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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.  SPDY was unveiled in 2009 and is currently used by Amazon, Twitter and Google on their servers.  SPDY aims to reduce network latency and congestion by using request prioritization, header compression and multiplexed streams over a single TCP connection.  It also uses (TLS) encryption throughout the protocol and has other optional server-initiated features.   The two proposals share a lot in common.  HTTP Speed+Mobility references the work that has been done on SPDY and WebSockets, but it is positioned to be more sensitive to mobile devices and applications.  It contests Google's blanket approach to encryption and compression which can affect battery life of mobile devices.

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. Taking advantage of these unique properties, Fermilab scientists succeeded in sending a simple, binary encoded message with neutrinos to a receiver that was one kilometer away and 240 meters of solid rock stood in the path. In the experiment, they used one of the most powerful accelerators in existence to generate a high-intensity beam of neutrinos.  Given the extreme technologies used in the demonstration, it will be many years before neutrino communications become practical.  Image credit: University of Rochester

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. This makes a lot of sense at a time when employers are eager to go global to recruit skilled interns from all corners of the world who may be discouraged to apply for internships in places where the cost of living is unaffordable.  At the same time, employers don't have to worry about the red tape and costs associated with sponsoring and processing visa for interns, which is one of the primary barriers to the borderless approach to talent.  

Related link - virtual internship opportunities at UNU 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 through 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. In most multimedia data the weights of the frequency components are small or equal to zero. This sparsity property is the key to many compression schemes - the original signal can be reconstructed by discarding negligible frequencies.  In fact, if the signal is sparse enough, the new algorithm can simply take random samples rather than reading the entire signal.  Faster than previously achieved speedups in FFT computation means compression could be implemented on a much less powerful processor enabling mobile devices to send huge video data without quickly draining their batteries.  Read the full article (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.
An alternative proposed by a research team at MIT reduces the core complexity down to a single photodetector - a one-pixel camera and works efficiently with existing processor power available in an ordinary cellphone.  The breakthrough is based on compressed sensing and parametric signal processing. The former allows a 2-D image to be reconstructed from the light intensities measured by a single pixel when a light pulse source selectively illuminates the scene using random checkerboard patterns. The third dimension to the depth map is derived using parametric signal processing.  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.  

Solving social challenges with crowdsourcing

September 3, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) -  If you 've got your cell phone handy and if you 've got the right apps, you can be a better citizen by turning the mobile data you collect into civic action.  Some of the new possibilities are coming from the Social App Lab at CITRIS, which develops free game-based apps that aim to harness the collective power of large-scale citizen participation in social issues.  Dengue Torpedo is one of their projects whose game objective is to earn points by identifying and destroying potential mosquito breeding places on a map, as well as recruiting new players.

Privacy watch: from cookies to supercookies

August 21, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - HTTP cookies are not new and many websites today would not work without them.  They are small plain-text files (up to 4KB) that are stored on your computer when instructed by the Web site you are visiting.  They are typically used to track information about you on your computer as well as to customize Web sites based on the state information collected.   The main concern with cookies is their stealth use without people's knowledge or permission in harmful ways.  Browsers provide various ways to block certain tracking cookies if desired. However, the advent of supercookies has radically changed the landscape of online privacy. Read more ...

A formula to optimize cloud costs

July 18, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) -  Cloud computing offers a cornucopia of almost unlimited compute capacity.  But the instant scaling and addition of near-unlimited resources also means that cloud costs can quickly grow out of control, particularly for the heaviest users like research institutions.   Reseachers from Swinburne University of Technology who have been working with large raw data and intermediate data sets (which are derived from the initial data), developed a mathematical model and an intermediate data-dependency graph to reduce cloud usage charges. The solution can assist in finding a balance between storage and computation cost, and to advise on what intermediary data to keep in the cloud.   Read the full article.

Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System Initiative Website Launched

July 10, 2011 - The working group of WEMS (Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System) Initiative has launched an information website to facilitate dissemination of the activities and results of the project.  Image credit:  "United Nations Cloud for the Advancement of Information Ecosystem in Africa with a Special Focus on Wildlife Enforcement" by Ng Chong. 

Uncovering botnets using DNS analysis and machine learning

June 26, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - Botnets rely on a host of tactics, including malicious, agile use of DNS such as by hiding themselves in new domain names to evade static blacklists and intrusion detection systems.  A dynamic domain name reputation model based on changes detected in the DNS infrastructure, focusing on the query characteristics and analysis of the domain network and zone features can lead to the early detection of botnets, according to research from the Georgia Institute of Technology. The researchers have reported recognition rates greater than 98 percent.  Read the full article

Who sends the most spam?

June 13, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) -  Spam need no introduction.  Every day a deluge of spam mail floods the Internet wasting countless computing and human resources.  Hijacked computers are spam havens and as their number continues to grow by leaps and bounds, the problem is not getting better.  Read more  

Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System (WEMS)

May 29, 2011  - The Lusaka Agreement Task Force (LATF) in collaboration with the United Nations University and the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente organized a regional training on Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System (WEMS). Read more

Audio CAPTCHAS Cracked

May 29, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - CAPTCHAS (short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are often the  first line of defense to protect web forms from intrusive, automated attacks such as spambots. Read more

An Inexpensive Optical Multitouch System

May 18, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) -  At the Computer Human Interaction conference in Vancouver, researchers from Texas A&M University showcased how their ZeroTouch system built using conventional infrared sensors turned a regular computer screen to a multitouch surface.  When stacking multiple layers of ZeroTouch, the researchers envisage that depth-sensing becomes possible to support 3-D multitouch experience.  Read more

