Satellite-services provider Dish Network has announced that it will let customers pay their bills with bitcoins starting 1 July 2014. It will use the services of bitcoin exchange Coinbase to process payments made via the virtual currency. “We always want to deliver choice and convenience for our customers and that includes the method they use to pay their bills,” said Dish executive vice president and chief operating officer Bernie Han . “Bitcoin is becoming a preferred way for some people to transact, and we want to accommodate those individuals.” Despite concerns from government officials and the financial sector about the virtual currency because of problems such as the recent closure of the world’s biggest bitcoin exchange, several online retailers and organizations such as Overstock.com, Zynga, and the Sacramento Kings US professional basketball team are accepting it for payment. (Reuters)(Wall Street Journal)
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Friday, May 23, 2014
Internet Provider: ISPs Allowing Network Congestion
A newly released report contends major US ISPs are allowing Internet congestion to occur by not upgrading their peering connections. Level 3 Communications, a communications-services provider, studied 51 of its peer ISPs around the world and found that customers are experiencing delayed or dropped packets throughout the day on congested connections to six ISPs, five of which are in the US. The company also said that rather than ensure that their networks can meet demand, ISPs generally expect payments from either the network middlemen or from content providers to deliver content to consumers. In other words, they save the higher bandwidth connections for those content or intermediate network providers that pay. Level 3 didn’t name specific ISPs engaged in this practice. Level 3 is seeking to change US laws to address this issue. However, said PC World, Level 3 has engaged in similar practices and may be more concerned about business than about customer service or consumer fairness. (PC World)(Ars Technica)(Level 3 Communications Blog)
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
US Agency Funds New Network Infrastructure Projects
A total of $15 million in grants were awarded by the US National Science Foundation to address the creation and testing of new Internet network architectures and networking concepts. Among the pilot projects being developed with various cities, non-profit organizations, academic institutions and industrial partners include a vehicular network deployment in Pittsburgh, a context-aware weather emergency notification system for Dallas/Fort Worth, and a partnership with Open mHealth in San Francisco. The projects will address issues including security, new service challenges, and scalability. These projects were initially funded in 2010 through the NSF’s Future Internet Architectures program and the new funding should move the projects into the pilot testing stage. (SlashDot)(National Science Foundation)
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Study: Chromecast Users Circumventing Network TV Viewing Restrictions
A new study finds a third of Google Chromecast owners are using the digital media streaming adapter daily to download and watch television shows on their TVs—rather than other devices such as computers, smartphones, and tablets—in violation of network viewing restrictions. Typically, broadcasters specify the types of devices on which consumers can watch downloaded content for free or for a fee, based on licensing agreements with content providers. However, in an August 2013 online survey of 3,000 broadband households, market research firm Parks Associates found that Chromecast owners are watching current TV shows on their televisions via the Hulu online servicefor free, designed for viewing via conventional computers, instead of paying the service’s subscription charge for viewing televised content via Internet-connected TVs, mobile devices, and game consoles. They are also using Chromecast to view sports events that are streamed online but not broadcast, noted the Parks Associates researchers, which also violates viewing restrictions. “Chromecast is giving people in Hollywood headaches right now,” stated Parks Associates’ director of consumer analytics John Barrett. “All the wrangling over licensing restrictions doesn’t mean much if consumers can simply circumvent them.” (The Los Angeles Times)(Mashable)(Parks Associates)
Friday, July 26, 2013
Opera Says Network Attack Lets Hackers Certify Malware
Browser maker Opera Software says an attack on its internal network took advantage of its update service and led to the theft of at least one old and expired code-signing certificate that hackers used to sign malware, making it look legitimate to victims and thus safe to use. This has allowed them to distribute malicious software that incorrectly appears to have been published by Opera Software or appears to be the Opera browser, Opera stated. The company released no other details. Because of the scheme, any Windows user who downloaded the malware thinking it was the Opera browser and tried to install the browser on 19 June 2013 may have installed the malicious software instead. This is an example of how hackers are increasingly focusing attacks on software firms’ internal networks -- which allows them to have the ability sign files and to escalate their own privileges in order to move more freely within the network -- rather than individual users, according to security experts. (SlashDot)(Security Week)(The Opera Security Group)
Thursday, July 18, 2013
[Conference News] Extracting Hidden Behavioral Patterns from Social Network Data
Massive information about human behavior is continuously generated by Web-based services, both public and private. The data include traces of not only individual activities but also collaborative work, and the social networks that can be extracted from these datasets offer a kind of knowledge that’s independent of user awareness.
In a paper presented at the 2013 International Conference on Social Intelligence and Technology (Social 2013), researchers from the Wroclaw University of Technology in Poland describe a data-driven approach to social network analysis that enables various applications of knowledge about human behavior. They illustrate selected models and analytical methods in applications to recommender systems, organizational structure analysis, and social group evolution.
