Movie Magic Conjured by Science
Discovery News (12/30/10) Eric Niiler
Filmmakers increasingly use technology based on fluid dynamics to create realistic scenes of violent oceans and falling buildings. "It used to be that the story was limited by the technology," says Digital Domain's Doug Roble. "Now we're getting to the point where there are no limits." Roble and others are leading the way in the use of software that uses algorithms that describe the physics of nature. The mathematical formulas behind the algorithms also can be used for movie special effects. "In order to simulate it accurately, you have to take extremely small time steps to move the simulation forward," Roble says. "[Digital filmmaking] has a lot in common with foundational work with applied mathematics and computational physics," says Exotic Matter's Robert Bridson. He notes that the continued convergence of computer science and filmmaking is possible due to the new, inexpensive computing systems needed to run the software. "We will start seeing more low-budget independent types of shops producing extraordinary effects," Bridson predicts. Roble says simulating human expressions is the next frontier. "The human face is extraordinarily tough," he says. "Right now, the research community is focused on muscles and skin."
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Blog: Movie Magic Conjured by Science
Monday, December 27, 2010
Blog: Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street [an example of Holland's Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS)]
Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street
Wired (12/27/10) Felix Salmon; Jon Stokes
The bulk of trading on Wall Street and an increasing volume of global trading is governed by algorithms, and this has engendered a market that is more efficient, faster, and more intelligent than any human. However, it also is unpredictable, highly volatile, and often defies human understanding. Some of the algorithms are designed to discover, purchase, and sell individual stocks, while others were developed to help brokers carry out large trades. Consequently, the trading arena is glutted with competing lines of code, each one trying to outsmart and counter the other. Interaction between the algorithms can give rise to unexpected behaviors, and this can lead to sudden market drops such as the May 6 flash crash. In the wake of this event, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission imposed or is considering imposing safeguards such as governors for trading algorithms that would restrict the size and speed at which trades can be executed. But such measures can only slow down or halt the algorithms for a short while. "Our financial markets have become a largely automated adaptive dynamical system, with feedback," says University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Kearns.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Blog: 7 Programming Languages on the Rise
7 Programming Languages on the Rise
InfoWorld (12/25/10) Peter Wayner
Python, Ruby on Rails, MATLAB, JavaScript, R, Erlang, Cobol, and CUDA are among the niche programming languages that are becoming increasingly popular in enterprises. Python has a structure that makes it easy to scale in the cloud, making it popular with scientists because it is flexible and allows users to improvise and quickly see results. Ruby on Rails is popular for prototyping and cataloging data that can be stored in tables. MATLAB was built to help mathematicians solve complex linear equations, but has found a market in the enterprise due to the large amounts of data that modern organizations must analyze. There are several open source alternatives to MATLAB, including Octave, Scilab, Sage, and PySci. Meanwhile, several new applications, including CouchDB and Node.js, have boosted the popularity of JavaScript. The R programming language carries out multiple functions for numerical and statistical analysis of large data sets, and is used to examine the feasibility of business or engineering projects. Erlang combines traditional aspects of functional programming with a modern virtual machine that organizes machine code. Cobol appeals to programmers who work well with syntax that is more similar to a natural language. CUDA extensions are being used by enterprise programmers for machine vision, huge simulations, and complicated statistical computations.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Blog: Meet the Data-Storing Bacteria [each cell can hold about 5 GB]
Meet the Data-Storing Bacteria
PC World (12/23/10) Elizabeth Fish
University of Hong Kong researchers have inserted 90 gigabytes (GB) of data into the DNA of a colony of 18 E.coli bacteria in an attempt to test its capability of storing electronic data. Bacteria possess enormous storage capacities, considering a gram contains about 10 million cells, and each cell can hold about 5 GB. Moreover, different types of cells are more radioresistant than others, which suggests that data in certain cells would survive a nuclear explosion. However, accessing that data is problematic. The researchers say that retrieving data from DNA cells currently is "tedious and expensive," and they note that stored data would be jeopardized because DNA cells can mutate. The team has only used genetically modified bacteria and copyright information data storing for testing.
