The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will explore whether computer systems, sensors, or cell phones contributed to the deadly Washington, D.C., Metrorail accident on June 22 in which nine people were killed. Although there are several other possible reasons for why the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) train crashed into the rear of another train, the WMATA computer systems will likely be closely examined because they are designed to prevent such rear-end accidents. The computer systems are constantly making decisions on train speed using data from track-bed sensors that monitor train movement. NTSB investigators will likely try to rule out possible causes, such as a misconfigured control system, a physical computer or hardware failure, or a security breach, says consultant Kegan Kawano. Security breaches have been known to happen in transportation systems, and Kawano says he is aware of 10 security incidents in transit systems since 2003. For example, a Polish teen allegedly derailed a train by hacking the network, and in 2003 a widespread worm affected systems used by rail hauler CSX Corp., causing the company to stop some passenger and freight service. Kawano says the design of rail automation systems is so unique that hackers often cannot figure out how to access them. NTSB investigator Debbie Hersman also says the agency will examine the actions of onboard operators and investigate the possibility of a mechanical failure.

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Stanford University computer scientist Debashis Sahoo and computer science professor David Dill recently completed a study of a program based on Boolean logic that can locate specific genes. Starting with two known B-cell genes, Sahoo searched through databases with thousands of gene products in milliseconds and found 62 genes that matched the patterns he would expect to see for genes that got turned on in between the activation of the two genes he started with. He then examined databases involving 41 strains of laboratory mice that were known to be deficient in one or more of the 62 genes. Of those 41 strains, 26 had defects in B-cell development. “Biologists are really amazed that, with just a computer algorithm, in milliseconds I can find genes that it takes them a really long time to isolate in the lab,” Sahoo says. He is currently using the technique to try to find new genes that contribute to cancer development. “This shows that computational analysis of existing data can provide clues about where researchers should look next,” Sahoo says.
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A new Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) report suggests that technically oriented women may face gender discrimination in their jobs at high-tech firms in part because of mismanaged projects. The report says that tech firms rely on a “hero mindset” to save coding projects that are poorly organized, and employees with family responsibilities–often women–are sacrificed as a result. The report is based on a discussion that took place between 59 senior business and technical managers from major technology companies in a closed forum last fall. The report says it is common to find a kind of “good old boys network” in the high-tech world, where managers tend to hire “people who are like them.” Another new ABI study found that women hold about four percent of senior-level technical positions and an estimated 25 percent of all technology jobs. However, at the higher levels, 36.9 percent of women end up in a manager job compared to 19 percent of men. ABI suggests that all women candidates should at least get an interview, and that a software tool could be created to weed out any unconscious bias against hiring or promoting technical women.
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The Spanish Software and Services Initiative Program’s Vulcano Project is a collaborative effort between higher education institutions, technology transfer centers, and industrial partners to develop open source software with the reliability and quality of proprietary programs. Vulcano was modeled after other European efforts to develop open source software by adopting similar methodologies, processes, business models, and the latest technologies. The Vulcano project is based on three main pillars. The first is a project to create a collaborative environment based on the latest technologies. The second pillar is a pilot program to demonstrate how open source software can help develop new projects. The third is the deployment of a nationwide competence center, which will help businesses and local organizations learn how to use open source software, including information on licenses, collaborative development, and development processes.
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Microsoft Live Labs researchers have developed Pivot, a tool designed to visually organize large data sets. Pivot presents data in the form of several images accompanied by textual data. Users can zoom into the images to study individual pieces of data, or zoom out to see items grouped according to certain criteria. Data collections can contain a few images with static data attached, or they can be large and connected to a feed of changing data. Pivot is based on Microsoft’s Seadragon, software designed for manipulating large amounts of visual information. Users can make their own collections of data by converting images to the Deep Zoom format used by Seadragon, and annotate them using a format based on extensible markup language. Pivot also could provide a better way to sort through Internet search results, because users could sort through thousands of results visually, instead of just looking a list of the top 10 search results.
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Inspired by the sandfish lizard, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are collaborating with Northwestern University’s Paul Umbanhowar to develop a snake-like robot that can swim through sand. When the sandfish lizard is submerged in sand, the animal tucks its limbs into its sides and moves forward by wiggling from side to side. The researchers created a computer model of the sandfish lizard that showed a snake-like robot with seven body segments that could travel through a granular medium such as sand. The researchers built a robot that is 35 centimeters long and features seven aluminum segments linked by six motors, which are covered in spandex to prevent the motors from becoming jammed. When the robot undulates its body at a frequency similar to the lizard, it can move forward at speeds of up to 0.3 body lengths per wave cycle. The team would have to add more jointed segments to match the 0.4 body lengths per cycle that a submerged lizard can achieve.
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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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The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) has been researching promising petascaling techniques, as well as related work on optimization techniques and the study of software libraries and programming models suitable for petascale computing. The combined work has laid the foundation for the efficient exploitation of the upcoming Tier-0 systems. The applications studied cover a variety of scientific areas and represent European high-performance computing use, with most of them originating from the European scientific community. The applications were ported, evaluated, and scaled on the PRACE supercomputer prototypes. Each application was ported to an average of three prototype systems. Porting to cluster-based systems encountered the fewest problems, while programs that were ported to Cell-based prototypes required a major time investment. PRACE researchers say it was essential to tune the options and parameters used when compiling and running a program, such as the choice of numerical libraries and compiler options. The project developed a tool for studying optimal compiler options and platform-specific recommendations. PRACE researchers also explored the programming models and software libraries required by petascale applications, and completed a survey and analysis of the new upcoming programming models and languages suitable for such programs.

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A project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and led by University of Nottingham researchers is developing a new computerized approach to scheduling airport operations that is designed to reduce delays, speed up baggage handling, and decrease pollution. The project aims to computerize and coordinate the scheduling of take-offs, landings, gate assignments, and baggage handling. The end result will be a search engine capable of analyzing the billions of possible scheduling combinations to provide the controllers with the most efficient courses of action. Currently, these four areas are organized manually by staff members who make decisions based on observations, reports, and experience. The scheduling improvements will make flying easier for passengers and reduce pollution by minimizing the time planes spend on the ground with their engines running. The project will develop computational models for each of the four areas of operations and determine how to run those models in conjunction with each other. One of the critical issues is how long an airplane needs for preparation on the ground before it can take off. Preparation includes enough time for the safety briefing and warming the engines. Sending a plane to the runway before either of these steps has taken place will cause delays on the runway that could affect other flights.

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