“From Data to Human Behaviour” and other papers from Social 2013 are available to both IEEE Computer Society members and paid subscribers via the Computer Society Digital Library.
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Dish Network Bids $25.5 Billion for Sprint
Satellite TV provider Dish Network has submitted an informal $25.5 billion bid for Sprint Nextel, upping a previous offer from Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank. Dish has offered Sprint shareholders $4.76 in cash and roughly $2.24 in stock that would be financed through $17.3 billion in cash and debt financing. SoftBank offered $20.1 billion in October 2012. Sprint—the third-biggest US cellular provider with 56 million subscribers—has yet to comment on the Dish proposal. Sprint is currently the No. 3 cellphone service provider in the United States with 56 million subscribers nationwide. (ZDNet)(CNNMoney)(The New York Times)(Dish)
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Popularity versus similarity: A balance that predicts network growth
That's much less likely, unless you are a fan of Italian baroque music or free solo climbing.
In that case, you would have heard of Bachar just as likely as Washington. The latter was popular, while the former was not as popular but had interests similar to yours.
A new paper published this week in the science journal Nature by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, explores the concept of popularity versus similarity, and if one more than the other fuels the growth of a variety of networks, whether it is the Internet, a social network of trust between people, or a biological network.
The researchers, in a study called "Popularity Versus Similarity in Growing Networks", show for the first time how networks evolve optimizing a unique trade-off between popularity and similarity. They found that while popularity attracts new connections, similarity is just as attractive.
"Popular nodes in a network, or those that are more connected than others, tend to attract more new connections in growing networks," said Dmitri Krioukov, co-author of the Nature paper and a research scientist with SDSC's CAIDA group, which studies the practical and theoretical aspects of the Internet and other large networks. "But similarity between nodes is just as important because it is instrumental in determining precisely how these networks grow. Accounting for these similarities can help us better predict the creation of new links in evolving networks."
In the paper, Krioukov and his colleagues, which include network analysis experts from academic institutions in Cyprus and Spain, describe a new model that significantly increases the accuracy of network evolution prediction by considering the trade-offs between popularity and similarity. Their model describes large-scale evolution of three kinds of networks: technological (the Internet), social (a network of trust relationships between people), and biological (a metabolic network of the Escherichia coli, typically harmlessly found in the human gastrointestinal tract, though some strains can cause diarrheal diseases.)
The researchers write that the model's ability to predict links in networks may find applications ranging from predicting protein interactions or terrorist connections to improving recommender and collaborative filtering systems, such as Netflix or Amazon product recommendations.
"On a more general note, if we know the laws describing the dynamics of a complex system, then we not only can predict its behavior, but we may also find ways to better control it," added Krioukov.
In establishing connections in networks, nodes optimize certain trade-offs between the two dimensions of popularity and similarity, according to the researchers. "These two dimensions can be combined or mapped into a single space, and this mapping allows us to predict the probability of connections in networks with a remarkable accuracy," said Krioukov. "Not only can we capture all the structural properties of three very different networks, but also their large-scale growth dynamics. In short, these networks evolve almost exactly as our model predicts."
Many factors contribute to the probability of connections between nodes in real networks. In the Internet, for example, this probability depends on geographic, economic, political, technological, and many other factors, many of which are un-measurable or even unknown.
"The beauty of the new model is that it accounts for all of these factors, and projects them, properly weighted, into a single metric, while allowing us to predict the probability of new links with a high degree of precision," according to Krioukov.
The other researchers who worked on this project are Fragkiskos Papadopoulos, Department of Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Informatics, Cyprus University of Technology in Cyprus; Maksim Kitsak, CAIDA/SDSC/UC San Diego; M. Ángeles Serrano and Marián Boguñá, Departament de Fisica Fonamental, Univsitat de Barcelona, in Spain.
This research was supported by a variety of grants, including National Science Foundation (NSF) grants CNS-0964236, CNS-1039646, and CNS-0722070; Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant N66001-08-C-2029; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant HR0011-12-1-0012; and support from Cisco Systems.
International support was provided by a Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant within the 7th European Community Framework Programme; Office of the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Spain (MICINN) projects FIS2010-21781-C02-02 and BFU2010-21847-C02-02; Generalitat de Catalunya grant 2009SGR838; the Ramón y Cajal program of the Spanish Ministry of Science; and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) Academia prize 2010, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya, Spain.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California, San Diego. The original article was written by Jan Zverina.
