Researchers Report Hacker Attack Campaign against US, EU Targets

Security vendor FireEye has uncovered a series of attacks against targets in Europe and the US that occurred between 29 April and 27 May. FireEye says a group of Middle East-based hackers called the Molerats are responsible for the attacks, launched via remote-access tool exploits known as Poison Ivy. The group, which also engages in phishing attacks, is become more active, according to researchers, who traced Molerats attacks to campaigns launched against the BBC, an unnamed US financial institution, and government organizations in Israel, Latvia, Macedonia, New Zealand, Slovenia, Turkey, the UK, and the US. Although the attackers typically use free, commonly available malware, FireEye says the group appears to be adapting its attacks to be increasingly difficult to detect. (SlashDot)(eWeek)(FireEye)

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Citizen Scientists Sought to Donate Idle Computer Time to Alzheimer’s Researchers

A newly launched project seeks volunteers willing to lend their idle computing power to help researchers with computationally difficult problems. The Compute Against Alzheimer’s Disease project is being developed by George Mason University and Parabon Computation. Participants will download software that works only when the computer is not otherwise in use. The spare computational cycles will be tasked with molecular modeling at the cellular level. This form of distributed computing approach has been used by groups including Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The researchers are trying to find what causes Alzheimer’s, which is the sixth leading cause of death in the US. (EurekAlert)(George Mason University)(Compute Against Alzheimer’s Disease)

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Researchers Demonstrate Wi-Fi Virus Spread

A team of UK researchers has demonstrated that infected Wi-Fi networks can spread a virus in densely populated areas as efficiently as the common cold moves among humans. They sought to disprove assumptions that developing a virus able to attack Wi-Fi networks is impossible. Scientists from the University of Liverpool, Queen’s University Belfast, and software vendor Traffic Observation via Management in Belfast designed a simulated Wi-Fi virus attack on Belfast and London. In the simulation, their Chameleon virus spread quickly between homes and businesses, while avoiding detection. The virus moved via access points after discovering those least protected by encryption and passwords. The researchers are using their findings to develop a technique to identify when a Wi-Fi virus attack is likely. They published their work in the journal EURASIP Journal on Information Security. (SlashDot)(PhysOrg)(University of Liverpool)(EURASIP Journal on Information Security)

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Researchers Use Lasers to Transform Material Properties

MIT scientists have conducted research that could let them shine precise laser beams on substances to create new materials, change their electronic properties, and turn them into semiconductors. The researchers accomplished this by developing a way to produce and measure photon and electron coupling on a topological-insulator material – a material that has both an insulating interior and a conductive surface. This work could enable scientists to create new kinds of electronic states in solid-state systems. The researchers shone a polarized laser beam at bismuth selenide crystals and found they could change their bandgap—the energy difference between it’s a material’s nonconductive and conductive states—and turn them into a semiconductor. They add  that, although they have only experimented with bismuth selenide, the technique might be useful with other materials. They published their work in Science.(SlashDot)(MIT News Office)
 

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Researchers Prove Twisted-Fiber Communications Works

An international team of researchers has proven that twisted light can indeed increase data rates in optical fibers but only on a new type of fiber. The concept had been previously demonstrated in free space, but not in fiber. The researchers—from Boston University, University of Southern California, Tel Aviv University, and Danish fiber company OFS-Fitel—report they achieved rates of 1.6 terabits per second over a distance of 1 km  of a newly designed optical fiber. The optical communication technology uses a corkscrew-shaped light that allows more data to be sent by encoding more data in the light’s twists. The method does not work using standard fiber because the twisted light loses the ability to send data, but the team created a new design incorporating different chemicals into each concentric ring of fiber. This changes the speed at which the light travels in each ring, thereby creating different pathways for the various twisted light beams, each of which functions as a channel. This means a single fiber can achieve data multiplexing. The approach might be first used in new or upgraded datacenters, which could install the new fiber easily. It cannot work on existing fiber networks such as submarine telecommunications cables. The researchers published their work in Science. (BBC)(Science)

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Researchers Create Inexpensive Holographic Display

MIT Media Lab researchers have developed a low-cost color holographic video display powered by a $10 optical chip they created. The prototype display can update images fast enough—30 times per second—to make the image look like it is in motion. The device could lead to affordable color holographic-video displays and increase conventional 2D displays’ resolutions. The chip is the least expensive component in the system, but it is not the only newly-devised component. Typically, it is difficult to control the light waves to create a holographic video image. Existing technologies are too expensive and cumbersome. As a solution, the researchers used a lithium niobate crystal, smaller than other materials previously attempted, and a single waveguide for each pixel in their system. The waveguides confine the light traveling through them and each can be located in close proximity to each other. Each waveguide also contains a metal electrode able to create an acoustic wave, which is used to filter light. The images they made refreshed at a rate of five frames per second and were 420 × 420 pixels. The researchers published their findings in Nature. (Mashable)(Discovery News)(MIT)(Nature)

