First Intelligent Financial Search Engine Developed.

SOURCE

ScienceDaily (Sep. 30, 2009) — Researchers from the Carlos III University of Madrid (UCM3) have completed the development of the first search engine designed to search for information from the financial and stock market sector based on semantic technology, which enables one to make more accurate thematic searches adapted to the needs of each user.

Unlike conventional search engines, SONAR -so named by its creators- enables the user to perform structured searches which are not based solely on concordance with a series of key words. This corporate financial search engine based on semantic technology, as described on the project website (http://www.proyecto-sonar.org), was developed by researchers from the UC3M in partnership with the University of Murcia, el Instituto de Empresa (the Business Institute) and the company Indra.
According to its creators, it has two main advantages. First, its effectiveness in a concrete domain- that of finance- which is closely defined and has very precise vocabulary. According to Juan Miguel Gómez Berbís, from the Computer Department of the UC3M “This verticality distinguishes SONAR from other more generic search engines, such as Google or Bing” Second, its capacity to establish relations between news, share valuations and prices via logical reasoning.
The first prototype works by making use of semantic web elements. Basically, the system collects data from both public information sources (Internet) and private, corporate ones (Intranet), adds them to a repository of semantically recorded data (labelled and structured) and allows intelligent access to this data. To achieve this, the platform incorporates an inference engine, a mechanism capable of performing reasoning tasks on the recorded information, as well as a natural language processor, which helps the user to perform the search in the simplest way possible. In this way the results obtained are matched to requests, eliminating ambiguities in polysemic terms, for example in searches carried out by users on stored data. “SONAR enables us to establish relations between different sources of information and discover and expand our knowledge, while at the same time it allows us to classify them so that users can get much more benefit from the experience”
Potential users
This search tool is designed for both private investors and large financial concerns. Its creators anticipate that it will be a very useful tool for analysts and stockbrokers. “It will be especially useful to the finance departments of banks and saving banks or to add to an existing search engine added value over its competitors” Gómez Berbís points out. And the search for accurate, reliable, relevant information in this business area has become a key factor in a domain where speed and quality of data are critical factors with an exceptional impact on business processes.
According to the researchers, this project aims to respond to a need from the financial sector, that is, the analysis of a large volume of information in order to take decisions. In this way, the execution of this project will allow the financial community to have access to a set of intelligent systems for the aggregated search of information in the financial domain and enable them to improve procedures for integrating company information and processes.
Researchers are currently incorporating new functions into the search tool and also receiving requests to adapt it to other domains, such as transport and biotechnology. In any case, the project is constantly evolving in order to enhance accuracy and reliability. “In SONAR2 we are working on two Intelligent Decision Support Systems for Financial Investments, one based on Fundamental Analysis and the other on Technical Chartist Analysis, which assists the work of the trader and average investor”, reveals professor Gómez Berbis.
Adapted from materials provided by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

Ants Vs. Worms: New Computer Security Mimics Nature.

SOURCE

ScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2009) — In the never-ending battle to protect computer networks from intruders, security experts are deploying a new defense modeled after one of nature’s hardiest creatures — the ant.

Unlike traditional security devices, which are static, these “digital ants” wander through computer networks looking for threats, such as “computer worms” — self-replicating programs designed to steal information or facilitate unauthorized use of machines. When a digital ant detects a threat, it doesn’t take long for an army of ants to converge at that location, drawing the attention of human operators who step in to investigate.
The concept, called “swarm intelligence,” promises to transform cyber security because it adapts readily to changing threats.
“In nature, we know that ants defend against threats very successfully,” explains Professor of Computer Science Errin Fulp, an expert in security and computer networks. “They can ramp up their defense rapidly, and then resume routine behavior quickly after an intruder has been stopped. We were trying to achieve that same framework in a computer system.”
Current security devices are designed to defend against all known threats at all times, but the bad guys who write malware — software created for malicious purposes — keep introducing slight variations to evade computer defenses.
As new variations are discovered and updates issued, security programs gobble more resources, antivirus scans take longer and machines run slower — a familiar problem for most computer users.
Glenn Fink, a research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Wash., came up with the idea of copying ant behavior. PNNL, one of 10 Department of Energy laboratories, conducts cutting-edge research in cyber security.
Fink was familiar with Fulp’s expertise developing faster scans using parallel processing — dividing computer data into batches like lines of shoppers going through grocery store checkouts, where each lane is focused on certain threats. He invited Fulp and Wake Forest graduate students Wes Featherstun and Brian Williams to join a project there this summer that tested digital ants on a network of 64 computers.
Swarm intelligence, the approach developed by PNNL and Wake Forest, divides up the process of searching for specific threats.
“Our idea is to deploy 3,000 different types of digital ants, each looking for evidence of a threat,” Fulp says. “As they move about the network, they leave digital trails modeled after the scent trails ants in nature use to guide other ants. Each time a digital ant identifies some evidence, it is programmed to leave behind a stronger scent. Stronger scent trails attract more ants, producing the swarm that marks a potential computer infection.”
In the study this summer, Fulp introduced a worm into the network, and the digital ants successfully found it. PNNL has extended the project this semester, and Featherstun and Williams plan to incorporate the research into their master’s theses.
Fulp says the new security approach is best suited for large networks that share many identical machines, such as those found in governments, large corporations and universities.
Computer users need not worry that a swarm of digital ants will decide to take up residence in their machine by mistake. Digital ants cannot survive without software “sentinels” located at each machine, which in turn report to network “sergeants” monitored by humans, who supervise the colony and maintain ultimate control.
Adapted from materials provided by Wake Forest University. Original article written by Eric Frazier, Office of Communications and External Relations.