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Journal Reference:
Fragkiskos Papadopoulos, Maksim Kitsak, M. Ángeles Serrano, Marián Boguñá, Dmitri Krioukov. Popularity versus similarity in growing networks. Nature, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nature11459Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
A network to guide the future of computing
At the same time, the world is in the midst of a data explosion, with humans and machines generating, storing, sharing and accessing ever increasing amounts of data in many different forms, on a multitude of different devices that require more energy-efficient, higher-performance processors.
How can computing systems, now facing a post-Moore era, meet this ever growing demand?
It is an open-ended question, but one that European researchers are working hard to answer, thanks in large measure to the efforts of HiPEAC (1), a 'Network of excellence' from academia and industry that has been helping to steer European computing systems research since 2004. Currently in its third incarnation, supported over four years by EUR 3.8 million in funding from the European Commission, the project has become the most visible and far-reaching computing systems network in Europe.
'HiPEAC was set up with three main goals: to bring together academia and industry, to bring together hardware and software developers and to create a real, visible computer systems community in Europe. On those fronts, and many others, we have undoubtedly succeeded,' says Koen De Bosschere, professor of the computer systems lab of Ghent University in Belgium and coordinator of the HiPEAC network.
HiPEAC's conferences and networking events are now attended by hundreds of academic researchers and industry representatives from Europe and beyond; the network's summer schools, workshops and exchange grants between universities are helping train researchers in new and emerging areas of computing systems theory and technology; and the project's biannual roadmap has become a guideline for both the public and private sector as to where research funding should be channelled.
'We now have a portfolio of between 30 and 40 computer systems projects that we are working with. The researchers involved come to our events, which have become one of the sector's main networking opportunities, and several projects have actually emerged from people meeting at our conferences,' Prof. De Bosschere notes.
He points, for example, to the EuroCloud project, which began in 2010 with the support of EUR 3.3 million in funding from the European Commission. Coordinated by microprocessor designer ARM in the United Kingdom, the project is developing on-chip servers using multiple ARM cores and integrating 3D DRAM with the aim of reducing energy consumption and costs at data centres by as much as 90 %.
The idea for the project first arose at the HiPEAC conference in Cyprus in 2009, Prof. De Bosschere notes. 'These kinds of networking opportunities are really showing their worth in spurring collaboration and innovation."
A roadmap of challenges and opportunities for Europe
Meanwhile, the HiPEAC Roadmap, a new edition of which is due to be published this year, has become something of a guidebook for the future of computing systems research in Europe.
'We didn't really set out doing it with that aim in mind, but the Commission took notice of it, consulted with industry on it, found the challenges we had identified to be accurate and started to use it to focus research funding,' the HiPEAC coordinator explains. 'Since we produced the first edition in 2008, EU funding in the sector has almost tripled and the next call will offer around EUR 70 million.'
For the short and medium term, the latest edition of the HiPEAC report concludes that specialising computing devices is the most promising but difficult path for dramatically improving the performance of future computing systems. In this light, HiPEAC has identified seven concrete research objectives -- from energy efficiency to system complexity and reliability -- related to the design and the exploitation of specialised heterogeneous systems. But in the longer term, the HiPEAC researchers say it will be critical to pursue research directions that break with classical systems, and their traditional hardware/software boundary, by investigating new devices and new computing paradigms, such as bio-inspired systems, stochastic computing and swarm computing.
'We can only go so far by following current trends and approaches, but in the long run we will nonetheless want and require more processing power that is more reliable, consumes less energy, produces less heat and can fit into smaller devices. More processing power means more applications and entirely new markets -- just look at what's happened with smartphones and tablet computers over the last five years,' Prof. De Bosschere says. 'For industry, it means that today, instead of a person having just one desktop or laptop computer, they may have three or four devices.'
And, in the future, he sees ever higher-performance devices doing much more than is possible or even imaginable today: bio-inspired neural networks powering data mining applications at 1 % of the energy consumption of today's data centres, for example, or smartphones that can analyse a blood sample, sequence the DNA and detect a virus in a few minutes, rather than the days it takes using laboratory computer systems at present.
'The potential applications for computing technology in almost every aspect of life are almost endless -- we just need to make sure we have the processing power to run them,' he says.
HiPEAC received research funding under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by CORDIS Features, formerly ICT Results.
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Sunday, October 14, 2012
Android-based network built to study cyber disruptions and help secure hand-held devices
Sandia cyber researchers linked together 300,000 virtual hand-held computing devices running the Android operating system so they can study large networks of smartphones and find ways to make them more reliable and secure. Android dominates the smartphone industry and runs on a range of computing gadgets.
The work is expected to result in a software tool that will allow others in the cyber research community to model similar environments and study the behaviors of smartphone networks. Ultimately, the tool will enable the computing industry to better protect hand-held devices from malicious intent.
The project builds on the success of earlier work in which Sandia focused on virtual Linux and Windows desktop systems.