Blog: Software [using classical computing] Said to Match Quantum Computing Speed
Software Said to Match Quantum Computing Speed
IDG News Service (12/23/10) Joab Jackson
University of Waterloo researchers have shown that for some computing problems, using the right software algorithms could enable classical computing techniques to work just as well as quantum computing. The researchers demonstrated how a seldom-used algorithm could achieve new levels in problem-solving performance when used on contemporary computers and theoretically match quantum computing speeds. "One striking implication of this characterization is that it implies quantum computing provides no increase in computational power whatsoever over classical computing in the context of interactive proof systems," according to the paper. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Scott Aaronson and colleagues recently proved that quantum interactive proof systems are just as difficult to solve as classical interactive proof systems, by using the matrix multiplicative weights update method to devise a new algorithm. The algorithm provides a method for solving problems using parallel processes, matching the efficiency of quantum computing. The researchers illustrated that "for a certain class of semi-definite programs you can get not the exact answer but a very good approximate answer, using a very small amount of memory," Aaronson says.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Blog: DARPA Goal for Cybersecurity: Change the Game
DARPA Goal for Cybersecurity: Change the Game
DVIDS (12/20/10) Cheryl Pellerin
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has developed programs that deal with cybersecurity threats by surprising the attackers. The agency created the Clean-slate Design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts (CRASH) and Programming Computation on Encrypted Data (PROCEED) programs to enhance the agency's cybersecurity research, says DARPA's Kaigham Gabriel. CRASH aims to develop new computer systems that resist cyberattacks the same way organisms fight bacteria and viruses. Gabriel says the researchers are developing computer hardware that give systems a kind of genetic diversity that would make them more resistant to cyberinfections by learning from attacks and repairing themselves. He notes that over the last two decades, the lines of code in security software has increased from approximately 10,000 to about 10 million lines, but the number of lines of code in malware has remained constant at about 125 lines. This analysis and others "led us to understand that many of the things we're doing are useful, but they're not convergent with the problem," Gabriel says. The PROCEED program is working to improve the efficiency of working on encrypted data that has not been decrypted. "If we were able to do relevant sorts of operations without ever having to decrypt, that would be a tremendous gain because ... whenever you decrypt into the open, you create vulnerability," he says.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Blog: Computers Help Social Animals to See Beyond Their Tribes
Computers Help Social Animals to See Beyond Their Tribes
New York Times (12/19/10) Noam Cohen
IBM's Center for Social Software is employing increasingly sophisticated computers to function as information advisers for users of social media. "I do think of computers as augmenting people, not replacing them," says center director Irene Greif. "We need help with the limits of the brain." The lab's scientists produce programs that spot patterns in the information flood, making it easier to choose which data or people are worth a user's full attention. For example, the researchers created the Many Bills Web site, which summarizes and displays congressional bills as they go through the legislative process via textual analysis, highlighting certain material of interest. Another tool designed for IBM employees, SaNDVis, can help search for expertise by displaying a web of relationships surrounding a search term to show who within IBM is an expert on a certain subject, mapping these links using writings, meetings attended, personal profile information, and previous work experience. IBM also performs data mining on its own workforce, with access to the full spectrum of internal social networking tools connected to an employee ID number. For business purposes, IBM is trying to escape the standard mode of social network use for navigating the data flood, which is interaction with like-minded friends that reinforces bias.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Blog: In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture [Steven Pinker involved]
In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture
New York Times (12/17/10) Patricia Cohen
Researchers from Google and Harvard University have developed an online database of 500 billion words taken from 5.2 million digitized books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, and Russian. The database offers a year-by-year count of how often certain words and phrases appear, data representations, and searching tools. Users can submit a string of up to five words and see a graph that displays the phrase's use over time. "The goal is to give an eight-year-old the ability to browse cultural trends throughout history, as recorded in books," says Harvard's Erez Lieberman Aiden. The database provides research opportunities to liberal arts professors, who have historically avoided quantitative analysis, in a new field dubbed culturomics. "We wanted to show what becomes possible when you apply very high-turbo data analysis to questions in the humanities," says Lieberman Aiden. The data set is downloadable and users can develop their own search tools. The researchers estimate that the English language has grown by 70 percent in the last 50 years and the new system could be used to update dictionaries by highlighting newly popular and underused words. The database and others like it will soon become universal in humanities research, says Harvard's Steven Pinker.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Blog: JASON: Science of Cyber Security Needs More Work
