World's Best Data Mining Knowledge and Expertise on Show in Paris at KDD-09
Business Wire (06/08/09)
Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 2009 (KDD-09), organized by ACM's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, will offer more than 120 presentations by data-mining experts from around the world and is expected to be attended by more than 600 leading data-mining researchers, academics, and practitioners. "Some of the best minds from the scientific and business communities will be there, ready and willing to share the results of their cutting-edge research and data-mining projects with end users," says KDD-09 joint chair Francoise Soulie Fogelman. "No other industry event offers anything like the depth and breadth of expertise on offer here." Social network analysis will be a focus of KDD-09. Data mining experts also will focus on using real-time Web applications for data mining for custom advertising and personalized offers. KDD-09 will take place June 28 through July 1 in Paris.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Blog: World's Best Data Mining Knowledge and Expertise on Show in Paris at KDD-09
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Blog: What's really in each Windows 7 Edition?
What's really in each Windows 7 Edition?
Ed Bott: Microsoft has put together a basic feature set that actually makes sense, with a consistent upgrade strategy to move between versions based on your requirements and your budget. That's a huge improvement over the practically incomprehensible Vista feature list. From Starter to Ultimate, here's what you'll find in each edition of Windows 7.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Blog: Researchers to Create Next Gen Discs; recording in 5 dimensions; light based spectral and ploarization dimensions added
Researchers to Create Next Gen Discs
Swinburne University of Technology (Australia) (05/21/09) Ladiges, Crystal
Nanotechnology can be used to create discs that offer 2,000 times the storage capacity of current DVDs, according to researchers from Australia's Swinburne University of Technology. A team from Swinburne's Center for Micro-Photonics has used nanoscopic particles to create five-dimensional discs, compared with current discs that have three spatial dimensions. The researchers inserted gold nanorods onto the disc's surface, and the nanoparticles' reaction to light allowed them to record information in a range of different color wavelengths on the same physical disc location. Current DVDs are recorded in a single color wavelength using a laser. Aside from the new spectral dimension, the researchers created a polarization dimension by projecting light waves onto the disc, with the electric field aligned with the gold nanorods enabling them to record different layers of information at different angles. "We were able to show how nanostructured material can be incorporated onto a disc in order to increase data capacity, without increasing the physical size of the disc," says Swinburne professor Min Gu. Although the researchers still need to address issues such as the speed at which the discs can be written on, they believe the discs will be commercially available within the next five to 10 years.
Blog: Mozilla launches Jetpack; Will add-ons be Firefox's secret sauce?
Mozilla has unveiled Jetpack, a project to make Firefox add-ons easier to code and deploy.
The general idea for Jetpack, which is in an early stage, is to develop browser add-ons with common technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Jetpack is Mozilla's attempt to take its 8,000 developers—and 12,000 add-ons they have produced—to another level. Mozilla said that Jetpack will enable add-ons to be created in as little as a dozen lines of code.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Blog: ACM Group Honors Researchers Who Discovered Zig-Zag Graph That Improves Design of Robust Computer Networks
AScribe Newswire (05/19/09)
ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computing Theory (SIGACT) and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science have awarded the Godel Prize to Omer Reingold, Salil Vadhan, and Avi Wigderson for developing a new type of graph that enables the construction of large expander graphs, which are important in designing robust computer networks and constructing theories of error-correcting computer codes. The new zig-zag graph was able to help solve the problem of detecting a path from one node to another in very small storage for undirected graphs. In their paper, "Entropy Waves, the Zig-Zag Graph Product and New Constant Degree Expanders," Reingold, Vadhan, and Wigderson discussed their research on a family of expander graphs, which are used for critical computer theory applications. The sparse but highly connected expander graphs were constructed using the zig-zag graph method, which enables the construction of large expanders from smaller expanders while preserving degree and connectivity. In a second paper, "Undirected Connectivity in Log-Space," Reingold proved that connectivity in undirected graphs can be solved in logarithmic storage, and that any connected graph is a very weak expander, but applying the zig-zag method makes it possible to turn the graph into an expander of only moderately large size. Omer Reingold is a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Salil Vadhan is a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Avi Wigderson is a professor at the School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study. The Godel Prize, which includes an award of $5,000, is named after Kurt Godel in recognition of his major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of computer science.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Blog: Are Your 'Secret Questions' Too Easily Answered?
Are Your 'Secret Questions' Too Easily Answered?
Technology Review (05/18/09) Lemos, Robert
The "secret questions" that protect online accounts and passwords may be far less secure than commonly believed, largely because their answers are often far too simple, researchers say. Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft researchers will present research at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, which highlights the vulnerabilities of the secret question systems used to secure the password-reset functions to numerous Web sites. In a study involving 130 people, the researchers found that 28 percent of the people who knew and were trusted by the study's participants could guess the correct answers to the participant's secret questions, and even people not trusted by the participant had a 17 percent chance of guessing the correct answer. "Secret questions alone are not as secure as we would like our backup authentication to be," says Microsoft researcher Stuart Schechter. "Nor are they reliable enough that their use alone is sufficient to ensure users can recover their accounts when they forget their passwords." The least-secure questions are simple ones that can be guessed with no existing knowledge of the subject. Schechter says backup-authentication schemes should be reliable and allow only legitimate users to regain access to their accounts. They also should be secure, preventing unauthorized users from gaining access. The study found that secret questions fail on both accounts. "We would eventually like to see these questions go away," Schechter says. "Unfortunately, since we didn't find many questions that were conclusively good, it's hard to recommend simply changing questions."
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Blog: Robert Kahn: A Different Kind of Internet; using Digital Object Architecture for managing information
Robert Kahn: A Different Kind of Internet
Government Computer News (05/14/09) Kash, Wyatt
Robert E. Kahn of the nonprofit Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) envisions an Internet that manages information rather than just moves it around. He says this can be facilitated by Digital Object Architecture, whose core element is a digital objector, or structured information that incorporates a unique identifier, and which can be parsed by any machine aware of the structure of digital objects. Areas where Digital Object Architecture applications have potential include archiving, with Kahn pointing out that CNRI has experimented with some archival capabilities on the Internet with the goal of fulfilling long-term archival storage needs. "My hope is that we can make the digital object technology, which operated in the Internet environment, available as we did with the original Internet technology, and get a lot of people in the public and private sectors to understand its power and the capability," Kahn says. "Because it's an open architecture, it has the potential to grow organically as did the nascent Internet." Kahn sees medical informatics as another potential application area for Digital Object Architecture. He says the architecture intrinsically incorporates public key infrastructure to ensure user identity authentication. "The government's role in things infrastructural is absolutely essential," Kahn says. "It really is very difficult--I would say almost impossible--to create national infrastructure without at least the imprimatur of the government."