"Smartphones are now ubiquitous and used as general-purpose computing devices as much as desktop or laptop computers," said Sandia's David Fritz. "But even though they are easy targets, no one appears to be studying them at the scale we're attempting."
The Android project, dubbed MegaDroid, is expected to help researchers at Sandia and elsewhere who struggle to understand large scale networks. Soon, Sandia expects to complete a sophisticated demonstration of the MegaDroid project that could be presented to potential industry or government collaborators.
The virtual Android network at Sandia, said computer scientist John Floren, is carefully insulated from other networks at the Labs and the outside world, but can be built up into a realistic computing environment. That environment might include a full domain name service (DNS), an Internet relay chat (IRC) server, a web server and multiple subnets.
A key element of the Android project, Floren said, is a "spoof" Global Positioning System (GPS). He and his colleagues created simulated GPS data of a smartphone user in an urban environment, an important experiment since smartphones and such key features as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities are highly location-dependent and thus could easily be controlled and manipulated by rogue actors.
The researchers then fed that data into the GPS input of an Android virtual machine. Software on the virtual machine treats the location data as indistinguishable from real GPS data, which offers researchers a much richer and more accurate emulation environment from which to analyze and study what hackers can do to smartphone networks, Floren said.
This latest development by Sandia cyber researchers represents a significant steppingstone for those hoping to understand and limit the damage from network disruptions due to glitches in software or protocols, natural disasters, acts of terrorism, or other causes. These disruptions can cause significant economic and other losses for individual consumers, companies and governments.
"You can't defend against something you don't understand," Floren said. The larger the scale the better, he said, since more computer nodes offer more data for researchers to observe and study.
The research builds upon the Megatux project that started in 2009, in which Sandia scientists ran a million virtual Linux machines, and on a later project that focused on the Windows operating system, called MegaWin. Sandia researchers created those virtual networks at large scale using real Linux and Windows instances in virtual machines.
The main challenge in studying Android-based machines, the researchers say, is the sheer complexity of the software. Google, which developed the Android operating system, wrote some 14 million lines of code into the software, and the system runs on top of a Linux kernel, which more than doubles the amount of code.
"It's possible for something to go wrong on the scale of a big wireless network because of a coding mistake in an operating system or an application, and it's very hard to diagnose and fix," said Fritz. "You can't possibly read through 15 million lines of code and understand every possible interaction between all these devices and the network."
Much of Sandia's work on virtual computing environments will soon be available for other cyber researchers via open source. Floren and Fritz believe Sandia should continue to work on tools that industry leaders and developers can use to better diagnose and fix problems in computer networks.
"Tools are only useful if they're used," said Fritz.
MegaDroid primarily will be useful as a tool to ferret out problems that would manifest themselves when large numbers of smartphones interact, said Keith Vanderveen, manager of Sandia's Scalable and Secure Systems Research department.
"You could also extend the technology to other platforms besides Android," said Vanderveen. "Apple's iOS, for instance, could take advantage of our body of knowledge and the toolkit we're developing." He said Sandia also plans to use MegaDroid to explore issues of data protection and data leakage, which he said concern government agencies such as the departments of Defense and Homeland Security.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Sandia National Laboratories.
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Thursday, September 27, 2012
Self-adapting computer network that defends itself against hackers?
Scott DeLoach, professor of computing and information sciences, and Xinming "Simon" Ou, associate professor of computing and information sciences, are researching the feasibility of building a computer network that could protect itself against online attackers by automatically changing its setup and configuration.
DeLoach and Ou were recently awarded a five-year grant of more than $1 million from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to fund the study "Understanding and quantifying the impact of moving target defenses on computer networks." The study, which began in April, will be the first to document whether this type of adaptive cybersecurity, called moving-target defense, can be effective. If it can work, researchers will determine if the benefits of creating a moving-target defense system outweigh the overhead and resources needed to build it.
Helping Ou and DeLoach in their investigation and research are Kansas State University students Rui Zhuang and Su Zhang, both doctoral candidates in computing and information sciences from China, and Alexandru Bardas, doctoral student in computing and information sciences from Romania.
As the study progresses the computer scientists will develop a set of analytical models to determine the effectiveness of a moving-target defense system. They will also create a proof-of-concept system as a way to experiment with the idea in a concrete setting.
"It's important to investigate any scientific evidence that shows that this approach does work so it can be fully researched and developed," DeLoach said. He started collaborating with Ou to apply intelligent adaptive techniques to cybersecurity several years ago after a conversation at a university open house.
