North Carolina State University’s Jay Narayan led a research effort to create a computer chip that has enough memory to store all the information in a library. The chip uses nanodots, or nanoscale magnets, which are made of single, defect-free crystals and can be as small as six diameters. The nanodots are integrated directly into a silicon chip. Their precise orientation enables programmers to reliably read and write data to the chips. “We have created magnetic nanodots that store one bit of information on each nanodot, allowing us to store over one billion pages of information in a chip that is one square inch,” Narayan says. He says the chip can be manufactured at an affordable cost. Narayan wants to develop magnetic packaging that would enable lasers or other technologies to interact with the nanodots.
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The European Union-funded ARRIVAL project, a collaboration of researchers from seven European countries, has developed algorithms that can optimize planning and scheduling in complex rail networks. ARRIVAL researchers say their algorithms will enable railways to have more trains, passengers, and goods travel on the same infrastructure, while improving punctuality, passenger satisfaction, and operator profit. “The new timetable, drawn up using the ARRIVAL algorithms, has meant that trains can be scheduled more efficiently and disruptions handled more effectively, while maintaining the usual security measures,” says University of Patras professor Christos Zaroliagis. Two optimized planning approaches led to the efficiency gains. Robust planning involves deploying algorithms to ensure that all parts of the railway network are organized as efficiently as possible. Online planning takes a reactive approach, dealing with disruptions as they happen in real time. Zaroliagis says the technology also has applications in other sectors. “Our algorithms could benefit industrial work-flow systems, e-commerce, P2P, and grid computing networks and even healthcare,” he says.
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The computer industry had an opportunity to learn about the technical details of Google’s infrastructure during LADIS 2009, ACM’s recent SIGOPS International Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware. Jeff Dean, a Google engineer who was one of the keynote speakers, also talked about Spanner, a new storage and computation system for automating the management of services across multiple data centers. Spanner, which will have a scale of 1 million to 10 million servers in the future, would be capable of automatically allocating resources across “entire fleets of machines,” Dean says. The goal will be “automatic, dynamic, worldwide placement of data and computation to minimize latency or cost.” Spanner also would offer a cost management strategy for addressing regional differences in bandwidth and power costs. Google would have energy management opportunities because Spanner can seamlessly shift workloads between data centers. Automated capacity management also would enable Google to route around failures or data center downtime as well as plan more energy-efficient facilities.

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Defcon founder and organizer Jeff Moss, who was named to the U.S. Homeland Security Advisory Council in June, notes that there is a desire in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other agencies to augment the cybersecurity alert system as well as adopt Web 2.0 technologies. “It goes back to this theme I keep hearing from people there that they need to fully engage in the cyber area with distributing information,” he says. “They want to be more transparent and they want to communicate information faster to broader audiences in different ways. The hang-up seems to be, what are the best ways to do it?” Moss says that DHS has been authorized to hire as many as 1,000 cybersecurity employees over the next three years, but he does not think that specialists are available in such numbers. Moss says agencies’ fierce protection of their bureaucratic fiefdoms plays a part in the U.S. government’s inability to respond adequately to a cyberattack. He acknowledges that the position of cybersecurity czar has been marked by a lot of turnover, and he presents a theory that “the longer you go without a czar the more they realize that maybe they don’t need one, that what they envision what a czar doing, the role is changing.” Moss argues that the position should be one tasked with coordinating intelligence, civilians, and the military. “So it’s probably more important to get the right person and explain the position so they don’t end up with one of these ‘all the responsibilities and none of the authority’ situations, which is what it sounded like, [a] multiple reporting structure with little budget and little staff and no real authority,” he says.

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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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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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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) unanimously voted to start drafting rules to support Internet neutrality. “It’s hard to imagine anything more important to the future of the success of our economy than a healthy and vibrant Internet, and there is no question that the openness of the Internet is the secret sauce to its success,” said FCC chairman Julius Genachowski following the vote. He also noted that the FCC has a core agenda to drive investment, innovation, and opportunity in 21st century communications. In addition to providing their customers with consistent Web traffic, Internet service providers (ISPs) would need to detail their network traffic management operations to ensure no wrongdoing. The U.S. government’s previous stance on the Web regulation issue was one of non-involvement, but it changed its position as worries mounted that ISPs could begin to exhibit favoritism toward their products and services. Crafting the rules will be a long, contentious process as wireless carriers, telecommunications firms, and other industry players and participants sound off on the benefits and drawbacks. The FCC’s Democratic commissioners are vocal advocates of net neutrality rules, while the agency’s Republican commissioners argue that such regulations are unnecessary. Critics are concerned that Web regulation will have an adverse effect on innovation in the Internet sector. However, Genachowski disagrees that the rules would hamper investment in broadband networks. “I reject the notion that we must choose between open Internet rules and investment by service providers in their networks,” he said during the meeting.

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University of Edinburgh researchers used low-energy lasers to make salt crystals in gel, which could make it possible to store a terabyte of data in a space the size of a sugar cube within the next 10 years. The researchers focused two overlapping low-energy laser beams on a salt solution, which provided the exact right amount of energy to form a temporary crystal. Edinburgh professor Andy Alexander says the process could be used to improve on traditional methods of optical data storage such as CDs. In comparison to the two-dimensional surface of a CD, three-dimensional (3D) optical data storage contains far more layers, and tiny crystals could act as storage points. Information would be stored by making marks in a pattern and read using light. Alexander says that 3D, crystal-based devices could be available within 10 years and would enable users to easily store, access, and move massive amounts of data. “This research builds on a discovery that was made by accident many years ago, when it was found that light can be used to trigger crystal formation,” he says. “We have refined this technique and now we can create crystals on demand. There is much work to be done before these crystals can be used in practical applications such as optical storage, but we believe they have significant potential.”

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