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The future of mobile telephones - where will it be in the next decade or so?

May 12, 2013 (posted by Ng Chong) - Researchers at the Technische Universität Darmstadt make predictions on what the future may hold for mobile telephones and identify the pre-requisite technologies that need to be researched and developed.  Augmented reality and stretchable/shrinkable displays are at the heart of their vision.  Progressive content zooming would allow users to see more detail or less depending on the viewed area of the resizable display.

Japan's firewall bypass tool available for free for everyone

March 17, 2013 (posted by Ng Chong) -  Governments that impose unwarranted Internet censorship and online surveillance on their citizens pose serious threats to Internet freedom.  VPN is one of the frequently used tools to circumvent government firewalls while making your IP address harder to trace.  VPN Gate, an academic project at Tsukuba University, Japan aims to provide free community-based VPN service to the masses. Read more

Information sharing beyond borders

As part of UNU Campus Computing Centre's commitment to mainstreaming ICT in UNU core activities, Ng Chong contributes to UNU-IAS's Policy Brief entitled “Bytes Beyond Borders: Strengthening Transboundary Information Sharing on Wildlife Crime through the Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System (WEMS) Initiative”.  Read more

Peer-to-peer hotspots

February 4, 2013 (posted by Ng Chong) -  In an ever increasingly mobile world users have come to expect Internet access wherever they go.  Unfortunately, ubiquitous Internet access is far from being a reality.  For example, you can be in a dead zone or the signal from your mobile operator is too weak to have a useful connection. Developed by MIT,  Air Mobs, a peer-to-peer carrier independent app could help increase Internet availability for mobile users.   Peer-to-peer networking is widely used as a technique for distributing large files over the Internet. Instead of data sharing, Air Mobs is designed to allow smartphone users to share their Internet links.  Read more

Good grammar is bad for password

January 20, 2013 (posted by Ng Chong) -  Passwords protect your computer resources and your privacy, yet unless strong passwords are required and enforced, users tend to pick simple passwords.  With computing power becoming cheaper and faster, there is even greater urgency to choose secure passwords.   To make a password more resilient to guessing often means injecting as much randomness and nonsensical information as possible into the composition of the password, e.g. ",$dF3k49au", but this also renders the password less memorable.   Read more

Countering cyber attacks with deception

January 7, 2013 (posted by Ng Chong) - A honeypot is a decoy system set up to snare hackers into your system like honey to bees, to gather information about their techniques and capabilities. Honeypots are not new. Its first documented incarnation in a high-profile case was chronicled in the book "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage" more than 2 decades ago.  Read more

Death of the pixel in sight?

December 16, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) - When you zoom in far enough on an image on your computer screen, you see the little colored 2D cells known as pixels.  They are the building blocks of digital media.   The fine detail that you want to record must be sampled at the appropriate resolution.  This means that pixel bitmaps can't be enlarged without loss of resolution. The smaller the pixel size and shorter the distance from one pixel to the next, the better the quality.  Read more

Nanoscale elements that mimick brain parallelism

November 24, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) - Despite all we 've learned about the human brain, this amazing and complex organ, home to billions of neuron cells remains mostly a mystery.  If the brain could file a patent for every single wonder it can do inside its vast microcosm, the number of patents to be issued to the brain would be overwhelming.  A remarkable ability of the brain is that it can both store and process information at the same time. Read more

Cassette tapes - from relic to revolutionary

November 4, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) - Introduced in the 1960s, cassette tapes were once a very popular way to store our favorite songs and melodies.  Researchers at Fuji Film in Japan and IBM in Switzerland are working to bring back the charm of cassette tapes in a revolutionary way.  Big data projects demand big storage.  Their lab cartridge prototypes measuring just 10 cm x 10 cm x 2 cm  are capable of storing 35 terabytes of data.  Tapes are over 200 times more energy efficient than disk drive arrays of similar capacity, according to a 2010 study.  A major drawback is that tapes are slower to access than disk drives, but speedup techniques such as those employed in the Linear Tape File System are expected to bring tapes on par with disk drives.