The term moving-target defense -- a subarea of adaptive security in the cybersecurity field -- was first coined around 2008, although similar concepts have been proposed and studied since the early 2000s. The idea behind moving-target defense in the context of computer networks is to create a computer network that is no longer static in its configuration. Instead, as a way to thwart cyber attackers, the network automatically and periodically randomizes its configuration through various methods -- such as changing the addresses of software applications on the network; switching between instances of the applications; and changing the location of critical system data.
Ou and DeLoach said the key is to make the network appear to an attacker that it is changing chaotically while to an authorized user the system operates normally.
"If you have a Web server, pretty much anybody in the world can figure out where you are and what software you're running," DeLoach said. "If they know that, they can figure out what vulnerabilities you have. In a typical scenario, attackers scan your system and find out everything they can about your server configuration and what security holes it has. Then they select the best time for them to attack and exploit those security holes in order to do the most damage. This could change that."
Creating a computer network that could automatically detect and defend itself against cyber attacks would substantially increase the security of online data for universities, government departments, corporations and businesses -- all of which have been the targets of large-scale cyber attacks.
In February 2011 it was discovered that the Nasdaq Stock Market's computer network had been infiltrated by hackers. Although federal investigators concluded that it was unlikely the hackers stole any information, the network's security had been left vulnerable for more than a year while the hackers visited it numerous times.
According to Ou, creating a moving-target defense system would shift the power imbalance that currently resides with hackers -- who need only find a single security hole to exploit -- back to the network administrators -- who would have a system that frequently removes whatever security privileges attackers may gain with a new clean slate.
"This is a game-changing idea in cybersecurity," Ou said. "People feel that we are currently losing against online attackers. In order to fundamentally change the cybersecurity landscape and reduce that high risk we need some big, fundamental changes to the way computers and networks are constructed and organized."
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Kansas State University.
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Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Scientists create chemical 'brain': Giant network links all known compounds and reactions
A decade in the making, the software optimizes syntheses of drug molecules and other important compounds, combines long (and expensive) syntheses of compounds into shorter and more economical routes and identifies suspicious chemical recipes that could lead to chemical weapons.
"I realized that if we could link all the known chemical compounds and reactions between them into one giant network, we could create not only a new repository of chemical methods but an entirely new knowledge platform where each chemical reaction ever performed and each compound ever made would give rise to a collective 'chemical brain,'" said Bartosz A. Grzybowski, who led the work. "The brain then could be searched and analyzed with algorithms akin to those used in Google or telecom networks."
Called Chematica, the network comprises some seven million chemicals connected by a similar number of reactions. A family of algorithms that searches and analyzes the network allows the chemist at his or her computer to easily tap into this vast compendium of chemical knowledge. And the system learns from experience, as more data and algorithms are added to its knowledge base.
Details and demonstrations of the system are published in three back-to-back papers in the Aug. 6 issue of the journal Angewandte Chemie.
Grzybowski is the senior author of all three papers. He is the Kenneth Burgess Professor of Physical Chemistry and Chemical Systems Engineering in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
In the Angewandte paper titled "Parallel Optimization of Synthetic Pathways Within the Network of Organic Chemistry," the researchers have demonstrated algorithms that find optimal syntheses leading to drug molecules and other industrially important chemicals.
"The way we coded our algorithms allows us to search within a fraction of a second billions of chemical syntheses leading to a desired molecule," Grzybowski said. "This is very important since within even a few synthetic steps from a desired target the number of possible syntheses is astronomical and clearly beyond the search capabilities of any human chemist."
Chematica can test and evaluate every possible synthesis that exists, not only the few a particular chemist might have an interest in. In this way, the algorithms find truly optimal ways of making desired chemicals.
The software already has been used in industrial settings, Grzybowski said, to design more economical syntheses of companies' products. Synthesis can be optimized with various constraints, such as avoiding reactions involving environmentally dangerous compounds. Using the Chematica software, such green chemistry optimizations are just one click away.
Another important area of application is the shortening of synthetic pathways into the so-called "one-pot" reactions. One of the holy grails of organic chemistry has been to design methods in which all the starting materials could be combined at the very beginning and then the process would proceed in one pot -- much like cooking a stew -- all the way to the final product.
The Northwestern researchers detail how this can be done in the Angewandte paper titled "Rewiring Chemistry: Algorithmic Discovery and Experimental Validation of One-Pot Reactions in the Network of Organic Chemistry."
The chemists have taught their network some 86,000 chemical rules that check -- again, in a fraction of a second -- whether a sequence of individual reactions can be combined into a one-pot procedure. Thirty predictions of one-pot syntheses were tested and fully validated. Each synthesis proceeded as predicted and had excellent yields.
In one striking example, Grzybowski and his team synthesized an anti-asthma drug using the one-pot method. The drug typically would take four consecutive synthesis and purification steps.