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Canadian Researchers Create Unique Computerized Fabrics

A team of two Canadian researchers is creating fabrics able to change color and shape. Concordia University associate professor Joanna Berzowska and École Polytechnique de Montréal professor Maksim Skorobogatiy, developed different types of smart textiles with technology woven into the fiber and have created prototype garments able to change shape and color. One of their prototype garments is constructed with a pleated structure into which photonic band-gap fibers are woven. Custom electronics control how these fibers are lit, which creates different patterns and textures. The technology could also potentially capture energy from human movement that could, for example, charge a mobile telephone. (EurekAlert)(Concordia University)

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Researchers Create Powerful Microbatteries

A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign research team has successfully developed new microbatteries that are reportedly the most powerful ever documented. A microbattery is a solid state electrochemical miniaturized power source that could be used in small items such as medical devices or RFID tags. This new technology could be used to create new compact radio-communications and electronics applications such as lasers, sensors, and medical devices. The millimeter-sized batteries provide both high power and high energy, where, with conventional battery technologies, there is a tradeoff between the two. Typically, capacitors release energy very quickly but can only store a small amount of energy while fuel cells and batteries are able to store a great deal of energy, but release or recharge slowly. These high-performance batteries contain a fast-charging cathode with an equally high-performance, microscale anode. Researchers say they can tune the battery such that it has the optimal power and energy capabilities for the specific application. The new technology could be used in transmitters able to broadcast radio signals able 30 times farther than conventional technology, the researchers said. These small batteries could also reportedly recharge 1000 times faster than conventional technologies, they added. The scientists are now working on lowering their batteries’ cost and integrating them with other electronics components. They published their results in the journal Nature Communications. (EurekAlert)(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

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UCLA Researchers Make New Material for High-Performance Supercapacitors

University of California, Los Angeles scientists have created a material they say could be used to create powerful supercapacitors. The material, a synthesized form of niobium oxide, could be used to rapidly store and release energy. The technology could be used to rapidly charge many devices, including mobile electronics and industrial equipment. The scientists have developed electrodes using the material, but must undertake more research to create entire quick-charging devices. Cornell University and the Université Paul Sabatier researchers contributed to the work, which was published in the journal Nature Materials. (EurekAlert)(University of California Los Angeles)(Nature Materials)

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Researchers: Wireless-Cloud Energy Consumption and CO2 Emissions Will Be Huge

Centre for Energy Efficient Telecommunications researchers have forecast that global wireless-cloud access will generate as much carbon dioxide as 4.9 million cars by 2015. CEET estimates that Wi-Fi, 3G, and long-term evolution (LTE) services will use up to 43 terawatt-hours of energy in 2015, compared to just 9.2 TWh in 2012. This is an increase of 367 percent and is based on estimates that cloud users will transfer 23 exabytes (1018 bytes) of data per month by 2015. The Australia-based CEET is a partnership between the University of Melbourne, Alcatel-Lucent, Bell Labs, and the Victorian state government. (ZDNet)(Centre for Energy Efficient Telecommunications)

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Researchers make DNA data storage a reality: Every film and TV program ever created -- in a teacup

Jan. 23, 2013 — Researchers at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have created a way to store data in the form of DNA – a material that lasts for tens of thousands of years. The new method, published January 23 in the journal Nature, makes it possible to store at least 100 million hours of high-definition video in about a cup of DNA.

There is a lot of digital information in the world – about three zettabytes’ worth (that’s 3000 billion billion bytes) – and the constant influx of new digital content poses a real challenge for archivists. Hard disks are expensive and require a constant supply of electricity, while even the best ‘no-power’ archiving materials such as magnetic tape degrade within a decade. This is a growing problem in the life sciences, where massive volumes of data – including DNA sequences – make up the fabric of the scientific record.

"We already know that DNA is a robust way to store information because we can extract it from bones of woolly mammoths, which date back tens of thousands of years, and make sense of it,” explains Nick Goldman of EMBL-EBI. “It’s also incredibly small, dense and does not need any power for storage, so shipping and keeping it is easy.”

