. “The environmental and economic importance of traffic control systems combined with the distributed nature of traffic nodes and their constantly changing traffic demands make traffic light control an ideal test case for organic computing approaches,” Prothmann says.

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A cell phone would be able to track the behavior of its user with SoundSense, new software developed by Dartmouth College researchers. SoundSense automatically classifies sounds as “voice,” “music,” or “ambient noise,” but the user also can train it to recognize unfamiliar sounds. When a sound is frequently picked up via the microphone on a cell phone, SoundSense gives it a high “sound rank” and asks the user whether it is significant and if he or she wants to label the sound. In tests, the software correctly determined when the user was in a particular coffee shop, walking outside, brushing her teeth, cycling, and driving a car. “The SoundSense system is our first step in building a system that can learn [user behavior] on the go,” says project leader and Dartmouth professor Tanzeem Choudhury. Monitoring everyday sounds via cell phones has the potential to provide people with much information on their daily activities, which could be used to improve their personal healthcare needs or time-management skills. SoundSense does not use a lot of power, sends data elsewhere for processing, stores raw audio clips, and can be told to ignore certain sounds.

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More than 6,000 volunteers around the world are contributing computing power to the University of Delaware (UD) in an attempt to help biomedical researchers find cures for HIV, Parkinson’s, arthritis, and breast cancer. UD’s Docking@Home project is using the computing power to model and simulate the combinations of molecules and their binding orientations, or docking, in an effort to discover candidates for new drugs. The computer users are helping UD complete 30,000 docking tasks a day, according to professor and project leader Michela Taufer. The volunteers are using the open source program Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing to enable UD to automatically access their computers when idle. UD also is developing software for ExSciTecH, an immersive volunteer computing system to explore science, technology, and health, which will enable volunteers to “throw” a molecule into a protein with a Nintendo Wii. “Other people do yoga with a Wii,” Taufer says. “We are doing science.”

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As robots increasingly move from industrial environments to the real world, human safety has become an important issue. Unlike industrial robots that perform repetitive tasks in controlled environments, household and real-world robots will have a relative amount of autonomy, and will work in ambiguous, human-centered environments. Before such robots become widespread, regulators are trying to determine how to approach the safety and legal issues that may arise. In a study published in the International Journal of Social Robotics, researchers proposed a framework for a legal system for next-generation robot safety issues. The goal is to ensure safer robot design through safety intelligence and to provide a method for handling accidents when they occur. The guiding principle of the study’s proposed system is to categorize robots as third-existence entities, since they are neither living or biological (first existence), or non-living/non-biological (second existence). Third-existence entities will resemble living things in appearance and behavior, but will not be self-aware. Robots are currently legally classified as second existence, or human property, but the authors believe that a third-existence classification could simplify incidents involving accidents and responsibility. A major component of integrating robots into human society will involve dealing with open texture risk, or risk that occurs due to unpredictable interactions in unstructured environments, such as getting robots to understand the subtleties of human language.

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Researchers from the College of William & Mary have developed real-time collaborative browsing (RCB) software that makes it easier for users to interact with each other while browsing the Web. Several ways of navigating the Internet collaboratively already exist, but all of them are limited in some way, such as not allowing users to browse together at the same time or limiting interactions on a single Web page. Screen sharing can allow users to browse together as if sharing a single machine, but such programs usually require connecting to an outside server. William & Mary professor Haining Wang says that with RCB, only the person leading the session needs to have the browser extension installed, and all other users only need a standard Web browser. The leader uses RCB to generate a session URL that can be sent to other participants, who can click on the link to join up with the leader. Once connected, both users can interact with a Web page and follow links, with all actions being funneled through the host’s browser. The host can add or remove participants as needed, connecting up to 10 participants without a significant drop in performance, though the researchers say RCB works best between two people. RCB is not yet available to the public, but the researchers recently presented their work at the Usenix Technical Conference.

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University of Cambridge researchers have developed a simple and affordable method for constructing virtual three-dimensional (3D) models, which should make 3D modeling more accessible. The new program requires only a basic Web camera in order for users to build 3D models of textured objects in real time. The system collects live video when an object is moved in front of the Webcam, and then reconstructs the object online. The software detects points on the object, uses them to estimate object structure from the motion of the camera or the object, and computes the Delaunay tetrahedralization of the points. The system records the points in a mesh of tetrahedra, which is where the object’s surface mesh is embedded. The invalid tetrahedra are removed to obtain the surface mesh based on a probabilistic carving algorithm and the object texture is applied to the 3D mesh in order to clean up the final reconstruction and produce a realistic model. The Cambridge team presented the system at the 20th British Machine Vision Conference in London.

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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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The Perception-on-Purpose (POP) project is an effort by European researchers to develop technology enabling a robot to integrate visual and audio data to facilitate purposeful perception. “It is not that easy to decide what is foreground and what is background using sound alone, but by combining the two modalities–sound and vision–it becomes much easier,” says project coordinator Radu Horaud. “If you are able to locate 10 sound sources in 10 different directions, but if in one of these directions you see a face, then you can much more easily concentrate on that sound and throw out the other ones.” The researchers followed this strategy in their development of algorithms that allowed their robot, Popeye, to reliably identify speakers. “Most often, sound research is conducted in specialized labs, with arrays of microphones and a very controlled acoustic environment,” Horaud says. “But we integrated our two microphones and two cameras onto the head of our Popeye. The idea is to have an agent-centered cognitive system.” Horaud believes there is a link between multi-sensory perception and cognition, and that some modern artificial intelligence applications are constrained by their inability to learn from their environment.

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Researchers at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have incorporated cloud computing technology into Dimmunix, a new tool designed to make programs immune to future recurrences of bugs. When a bug manifests in software for the first time, Dimmunix saves its signature, then observes the response of the computer and records a trace, which enables the tool to recognize the bug the next time. When the bug appears again, Dimmunix automatically changes the execution of the program so it continues to run smoothly. The use of cloud computing technology means the tool can protect an entire network of computers from bugs, even in an environment such as the Internet. EPFL professor George Candea compares Dimmunix to the way the human immune system develops antibodies after an infection. “Subsequently, when the immune system encounters the same pathogen once again, the body recognizes it and knows how to effectively fight the illness,” he says. Dimmunix is available online for free.

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Researchers at the National Center for Scientific Research have devised an organic transistor that can emulate a synapse’s primary functionalities. The researchers say the breakthrough could lead to new generations of neuro-inspired computers capable of functions comparable to those of the human brain. The nanoparticle organic memory field-effect transistor (NOMFET) successfully mimics synapse plasticity. Gold nanoparticles are fixed in the transistor channel and coated with pentacene, and they have a memory effect that permits them to imitate the way a synapse operates during the transmission of action potentials between a pair of neurons. Thus the electronic element can evolve as a function of the system in which it is encapsulated. The NOMFET’s performance matches that of at least seven complementary metal-oxide semiconductor transistors that up to now have been needed to mimic plasticity. Neuro-inspired computers can address visual recognition and other challenges that are beyond the capabilities of silicon computers.

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