"Our algorithms told us this sequence could be combined into just one step, and we were naturally curious to check it out in a flask," Grzybowski said. "We performed the one-pot reaction and obtained the drug in excellent yield and at a fraction of the cost the individual steps otherwise would have accrued."
The third area of application is the use of the Chematica network approach for predicting and monitoring syntheses leading to chemical weapons. This is reported in the Angewandte paper titled "Chemical Network Algorithms for the Risk Assessment and Management of Chemical Threats."
"Since we now have this unique ability to scrutinize all possible synthetic strategies, we also can identify the ones that a potential terrorist might use to make a nerve gas, an explosive or another toxic agent," Grzybowski said.
Algorithms known from game theory first are applied to identify the strategies that are hardest to detect by the federal government -- the use of substances, for example, such as kitchen salt, clarifiers, grain alcohol and a fertilizer, all freely available from a local convenience store. Characteristic combinations of seemingly innocuous chemicals, such as this example, are red flags.
This strategy is very different from the government's current approach of monitoring and regulating individual substances, Grzybowski said. Chematica can be used to monitor patterns of chemicals that together become suspicious, instead of monitoring individual compounds. Grzybowski is working with the federal government to implement the software.
Chematica now is being commercialized. "We chose this name," Grzybowski said, "because networks will do to chemistry what Mathematica did to scientific computing. Our approach will accelerate synthetic design and discovery and will optimize synthetic practice at large."
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Northwestern University. The original article was written by Megan Fellman.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal References:
Mikolaj Kowalik, Chris M. Gothard, Aaron M. Drews, Nosheen A. Gothard, Alex Weckiewicz, Patrick E. Fuller, Bartosz A. Grzybowski, Kyle J. M. Bishop. Parallel Optimization of Synthetic Pathways within the Network of Organic Chemistry. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2012; 51 (32): 7928 DOI: 10.1002/anie.201202209Chris M. Gothard, Siowling Soh, Nosheen A. Gothard, Bartlomiej Kowalczyk, Yanhu Wei, Bilge Baytekin, Bartosz A. Grzybowski. Rewiring Chemistry: Algorithmic Discovery and Experimental Validation of One-Pot Reactions in the Network of Organic Chemistry. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2012; 51 (32): 7922 DOI: 10.1002/anie.201202155Patrick E. Fuller, Chris M. Gothard, Nosheen A. Gothard, Alex Weckiewicz, Bartosz A. Grzybowski. Chemical Network Algorithms for the Risk Assessment and Management of Chemical Threats. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2012; 51 (32): 7933 DOI: 10.1002/anie.201202210Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
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Friday, August 24, 2012
Cyberwarfare, conservation and disease prevention could benefit from new network model
"Our model allows users to identify the best or worst possible scenarios of network change," said Tim Matisziw, assistant professor of geography and engineering at MU. "The difficulty in evaluating a networks' resilience is that there are an infinite number of possibilities, which makes it easy to miss important scenarios. Previous studies focused on the destruction of large hubs in a network, but we found that in many cases the loss of smaller facilities can be just as damaging. Our model can suggest ways to have the maximum impact on a network with the minimum effort."
Limited resources can hinder law enforcement officers' ability to stop criminal organizations. Matisziw's model could help design plans which efficiently use a minimum of resources to cause the maximum disruption of trafficking networks and thereby reduce flows of drugs, weapons and exploited people. In a similar fashion, disease outbreaks could be mitigated by identifying and then blocking important links in their transmission, such as airports.
However, there are some networks that society needs to keep intact. After the breakdown of such a network, the model can be used to evaluate what could have made the disruption even worse and help officials prevent future problems. For example, after an electrical grid failure, such as the recent blackout in the eastern United States, future system failures could be pinpointed using the model. The critical weak points in the electrical grid could then be fortified before disaster strikes.
The model also can determine if a plan is likely to create the strongest network possible. For example, when construction projects pave over wetland ecosystems, the law requires that new wetlands be created. However, ecologists have noted that these new wetlands are often isolated from existing ecosystems and have little value to wildlife. Matisziw's model could help officials plan the best places for new wetlands so they connect with other natural areas and form wildlife corridors or stretches of wilderness that connect otherwise isolated areas and allow them to function as one ecosystem.
Matisziw's model was documented in the publicly available journal PLoS ONE. Making such a powerful tool widely available won't be a danger, Matisziw said. To use his model, a network must be understood in detail. Since terrorists and other criminals don't have access to enough data about the networks, they won't be able to use the model to develop doomsday scenarios.