Reading DNA is fairly straightforward, but writing it has until now been a major hurdle to making DNA storage a reality. There are two challenges: first, using current methods it is only possible to manufacture DNA in short strings. Secondly, both writing and reading DNA are prone to errors, particularly when the same DNA letter is repeated. Nick Goldman and co-author Ewan Birney, Associate Director of EMBL-EBI, set out to create a code that overcomes both problems.

“We knew we needed to make a code using only short strings of DNA, and to do it in such a way that creating a run of the same letter would be impossible. So we figured, let’s break up the code into lots of overlapping fragments going in both directions, with indexing information showing where each fragment belongs in the overall code, and make a coding scheme that doesn't allow repeats. That way, you would have to have the same error on four different fragments for it to fail – and that would be very rare," says Ewan Birney.

The new method requires synthesising DNA from the encoded information: enter Agilent Technologies, Inc, a California-based company that volunteered its services. Ewan Birney and Nick Goldman sent them encoded versions of: an .mp3 of Martin Luther King’s speech, “I Have a Dream”; a .jpg photo of EMBL-EBI; a .pdf of Watson and Crick’s seminal paper, “Molecular structure of nucleic acids”; a .txt file of all of Shakespeare's sonnets; and a file that describes the encoding.

“We downloaded the files from the Web and used them to synthesise hundreds of thousands of pieces of DNA – the result looks like a tiny piece of dust,” explains Emily Leproust of Agilent. Agilent mailed the sample to EMBL-EBI, where the researchers were able to sequence the DNA and decode the files without errors.

“We’ve created a code that's error tolerant using a molecular form we know will last in the right conditions for 10 000 years, or possibly longer,” says Nick Goldman. “As long as someone knows what the code is, you will be able to read it back if you have a machine that can read DNA.”

Although there are many practical aspects to solve, the inherent density and longevity of DNA makes it an attractive storage medium. The next step for the researchers is to perfect the coding scheme and explore practical aspects, paving the way for a commercially viable DNA storage model.

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Nick Goldman, Paul Bertone, Siyuan Chen, Christophe Dessimoz, Emily M. LeProust, Botond Sipos, Ewan Birney. Towards practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA. Nature, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nature11875

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Common data determinants of recurrent cancer are broken, mislead researchers

Jan. 2, 2013 — In order to study the effectiveness or cost effectiveness of treatments for recurrent cancer, you first have to discover the patients in medical databases who have recurrent cancer. Generally studies do this with billing or treatment codes -- certain codes should identify who does and does not have recurrent cancer. A recent study published in the journal Medical Care shows that the commonly used data determinants of recurrent cancer may be misidentifying patients and potentially leading researchers astray.

"For example, a study might look in a database for all patients who had chemotherapy and then another round of chemotherapy more than six months after the first, imagining that a second round defines recurrent disease. Or a study might look in a database for all patients with a newly discovered secondary tumor, imagining that all patients with a secondary tumor have recurrent disease. Our study shows that both methods are leave substantial room for improvement," says Debra Ritzwoller, PhD, health economist at the Kaiser Permanente Colorado Institute for Health Research and investigator at the University of Colorado Cancer Center.

The study used two unique datasets derived from HMO/Cancer Research Network and CanCORS/Medicare to check if the widely used algorithms in fact discovered the patients with recurrent disease that the algorithms were designed to detect. They did not. For example, a newly diagnosed secondary cancer may not mark a recurrence but may instead be a new cancer entirely; a second, later round of chemotherapy may be needed for continuing control of the de novo cancer, and not to treat recurrence.

"Basically, these algorithms don't work for all cancer sites in many datasets commonly used for cancer research," says Ritzwoller.

For example, to discover recurrent prostate cancer, no combination of billing codes used in this large data set pointed with sensitivity and specificity to patients whom notes in the data showed had recurrent disease. The highest success of the widely used algorithms was predicting patients with recurrent lung, colorectal and breast cancer, with success rates only between 75 and 85 percent.

"We need to know who in these data sets has recurrent disease. Then we can do things like look at which treatments lead to which outcomes," Ritzwoller says. Matching patients to outcomes can help to decide who gets what treatment, and can help optimize costs in health care systems.

In a forthcoming paper, Ritzwoller and colleagues will suggest algorithms to replace these that have now proved inadequate.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Colorado Denver. The original article was written by Garth Sundem.