Harnessing ubiquity for new designs

May 6, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - One fascinating form of scientific creativity consists of looking for ways to transform something widely abundant into a unique outcome that is useful in our daily lives.  There are many manifestations of this type of human ingenuity in R&D.  Read more

Internet freedom

May 1, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - The Internet and its advances have enabled development and growth in all walks of life, for good or ill across the globe.  Internet technologies and open social networking are fueling citizen participation in promoting change in local governments and even protests and revolutions, like those that are sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa.  Unfortunately, the right to online freedom and information privacy is illusory when repressive governments impose censorship and blocking control on Internet communications to discourage their citizens from expressing freely online. Read more

Contour - an open source context-sensitive approach to user interface design

April 16, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - Traditionally,  data type and application have been locked in a one-to-one static relationship. You access one type of data using a default application. It is very much an application-centric user environment where there is a single point of entry to your information regardless of user activities and personal usage patterns. The user interface (UI) has no awareness of user preferences for different contexts and activities.  Adapting the UI to the changing information context is the main idea behind the Contour project. Read more

What if a digital certificate authority gets hacked?

April 9, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - Secure communications and commerce on the Internet rely on encryption to guarantee confidentiality and integrity of the interactions between websites and their visitors.  Secure websites' URLs begin with "https" and are typically identified with a closed lock icon on Web browsers. In addition to data encryption, these sites make use of a chain of digital certificates to prove their authenticity to Web browsers.  These certificates are issued and signed by a growing number of certificate authorities that browser makers trust.  According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, there were 676 organizations issuing certificates as of December 2010. Read more

Free software for sensing seismic activities using your home computer

March 27, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong) - If you own a laptop, chances are that you already have most of what you need to detect seismic activities. Modern laptops come with accelerometers that can detect sudden movement and prepare the hard drive for impact.  The same technology can be used to turn your computer into a seismic monitoring station for your area.  The pervasiveness of sudden-motion sensor and the abundance of aggregate idle time of computers connected to the Internet form the technological basis of the crowdsourcing initiative, Quake-Catcher Network.  The primary goal of this collaborative strong-motion seismic network is to support worldwide earthquake safety and earthquake education by utilizing the sensors in or attached to Internet-connected computers. Software for your computer and educational materials can be downloaded from the Quake-Catcher Network website.

Computer simulation shows the propagation of the deadly tsunami that devastated the east coast of Japan and beyond on March 11, 2011

March 21, 2011 (posted by Ng Chong)  Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Center for Tsunami Research. The real-time tsunami forecasting animation is based on the MOST model developed by Titov of PMEL and Synolakis of University of Southern California.  According to NOAA, the tsunami was registered at a tsunami detection buoy within approximately 25 minutes after the earthquake, which unfortunately left very little time for the coastal communities of Japan to perform a mass evacuation.

What is wrong with shortened links?

March 05, 2011 (blurb by Ng Chong) - Link-shortening services are heavily used in popular sites like YouTube and Twitter.  Long URLs are hard to pass along and when they wrap multiple lines, they can break HTML formatting and become unclickable in many cases.   Shortened links prevent this problem and make input of long URLs efficient.  Some link-shortening services even offer web analytics capabilities.  According to a study conducted by the Foundation for Research and Technology and Microsoft Research, shortening services introduce a delay of less than half of a second, which has little impact on user experience.  However, the study warns the possibility of an overall performance degradation if usage continues to grow, which could eventually drive up the latency to a point that is perceptible by users.

Read the full article

The world's smartest computer wins Jeopardy's best players

February 17, 2010 (posted by Ng Chong) -  For many years AI (Artificial Intelligence) has epitomized its prowess in mathematical games and puzzles.  AI astonished the world when IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer became the world's best chess player after defeating the World Chess Champion, Garry Kasparov.  It may seem that this victory has narrowed the gap between human intelligence and machine intelligence, but arguably it is the sheer speed at which Deep Blue computes what-if chess moves that makes a difference in the man versus machine face-off. 

Read more

Cryptography's holy grail?

February 4, 2011 (synopsis by Ng Chong) -  Public cloud computing offers enormous compute flexibility and scalabilty and is quickly becoming a viable alternative to building your own data center.  However, security remains a concern when your cloud-resident application has to process private and sensitive data such as health records and financial transactions.  While encryption can be used to protect the end-to-end transmission between the local source and the cloud and keep the data secure at rest, the encrypted data is required to be decrypted first into clear text before any computations can be performed on them.  A new ground-breaking development known as homomorphic encryption could be a foundation to eliminate this security weakness and radically enhance security in distributed computing.

Read the full article

A new wave of wearable products

January 17, 2011 (synopsis by Ng Chong) - Hewlett-Packard (HP) is developing a working prototype of a lightweight, wearable device that can view digital maps and other data.  It will be built using a plastic film that is lighter and thinner than glass and can be stored in rolls.  "You can start thinking about putting electronic displays on things where you wouldn't ordinarily think of having them," says Arizona State University's Nick Colaneri, a scientist and director of the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University. "How about a stack of thin displays that I can peel off and stick on things, sort of like a pad of Post-it notes?"

Read the full article

Faster and greener numerical simulations

January 3, 2011 (synopsis by Ng Chong) - Usage of GPUs (graphics processing units) in high-performance computing is on the rise.  Multi-GPU based parallel  architectures not only accelerate computations but also are more energy efficient less than similar architectures using standard processors.   The Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI) and the University of Bonn have teamed up to develop parallel multi-GPUs software for numerical simulations, which are essential in industrial production such as the creation of new materials and simulation of material strength and fluid dynamics.

Read the full article