Software developed by the Heath-e-Child project is capable of comparing a variety of structured and unstructured data to help identify rare or life-threatening diseases in children and then model the potential progression of those diseases. The software can search and compare patient data from hospitals throughout Europe, allowing doctors to study how patients with similar data at other hospitals were treated and whether treatment was successful. The Health-e-Child system links anonymized databases of patient information from hospitals in Paris, Genoa, Rome, and London, and there are plans to extend the network to 25 hospitals. For unstructured data such as images, the project has developed tools that translate visual information into a machine-readable language. The project’s three-dimensional (3D) registration tool for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and its MRI erosion-scoring system for juvenile idiomatic arthritis have been recognized as major advances. The project’s CaseReasoner tool enables doctors to search thousands of disease diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes to find similar cases. And the CardioWiz tool can be combined with MRI scan measurements to rapidly generate animated 3D models of a patient’s heart that can be used to simulate the effects of heart surgery or drug treatments.

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The U.S. Supreme Court will consider what types of inventions should be eligible for a patent as part of a case that could undermine legal protections for software. The question facing the Supreme Court is whether the “machine or transformation” test the Patent Office uses to determine if an application is patentable is the right standard. The Patent Office denied a patent request for a method of hedging weather-related risk in energy prices that can lock in prices during unusually cold weather. The patent applicants appealed the decision. A ruling in favor of the U.S. Patent Office could restrict patents on business methods and processes, such as online shopping techniques, medical diagnostic tests, and procedures for executing trades on Wall Street. Analysts say the worst-case scenario for the technology industry would be if the ruling invalidated many existing software patents, or made them more difficult to defend in lawsuits. “Technology companies care about this case, because it will define what you can and cannot get a patent on,” says the Business Software Alliance’s Emery Simon. James Carmichael, a former judge on the Patent Office board of appeals, says the software industry would lose a major incentive for innovation if the government stops issuing software patents. An unfavorable outcome could force companies to apply for patents using new strategies or rely more on copyright and trade secret protections.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers led by professor Martin Rinard have developed ClearView, software capable of finding and fixing certain types of software bugs within a few minutes. Rinard, who presented the software at ACM’s recent Symposium on Operating System Principles, says the goal is to create an “immortal, invulnerable program.” ClearView can operate without assistance from humans and without access to a program’s underlying source code. By observing a program’s normal behavior and creating a set of rules, ClearView can detect certain errors, including those caused by malicious programs. ClearView detects any anomalies that violate the rules and provides several potential patches that would force the software to follow the rules. The patches are applied directly to the binary, bypassing the source code. ClearView analyzes the possible solutions to decide which ones are the most likely to work and installs the top candidates and tests their effectiveness. If additional rules are violated or the patch crashes the system, ClearView rejects those solutions and finds another. The researchers say the system is particularly effective on a group of machines running the same software. They tested ClearView by installing it on a group of computers running Firefox and using an independent team to attack the Web browser using 10 different approaches. ClearView successfully blocked all of the attacks by detecting the anomalies and terminating the application before the attack could take effect.

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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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A researcher from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an expert on cover versions and music re-mixes from the Institute of Musicology at the University of Hamburg have used cognitive similarity algorithms to predict the outcome of court cases involving music plagiarism. Goldsmiths’ Daniel Mullensiefen developed software with Hamburg’s Marc Pendzich that correctly predicted 90 percent of court decisions during tests involving 20 U.S. cases. The software uses a number of similarity algorithms to model court decisions for cases involving allegations of melodic plagiarism. Mullensiefen and Pendzich believe the software could potentially replace a jury and expert witnesses in court. “Also, on a very popular level, you could claim that the software can detect melodic plagiarism in popular music automatically,” Mullensiefen says. “Thus, in principle, we could develop this into a business where songwriters and music publishers submit songs and we test against a database whether there are any highly similar pre-existing melodies in it.” Mullensiefen and Pendzich plan to study more U.S. plagiarism lawsuits and also test the software on cases in the United Kingdom and Germany.

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SUPER, a European research project, has developed software that expedites companies’ development or adjustment of their business processes while realizing cost savings through the application of semantic Web technology. The tools yielded by the project augment the business usability of the service-oriented architecture approach to software development. SUPER research consortium member Agata Filipowska says the project effectively brought together a trio of different research groups consisting of people working in the semantic Web, business process management, and information systems. Telecom business managers can model new business processes, seek out existing process fragments, automatically fill in the missing components in the process model, look for semantic Web services that will provide the functionality, organize business processes from available Web services, and perform implemented business process models through employment of the SUPER ontologies. SUPER tools can render business language as machine-readable language and vice versa, making expertise in the underlying information technology unnecessary. In the first stage of SUPER, a business analyst can model a new process on his or her computer using familiar flowchart-like graphics. The executable description of the process is readied from the outputs of the semantic business process modeling phase, while further flexibility is injected via semantic Web services. The SUPER tools oversee the performance of business processes during execution, while in the analysis stage this data may be used to check the business processes against key performance indicators and deliver feedback for continuous process improvement.

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