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Journal Reference:

Michael J. Hassett, Debra P. Ritzwoller, Nathan Taback, Nikki Carroll, Angel M. Cronin, Gladys V. Ting, Deb Schrag, Joan L. Warren, Mark C. Hornbrook, Jane C. Weeks. Validating Billing/Encounter Codes as Indicators of Lung, Colorectal, Breast, and Prostate Cancer Recurrence Using 2 Large Contemporary Cohorts. Medical Care, 2012; : 1 DOI: 10.1097/MLR.0b013e318277eb6f

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Study reveals impact of public DNS services; Researchers develop tool to help

Oct. 25, 2012 — A new study by Northwestern University researchers has revealed that public DNS services could actually slow down users' web-surfing experience. As a result, researchers have developed a solution to help avoid such an impact: a tool called namehelp that could speed web performance by 40 percent.

Through a large-scale study involving more than 10,000 hosts across nearly 100 countries, Fabián Bustamante, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and his team found that one cause of slow web performance is a growing trend toward public Domain Name Systems (DNS), a form of database that translates Internet domain and host names into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

DNS services play a vital role in the Internet: every time a user visits a website, chats with friends, or sends email, his computer performs DNS look-ups before setting up a connection. Complex web pages often require multiple DNS look-ups before they start loading, so users' computers may perform hundreds of DNS look-ups a day. Most users are unaware of DNS, since Internet Service Providers (ISP) typically offer the service transparently.

Over the last few years, companies such as Google, OpenDNS, and Norton DNS have begun offering "public" DNS services. While "private" DNS services, such as those offered by ISPs, may be misconfigured, respond slowly to queries, and go down more often, public DNS services offer increased security and privacy, and quicker resolution time. The arrangement is also beneficial for public DNS providers, who gain access to information about users' web habits.

Bustamante and his team found that while using public DNS services may provide many benefits, users' web performance can suffer due to the hidden interaction of DNS with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), another useful and equally transparent service in the web.

CDNs help performance by offering exact replicas of website content in hundreds or thousands of computer servers around the world; when a user types in a web address, he is directed to the copy geographically closest to him. Most popular websites -- more than 70 percent of the top 1,000 most popular sites, according to the Northwestern study -- rely on CDNs to deliver their content quickly to users around the world.

But researchers found that using public DNS services can result in bad redirections, sending users to content from CDN replicas that are three times farther away than necessary.

Public DNS and CDN services are working to address the problem, but current users are left with two mediocre options -- bad web performance through public DNS services or bad security and privacy support through private DNS services.

Now Bustamante and his group have developed a tool called namehelp that may let users have their cake and eat it, too -- by using public DNS services without compromising on web performance.

namehelp runs personalized benchmarks in the background, from within users' computers, to determine their optimal DNS configuration and improve their web experience by helping sites load faster. If it finds that a user is receiving less than optimal web performance, namehelp automatically fixes it by cleverly interacting with DNS services and CDNs to ensure the user gets his content from the nearest possible copy.

You can download namehelp today from: http://aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/namehelp.

The paper describing the research is titled "Content Delivery and the Natural Evolution of DNS: Remote DNS Trends, Performance Issues and Alternative Solutions." The team's findings will be presented at the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2012) in Boston this November. In addition to Bustamante, authors on the paper are lead author John S. Otto, Mario A. Sanchez, and John P. Rula, all of Northwestern.

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Researchers identify ways to exploit 'cloud browsers' for large-scale, anonymous computing

Nov. 28, 2012 — Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Oregon have found a way to exploit cloud-based Web browsers, using them to perform large-scale computing tasks anonymously. The finding has potential ramifications for the security of "cloud browser" services.

At issue are cloud browsers, which create a Web interface in the cloud so that computing is done there rather than on a user's machine. This is particularly useful for mobile devices, such as smartphones, which have limited computing power.The cloud-computing paradigm pools the computational power and storage of multiple computers, allowing shared resources for multiple users.

"Think of a cloud browser as being just like the browser on your desktop computer, but working entirely in the cloud and providing only the resulting image to your screen," says Dr. William Enck, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research.

Because these cloud browsers are designed to perform complex functions, the researchers wanted to see if they could be used to perform a series of large-scale computations that had nothing to do with browsing. Specifically, the researchers wanted to determine if they could perform those functions using the "MapReduce" technique developed by Google, which facilitates coordinated computation involving parallel efforts by multiple machines.

The research team knew that coordinating any new series of computations would entail passing large packets of data between different nodes, or cloud browsers. To address this challenge, researchers stored data packets on bit.ly and other URL-shortening sites, and then passed the resulting "links" between various nodes.

Using this technique, the researchers were able to perform standard computation functions using data packets that were 1, 10 and 100 megabytes in size. "It could have been much larger," Enck says, "but we did not want to be an undue burden on any of the free services we were using."

"We've shown that this can be done," Enck adds. "And one of the broader ramifications of this is that it could be done anonymously. For instance, a third party could easily abuse these systems, taking the free computational power and using it to crack passwords."

