Time-consuming manual vote-counts and ballot boxes could soon be consigned to the history books, thanks to innovative new secure voting technology.

The system is being developed by computer scientists at the Universities of Surrey and Birmingham, with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and in collaboration with the University of Luxembourg.

Combining speed with total vote-counting accuracy, the system is unique because it will integrate state-of-the-art optical scanning, data processing and encryption with the tried-and-tested process of manually writing on a ballot paper.

No other voting system either in use or currently under development uses such a combination, which will enable the new system to avoid the major drawbacks associated with both purely manual and purely electronic voting methods.

As well as eliminating the need for laborious manual counts and recounts, which are complex and expensive to conduct, it will remove the possibility of ballot papers being miscounted, mislaid or marked (and thus invalidated) accidentally or deliberately during a manual vote-count.

Similarly, although electronic voting could offer an alternative to manual voting and vote-counting, and indeed has been tested in many countries, there are serious concerns over its reliability. Some voters have even claimed that the vote shown to have been registered on the voting screen did not tally with the button they pressed.*
hand posting ballot paper into ballot box

The Surrey/Birmingham team’s solution to these problems will retain the use of a ballot paper that looks almost identical to those used today, with the list of candidates on the left and the voting boxes on the right. There will, however, be two key differences.

First, the order of the candidates’ names will be randomised, and will not be the same on every ballot paper as in current elections.

Second, a perforated line will run down the middle of the ballot paper, with the candidates’ names on the left and the voting boxes on the right hand side. Each person, after casting their vote, will use this perforation to tear the ballot paper in half. They will then use a shredder provided at the polling station to destroy the left-hand half containing the list of candidates.

The voter will then feed the right-hand half into an optical scanner which will immediately feed all the information to a central database which will keep a count of all votes cast.

Bespoke cryptographic software being developed by the project team will ensure all data remains completely anonymous and safely encrypted.

Once the polls have closed several computers will work together to identify candidate placings.

The new system will allow also the voter to keep the right-hand half of their ballot paper as evidence of where they marked their paper. They will then be able to check that their vote has not been tampered with by logging on to a bespoke website, entering a serial number unique to them, and viewing the scan of their ballot paper. They can therefore verify their vote without anyone else knowing how they have voted.
posting a voting paper into a ballot box

“Our system will combine the best of both worlds – providing secure electronic vote-counting that cuts the cost and complexity of running elections but doesn’t require big changes to the actual voting process,” says Dr James Heather of the University of Surrey. “This is vital as some people find touch-screen or push-button technology intimidating, and might even be deterred from voting as a result.”

Not only could the new system prove enormously valuable in elections in the UK and elsewhere in the developed world, preventing controversies and multiple recounts such as those in the 2000 US Presidential Election. It could also play a key role in elections in developing countries, helping to prevent election fraud and ballot-rigging.

“Overall, the new system aims to deliver a completely trustworthy, ‘right first time’ voting mechanism that voters are comfortable using and that delivers rapid results which everyone can have complete confidence in,” adds Professor Mark Ryan of the University of Birmingham. “Our objective is to develop the system to the point where it could be trialled in a local or mayoral election, for example, within about four years.”

Researchers forecast “paradigm shift in information and communication technology”

A silicon-based nanoscale system which aims to harness the ‘spin’ of electrons to boost the processing power of future computer systems is being developed by researchers at the University of Southampton, jointly with the University of Cambridge, the NTT Basic Research Laboratories and the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory.

The three-year project, which has just received funding of £1M from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) aims to build the world’s first silicon-based integrated single-spin quantum bit system.

According to Nano Research Group at the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), the new system will enable researchers working with silicon to initialise, manipulate and read single-electron’s ‘spin’ states rather than just charge states. In the past, it has been possible to capture just electronic charge. The advantage of employing spin rather than charge is that spin can maintain coherence and is hardly destroyed by interference in silicon or graphene.

The approach will also enable the development of novel nanospintronic devices - nanoscale circuits that could use the spin of the individual electrons to transmit, store and process information. In principle, such devices could dramatically enhance scaling of functional density and performance while simultaneously reducing the energy dissipated per functional operation. As well as boosting the processing power of conventional computers, this could also be used in quantum computers.