New server cooling technology

September 29, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) - According to a study published in the New York Times, energy-hungry data centers worldwide consume a rough equivalent of the output of 30 nuclear power plants. These huge data centers with rows and rows of servers can waste as much as 90 percent of the electricity intake from the power grid when running at full capacity for 24 hours a day. Read more

Google's open source learning technology

September 15, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) - Google makes Course Builder, the technology behind its recently launched Massive Open Online Course, Power Searching with Google, available for everyone.  It is an experimental framework that lets anyone with minimal experience in HTML and JavaScript create their own web courses, from online registration to course lessons and scheduled activities to assessment. Read more

Making sense of the world by pointing

August 18, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) -  Pointing is a natural human gesture for indicating focus.  This is the backbone of the wearable intuitive interface design of MIT's EyeRing, a finger-worn device that allows people to learn more information about an object they are pointing at through an aural feedback.  The ring is equipped with a camera that is wirelessly paired with a smartphone via Bluetooth for processing the captured images. Read more

Bioinformatics in the Web App era

July 30, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) - The open, collaborative computational ecosystems that surround smartphone apps are gaining traction in the life sciences community. One recent academic effort in this direction can be traced to a team at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The researchers have developed ImageJS, a free app system that enables pathologists to drag a digitized pathology slide into a Web app and assess the specimen for malignancy based on image analysis. The app ecosystem allows researchers to reproduce results easily in a web browser and includes algorithms for feature segmentation, analysis, and filtering, which support the development of new modules. ImageJS permits the code to be migrated to the browser and pushes the computation to where the data is, which eliminates the risks of exposure that violates patient privacy. This is a stark contrast to the traditional, non-pervasive image bioinformatics architecture model, which relies on computation being done on a server and results being rendered on a client.

World's thinnest transparent display

July 14, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) - Traditional screens are opaque and lack the ability to capture the transparency and reflectance qualities of displayed objects.  Researchers have developed a technology to project 2D or 3D images on a screen made out of sturdy soap film, which have the potential to provide better visual realism in images than traditional screens.  The screen uses ultrasonic sound waves to control the film's transparency and reflectance, which in turn modify the texture of a projected image.

NextShare - keeping pace with the world's insatiable demand for video bandwidth

June 24, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) - Video is growing at an explosive rate.  Cisco estimates that by 2016 every second, 1.2 million minutes of video content will cross the Internet, accounting for 54% of the world's combined traffic. Much of today's video streaming is based on point-to-point transmission, or unicasting, where servers send data directly to each client.  Read more

Security flaws revealed in cell networks

June 3, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) - Your cell phone carrier's security designed to filter traffic could be used to help hackers break into your Facebook and Twitter accounts, according to a study from the University of Michigan.  To take advantage of this vulnerability, an untrusted app must be installed on the victim's smartphone.  The researchers posted a video on YouTube that demonstrates how an attacker could hijack a Facebook connection by riding on the carrier's firewall middleboxes.  Read the full article.

Password-less authentication

May 20, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) -  Will passwords ever go away?  Passwords are the most common form of protection used against unauthorized access.  Password authentication comes in different flavors and also varying degrees of strength (e.g., 2-factor authentication, one-time password), but they all cause inconvenience to the users.  A new research trend looks into new ways to authenticate a user without requiring a password by capturing and analyzing behavorial characteristics of how the user interacts with the computer.  A system developed at QUT's School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science takes advantage of the fact that people have unique typing styles or keystroke dynamics, which are governed by motor control rather than conscious thought.  Unlike passwords, the method also can be used to check the identity of the user continuously throughout the session.

Collective Intelligence

April 29, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) -  The Internet continues to foster and enable the emergence of new ideas, behaviors and solutions just as big and surprising as itself.  A recent conference organized by MIT brought researchers from various disciplines to examine the theory and practice of one of the best collaborative behaviors that the Internet has to offer, collective intelligence.   Google, Wikipedia and Re-captcha are well-known examples of intelligent behavior based on wisdom of crowds.  Harnessing this vast potential can improve our ability to solve problems and increase productivity in companies.  For example, in Threadless, the company produces T-shirts based on design ideas gathered from the Internet community who also vote for their favorite designs.  The papers presented in the conference are online.

HTTP 2.0: A new foundation for a faster Internet

April 9, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) -  Designed by Tim-Berners Lee 20 years ago, HTTP 1.0/1.1 affects everything that is connected to the Internet.  It serves as a response-request protocol in the application layer and governs the way your browser, app interacts with a Web site.  Despite its success, the messaging framing and syntax in the legacy standard leads to subutilization of the network (transport layer).  Recently, engineers gathered in Paris to review viable options  for overhauling HTTP.  Among the submissions for HTTP 2.0, Google's SPDY and Microsoft's HTTP Speed+Mobility captured the most attention.  Read more

Could ghost particles change the future of wireless communications?