However, Enck says cloud browsers can protect themselves to some extent by requiring users to create accounts -- and then putting limits on how those accounts are used. This would make it easier to detect potential problems.

The paper, "Abusing Cloud-Based Browsers for Fun and Profit," will be presented Dec. 6 at the 2012 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference in Orlando, Fla. The paper was co-authored by Vasant Tendulkar and Ashwin Shashidharan, graduate students at NC State, and Joe Pletcher, Ryan Snyder and Dr. Kevin Butler, of the University of Oregon. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office.

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Robots using tools: Researchers aim to create 'MacGyver' robot

ScienceDaily (Oct. 9, 2012) — Robots are increasingly being used in place of humans to explore hazardous and difficult-to-access environments, but they aren't yet able to interact with their environments as well as humans. If today's most sophisticated robot was trapped in a burning room by a jammed door, it would probably not know how to locate and use objects in the room to climb over any debris, pry open the door, and escape the building.

A research team led by Professor Mike Stilman at the Georgia Institute of Technology hopes to change that by giving robots the ability to use objects in their environments to accomplish high-level tasks. The team recently received a three-year, $900,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research to work on this project.

"Our goal is to develop a robot that behaves like MacGyver, the television character from the 1980s who solved complex problems and escaped dangerous situations by using everyday objects and materials he found at hand," said Stilman, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. "We want to understand the basic cognitive processes that allow humans to take advantage of arbitrary objects in their environments as tools. We will achieve this by designing algorithms for robots that make tasks that are impossible for a robot alone possible for a robot with tools."

The research will build on Stilman's previous work on navigation among movable obstacles that enabled robots to autonomously recognize and move obstacles that were in the way of their getting from point A to point B.

"This project is challenging because there is a critical difference between moving objects out of the way and using objects to make a way," explained Stilman. "Researchers in the robot motion planning field have traditionally used computerized vision systems to locate objects in a cluttered environment to plan collision-free paths, but these systems have not provided any information about the objects' functions."

To create a robot capable of using objects in its environment to accomplish a task, Stilman plans to develop an algorithm that will allow a robot to identify an arbitrary object in a room, determine the object's potential function, and turn that object into a simple machine that can be used to complete an action. Actions could include using a chair to reach something high, bracing a ladder against a bookshelf, stacking boxes to climb over something, and building levers or bridges from random debris.

By providing the robot with basic knowledge of rigid body mechanics and simple machines, the robot should be able to autonomously determine the mechanical force properties of an object and construct motion plans for using the object to perform high-level tasks.

For example, exiting a burning room with a jammed door would require a robot to travel around any fire, use an object in the room to apply sufficient force to open the stuck door, and locate an object in the room that will support its weight while it moves to get out of the room.

Such skills could be extremely valuable in the future as robots work side-by-side with military personnel to accomplish challenging missions.

"The Navy prides itself on recruiting, training and deploying our country's most resourceful and intelligent men and women," said Paul Bello, director of the cognitive science program in the Office of Naval Research (ONR). "Now that robotic systems are becoming more pervasive as teammates for warfighters in military operations, we must ensure that they are both intelligent and resourceful. Professor Stilman's work on the 'MacGyver-bot' is the first of its kind, and is already beginning to deliver on the promise of mechanical teammates able to creatively perform in high-stakes situations."

To address the complexity of the human-like reasoning required for this type of scenario, Stilman is collaborating with researchers Pat Langley and Dongkyu Choi. Langley is the director of the Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise (ISLE), and is recognized as a co-founder of the field of machine learning, where he championed both experimental studies of learning algorithms and their application to real-world problems. Choi is an assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Kansas.

Langley and Choi will expand the cognitive architecture they developed, called ICARUS, which provides an infrastructure for modeling various human capabilities like perception, inference, performance and learning in robots.

"We believe a hybrid reasoning system that embeds our physics-based algorithms within a cognitive architecture will create a more general, efficient and structured control system for our robot that will accrue more benefits than if we used one approach alone," said Stilman.

After the researchers develop and optimize the hybrid reasoning system using computer simulations, they plan to test the software using Golem Krang, a humanoid robot designed and built in Stilman's laboratory to study whole-body robotic planning and control.

This research is sponsored by the Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research, through grant number N00014-12-1-0143. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Naval Research.

