Technology

The electronic eyeglasses that could replace bifocals

PixelOptics plans to release a new line of high-tech specs that toggle between prescriptions with a mere tilt of your head

posted on April 22, 2011, at 3:31 PM

They may look like normal glasses, but they are the first electronic specs that can toggle between prescriptions with a mere press of a button... or tilt of your head. Photo: pixeloptics.com

Bespectacled Americans who rely on bifocal or progressive lenses may soon get a new view on life. This June, PixelOptics of Roanoke, Va., plans to introduce a line of electronic eyeglasses, called emPower, that allow wearers to effortlessly switch between prescriptions for reading and distance viewing. Here, a guide to the new technology:

How do these glasses work?
Their parts are reminiscent of those found in iPods, says Anne Eisenberg in The New York Times. The lenses "feature a thin layer of liquid crystal sandwiched between two layers of plastic," says Catherine Clifford at CNNMoney. When zapped with a jolt of electricity, the crystals change their alignment to affect how the lenses reflect light. Wearers can simply tilt their head downward or manually press the frames to activate that change. The toggling function will work for two to three days after each six- to eight-hour battery charge.

Why is this necessary?
The reading portion of traditional bifocal lenses "blur objects more than an arm’s length away," says Eisenberg in The New York Times, meaning that they can distort the view when looking down at the ground, stepping off a curb, climbing a staircase, or even swinging at a golf ball. In 2010, more than 20 million sets of progressive lenses and more than 16 million bifocals were sold in the U.S.

How long have these high-tech specs been in development?
The process took about 12 years and involved some 275 patents.

Where will they be available?
The emPower glasses "will be distributed through a network of local eyewear professionals," according to Clifford at CNNMoney. The company will roll them out regionally, starting in Virginia and North Carolina, this summer.

How much will they cost?
Considerably more than a basic pair of glasses. The individual retailers will set their own markups, but Blum says the price tag will be between $1,000 and $1,250 a pair. That includes the frames, lenses, coatings, and charger. Still, even at that price, these glasses "can be a convenient alternative for those with qualms over corrective surgery with lasers," says Paul Eng at The Consumerist.

Sources: CNNMoney, The Consumerist, New York Times, Orlando Sentinel

Three scientists at UC San Diego have rigorously estimated the annual amount of business-related information processed by the world’s computer servers in terms that Guttenberg and Galileo would have appreciated: the digital equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year.

The world’s roughly 27 million computer servers processed 9.57 zettabytes of information in 2008, according to a paper to be presented April 7 at Storage Networking World’s (SNW’s) annual meeting in Santa Clara, Calif. The first-of-its kind rigorous estimate was generated with server-processing performance standards, server-industry reports, interviews with information technology experts, sales figures from server manufacturers and other sources. (One zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power, or a million million gigabytes.)

The study estimated that enterprise server workloads are doubling about every two years, which means that by 2024 the world’s enterprise servers will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system in the Milky Way Galaxy. (Each book is assumed to be 4.8 centimeters thick and contain 2.5 megabytes of information.)

Technophiles who have been dreaming of mobile devices that run longer on lighter, slimmer batteries may soon find their wish has been granted.

Three parallel memory bits with carbon nanotube electrodes (false color image based on topographic profile from atomic force microscopy). The middle bit is in the “off” state, the other two are “on.” The silicon dioxide substrate is shown in blue. | Image courtesy Eric Pop

University of Illinois engineers have developed a form of ultra-low-power digital memory that is faster and uses 100 times less energy than similar available memory. The technology could give future portable devices much longer battery life between charges.

Led by electrical and computer engineering professor Eric Pop, the team will publish its results in an upcoming issue of Science magazine and online in the March 10 Science Express.

“I think anyone who is dealing with a lot of chargers and plugging things in every night can relate to wanting a cell phone or laptop whose batteries can last for weeks or months,” said Pop, who is also affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois.

The flash memory used in mobile devices today stores bits as charge, which requires high programming voltages and is relatively slow. Industry has been exploring faster, but higher power phase-change materials (PCM) as an alternative. In PCM memory a bit is stored in the resistance of the material, which is switchable.

Pop’s group lowered the power per bit to 100 times less than existing PCM memory by focusing on one simple, yet key factor: size.