Reconstruct Mars Automatically In Minutes.

SOURCE

ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2009) — A computer system is under development that can automatically combine images of the Martian surface, captured by landers or rovers, in order to reproduce a three dimensional view of the red planet. The resulting model can be viewed from any angle, giving astronomers a realistic and immersive impression of the landscape.

The new development has been presented at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam by Dr Michal Havlena.
“The feeling of ‘being right there’ will give scientists a much better understanding of the images. The only input we need are the captured raw images and the internal camera calibration. After minutes of computation on a standard PC, a three dimensional model of the captured scene is obtained,” said Dr Havlena.
The growing amount of available imagery from Mars is nearly impossible to handle for the manual image processing techniques used to date. The new automated method, which allows fast high quality image processing, was developed at the Center for Machine Perception of the Technical University of Prague, under the supervision of Tomas Pajdla, as a part of the EU FP7 Project PRoVisG.
From the technical point of view, the image processing consists of three stages: the first step is determining the image order. If the input images are unordered, i.e. they do not form a sequence but still are somehow connected, a state-of-the-art image indexing technique is able to find images of cameras observing the same part of the scene. To start with, up to a thousand features on each image are detected and “translated” into visual words, according to a visual vocabulary trained on images from Mars. Then, starting from an arbitrary image, the following image is selected if it shares the highest number of visual words with the previous image.
The second step of the pipeline, the so-called ‘structure-from-motion computation’, helps scientists determine the accurate camera positions and rotations in three dimensional space. Just five corresponding features are enough to obtain a relative camera pose between the two images that have been selected as sequential.
The last and most important step is the so-called ‘dense 3D model generation’ of the captured scene, which essentially creates and fuses the Martian surface depth maps. To do this, the model uses the disparities (parallaxes) present in images taken at two distinct camera positions, which were identified in the second step.
“The pipeline has already been used successfully to reconstruct a three dimensional model from nine images captured by the Phoenix Mars Lander, which were obtained just after performing some digging operation on the Mars surface,” said Dr Havlena.
“The challenge is now to reconstruct larger parts of the surface of the red planet, captured by the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity,” concluded Dr Havlena.
Adapted from materials provided by Europlanet Media Centre, via AlphaGalileo.

Quantum Computing: From qubits to qudits, with five energy levels

Source: ScienceDaily

ScienceDaily (Aug. 13, 2009) — Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have devised a new type of superconducting circuit that behaves quantum mechanically – but has up to five levels of energy instead of the usual two. The findings are published in the August 7 issue of Science.

These circuits act like artificial atoms in that they can only gain or lose energy in packets, or quanta, by jumping between discrete energy levels. "In our previous work, we focused on systems with just two energy levels, 'qubits,' because they are the quantum analog of 'bits,' which have two states, on and off," said Matthew Neeley, first author and a graduate student at UCSB.
He explained that in this work they operated a quantum circuit as a more complicated artificial atom with up to five energy levels. The generic term for such a system is "qudit," where 'd' refers to the number of energy levels –– in this case, 'd' equals five.
"This is the quantum analog of a switch that has several allowed positions, rather than just two," said Neeley. "Because it has more energy levels, the physics of a qudit is richer than for just a single qubit. This allows us to explore certain aspects of quantum mechanics that go beyond what can be observed with a qubit."
Just as bits are used as the fundamental building blocks of computers, qubits could one day be used as building blocks of a quantum computer, a device that exploits the laws of quantum mechanics to perform certain computations faster than can be done with classical bits alone. "Qudits can be used in quantum computers as well, and there are even cases where qudits could be used to speed up certain operations with a quantum computer," said Neeley. "Most research to date has focused on qubit systems, but we hope our experimental demonstration will motivate more effort on qudits, as an addition to the quantum information processing toolbox."
The senior co-author of the paper is John M. Martinis, professor of physics at UCSB. Other co-authors from UCSB are: Markus Ansmann, Radoslaw C. Bialczak, Max Hofheinz, Erik Lucero, Aaron D. O'Connell, Daniel Sank, Haohua Wang, James Wenner, and Andrew N. Cleland. Another co-author, Michael R. Geller, is from the University of Georgia.
Adapted from materials provided by University of California - Santa Barbara.

This Article Will Self-destruct: Tool To Make Online Personal Data Vanish

SOURCE

ScienceDaily (July 22, 2009) — Computers have made it virtually impossible to leave the past behind. College Facebook posts or pictures can resurface during a job interview. A lost cell phone can expose personal photos or text messages. A legal investigation can subpoena the entire contents of a home or work computer, uncovering incriminating, inconvenient or just embarrassing details from the past.