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Researchers make quantum processor capable of factoring a composite number into prime factors

ScienceDaily (Aug. 19, 2012) — Computing prime factors may sound like an elementary math problem, but try it with a large number, say one that contains more than 600 digits, and the task becomes enormously challenging and impossibly time-consuming. Now, a group of researchers at UC Santa Barbara has designed and fabricated a quantum processor capable of factoring a composite number -- in this case the number 15 -- into its constituent prime factors, 3 and 5.

Although modest compared to a 600-digit number, the achievement represents a milestone on the road map to building a quantum computer capable of factoring much larger numbers, with significant implications for cryptography and cybersecurity. The results are published in the advance online issue of the journal Nature Physics.

"Fifteen is a small number, but what's important is we've shown that we can run a version of Peter Shor's prime factoring algorithm on a solid state quantum processor. This is really exciting and has never been done before," said Erik Lucero, the paper's lead author. Now a postdoctoral researcher in experimental quantum computing at IBM, Lucero was a doctoral student in physics at UCSB when the research was conducted and the paper was written.

"What is important is that the concepts used in factoring this small number remain the same when factoring much larger numbers," said Andrew Cleland, a professor of physics at UCSB and a collaborator on the experiment. "We just need to scale up the size of this processor to something much larger. This won't be easy, but the path forward is clear."

Practical applications motivated the research, according to Lucero, who explained that factoring very large numbers is at the heart of cybersecurity protocols, such as the most common form of encoding, known as RSA encryption. "Anytime you send a secure transmission -- like your credit card information -- you are relying on security that is based on the fact that it's really hard to find the prime factors of large numbers," he said. Using a classical computer and the best-known classical algorithm, factoring something like RSA Laboratory's largest published number -- which contains over 600 decimal digits -- would take longer than the age of the universe, he continued.

A quantum computer could reduce this wait time to a few tens of minutes. "A quantum computer can solve this problem faster than a classical computer by about 15 orders of magnitude," said Lucero. "This has widespread effect. A quantum computer will be a game changer in a lot of ways, and certainly with respect to computer security."

So, if quantum computing makes RSA encryption no longer secure, what will replace it? The answer, Lucero said, is quantum cryptography. "It's not only harder to break, but it allows you to know if someone has been eavesdropping, or listening in on your transmission. Imagine someone wiretapping your phone, but now, every time that person tries to listen in on your conversation, the audio gets jumbled. With quantum cryptography, if someone tries to extract information, it changes the system, and both the transmitter and the receiver are aware of it."

To conduct the research, Lucero and his colleagues designed and fabricated a quantum processor to map the problem of factoring the number 15 onto a purpose-built superconducting quantum circuit. "We chose the number 15 because it is the smallest composite number that satisfies the conditions appropriate to test Shor's algorithm -- it is a product of two prime numbers, and it's not even," he explained.

The quantum processor was implemented using a quantum circuit composed of four superconducting phase qubits -- the quantum equivalents of transistors -- and five microwave resonators. The complexity of operating these nine quantum elements required building a control system that allows for precise operation and a significant degree of automation -- a prototype that will facilitate scaling up to larger and more complex circuits. The research represents a significant step toward a scalable quantum architecture while meeting a benchmark for quantum computation, as well as having historical relevance for quantum information and cryptography.

"After repeating the experiment 150,000 times, we showed that our quantum processor got the right answer just under half the time" Lucero said. "The best we can expect from Shor's algorithm is to get the right answer exactly 50 percent of the time, so our results were essentially what we'd expect theoretically."

The next step, according to Lucero, is to increase the quantum coherence times and go from nine quantum elements to hundreds, then thousands, and on to millions. "Now that we know 15=3x5, we can start thinking about how to factor larger -- dare I say -- more practical numbers," he said.

Other UCSB researchers participating in the study include John Martinis, professor of physics; Rami Barends, Yu Chen, Matteo Mariantoni, and Y. Yin, postdoctoral fellows in physics; and physics graduate students Julian Kelly, Anthony Megrant, Peter O'Malley, Daniel Sank, Amit Vainsencher, Jim Wenner, and Ted White.

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Erik Lucero, R. Barends, Y. Chen, J. Kelly, M. Mariantoni, A. Megrant, P. O’Malley, D. Sank, A. Vainsencher, J. Wenner, T. White, Y. Yin, A. N. Cleland & John M. Martinis. Computing prime factors with a Josephson phase qubit quantum processor. Nature Physics, 19 August 2012 DOI: 10.1038/nphys2385

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Math formula leads researchers to source of pollution

ScienceDaily (June 25, 2012) — The leaking of environmentally damaging pollutants into our waters and atmosphere could soon be counteracted by a simple mathematical algorithm, according to researchers.

