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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Khronos wants to develop a public version of a royalty-free specification for accelerated three-dimensional (3D) graphics on the Web within 12 months. The consortium that oversees the OpenGL graphics interface technology has established the Accelerated 3D on Web working group for the task in response to a proposal from Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox browser. The initiative comes as the speed of JavaScript, the programming language used to write many Web-based applications, continues to improve. Mozilla wants to use a mechanism to let JavaScript tap into the OpenGL standard to produce the accelerated graphics. “Accelerated 3D graphics with the super-fast, next-generation JavaScript engines from nearly every Web browser vendor means that we’re going to be able to start to see more and more advanced applications written using open Web technologies,” said Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard in a blog post. Mozilla would release the technology first as an extension to its browser sometime after introducing Firefox 3.5. Improving the quality of 3D graphics on the Web would enhance online games and other Web applications.

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Yahoo! has expanded its partnerships with top U.S. universities to advance cloud computing research. The University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst will join Carnegie Mellon University in using Yahoo!’s cloud computing cluster to conduct large-scale systems software research and explore new applications that analyze Internet-scale data sets, ranging from voting records to online news sources. To date, academic researchers have had limited access to Internet-scale supercomputers for conducting systems and applications research. To help alleviate this obstacle, Yahoo! is granting these four universities access to the Yahoo! cloud computing cluster. The Yahoo! cluster, also known as M45, has been operational since November 2007 and in use by Carnegie Mellon. The cluster has approximately 4,000 processor-cores and 1.5 petabytes of disks. “We have been using the Yahoo! cluster for more than a year now and have made significant progress in a number of key research areas, resulting in the publication of more than two dozen academic papers,” said Randal E. Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. “Our researchers were able to extract and process documents from the Web in a way that was not possible before, changing the way we think about research problems.” Yahoo!’s M45 cluster runs Hadoop, an open source distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data.

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Controlling applications with hand gestures is a more natural way to communicate with computers, according to a team of engineering students at Northeastern University. With a PC interface developed by the team, users move a hand back and forth or up and down over several rows of copper plates to communicate with a computer. The “electric-field sensing device” locks on to the static electricity of the user. The team has created an “interactive space” in which communication occurs without the user wearing sensors. The copper plates track the hand movements, then pass the coordinates through circuitry that is attached to a PC via a USB port. The team used the device to control a three-dimensional model on a computer screen in a video demonstration.

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Three times a year, leaders from the world’s major technology and communications companies meet to discuss strategies for preventing the Internet from becoming overrun with attacks, spam, viruses, and hackers, though the specifics of these meetings is often kept secret. “Some people might get nervous if they knew all the things we talked about,” says Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) chairman Michael O’Rierdan. “It’s our job to make the Internet safe, but we don’t want to put people off using the Web.” MAAWG participants also are nervous about being targeted by the criminals they are trying to stop. Most of the spam and hacking online is now perpetrated by organized crime. Within the United States, retaliation against MAAWG generally comes in the form of lawsuits, but in other countries organized criminals in Russia and the Ukraine use more violent methods. MAAWG founder Steve Linford has been advised by the police not to open any unexpected packages. The MAAWG conferences attract approximately 270 delegates from 19 countries, and although the press has usually been kept out of the conferences, that trend is starting to change as participants feel the industry needs to reach out to consumers and get them to help fight spam and cybercrime. Nearly 90 percent of spam is sent from computers that have been hacked and are remotely programmed to send spam. More than 9.4 million computers have been hijacked for this purpose, and cleaning up all of these machines will be impossible without the public’s help.