JASON: Science of Cyber Security Needs More Work
Secrecy News (12/14/10) Steven Aftergood
The JASON independent scientific advisory panel has produced a report on cybersecurity for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) that says a fundamental understanding of the science of cybersecurity is needed to improve the country's security approaches. The advisory says the science of cybersecurity "seems underdeveloped in reporting experimental results, and consequently in the ability to use them." The report notes that the science of cybersecurity is unique in that the background for events is almost completely created by humans and is digital, and there are good actors as well as adversaries who are purposeful and intelligent. The JASON report also addresses the importance of definitions, the need for a standard vocabulary to discuss the subject, and the need to devise experimental protocols for developing a reproducible experimental science of cybersecurity. "At the most abstract level, studying the immune system suggests that cybersecurity solutions will need to be adaptive, incorporating learning algorithms and flexible memory mechanisms," the report says. It also says the DoD should support a network of cybersecurity research centers in universities and elsewhere.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Blog: Cryptographers Chosen to Duke It Out in Final Fight [SHA-3]
Cryptographers Chosen to Duke It Out in Final Fight
New Scientist (12/13/10) Celeste Biever
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has selected five Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-3) entrants as finalists for its competition to find a replacement for the gold-standard security algorithm. The finalists include BLAKE, devised by a team led by Jean-Philippe Aumasson of the Swiss company Nagravision, and Skein, which is the work of computer security expert and blogger Bruce Schneier. "We picked five finalists that seemed to have the best combination of confidence in the security of the algorithm and their performance on a wide range of platforms" such as desktop computers and servers, says NIST's William Burr. "We wanted a set of finalists that were different internally, so that a new attack would be less likely to damage all of them, just as biological diversity makes it less likely that a single disease can wipe out all the members of a species." The finalists incorporate new design ideas that have arisen in recent years. The Keccak algorithm from a team led by STMicroelectronics' Guido Bertoni uses a novel idea called sponge hash construction to produce a final string of 1s and 0s. The teams have until Jan. 16, 2011, to tweak their algorithms, then an international community of cryptanalysts will spend a year looking for weaknesses. NIST willl pick a winner in 2012.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Blog: Problem-Solving Ants Inspire Next Generation of Algorithms
Problem-Solving Ants Inspire Next Generation of Algorithms
University of Sydney (12/10/10) Katie Szittner
University of Sydney researchers have found that ants can solve difficult math problems as well as adapt the optimal solution to fit a changing problem. The researchers say their results will help computer scientists develop better software to solve logistical problems and maximize efficiency in different industries. The researchers tested the ants using a version of the Towers of Hanoi problem, a toy puzzle that asks players to move disks between rods while following certain rules and using the fewest possible moves. The researchers converted the puzzle into a maze in which the shortest path corresponds to the solution with the fewest moves in the toy puzzle. The findings suggest that when the ants use an exploratory pheromone they are much better at solving a problem in a changing environment, which is similar to many real-world human problems. "Discovering how ants are able to solve dynamic problems can provide new inspiration for optimization algorithms, which in turn can lead to better problem-solving software and hence more efficiency for human industries," says Sydney researcher Chris Reid.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Blog: Researchers Open the Door to Biological Computers
Researchers Open the Door to Biological Computers
University of Gothenburg (Sweden) (12/09/10) Anita Fors
University of Gothenburg researchers have developed genetically altered yeast cells that can communicate with each other like electronic circuits. They say the technology could lead to complex systems in which human cells help keep the body healthy. "In the future we expect that it will be possible to use similar cell-to-cell communication systems in the human body to detect changes in the state of health, to help fight illness at an early stage, or to act as biosensors to detect pollutants in connection with our ability to break down toxic substances in the environment," says Gothenburg researcher Kentaro Furukawa. The yeast cells can sense their surroundings based on predetermined criteria and send messages to other cells using signaling molecules. The different cells can be fixed together to build more complex circuits, including electronic functions. "Even though engineered cells can't do the same job as a real computer, our study paves the way for building complex constructions from these cells," Furukawa says.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Blog: UCSF Team Develops "Logic Gates" to Program Bacteria as Computers