Rather than the metal wires standard in industry, the group used carbon nanotubes, tiny tubes only a few nanometers in diameter – 10,000 times smaller than a human hair.

Researchers at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) are participating in the development of an application to integrate electronic ID data into an SIM mobile phone card so as to use the terminal as a means of personal identifications

The prototype of mDNI, recently presented at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, allows secure identification of the user by his eID data stored in the mobile phone SIM card. "The SIM cards are like small computers that we carry in our mobile devices allowing us to store information and execute applications, with the advantage of providing a high level security,” explained the UC3M Professor from the Telematic Engineering Department, Celeste Campo, the principal researcher for this project which is being carried out in collaboration with Telefónica R D and Secuware.

PARMA, ITALY (AP) - It's a modern-day version of Marco Polo's journey halfway around the world _ but is anyone at the controls?

A team of Italian engineers on Tuesday launched what has been billed as the longest-ever test drive of driverless vehicles: a 13,000-kilometer (8,000-mile), three-month road trip from Italy to China, not in search of silk, but to test the limits of future automotive technology.

Two bright orange vehicles, equipped with laser scanners and cameras that work in concert to detect and help avoid obstacles, are to brave the traffic of Moscow, the summer heat of Siberia and the bitter cold of the Gobi desert before the planned arrival in Shanghai at the end of October.

"What we are trying to do is stress our systems and see if they can work in a real environment, with real weather, real traffic and crazy people who cross the road in front of you and a vehicle that cuts you off," said project leader Alberto Broggi.

The road trip consists of two pairs of vehicles, each with a driven lead van followed by a driverless vehicle occupied by two technicians, whose job is to fix glitches and take over the wheel in case of an emergency.

The driverless vehicle takes cues from the lead van, but will have to respond to any ordinary obstacles or dangers. The two pairs alternate stretches along the route to China.

The remarkable ability of an electron to exist in two places at once has been controlled in the most common electronic material – silicon – for the first time.

The research findings – published in Nature by a UK–Dutch team from UCL, the University of Surrey, Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, and the FOM Institute for Plasma Physics near Utrecht - marks a significant step towards the making of an affordable "quantum computer".

According to the research paper in Nature the scientists have created a simple version of Schrodinger’s cat – which is paradoxically simultaneously both dead and alive - in the cheap and simple material out of which ordinary computer chips are made.

"This is a real breakthrough for modern electronics and has huge potential for the future," explained Professor Ben Murdin, Photonics Group Leader at the University of Surrey. "Lasers have had an ever increasing impact on technology, especially for the transmission of processed information between computers, and this development illustrates their potential power for processing information inside the computer itself. In our case we used a far-infrared, very short, high intensity pulse from the Dutch FELIX laser to put an electron orbiting within silicon into two states at once - a so-called quantum superposition state. We then demonstrated that the superposition state could be controlled so that the electrons emit a burst of light at a well-defined time after the superposition was created. The burst of light is called a photon echo; and its observation proved we have full control over the quantum state of the atoms."

And the development of a silicon based "quantum computer" may be only just over the horizon. "Quantum computers can solve some problems much more efficiently than conventional computers - and they will be particularly useful for security because they can quickly crack existing codes and create un-crackable codes," Professor Murdin continued. "The next generation of devices must make use of these superpositions to do quantum computations. Crucially our work shows that some of the quantum engineering already demonstrated by atomic physicists in very sophisticated instruments called cold atom traps, can be implemented in the type of silicon chip used in making the much more common transistor."

Professor Gabriel Aeppli, Director of the London Centre for Nanotechnology added that the findings were highly significant to academia and business alike. "Next to iron and ice, silicon is the most important inorganic crystalline solid because of our tremendous ability to control electrical conduction via chemical and electrical means," he explained. "Our work adds control of quantum superpositions to the silicon toolbox."

Emily Howell' is a computer program that composes classical music by following rules of music its programmer taught it.

Earlier this year, 6-year-old musical prodigy Emily Howell released an 11-track debut album, resembling the work of history's most renowned classical composers. But instead of receiving the praise given to Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach, the California native has become a lightning rod for controversy within the musical community.