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Frank Moss, head of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says there are real opportunities in developing technology for disabled or disadvantaged people, and believes they will translate into great commercial hits. For example, MIT’s Rosalind Picard is creating a system for people with autism that can tell from a person’s head movements and facial expressions if they are confused, interested, or disagreeing. The system then feeds the information to a display in the corner of a pair of glasses. “The idea is to supply autistic people with the cues they would otherwise miss,” says Moss. Meanwhile, MIT’s Hugh Herr has designed a supportive exoskeleton that enables a person to run with the same energy they would normally use to walk. And MIT research assistant John Moore has built an artificial intelligence system that collects information from a patient and creates a report for the doctor. The patient talks to an avatar, which uses natural language processing to interpret what the patient says.
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A recent ACM survey of more than 1,400 college-bound high school students found that 45 percent of boys see a computer science major as a “very good” choice, but only 10 percent of girls have a similar opinion. Experts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), where only 5 percent to 10 percent of approximately 350 computer science and engineering students are female, say they have noticed the problem and are working to spread the word about the urgent need for a technology-savvy work force in which both genders are equally represented. The university has launched an initiative called the Girl Empowerment and Mentoring for Computing Project (GEM), which aims to inspire girls to pursue careers in information technology. The GEM project gives female computer science students at UNL the opportunity to serve as mentors to middle- and high-school girls interested in computing fields. Participants are divided into teams, and with the help of their mentor, prepare essays on topics related to information technology, including environmentally-friendly computers, hybrid cars, and the use of technology to save endangered species. UNL faculty members judge the essays and award scholarships worth up to $1,000 per year if they attend UNL and pursue computer science as a major. UNL professor Stephen Scott says women are an “untapped market” for the computer science field. “As women have become more prominent in taking leadership roles in society, they need to be at least as informed about computing and participating at least as much as men are,” Scott says.

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Scientists from 41 European research and industrial organizations recently sent secure, quantum encrypted information over an eight-node, mesh network. By creating a network with an average link length of 20 to 30 kilometers, with the longest link being 83 kilometers, the researchers say they have broken all previous records and taken a major step toward the practical implementation of secure, quantum-encrypted communication networks. Launched in late 2008, the quantum key distribution (QKD) demonstration involved secure telephone communications and videoconferencing, as well as a rerouting experiment that demonstrated the functionality of the SEcure COmmunication network based on Quantum Cryptography (SECOQC). “In our paper we have put forward, for the first time, a systematic design that allows unrestricted scalability and interoperability of QKD technologies,” the researchers write in their recent journal paper “The SECOQC Key Distribution Network in Vienna.” The paper describes the operation of the network and offers an initial estimate for the maximum number of keys that can be exchanged on a QKD network.

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A recent ACM study concluded that there is still a major gap between how teenage girls and boys view computers and careers in computer science. The nationwide ACM survey of college-bound high school students age 13 to 17 found that 45 percent of boys thought majoring in computer science would be “very good” while only 10 percent of girls shared that viewpoint. There were also major disparities when asked about different technical tasks, such as learning a new software program, setting up a wireless network, or editing music or video on a computer, with boys consistently giving more confident responses than girls. “Using technology doesn’t necessarily enhance your idea of creating technology,” says Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology president Telle Whitney. “If you think about how you think about your car, it kind of makes sense. I think many girls are like that.” In the ACM study, when asked to do a word association based on computers, boys responded with words like design, games, and video, while girls responded with words like boring, hard, and nerd. “As long as teenagers believe that computer science is boring, difficult, anti-social, or doesn’t have much impact on solving the world’s problems, they’re unlikely to choose it for their future,” the study says. Whitney says the Borg Institute is working to change these misconceptions among young women by arguing that computer skills are necessary for success in a world that is increasingly dominated by technology. Whitney believes that much of the change will come from establishing mentoring programs so girls can find successful role models in the technology industry. “One of our messages is that you can like pink and you can like princesses and still be good at programming a computer,” she says.

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The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) released guidelines that would allow nearly 3 million overseas and military voters to cast votes over the Internet in November. The EAC plan worries cybersecurity experts, election officials, and voting integrity advocates. They note that email messages and voting Web sites are vulnerable to interception or hacking. Congress mandated in 2009 that the EAC develop guidelines for pilot programs to aid overseas voting, including online voting. Most states seek EAC certification of voting technology, and the commission’s Jeannie Layson says “the EAC hopes that the work we do in 2010 will assist states already running pilot programs to improve services for military and overseas voters.” The majority of the 33 states that have developed pilot programs for Internet voting will let voters send completed ballots as an email attachment, while faxes, which are another approved method for sending votes, are increasingly being sent on the Web due to the growing use of voice-over-Internet phone service. Critics say the EAC is circumventing the technical board that is supposed to review new regulations and also may be violating federal law by not allowing enough time for public comment on the guidelines.
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