BOULDER, Colo.— Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated the first “universal” programmable quantum information processor able to run any program allowed by quantum mechanics—the rules governing the submicroscopic world—using two quantum bits (qubits) of information. The processor could be a module in a future quantum computer, which theoretically could solve some important problems that are intractable today.
photo of David Hanneke

NIST postdoctoral researcher David Hanneke at the laser table used to demonstrate the first universal programmable processor for a potential quantum computer. A pair of beryllium ions (charged atoms) that hold information in the processor are trapped inside the cylinder at the lower right. A colorized image of the two ions is displayed on the monitor in the background.

Credit: J. Burrus/NIST

The NIST demonstration, described in Nature Physics,* marks the first time any research group has moved beyond demonstrating individual tasks for a quantum processor—as done previously at NIST and elsewhere—to perform programmable processing, combining enough inputs and continuous steps to run any possible two-qubit program.

The NIST team also analyzed the quantum processor with the methods used in traditional computer science and electronics by creating a diagram of the processing circuit and mathematically determining the 15 different starting values and sequences of processing operations needed to run a given program.

All being well, IBM plans to enter its Watson computer into the US gameshow Jeopardy! in 2010. In order to win, the machine will not only have to understand the questions, but dig out the correct answers and speak them intelligibly.

After all the broken promises from the over-optimistic visionaries of the '50s and '60s, are we finally moving towards a real-life HAL? If we are, why has it taken so long?

Mobile phones are on the verge of becoming powerful tools to collect data on many issues, ranging from global health to the environment.

Computer scientists at the University of Washington have used Android, the open-source mobile operating system championed by Google, to turn a cell phone into a versatile data-collection device. Organizations that want a fully customizable way to, say, snap pictures of a deforested area, add the location coordinates and instantly submit that information to a global environmental database now have a flexible and free way to do it.

UW computer scientists were already working on mobile tools for the developing world when Android, the first comprehensive open-source platform for mobile devices, was announced two years ago by the Open Handset Alliance, a group of companies of which Google is a member. Since then UW computer science and engineering doctoral students Carl Hartung, Yaw Anokwa and Waylon Brunette have worked at Google's Seattle office using Android to create a data-collection platform for use in developing regions.

Martin Rinard, a professor of computer science at MIT, is unabashed about the ultimate goal of his group's research: "delivering an immortal, invulnerable program." In work presented this month at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in Big Sky, MT, a group of MIT researchers, led by Rinard and Michael Ernst, who is now an associate professor at the University of Washington, developed software that can find and fix certain types of software bugs within a matter of minutes.

When a potentially harmful vulnerability is discovered in a piece of software, it takes nearly a month on average for human engineers to come up with a fix and to push the fix out to affected systems, according to a report issued by security company Symantec in 2006. The researchers, who collaborated with a startup called Determina on the work, hope that the new software, called ClearView, will speed this process up, making software significantly more resilient against failure or attack.

By turning the brain cell activity underlying fly eyesight into mathematical equations, researchers have found an ultra-efficient method for pulling motion patterns from raw visual data.

Though they built the system, the researchers don’t quite understand how it works. But however mysterious the equations may be, they could still be used to program the vision systems of miniaturized battlefield drones, search-and-rescue robots, automobile navigation systems and other systems where computational power is at a premium.

“We can build a system that works perfectly well, inspired by biology, without having a complete understanding of how the components interact. It’s a non-linear system,” said David O’Carroll, a computational neuroscientist who studies insect vision at Australia’s University of Adelaide. “The number of computations involved is quite small. We can get an answer using tens of thousands of times less floating-point computations than in traditional ways.”

Networks of compromised computers controlled by a central server, better known as botnets, are a Swiss Army knife of tools for online criminals. Hackers can use these co-opted systems to churn out spam, host malicious code, hide their tracks on the Internet, or flood a corporate network to cut off its access to the Web.

