The successful completion of the Netflix Prize competition demonstrates that prizes are a viable mechanism for encouraging research in the computing fields, writes Harvey Mudd College professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas. In the broader computing community, the Clay Mathematics Institute now offers Millennium Prizes, which are awards of $1 million for solutions to each of seven famous [...]

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researcher Glenn Fink is working with Wake Forest University professor Errin Fulp to develop a computer security program that models itself after the defensive techniques of ants. The new anti-malware system uses itinerant digital ants to find problems in a large network. When an ant comes across something suspicious, it [...]

Google’s Project 10 to the 100th–a contest celebrating the company’s 10th anniversary–asked participants in September 2008 to submit ideas that could help change the world. Google is giving the five winners a collective $10 million to fund their projects. However, because there were more than 150,000 submissions, Google is still deliberating between 16 newly-released finalists. [...]

The Long Tail theory suggests that the Internet drives demand away from popular products with mass appeal and directs it to more obscure niche offerings as it eases distribution and uses cutting-edge recommendation systems, but this theory is being challenged by new Wharton School research. A paper by Wharton professor Serguei Netessine and doctoral student [...]

Three mathematics and science professors called on the U.S. government to support institutional programs that have succeeded in attracting and retaining minority students during a recent Congressional briefing session. Arizona State University professor Carlos Castillo-Chavez said that most of the Hispanic and American-Indian students who participate in the university’s math and science honors program, a [...]

Researchers from Imperial College London (ICL) and Syngenta have developed a computational tool that uses machine learning to find complex patterns in data about the behavior of plants. The use of machine learning means agricultural researchers will be able to analyze plant biology in minutes, even if they lack certain information about the inner workings [...]

Recently declassified documents show that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC), a data-mining system that was proposed as a tool to track down terrorists, is being used in hacker and domestic criminal investigations. NSAC’s database now contains more than 1.5 billion government and private-sector records on U.S. citizens [...]

Coverity reports that the number of defects in open source projects is on the decline. Coverity has created a Web site for analyzing the programming code of open source projects. Among the code submitted by open source projects and developers over the past three years, “defect density” has declined 16 percent and some 11,200 defects [...]

Google has threatened to withdraw from China following a computer network attack targeting its email service and corporate infrastructure. Google claimed to have proof suggesting that “a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists,” while noting that at least 20 other large firms have been targeted by [...]

The European Union-funded GRid enabled access to rich mEDIA (GREDIA) content project has developed a platform that makes the grid’s resources available to business users. “Many business applications need to work fast and need to work with huge amounts of data,” says GREDIA coordinator Nikos Sarris. “The grid is ideal for that, but software developers [...]