“This project is a paradigm shift in information and communication technology (ICT),” said Professor Mizuta. “It is not just an extension of existing silicon technology; we have introduced a completely new principle based on quantum mechanics, which will make it possible for industry to continue to use silicon as devices get smaller.”

The research team, which consists of the ECS Nano Research Group, the University of Cambridge, Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory and NTT Basic Research Laboratories, will develop an integrated single-spin information processing technology, which will provide a unique solution to massively-parallel and highly-secure information processing technology in the "beyond CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) era.

Today, the way to interact with a mobile phone is by tapping its keypad or screen with your fingers. But researchers are exploring ways to use mobile devices that would be far less limited.

Imagine this: A person (top) draws a curved line with his finger, and the gesture is captured by a wearable camera (bottom). The line is transferred to a mobile device, which sends it to a recipient’s screen for display. Credit: Hasso Plattner Institute

Patrick Baudisch, professor of computer science at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Postdam, Germany, and his research student, Sean Gustafson, are developing a prototype interface for mobile phones that requires no touch screen, keyboard, or any other physical input device. A small video recorder and microprocessor attached to a person's clothing can capture and analyze their hand gestures, sending an outline of each gesture to a computer display.

The idea is that a person could use an "imaginary interface" to augment a phone conversation by tracing shapes with their fingers in the air. Baudisch and Gustafson have built a prototype device in which the camera is about the size of a large broach, but they predict that within a few years, components will have shrunk, allowing for a much smaller system.

The idea of interacting with computers through hand gestures is nothing new. Sony already sells EyeToy, a video camera and software that capture gestures for its PlayStation game consoles; Microsoft has developed a more sophisticated gesture-sensing system, called Project Natal, for the Xbox 360 games console. And a gesture-based research project called SixthSense, developed by Pattie Maes, a professor at MIT, and her student Pranav Mistry uses a wearable camera to record a person's gestures and a small projector to create an ad-hoc display on any surface.

Baudisch and Gustafson say their system is simpler than SixthSense, requiring fewer components, which should make it cheaper. A person "opens up" the interface by making an "L" shape with her left or right hand. This creates a two dimensional spatial surface, a boundary for the forthcoming finger traces. Baudisch says that a person could use this space to clarify spatial situations, such as how to get from one place to another. "Users start drawing in midair," he says. "There is no setup effort here, no need to whip out a mobile device or stylus." The researchers also found that users were even able to go back to an imaginary sketch to extend or annotate it, thanks to their visual memory

A paper detailing the setup and user studies will be presented at the 2010 symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in New York in October.

Andy Wilson, a senior researcher at Microsoft who led the development of Surface, an experimental touch- screen table, says the work could be a sign of things to come. "I think it's quite interesting in the sense that it really is the ultimate in thinking about when devices shrink down to nothing--when you don't even have a display," he says.

Wilson notes that the interface draws on the fact that people naturally use their hands to explain spatial ideas. "That's a quite powerful concept, and it hasn't been explored," he says. "I think they're onto something."

Major step ahead for cryptography

Press release issued 26 May 2010

Imagine you could work out the answer to a question, without knowing what the question was.  For example, suppose someone thinks of two numbers and then asks another person to work out their sum, without letting them know what the two numbers are.  However, they are given an encryption of the two numbers but not told how to decrypt them.

Nigel Smart, Professor of Cryptology in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol, will present a paper in Paris this week [Friday 28 May],  which makes a step towards a fully practical system to compute on encrypted data.  The work could have wide ranging impact on areas as diverse as database access, electronic auctions and electronic voting.

Professor Smart said: “We will present a major improvement on a recent encryption scheme invented by IBM in 2009.”

“Our scheme allows for computations to be performed on encrypted data, so it may eventually allow for the creation of systems in which you can store data remotely in a secure manner and still be able to access it.”

