Users of touch-screen gadgets must contend with snoopers, and researchers at Britain’s Newcastle University and elsewhere are working on alternative input mechanisms to thwart shoulder surfing, based on touch screens that can detect multiple simultaneous touches. ColorRings, developed by Newcastle’s Paul Dunphy and Patrick Olivier in collaboration with colleagues at Northumbria University, is one such system. ColorRings is based on a user recalling a sequence of pictorial icons rather than numbers, and when entering this code, users are presented with a screen littered with icons, including their four secret ones. The users use their fingers to drag four different colored circles so that each surrounds the correct icon–and with each circle big enough to ring as many as six icons, it is impossible for snoopers to know which icon is part of the code. Meanwhile, an authentication system also developed by Olivier’s team requires the user to choose a different known face in each of a sequence of grids containing numerous faces. The method is designed to deter shoulder surfers by having the user place three fingers on each grid, highlighting three rows or columns of faces. Northumbria University’s David Kim says that users apply extra pressure to the row in which the known face is to make their actual choice, “so the user is not directly selecting each face.”

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Lehigh University professors Stefan Maas and Daniel Lopresti are engaged in a study on RNA editing. Lopresti has devised RNA Editing Dataflow Systems (REDS), a program that identifies the discrepancies that take place when DNA is transcribed into RNA, and then filters out those that are not induced by RNA editing. “We then take the data we obtain from the lab and feed it to our software to improve on our predictions,” Maas says. “The more data we obtain, the more our predictions can be based on machine learning.” Lopresti has created an algorithm designed to simulate RNA folding and correlate folding structures with editing sites. “The algorithm is not perfect, but it does rank all potential editing sites based on predicted folding because of structure,” he says. Maas says that more knowledge about RNA editing could yield insights on the underlying causes for certain diseases and their possible treatments.

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European researchers, coordinated by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, have developed a cognitive computational system using video cameras and software, which is able to recognize and predict human behavior. Human Expressive Graphic Representation of Motion and their Evaluation in Sequences (HERMES) analyzes human behavior based on three levels of video recording sequences. The information is processed by computer vision and artificial intelligence algorithms, which allow the system to recognize movement trends. The researchers say that HERMES uses two new ideas in the field of computer vision. First, it can describe the movement captured by the cameras in natural language using simple and precise phrases. Second, the system can analyze and discover potentially unusual behavior and give off warning signals. Researchers anticipate that HERMES can be used in several different fields, especially intelligent surveillance and accident and crime prevention, as well as marketing and psychology.

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Studies done at Microsoft Research are using electroencephalograph (EEG) measurements to read users’ minds in order to help tag online images. The researchers say the mind-reading technique is the first step toward a hybrid human-computer data analysis system. The manual process for tagging images is often tedious and repetitive, but with the new method of EEG tagging, workers may be able to perform other tasks during the tagging process. Computers can recognize shapes and movements very well, but they have a harder time with categorizing objects in human terms, says Microsoft Research’s Desney Tan. During testing, researchers could determine if the subject was looking at a face, an animal, or an inanimate object with good results. The researchers found that no improvement was seen if the viewer was given more than half a second to look at each image. This leads researchers to think images could be displayed at that speed with no loss of accuracy.

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The United States remains the world’s leader in science and technology, based on factors such as gross dollars spent, relative spending on research, research articles published, and patents granted, according to the National Science Board’s biennial report on science and engineering. The report says the U.S. accounted for nearly one third of the $1.1 trillion spent on research and development (R&D) worldwide in 2007. From 1998 to 2007, R&D spending grew between five and six percent annually in the United States, Japan, and the European Union. However, R&D spending in India, South Korea, and Taiwan grew an average of nine to 10 percent per year during that period, and Chinese spending grew by more than 20 percent per year. Out of approximately 760,000 research articles published in 2008, 25 percent were written by U.S. researchers. Chinese scientists published about eight percent of the research articles, up from one percent in 1988. U.S.-based inventors accounted for 49 percent of the patents granted in 2008, down from 55 percent in 1995.

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A panel of experts told U.S. senators at a recent hearing of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that the United States would be defeated in an all-out cyberwar, and reducing this vulnerability will not occur until the government takes a more active interest in safeguarding the nation’s network. Former director of national security and national intelligence Michael McConnell warned that greater government involvement may not happen until after a “catastrophic event” transpires. The focus of the hearing was the Cyber Security Act of 2009, which would oversee organizations and companies that supply critical U.S. infrastructure, mandate licensing and certification for cybersecurity professionals, and sponsor grant and scholarship programs.

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A consortium of European research institutions is working on a new, photonic computing model under the aegis of the PHOCUS project. The system envisioned by the project uses light to communicate, potentially raising energy efficiency far above that of current supercomputers. The reservoir computer concept is inspired by the rapid information processing architecture of the human brain, in which stimuli or inputs are fed into neural networks or reservoirs. Inputs remain detectable in the reservoir for a certain time, and this input memory, coupled with the emerging response of the reservoir, converts the input into a large number of dynamical states of the reservoir, producing a high-dimensional state space. The researchers say that photonic systems could be employed to comprehend and eventually imitate some of the brain’s functionalities. PHOCUS’ ultimate target is photonic deployment of reservoir computing, running at high data rates, as an alternative to supercomputers for operations that require reduced size and less power consumption.

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Robots that serve and prepare food have been developed by various institutions and companies, mainly to promote new technological breakthroughs, to imbue robots with personalities to help overcome an animus toward them, and to position the machines for work in other industries. For instance, researchers at Switzerland’s Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory invented the Chief Cook Robot, an omelet-making machine that can be “taught” to perform complex tasks. Underlying such efforts is the desire to change the often threatening and distrustful way we perceive robots, says NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory roboticist Heather Knight. The spate of food-serving and food-making robots calls attention to the fact that developers are migrating away from a previous focus on efficiency and toward one of personality and more comfortable human-machine interaction.

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The European Union is funding research into the design of future microchips. Glasgow University professor Asen Asenov says developers need new circuit and system design to shrink the size of transistors for more powerful circuits. Glasgow is participating in the Tera-scale Reliable Adaptive Memory Systems (TRAMS) consortium, along with Intel Iberia, Interuniversitair Micro-Elektronica Centrium, and the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. “We hope this project will result in new chip design paradigms for building reliable memory systems out of unreliable nanoscale components cheaply and effectively, heralding the era of terascale computing,” Asenov says. TRAMS will focus on next-generation complementary metal-oxide semiconductor transistors and microchips.

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Deutsche Telekom (DT) researchers have developed MagiTact, software that makes it possible to control a cell phone by moving a hand-worn magnet close to it. MagiTact works on devices with a compass sensor, such as the Apple iPhone and Google’s Nexus One. The software tracks changes to the magnetic field around a cell phone to identify different hand gestures. “The idea is to develop a way to interact with mobile devices through more natural human gestures,” says DT researcher Hamed Ketabdar. Meanwhile, Hasso Plattner Institute researchers are working to improve touchscreen interaction by adding a touch-sensitive pad to the back of devices and by studying the angles at which users’ fingers touch the screen to make buttons smaller.

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