Presenting their research June 26, in IOP Publishing's journal Inverse Problems, the researchers, from Université de Technologie de Compiègne, believe their work could aid efforts to avoid environmental catastrophes by identifying the exact location where pollutants have been leaked as early as possible.

In the event of an oil spill across a region of the sea, researchers could collect samples of pollutants along certain sections of the body of water and then feed this information into their algorithm.

The algorithm is then able to determine two things: the rate at which the pollutant entered the body of water and where the pollutant came from.

This isn't the first time that mathematical algorithms have been used to solve this problem; however, this new approach is unique in that it could allow researchers to 'track' the source of a pollutant if it is moving or changing in strength.

Co-author of the study, Mr Mike Andrle, said: "In the unfortunate event of a pollutant spill, either by purposeful introduction into our waters or atmosphere, or by purely accidental fate, collaboration with scientists and engineers and application of this work may save precious moments to avert more environmental damage."

The algorithm itself is modelled on the general transport of a pollutant and takes three phenomena into account: diffusion, convection and reaction.

Diffusion is where the pollutant flows naturally from high concentrations to low concentrations and convection is where other factors cause the pollutant to displace, such as a current in the sea. A pollutant may also react with other materials in the water or settle on a seabed or lake floor: this is classified as 'reaction'.

The researchers add that other terms could also be added into the algorithm to account for the properties of different pollutants; for example, oil may not dissolve entirely in water and may form droplets, in which case the buoyancy and settling would need to be accounted for.

Their theoretical results have already shown that the result is unique; that is, the solution found is the only possible one given the observable data. The results were also shown to be very robust, which is extremely important in practice where such measurements often have relatively large errors associated with them.

Mr Andrle continued: "Growing up on Lake Erie, I heard of the previous shape it had been in where industry resulted in much of the lake being declared dead at one time. Though I was not alive to see it at its worst, I did witness how lots of legislation and new policies had turned its fate around.

"I saw a chance to contribute to research that may help mitigate causes of similar future events. We hope that the results of this work are substantially circulated so that those involved in pollution spill localisation and clean-up are aware of this solution."

The paper's second author, Professor Abdellatif El-Badia, said: "Inverse problems are very important in science, engineering and bioengineering. It is very interesting that we've been able to apply this topic to the very big problem of pollution."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Institute of Physics, 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:

M Andrle and A El Badia. Identification of multiple moving pollution sources in surface waters or atmospheric media with boundary observations. Inverse Problems, 2012 DOI: 10.1088/0266-5611/28/7/075009

Note: 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.

View the original article here

Researchers advance biometric security

ScienceDaily (June 21, 2012) — Researchers in the Biometric Technologies Laboratory at the university have developed a way for security systems to combine different biometric measurements -- such as eye colour, face shape or fingerprints -- and create a learning system that simulates the brain in making decisions about information from different sources.

Professor Marina Gavrilova, the founding head of the lab -- among the first in the research community to introduce and study neural network based models for information fusion -- says they have developed a biometric security system that simulates learning patterns and cognitive processes of the brain.

"Our goal is to improve accuracy and as a result improve the recognition process," says Gavrilova. "We looked at it not just as a mathematical algorithm, but as an intelligent decision making process and the way a person will make a decision."

The algorithm can learn new biometric patterns and associate data from different data sets, allowing system to combine information, such as fingerprint, voice, gait or facial features, instead of relying on a single set of measurements.

The key is in the ability to combine features from multiple sources of information, prioritise them by identifying more important/prevalent features to learn and adapt the decision-making to changing conditions such as bad quality data samples, sensor errors or an absence of one of the biometrics.

"It's a kind of artificial intelligence application that can learn new things, patterns and features," Gavrilova says. With this new multi-dimensional approach, a security system can train itself to learn the most important features of any new data and incorporate it in the decision making process.

"The neural network allows a system to combine features from different biometrics in one, learn them to make the optimal decision about the most important features, and adapt to a different environment where the set of features changes. This is a different, more flexible approach."

Biometric information is becoming more common in our daily lives, being incorporated in drivers' licenses, passports and other forms of identification. Gavrilova says the work in her lab is not only pioneering the intelligent decision-making methodology for human recognition but is also important for maintaining security in virtual worlds and avatar recognition.

The research has been published in several journals, including Visual Computer and International Journal of Information Technology and Management, as well as being presented in 2011 at the CyberWorlds and International Conference on Cognitive Informatics & Cognitive Computing in Banff.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Calgary.

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.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here

Math formula leads researchers to source of pollution

ScienceDaily (June 25, 2012) — The leaking of environmentally damaging pollutants into our waters and atmosphere could soon be counteracted by a simple mathematical algorithm, according to researchers.