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Journal Reference:
Timothy C. Matisziw, Tony H. Grubesic, Junyu Guo. Robustness Elasticity in Complex Networks. PLoS ONE, 2012; 7 (7): e39788 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0039788Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
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Saturday, July 21, 2012
Cyberwarfare, conservation and disease prevention could benefit from new network model
"Our model allows users to identify the best or worst possible scenarios of network change," said Tim Matisziw, assistant professor of geography and engineering at MU. "The difficulty in evaluating a networks' resilience is that there are an infinite number of possibilities, which makes it easy to miss important scenarios. Previous studies focused on the destruction of large hubs in a network, but we found that in many cases the loss of smaller facilities can be just as damaging. Our model can suggest ways to have the maximum impact on a network with the minimum effort."
Limited resources can hinder law enforcement officers' ability to stop criminal organizations. Matisziw's model could help design plans which efficiently use a minimum of resources to cause the maximum disruption of trafficking networks and thereby reduce flows of drugs, weapons and exploited people. In a similar fashion, disease outbreaks could be mitigated by identifying and then blocking important links in their transmission, such as airports.
However, there are some networks that society needs to keep intact. After the breakdown of such a network, the model can be used to evaluate what could have made the disruption even worse and help officials prevent future problems. For example, after an electrical grid failure, such as the recent blackout in the eastern United States, future system failures could be pinpointed using the model. The critical weak points in the electrical grid could then be fortified before disaster strikes.
The model also can determine if a plan is likely to create the strongest network possible. For example, when construction projects pave over wetland ecosystems, the law requires that new wetlands be created. However, ecologists have noted that these new wetlands are often isolated from existing ecosystems and have little value to wildlife. Matisziw's model could help officials plan the best places for new wetlands so they connect with other natural areas and form wildlife corridors or stretches of wilderness that connect otherwise isolated areas and allow them to function as one ecosystem.
Matisziw's model was documented in the publicly available journal PLoS ONE. Making such a powerful tool widely available won't be a danger, Matisziw said. To use his model, a network must be understood in detail. Since terrorists and other criminals don't have access to enough data about the networks, they won't be able to use the model to develop doomsday scenarios.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Missouri-Columbia, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Timothy C. Matisziw, Tony H. Grubesic, Junyu Guo. Robustness Elasticity in Complex Networks. PLoS ONE, 2012; 7 (7): e39788 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0039788Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Self-adapting computer network that defends itself against hackers?
Scott DeLoach, professor of computing and information sciences, and Xinming "Simon" Ou, associate professor of computing and information sciences, are researching the feasibility of building a computer network that could protect itself against online attackers by automatically changing its setup and configuration.
DeLoach and Ou were recently awarded a five-year grant of more than $1 million from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to fund the study "Understanding and quantifying the impact of moving target defenses on computer networks." The study, which began in April, will be the first to document whether this type of adaptive cybersecurity, called moving-target defense, can be effective. If it can work, researchers will determine if the benefits of creating a moving-target defense system outweigh the overhead and resources needed to build it.
Helping Ou and DeLoach in their investigation and research are Kansas State University students Rui Zhuang and Su Zhang, both doctoral candidates in computing and information sciences from China, and Alexandru Bardas, doctoral student in computing and information sciences from Romania.
As the study progresses the computer scientists will develop a set of analytical models to determine the effectiveness of a moving-target defense system. They will also create a proof-of-concept system as a way to experiment with the idea in a concrete setting.
"It's important to investigate any scientific evidence that shows that this approach does work so it can be fully researched and developed," DeLoach said. He started collaborating with Ou to apply intelligent adaptive techniques to cybersecurity several years ago after a conversation at a university open house.
The term moving-target defense -- a subarea of adaptive security in the cybersecurity field -- was first coined around 2008, although similar concepts have been proposed and studied since the early 2000s. The idea behind moving-target defense in the context of computer networks is to create a computer network that is no longer static in its configuration. Instead, as a way to thwart cyber attackers, the network automatically and periodically randomizes its configuration through various methods -- such as changing the addresses of software applications on the network; switching between instances of the applications; and changing the location of critical system data.
Ou and DeLoach said the key is to make the network appear to an attacker that it is changing chaotically while to an authorized user the system operates normally.
"If you have a Web server, pretty much anybody in the world can figure out where you are and what software you're running," DeLoach said. "If they know that, they can figure out what vulnerabilities you have. In a typical scenario, attackers scan your system and find out everything they can about your server configuration and what security holes it has. Then they select the best time for them to attack and exploit those security holes in order to do the most damage. This could change that."
Creating a computer network that could automatically detect and defend itself against cyber attacks would substantially increase the security of online data for universities, government departments, corporations and businesses -- all of which have been the targets of large-scale cyber attacks.
In February 2011 it was discovered that the Nasdaq Stock Market's computer network had been infiltrated by hackers. Although federal investigators concluded that it was unlikely the hackers stole any information, the network's security had been left vulnerable for more than a year while the hackers visited it numerous times.