March 18, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) - Today, most wireless networks use radio waves to send data, but radio waves are vulnerable to electromagnetic interference and can be blocked by many types of materials (e.g., thick stone walls). Neutrinos, subatomic particles that travel nearly at the speed of light, on the other hand, are nearly massless, electrically neutral and can go through almost any types and amounts of material without being disturbed. Physicists call these odd particles, ghost particles because they are hard to generate and even harder to detect. Image credit: University of Rochester.  Read more

Online privacy and security at risk

March 4, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) - It is hardly surprising that many people don't trust their online data are secure and safe.  It was not long ago that a loophole was revealed in iPhone's IOS that an app could steal photos if it was allowed to use location data [1].  Trust-eroding bugs keep on surfacing and this time the threat is coming from Google's Android.  New York Times reports that a similar flaw is present in Android - as long as an app has the right to send data over the Internet, your private photos can be secretly uploaded to a server without your consent [2].  Perhaps it is even more disturbing to know that that we shouldn't trust the padlocked icon we see in our browser under certain conditions.  Recently researchers from University of Bristol were able to recover the cryptographic key used to encrypt data by exploting a bug in the SSL protocol, 0.9.8g when a particular set of options were used [3]. Related link.

Virtual Internships

February 19, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) -  Communication and collaboration tools are making steady inroads into the realm of internship, where training and supervision activities are increasingly becoming more flexible and less location dependent.  This trend, known as virtual internship, helps student interns across the globe gain professional experience in a variety of career fields, without ever setting foot in an office or on campus.  Columbia University's Virtual Internship Program is perhaps the most notable example of this internship transformation.  Read more

Related link - virtual internship opportunities at United Nations University - Campus Computing Centre.

One out of every four tweets not worth reading, according to new findings

February 5, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - Of the estimated over 200 million tweets posted worldwide every day, how many tweets are really worth reading? To help answer this question, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology analyzed ratings of 43,738 tweets collected from visitors to the Who Gives a Tweet site over a period of 19 days in late 2010 and early 2011. The researchers found that the readers liked a little over a third of the tweets from the accounts of 21,014 Twitter users they followed. 25% of the remaining tweets were simply useless and another 39% generated no strong opinion.  Read the full article.

Greening by speeding up compression

January 22, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) - A team of researchers at MIT claimed to have found a way to improve on a classic numerical method known as Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), which has important applications in signal processing and other fields.  FFT represents a complex signal as a sum of weighted frequency components. Read more (Image: Christine Daniloff).

Math tricks could bring high-quality 3-D cameras to the masses

January 7, 2012 (posted by Ng Chong) - A time-of-flight depth-sensing system acquires depth information by firing a series of light pulses at a scene and measuring the time it takes the light to return from objects.  There are two widely used methods to find the time of flight.  One uses raster scanning to gauge depth one pixel at a time. The process is slow and requires hardware to redirect the beam of light.   Another uses a 2-D array of ranging sensors to register the light bounced from objects at different distances when the entire scene is illuminated with a light pulse.  The cost and spatial quality are proportional to the number of pixels and the resolution of the sensors.
Read more (Image: flickr/Dominic)

Could self-healing electronics slow down e-waste?

December 26, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - E-waste is not easily biodegradable and is laden with toxic substances such as arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, flame retardants, which poses a threat to human health and the environment if not properly disposed and recycled. It is the fastest-growing part of the world garbage stream, thanks in part to the short lifespan of most electronics. Self-healing materials developed at University of Illinois promise to extend the longevity of electronic devices. At the heart of this biologically inspired behavior is the dispersion of tiny microcapsules, filled with a liquid metal on top of gold lines of circuits. A failure in the circuit causes the microcapsules in the path of the crack to rupture and release the liquid metal contained inside, restoring conductivity in a split microsecond, without human intervention. Read source article (Image credit: Scott White).

The Internet of Energy

December 17, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) -  Following the mega-disaster of 2011/03/11 that put out of operation key nuclear power plants in Japan, adding intelligence to power utility networks has become one of the most sought after goals in energy management.  Founded in September, the Digital Grid Consortium has recently announced plans to build a granular, smart grid architecture that will be able to efficiently track and direct the flow of power units in any direction by tagging them with information similar to the way data packets are routed on the Internet.  For increased robustness against failure and manageability of power variations, the grid is partitioned into many autonomous cells that are interconnected by power routers to the backbone. Photo credit: © TebNad/iStockphoto

World's first terahertz frequency radio chip

December 3, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - Osaka University and Rohm have jointly developed a terahertz frequency radio chip measuring 1.5x3 mm, capable of a data transmission rate of 1.5 gigabits per second. Until now semiconductor devices operating in this high frequency band are generally large and their top speed is 0.1 gigabits per second. The researchers forecast that even higher bandwidths of up to 30 gigabits per second may be possible and the chip's production cost would come at US $1.30 per unit. Read source article from Physorg.com (Image credit: Rohm/Osaka University)

Could W3C's 'Do Not Track' put users in control of their privacy?