This system could be used in medical care research.  Hospitals or drug companies could perform statistical calculations on their shared databases without needing to reveal information about the individual patients.  This would enable more efficient research in medical care and drug testing, without compromising patient privacy.

As another example, imagine a person is participating in an online auction but doesn’t want the auctioneer to find out what their bid is in case it is used to encourage higher bids. Encrypted bids could be sent to the auctioneer and then, using a fully homomorphic scheme, the auctioneer could work out who won and what the winning bid was without learning what all the other bids were.

Alternatively in an electronic election all voters could encrypt their votes. The outcome of the election could then be computed by the returning officer whilst still ensuring the voter’s privacy.

For nearly 30 years one cryptographic dream has been to come up with an encryption scheme for which you can “add” and “multiply” ciphertexts.  Ciphertext is the encrypted result.  This is a so-called fully homomorphic scheme.  As soon as you can “add” and “multiply” you can compute any function.

Over the years many encryption schemes have been proposed which either have the “add” operation or the “multiply” operation, but not both. 

It was one of the Holy Grails of cryptography to find a scheme where you could perform both operations.

In 2009 Craig Gentry from IBM came up with the first scheme which simultaneously allows you to “add” and “multiply” ciphertexts.  Gentry’s scheme, although an amazing theoretical breakthrough is not practical.

In the paper to be presented, Professor Nigel Smart and Dr Frederik Vercauteren, from the Katholieke University Leuven in Belgium, have devised a way of simplifying Gentry’s scheme so that it becomes more practical.  Whilst the new scheme is not fully practical it is an important step along the way to forming a system which is truly practical.

Professor Smart and Dr Vercauteren’s scheme also provides an intriguing new application of objects in an area of Pure Mathematics called Class Groups of Number Fields.  Such objects have been studied in pure mathematics for around two centuries with little possibility of impact on everyday life.  This work is another example of the unexpected applicability of years of curiosity driven research.

The research is published at the 13th IACR workshop on Public Key Cryptography in Paris. 

 

Please contact Joanne Fryer for further information.

Further information:

The International Conference on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography (PKC) [26-28 May] is the main annual conference focusing on all aspects of public-key cryptography for world-renowned scientists in the area.

Paper: Fully Homomorphic Encryption with Relatively Small Key and Ciphertext Sizes, Nigel P. Smart and Frederik Vercauteren.

The Cryptography and Information Security Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol conducts research into public key cryptography; the underlying hard problems on which it is based and the hardware and software needed to implement secure systems.

The group has particular interest in techniques for efficient implementation of such systems on small computing devices and the verification that such implementations do what they say they do.

Researchers have shown off a transistor made from just seven atoms that could be used to create smaller, more powerful computers.

Transistors are tiny switches used as the building blocks of silicon chips.

If the new atomic transistor can be made in large numbers it could mean chips with components up to 100 times smaller than on existing processors.

The Australian creators of the transistor hope it is also a step towards a solid-state quantum computer.

The transistor is not the smallest ever created as two research groups have previously managed to produce working single-atom transistors.

However, the device is many times smaller than the components found in chips in contemporary computers. On chips where components are 22 nanometres in size, transistor gates are about 42 atoms across.

The working transistor was created by replacing seven atoms in a silicon crystal with phosphorus atoms.

Ever since Steven Spielberg’s 2002 sci-fi movie Minority Report, in which a black-clad Tom Cruise stands in front of a transparent screen manipulating a host of video images simply by waving his hands, the idea of gesture-based computer interfaces has captured the imagination of technophiles. Academic and industry labs have developed a host of prototype gesture interfaces, ranging from room-sized systems with multiple cameras to detectors built into laptops’ screens. But MIT researchers have developed a system that could make gestural interfaces much more practical. Aside from a standard webcam, like those found in many new computers, the system uses only a single piece of hardware: a multicolored Lycra glove that could be manufactured for about a dollar.