Why? Because Emily is not human.

Emily is a computer program, and "her" ability to write original compositions has called into question whether art is as uniquely human as many like to believe.

"Can computers be creative? In the sense that they are creating something that wasn't there before, yes," says David Cope, Emily's programmer and professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "But so can birds and insects and volcanoes. We have reserved this notion of creativity for humans for a long time, and we are enamored of it."

As he sees it, creativity has never been a human-defining trait. This feeling of his stretches back three decades, to when Mr. Cope first dabbled in teaching music to computers. After hitting a dead end while trying to write new music on his own, Cope created a program called EMI, which he pronounces as "Emmy."

EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) would analyze the work of human composers, pick up on their musical styles, and generate new work seemingly written by the original musician. EMI created "zillions" of compositions before being scrapped for Cope's latest project, he says.

The concept of self-healing materials has been successfully demonstrated for polymers and is being developed for applications such as coatings on large scale structures like bridges. Now, a Beckman Institute research group that pioneered this rapidly emerging field has shown that healing can also work for a critical small scale application: restoring lost conductivity in electronics.

Writing in Advanced Functional Materials, the researchers report on a twin-microcapsule method that is “the first microcapsule system for the restoration of conductivity in mechanically damaged electronic devices in which the repairing agent is not conductive until its release.” The paper, Restoration of Conductivity with TTF-TCNQ Charge-transfer Salts, is available online and will serve as a cover story for the journal.

Lead author of the paper is postdoctoral researcher Susan Odom, with faculty member Jeff Moore the corresponding author. They and their co-authors are members of the Autonomous Materials Systems (AMS) group at Illinois’s Beckman Institute.

Odom said that the system builds upon recent work in the group on a single capsule method for restoring conductivity, but with the added feature of being non-conductive until damage occurs and the conductivity agents are needed. The microcapsule shells of the twin microcapsules rupture in response to the damage and the component precursor materials are released as a liquid from the core, forming a solid charge-transfer salt that restores conductivity to the electronic device.

“We’ve been able to encapsulate this conductive salt on its own but we wanted to show that we could encapsulate something that was non-conductive,” Odom said. “We only want it to be conductive when it’s actually being used in repair.”

The precursor components are encapsulated in a solution in an organic solvent. An advantage of using non-conductive liquid precursors is improved flow of the healing agent, enabling improved delivery to a damage site.

For as long as there have been computers, there has been coding. And with coding comes repetition - lots of it. That's always been the basic fact of a programmer's existence, even as computers have become ever more friendly from a user's perspective.

That's where Sikuli comes in. The latest from the User Interface Design Group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, it's a programming tool that has the ability to see like a human being. Not only does it put the graphical user interface (or GUI) in the hands of programmers, but it may one day put programming in the hands of everyday computer users.

Sikuli stemmed from the research of Associate Professor Rob Miller, Ph.D. student Tsung-Hsiang Chang, and University of Maryland post-doctoral researcher Tom Yeh. It's a software agent that allows one to quickly automate just about any task - so long as there's a GUI involved. Sikuli enables the programming of tasks through a combination of screenshots and simple commands.

The key to Sikuli's appeal is how intuitive it is, something that has rarely if ever been true of programming before. Sikuli users can script what look like function calls, except with screenshots between the parentheses instead of code. This type of interface allows for use by beginners and seasoned programmers alike.

At this point in its development, more involved Sikuli use requires some understanding of Python. But a streamlined, novice-friendly Sikuli could one day put programming into the hands of the average computer user. It would mean a sort of democratization of computing, and would have far-reaching cultural implications.

"You can look at it as an augmentation of human capability," Miller observes. "Which is pretty exciting, because we're not really getting much smarter biologically. I think we need to find ways to make ourselves smarter technologically."

Scientists have made a breakthrough toward creating nanocircuitry on graphene, widely regarded as the most promising candidate to replace silicon as the building block of transistors. They have devised a simple and quick one-step process based on thermochemical nanolithography (TCNL) for creating nanowires, tuning the electronic properties of reduced graphene oxide on the nanoscale and thereby allowing it to switch from being an insulating material to a conducting material.

The technique works with multiple forms of graphene and is poised to become an important finding for the development of graphene electronics. The research appears in the June 11, 2010, issue of the journal Science.