November 20, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - Online advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry.  To increase revenue, ADs are increasingly targeted at consumers based on data collected about their web browsing habits, using such methods as click tracking and search terms.  Seeking a balance between the privacy concerns and demands for consumer data, W3C released in this month two draft speciffications that define how users can tell a website their privacy preferences and how a website should comply with the 'Do Not Track' settings.  Both Microsoft's IE9 and Firefox are expected to implement some flavor of 'Do Not Track', but there isn't any mechanism in place at this point to ensure that websites will always honor users' privacy settings.

Japan's K Computer is World's Fastest Supercomputer

November 5, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - The K Computer at the Riken Institute for Physical and Chemical Research in Kobe, Japan has broken its own world record, achieving a top speed of over 10 petaflops per second.  Back in June, when it became the world's fastest supercomputer, it revved up a peak performance of 8 petaflops per second which was three times speedier than the previous world record held by China's Tianhe-1A according to the latest Top500 list.  It is more powerful than the next five systems on the list combined. Japan and China claim four of the top five spots on the list, while the United States run five of world's top 10 supercomputers.  The K Computer will retain its world status in the forthcoming release of the Top 500 list on November 14, according to Jack Dongarra, who oversees the list. Read more  (Photo credit: RIKEN)

W3C's XML encryption standard cracked

October 30, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - A team of security researchers claim to have broken XML encryption, which poses a real threat to many online transaction systems that depend on this standard for securing transmission of sensitive data. It is widely used in web service frameworks of major commercial and open-source organizations, including Apache, RedHat, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon.  The flaw lies in the cryptographic weakness in the cipher-block chaining (CBC) mode recommended by the W3C.  The researchers have demonstrated a practical attack on a major web service implementation based on the Apache Axis2 XML framework.   In addition to exploiting the uncovered flaw, the technique also requires the availability of an 'oracle', often provided in a web service implementation, which returns error messages when ciphertexts are incorrectly formed.  The standard has never been updated since its ratification in 2002.  The researchers don't believe that there is a simple fix but changing the standard.

UNU Calendar – automatic aggregation of online content from varied sources

October 23, 2011 - The UN University (UNU) is a global university with campuses around the world.  Each campus maintains their own website. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a facility where users can browse the present, past and future activities of UNU in one place? 
Relying on a manual process of information discovery and capture to compile the geographically dispersed content would add much undue burden to the UNU workforce.  The UNU Calendar project (http://portal.unu.edu/) looks into harvesting research and scholarly activity information from scattered, disparate UNU websites in a timely, efficient and transparent manner with as little human intervention as possible. Ng Chong of UNU Campus Computing Centre has developed computer algorithms and heuristics to meet this goal with a good degree of success.  Read more

Full-duplex breakthrough could double WiFi capacity without additional cell towers

October 16, 2011 (Posted by Ng Chong) - Full-duplex transmission refers to the ability to send and receive simultaneously. This effectively increases network throughput twofold.  Two-way communications over wireless networks were long thought impossible without using a different frequency to send and to listen. To see the challenge imagine what happens if two people speak to each other at the same time - neither can hear the other.

A breakthrough from Rice University promises a practical solution that is not only possible to achieve full-duplex on a single frequency but also requires no new hardware on mobile devices. The key to the innovation is self-interference cancellation, which can be described as a mechanism used to silence locally the speaker's own sound in the analogy of two people speaking at the same time.  Read the full article

Next-generation defense against adaptive malware

October 9, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) -  The possibility of predicting crime before it happens, popularized by Steven Spielberg's Minority Report is no longer a far-fetched idea.  It is an active research area that has gone beyond the confines of crime fighting and crime prevention.  The same enthusiasm is manifested in the virus-antivirus arms race.  Read more ...

Augmenting touch screen with around-the-screen interactivity

September 27, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - Not satisfied with the size of your touch screen?  A team comprised of researchers from Intel, Microsoft and the University of Washington developed Portico, a tablet computer that extends on-screen interactivity to the space surrounding the tablet screen. See the video that demonstrates a number of proof-of-concept applications.