Other prototypes of low-cost gestural interfaces have used reflective or colored tape attached to the fingertips, but “that’s 2-D information,” says Robert Wang, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who developed the new system together with Jovan Popović, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “You’re only getting the fingertips; you don’t even know which fingertip [the tape] is corresponding to.” Wang and Popović’s system, by contrast, can translate gestures made with a gloved hand into the corresponding gestures of a 3-D model of the hand on screen, with almost no lag time. “This actually gets the 3-D configuration of your hand and your fingers,” Wang says. “We get how your fingers are flexing.”

The idea of hackers breaking into your personal computer is alarming enough. But what if they could seize control of your car's control systems while you are driving? Using a laptop and custom-written software, security researchers have hacked into the control systems of a family car, disable the brakes and turn off the engine while the vehicle was moving.

Fortunately, the hack is technically difficult and the risk to drivers is low – for now. But the benign hackers, led by Tadayoshi Kohno at the University of Washington in Seattle and Stefan Savage at the University of California, San Diego, have revealed the details to encourage car makers to make future vehicles more secure.

Computers help control many systems in modern vehicles, from anti-lock braking systems to the timing of ignition. Each system typically has its own dedicated computer controller, which is connected to a network that can be accessed by mechanics via a socket under the dashboard.

There are positive links between access to technology and feelings of well-being, a study claims.

BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, analysed the results of a survey of 35,000 people around the world.

Access to communication devices was found to be the most valued.

It found that women in developing countries, and people of both sexes with low incomes or poor education, were most influenced emotionally by their access to technology.

It is partly because women tend to have a more central role in family and other social networks, said researcher Paul Flatters of Trajectory Partnership, which conducted the research on behalf of the BCS.

"Our hypothesis is that women in developing countries benefit more because they are more socially constrained in society," he added.

"The next phase of our research is to test that."

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed the first “dimmer switch” for a superconducting circuit linking a quantum bit (qubit) and a quantum bus—promising technologies for storing and transporting information in future quantum computers. The NIST switch is a new type of control device that can “tune” interactions between these components and potentially could speed up the development of a practical quantum computer.

Quantum computers, if they can be built, would use the curious rules of quantum mechanics to solve certain problems that are now intractable, such as breaking today’s most widely used data encryption codes, or running simulations of quantum systems that could unlock the secrets of high-temperature superconductors. Unlike many competing systems that store and transport information using the quantum properties of individual atoms, superconducting qubits use a “super flow” of oscillating electrical current to store information in the form of microwave energy. Superconducting quantum devices are fabricated like today’s silicon processor chips and may be easy to manufacture at the large scales needed for computation.

Are you going to be part of the last generation to die from aging… or part of the first generation to enjoy open-ended youth?

Age reversal? Complete transformation from old to young? Combining the wisdom and experience of age with the energy and beauty of youth? Is this still a 6000 year-old impossible dream?

No! Scientists are hard at work on restoring your youth right now.

In fact, many of the world’s leading researchers have been quietly collaborating for years on the strategy and science to completely reverse the human aging process. Yes, that’s right. This is no longer science fiction. It will happen, probably in your lifetime, if you and we do the right things.

Just what are those things? Here’s a little history.

Manhattan Beach Project's first scientific anti-aging conference was held in Manhattan Beach, California over nine years ago. This was no ordinary conference. Rather, it was a high-powered brainstorm session to figure out how to reverse aging. Twelve researchers from around the world combined their genius and their levels of expertise in their specific specialties, and they laid the groundwork for what eventually evolved into a scientific roadmap for full age reversal.

Each scientist represented a separate discipline. Field’s such as stem cells, genomics, nanotechnology, information technology and more were represented. You see, aging is extremely complex, and each scientist contributed a piece of the puzzle.

Just as the Manhattan Project was designed in 1942 to build the atomic bomb to end WW II, the Manhattan “Beach” Project was founded at the original conference on June 23rd, 2000 as an all-out assault on the world’s biggest killer – Aging.

Now, after nine years of research and collaboration, the scientists are finally disclosing their plan to the public, a plan to start saving up to 100,000 lives lost to aging every day, by 2029. It is now time to formally launch the Project.

Timely success may determine whether you will be part of the last generation to deteriorate, suffer and die from aging… or be part of the first generation to achieve our oldest dream… indefinite youth, health and vitality.