Scientists who work with nanocircuits are enthusiastic about graphene because electrons meet with less resistance when they travel along graphene compared to silicon and because today's silicon transistors are nearly as small as allowed by the laws of physics. Graphene also has the edge due to its thickness - it's a carbon sheet that is a single atom thick. While graphene nanoelectronics could be faster and consume less power than silicon, no one knew how to produce graphene nanostructures on such a reproducible or scalable method. That is until now.

“We’ve shown that by locally heating insulating graphene oxide, both the flakes and epitaxial varieties, with an atomic force microscope tip, we can write nanowires with dimensions down to 12 nanometers. And we can tune their electronic properties to be up to four orders of magnitude more conductive. We’ve seen no sign of tip wear or sample tearing,” said Elisa Riedo, associate professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

On the macroscale, the conductivity of graphene oxide can be changed from an insulating material to a more conductive graphene-like material using large furnaces. Now, the research team used TCNL to increase the temperature of reduced graphene oxide at the nanoscale, so they can draw graphene-like nanocircuits. They found that when it reached 130 degrees Celsius, the reduced graphene oxide began to become more conductive.

“So the beauty of this is that we’ve devised a simple, robust and reproducible technique that enables us to change an insulating sample into a conducting nanowire. These properties are the hallmark of a productive technology,” said Paul Sheehan, head of the Surface Nanoscience and Sensor Technology Section at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

The research team tested two types of graphene oxide – one made from silicon carbide, the other with graphite powder.

“I think there are three things about this study that make it stand out,” said William P. King, associate professor in the Mechanical Science and Engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “First, is that the entire process happens in one step. You go from insulating graphene oxide to a functional electronic material by simply applying a nano-heater.  Second, we think that any type of graphene will behave this way. Third, the writing is an extremely fast technique. These nanostructures can be synthesized at such a high rate that the approach could be very useful for engineers who want to make nanocircuits.”

“This project is an excellent example of the new technologies that epitaxial graphene electronics enables,” said Walt de Heer, Regent’s Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics and the original proponent of epitaxial graphene in electronics. His study led to the establishment of the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center two years ago. “The simple conversion from graphene oxide to graphene is an important and fast method to produce conducting wires. This method can be used not only for flexible electronics, but it is possible, sometime in the future, that the bio-compatible graphene wires can be used to measure electrical signals from single biological cells."

The research is a collaboration among the Georgia Tech, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Other members of the research team include: Zhongqing Wei, Debin. Wang, Suenne Kim, Soo-Young Kim, Yike Hu, Michael K. Yakes, Arnaldo R.Laracuente, Zhenting Dai, Seth R. Marder, Claire Berger, and Walter A. de Heer.

 

The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the world's premier research universities. Ranked seventh among U.S. News & World Report's top public universities and the eighth best engineering and information technology university in the world by Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities, Georgia Tech’s more than 20,000 students are enrolled in its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Management and Sciences. Tech is among the nation's top producers of women and minority engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

FASHION crime it may be, but a multicoloured dayglo glove could bring Minority Report-style computing to your home PC.

Interest in so-called gesture-based computingMovie Camera has been stoked by the forthcoming launch of gaming systems from Microsoft and SonyMovie Camera that will track the movements of players' bodies and replicate them on screen. But an off-the-shelf system that can follow delicate hand movements in three dimensions to manipulate virtual objects remains tantalisingly beyond reach.

The problem with systems such as Microsoft's Project Natal for the Xbox is that they do not focus on the detailed movement of hands, limiting the degree to which players can manipulate virtual objects, says Javier Romero, a computer-vision researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Arm movements can be captured but more subtle pinches or twists of the wrists may be missed.

Until now, capturing detail required expensive motion-capture systems like those used for Hollywood's special-effects fests. These utilise markers placed around the body, or sensor-studded data gloves in which flexible sensors detect joint movements. "Really accurate gloves cost up to $20,000 and are a little unwieldy to wear," says Robert Wang, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Wang has developed a system that could bring gesture-based computing to the masses and it requires nothing more than a pair of multicoloured latex gloves, a webcam and a laptop (pictured).

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.