UCSF Team Develops "Logic Gates" to Program Bacteria as Computers
UCSF News (12/08/10) Kristen Bole
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) researchers have genetically engineered E. coli bacteria with a specific molecular circuitry that will enable scientists to program the cells to communicate and perform computations. The process can be used to develop cells that act like miniature computers that can be programmed to function in a variety of ways, says UCSF professor Christopher A. Voigt. "Here, we've taken a colony of bacteria that are receiving two chemical signals from their neighbors, and have created the same logic gates that form the basis of silicon computing," Voigt says. The technology will enable researchers to use cells to perform specific, targeted tasks, says UCSF's Mary Anne Koda-Kimble. The purpose of the research is to be able to utilize all of biology's tasks in a reliable, programmable way, Voigt says. He says the automation of biological processes will advance research in synthetic biology. The researchers also plan to develop a formal language for cellular computation that is similar to the programming languages used to write computer code, Voigt says.
Blog: Quantum Links Let Computers Understand Language
Quantum Links Let Computers Understand Language
New Scientist (12/08/10) Jason Aron
University of Oxford researchers are using a form of graphical mathematics to develop an approach to linguistics that could enable computers to make sense of language. Oxford's Bob Coecke and Samson Abramsky used a graphical form of the category theory, a branch of mathematics that allows different objects within a collection to be linked, to formulate quantum mechanical problems more intuitively by providing a way to link quantum objects. The researchers are using that graphical approach to create a universal theory of meaning in which language and grammar are encoded as mathematical rules. Most existing human language models focus on deciphering the meaning of individual words, or the rules of grammar, but not both. The researchers combined the existing models using the graphical approach that was designed for quantum mechanics. Coecke developed an algorithm that connects individual words. The Oxford team plans to teach the system using a billion pieces of text taken from legal and medical documents.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Blog: How Rare Is that Fingerprint? Computational Forensics Provides the First Clues
How Rare Is that Fingerprint? Computational Forensics Provides the First Clues
UB News Services (12/07/10) Ellen Goldbaum
University at Buffalo researchers have developed a method to computationally determine how rare a particular fingerprint is and how likely it is to belong to a specific crime suspect. The Buffalo researchers created a probabilistic method to determine if a fingerprint would randomly match another in a database. The researchers say their study could help develop computational systems that quickly and objectively show how important fingerprints are to solving crimes. "Our research provides the first systematic approach for computing the rarity of fingerprints in a scientifically robust and reliable manner," says Buffalo professor Sargur N. Srihari. Determining the similarity between two sets of fingerprints and the rarity of a specific configuration of ridge patterns are the two main types of problems involved in fingerprint analysis, Srihari says. The Buffalo method relies on machine learning, statistics, and probability.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Blog: New Psychology Theory Enables Computers to Mimic Human Creativity at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
New Psychology Theory Enables Computers to Mimic Human Creativity at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
RPI News (12/01/10) Mary L. Martialay
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers are using the new Explicit-Implicit Interaction Theory to develop artificial intelligence (AI) models. The researchers say the theory, which explains how humans solve problems creatively, could provide a blueprint to building AI systems that perform tasks like humans. The model can be used "as the basis for creating future artificial intelligence programs that are good at solving problems creatively," says RPI professor Ron Sun. He worked with the University of California, Santa Barbara's Sebastien Helie to develop the CLARION cognitive architecture, a system based on the Explicit-Implicit theory that acts like a cognitive system. The researchers ran a logic test in which 35 percent of humans answered correctly after discussing their thinking and 45 percent answered correctly after working on another problem. In 5,000 trials of the same test, the CLARION system got the correct answer 35 percent of the time on the first try, and 45 percent of the time on the second try. "This tells us how creative problem solving may emerge from the interaction of explicit and implicit cognitive processes," Sun says.