Credit: Technology Review

Whenever a new botnet appears, researchers race to reverse engineer the software it installs on a victim's machine, and to decode the way each bot communicates with the controlling server. Because these communications are often encrypted, such analyses can take weeks or months. Now researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University have created a way to automatically reverse engineer the communications between compromised computers and their controlling servers.

In a paper to be presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Computer and Communications Security, the researchers show how automatic reverse engineering can decipher the structure and purpose of the communications between a command-and-control server and its bots.

"The communications protocol of the botnet is the core of the botnet," says Juan Caballero, a PhD student affiliated with both the University of California at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, and lead author of the paper. "That is how the attacker sends commands to the botnet."

When researchers have previously tried to automatically analyze botnet communicationprotocols, they focused on deciphering the commands received by the client. Yet Caballero, together with UC Berkeley assistant professor Dawn Song and two other colleagues, has developed a technique that translates both the commands received by a client and the responses it sends.

The researchers then ran the botnet code on a virtual machine and analyzed the movement of information to and from a computer's registers--memory components within a machine's processor--before it was encrypted. Watching for changes in the memory registers--the researchers call this "buffer deconstruction"-- allowed them to derive the structure of the botnet communications and infer the function of the various components of each command.

As players who stay up all night fighting imaginary warriors demonstrate, slipping into the skin of an avatar, and inhabiting a virtual world can be riveting stuff. But to what extent does your brain regard your virtual self as you?

Brain scans of avid players of the hugely popular online fantasy world World of Warcraft reveal that areas of the brain involved in self-reflection and judgement seem to behave similarly when someone is thinking about their virtual self as when they think about their real one.

Disentangling how the brain regards avatars versus real individuals may help explain why some people spend large chunks of their life playing immersive online games, says Kristina Caudle, a social neuroscientist at Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire, who led the study along with her adviser William Kelley.

Remember the scene in the movie Minority Report where Tom Cruise uses hand gestures instead of a mouse to interact with a computer screen displayed on the wall? The idea isn't really that far-fetched and software developer Pranav Mistry has been working on making it a reality.

Mistry is the creator of SixthSense, a wearable gesture interface that uses a camera and tiny projector to display data and information onto surfaces, walls, and even your hand. Special fingertip sensors let users manipulate the data and use their hands to interact with it. During a presentation at the TEDIndia conference this week, the PhD student announced plans to release SixthSense under an open source license in the coming months.

"I notice that it's hard to for these kind of things to market in some sense. . . because I don't want this to comply with some of kind of corporate policy," says Mistry. "Rather than waiting for that time to come, I want people to make their own system. Why not?"

"People will be able to make their own hardware. I will give them instructions how to make it. And also provide them key software...give them basic key software layers. . . they will be able to build their own applications. They will be able to modify base level and do anything".

The device, which can be built for about $350, has fascinating implications beyond its infinite coolness. SixthSense has the ability to sense objects around you and displays content relevant to your environment. If you're in a bookstore, for instance, and hold up a copy of Learning the Vi and Vim Editors, SixthSense shows you pricing guides, information about the author, and so on. Mistry's device puts the Internet literally at your fingertips.

Image courtesy of Pranav Mistry and Sam Ogden.

In the event of a severe pandemic, the Internet might not be able to accommodate increased traffic caused by the increased number of people working from home, the Government Accountability Office said Monday in a report issued.

The report, entitled Influenza Pandemic: Key Securities Market Participants Are Making Progress, but Agencies Could Do More to Address Potential Internet, comes just days after President Obama declared a national emergency because of the spreading H1N1 flu and focuses on the financial services industry, though the impact could be broader to include a wide number of industries.

"Increased demand during a severe pandemic could exceed the capacities of Internet providers' access networks for residential users and interfere with teleworkers in the securities market and other sectors," the GAO study said, citing studies by the Department of Homeland Security, Internet service providers and its own analysis.

GAO, Congress' investigative arm, said ISPs have limited ability to prioritize traffic or take other actions that could assist critical teleworkers. The Congressional auditors said some actions, such as reducing customers' transmission speeds or blocking popular Web sites, could negatively impact e-commerce and require government authorization.