According to Ou, creating a moving-target defense system would shift the power imbalance that currently resides with hackers -- who need only find a single security hole to exploit -- back to the network administrators -- who would have a system that frequently removes whatever security privileges attackers may gain with a new clean slate.
"This is a game-changing idea in cybersecurity," Ou said. "People feel that we are currently losing against online attackers. In order to fundamentally change the cybersecurity landscape and reduce that high risk we need some big, fundamental changes to the way computers and networks are constructed and organized."
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Kansas State University, via Newswise.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
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Friday, June 1, 2012
Game of go: A complex network
The study of complex networks has attracted increasing interest over the past few years, fuelled in particular by the development of communication and information networks. This new research field is proving very useful for the description of complex systems such as social networks and the Internet. For instance, when network theory is applied to the Internet, every page is a node and hypertext links are links between the nodes. However, this type of approach had never been contemplated for the study of games of strategy such as goor chess. These games, which have a very long history and millions of players around the world, are extremely difficult to model. Computer programs have only been able to beat chess champions since the last fifteen years, and are still unable to compete with top go players.
Using a database containing around 5 000 games played by professional and amateur go players in international tournaments, Bertrand Georgeot from the Theoretical Physics Laboratory (Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier/CNRS) and Olivier Giraud from the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics and Statistical Models (Université Paris-Sud/CNRS) applied network theory to this game of strategy. They constructed a network whose nodes are local patterns on the board, while the vertices (which represent the links) reflect the sequence of moves. This enabled them to recapture part of the local game strategy. In this game, where players place their stones at the intersections of a grid consisting of 19 vertical and 19 horizontal lines (making 361 intersections), the researchers studied local patterns of 9 intersections. They showed that the statistical frequency distribution of these patterns follows Zipf's law, similar to the frequency distribution of words in a language.
Although the go network's features resemble those of other real networks (social networks or the Internet), it has its own specific properties. While the most recent simulation programs already include statistical data from real games, albeit at a still basic level, these new findings should allow better modeling of this kind of board game.
* Go is a game of strategy played by two players who take turns to place black and white stones on a board called a goban. The players each try to control a larger portion of the board than their opponent.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by CNRS (Délégation Paris Michel-Ange), via AlphaGalileo.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
B. Georgeot, O. Giraud. The game of go as a complex network. EPL (Europhysics Letters), 2012; 97 (6): 68002 DOI: 10.1209/0295-5075/97/68002Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
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Thursday, May 31, 2012
It's the network: Ever wonder why your friends have more friends than you or diamond is harder than graphite?
The article establishes relationships between seemingly disparate topics such as the friendship paradox -- by which our friends have on average more friends than we do -- and why carbon can result in a hard diamond or the softer material graphite.
"Many broadly significant scientific questions, ranging from self-organization and information flow to systemic robustness, can now be properly formalized within the emerging theory of networks," said Adilson E. Motter, the Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. "I was thus humbled to be invited to write such a timely piece."
Motter is first author of the article "Networks in Motion," published last week as the cover story in Physics Today, the membership journal of the American Institute of Physics. His co-author is Réka Albert, professor of physics and biology at Penn State University.
The authors argue that, as network research matures, there will be increasing opportunities to exploit network concepts to also engineer new systems with desirable properties that may not be readily available in existing ones. Examples include emerging areas such as synthetic biology and microfluidics, which could be radically changed by rational circuit design, but also established areas such as traffic and materials research.
Motter and Albert consider the problem of network control, particularly in the context of biological networks as a promising new avenue for disease treatment. Cascading processes, in particular, in which successive elements in a complex network fail, are shown to be not as unstoppable as previously thought.
They also discuss at length how collective behavior may depend on properties of the underlying network, even when composed of the exact same nodes -- as in the case of radically different materials made of the same chemical element.
By and large, the recent study of complex systems has been centered on the identification and analysis of network features relevant to a particular phenomenon of interest, ultimately reducing complexity. But, the authors ask, with so many conceivable possibilities, what if one simply fails to look for the right features? Researchers have been thinking about this, too, and, as a result, exploratory methods are now being devised to identify patterns not anticipated by pre-conceptions.
One such method mentioned in the article aims at resolving the internal structure of complex networks by organizing the nodes into groups that share something in common, even if researchers do not know a priori what that thing is.
"This is, of course, only the very tip of the iceberg," Motter said. "A broader undertaking concerns the development of similar exploratory approaches that can also systematically account for network dynamics, which remains widely unexplored."
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Northwestern University. The original article was written by Megan Fellman.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Adilson E. Motter, Re´ka Albert. Networks in motion. Physics Today, 2012; 65 (4): 43 DOI: 10.1063/PT.3.1518Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.