Presenting their research June 26, in IOP Publishing's journal Inverse Problems, the researchers, from Université de Technologie de Compiègne, believe their work could aid efforts to avoid environmental catastrophes by identifying the exact location where pollutants have been leaked as early as possible.

In the event of an oil spill across a region of the sea, researchers could collect samples of pollutants along certain sections of the body of water and then feed this information into their algorithm.

The algorithm is then able to determine two things: the rate at which the pollutant entered the body of water and where the pollutant came from.

This isn't the first time that mathematical algorithms have been used to solve this problem; however, this new approach is unique in that it could allow researchers to 'track' the source of a pollutant if it is moving or changing in strength.

Co-author of the study, Mr Mike Andrle, said: "In the unfortunate event of a pollutant spill, either by purposeful introduction into our waters or atmosphere, or by purely accidental fate, collaboration with scientists and engineers and application of this work may save precious moments to avert more environmental damage."

The algorithm itself is modelled on the general transport of a pollutant and takes three phenomena into account: diffusion, convection and reaction.

Diffusion is where the pollutant flows naturally from high concentrations to low concentrations and convection is where other factors cause the pollutant to displace, such as a current in the sea. A pollutant may also react with other materials in the water or settle on a seabed or lake floor: this is classified as 'reaction'.

The researchers add that other terms could also be added into the algorithm to account for the properties of different pollutants; for example, oil may not dissolve entirely in water and may form droplets, in which case the buoyancy and settling would need to be accounted for.

Their theoretical results have already shown that the result is unique; that is, the solution found is the only possible one given the observable data. The results were also shown to be very robust, which is extremely important in practice where such measurements often have relatively large errors associated with them.

Mr Andrle continued: "Growing up on Lake Erie, I heard of the previous shape it had been in where industry resulted in much of the lake being declared dead at one time. Though I was not alive to see it at its worst, I did witness how lots of legislation and new policies had turned its fate around.

"I saw a chance to contribute to research that may help mitigate causes of similar future events. We hope that the results of this work are substantially circulated so that those involved in pollution spill localisation and clean-up are aware of this solution."

The paper's second author, Professor Abdellatif El-Badia, said: "Inverse problems are very important in science, engineering and bioengineering. It is very interesting that we've been able to apply this topic to the very big problem of pollution."

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Institute of Physics, 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:

M Andrle and A El Badia. Identification of multiple moving pollution sources in surface waters or atmospheric media with boundary observations. Inverse Problems, 2012 DOI: 10.1088/0266-5611/28/7/075009

Note: 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.

View the original article here

Researchers advance biometric security

ScienceDaily (June 21, 2012) — Researchers in the Biometric Technologies Laboratory at the university have developed a way for security systems to combine different biometric measurements -- such as eye colour, face shape or fingerprints -- and create a learning system that simulates the brain in making decisions about information from different sources.

Professor Marina Gavrilova, the founding head of the lab -- among the first in the research community to introduce and study neural network based models for information fusion -- says they have developed a biometric security system that simulates learning patterns and cognitive processes of the brain.

"Our goal is to improve accuracy and as a result improve the recognition process," says Gavrilova. "We looked at it not just as a mathematical algorithm, but as an intelligent decision making process and the way a person will make a decision."

The algorithm can learn new biometric patterns and associate data from different data sets, allowing system to combine information, such as fingerprint, voice, gait or facial features, instead of relying on a single set of measurements.

The key is in the ability to combine features from multiple sources of information, prioritise them by identifying more important/prevalent features to learn and adapt the decision-making to changing conditions such as bad quality data samples, sensor errors or an absence of one of the biometrics.

"It's a kind of artificial intelligence application that can learn new things, patterns and features," Gavrilova says. With this new multi-dimensional approach, a security system can train itself to learn the most important features of any new data and incorporate it in the decision making process.

"The neural network allows a system to combine features from different biometrics in one, learn them to make the optimal decision about the most important features, and adapt to a different environment where the set of features changes. This is a different, more flexible approach."

Biometric information is becoming more common in our daily lives, being incorporated in drivers' licenses, passports and other forms of identification. Gavrilova says the work in her lab is not only pioneering the intelligent decision-making methodology for human recognition but is also important for maintaining security in virtual worlds and avatar recognition.

The research has been published in several journals, including Visual Computer and International Journal of Information Technology and Management, as well as being presented in 2011 at the CyberWorlds and International Conference on Cognitive Informatics & Cognitive Computing in Banff.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Calgary.

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.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here