The University of Washington has developed a way to make such information expire. After a set time period, electronic communications such as e-mail, Facebook posts and chat messages would automatically self-destruct, becoming irretrievable from all Web sites, inboxes, outboxes, backup sites and home computers. Not even the sender could retrieve them.
"If you care about privacy, the Internet today is a very scary place," said UW computer scientist Tadayoshi Kohno. "If people understood the implications of where and how their e-mail is stored, they might be more careful or not use it as often."
The team of UW computer scientists developed a prototype system called Vanish that can place a time limit on text uploaded to any Web service through a Web browser. After a set time text written using Vanish will, in essence, self-destruct. A paper about the project went public today and will be presented at the Usenix Security Symposium Aug. 10-14 in Montreal.
Co-authors on the paper are doctoral student Roxana Geambasu, assistant professor Tadayoshi Kohno, professor Hank Levy and undergraduate student Amit Levy, all with the UW's department of computer science and engineering. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Intel Corp.
"When you send out a sensitive e-mail to a few friends you have no idea where that e-mail is going to end up," Geambasu said. "For instance, your friend could lose her laptop or cell phone, her data could be exposed by malware or a hacker, or a subpoena could require your e-mail service to reveal your messages. If you want to ensure that your message never gets out, how do you do that?"
Many people believe that pressing the "delete" button will make their data go away.
"The reality is that many Web services archive data indefinitely, well after you've pressed delete," Geambasu said.
Simply encrypting the data can be risky in the long term, the researchers say. The data can be exposed years later, for example, by legal actions that force an individual or company to reveal the encryption key. Current trends in the computing and legal landscapes are making the problem more widespread.
"In today's world, private information is scattered all over the Internet, and we can't control the lifetime of that data," said Hank Levy. "And as we transition to a future based on cloud computing, where enormous, anonymous datacenters run the vast majority of our applications and store nearly all of our data, we will lose even more control."
The Vanish prototype washes away data using the natural turnover, called "churn," on large file-sharing systems known as peer-to-peer networks. For each message that it sends, Vanish creates a secret key, which it never reveals to the user, and then encrypts the message with that key. It then divides the key into dozens of pieces and sprinkles those pieces on random computers that belong to worldwide file-sharing networks, the same ones often used to share music or movie files. The file-sharing system constantly changes as computers join or leave the network, meaning that over time parts of the key become permanently inaccessible. Once enough key parts are lost, the original message can no longer be deciphered.
In the current Vanish prototype, the network's computers purge their memories every eight hours. (An option on Vanish lets users keep their data for any multiple of eight hours.)
Unlike existing commercial encryption services, a message sent using Vanish is kept private by an inherent property of the decentralized file-sharing networks it uses.
"A major advantage of Vanish is that users don't need to trust us, or any service that we provide, to protect or delete the data," Geambasu says.
Researchers liken using Vanish to writing a message in the sand at low tide, where it can be read for only a few hours before the tide comes in and permanently washes it away. Erasing the data doesn't require any special action by the sender, the recipient or any third party service.
"Our goal was really to come up with a system where, through a property of nature, the message, or the data, disappears," Levy says.
Vanish was released today as a free, open-source tool that works with the Firefox browser. To work, both the sender and the recipient must have installed the tool. The sender then highlights any sensitive text entered into the browser and presses the "Vanish" button. The tool encrypts the information with a key unknown even to the sender.
That text can be read, for a limited time only, when the recipient highlights the text and presses the "Vanish" button to unscramble it. After eight hours the message will be impossible to unscramble and will remain gibberish forever.
Vanish works with any text entered into a Web browser: Web-based e-mail such as Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail, Web chat, or the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook. The Vanish prototype now works only for text, but researchers said the same technique could work for any type of data, such as digital photos.
It is technically possible to save information sent with Vanish. A recipient could print e-mail and save it, or cut and paste unencrypted text into a word-processing document, or photograph an unscrambled message. Vanish is meant to protect communication between two trusted parties, researchers say.
"Today many people pick up the phone when they want to talk with a lawyer or have a private conversation," Kohno said. "But more and more communication is happening online. Vanish is designed to give people the same privacy for e-mail and the Web that they expect for a phone conversation."
The paper and research prototype are at http://vanish.cs.washington.edu.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Washington.

Program For Cyber Security 'Neighborhood Watch' Developed

SOURCE

ScienceDaily (July 16, 2009) — U.S. Department of Energy laboratories fight off millions of cyber attacks every year, but a near real-time dialog between these labs about this hostile activity has never existed – until now.

Scientists at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory have devised a program that allows for Cyber Security defense systems to communicate when attacked and transmit that information to cyber systems at other institutions in the hopes of strengthening the overall cyber security posture of the complex.
"The Federated Model for Cyber Security acts as a virtual neighborhood watch program. If one institution is attacked; secure and timely communication to others in the Federation will aide in protecting them from that same attack through active response," cyber security officer Michael Skwarek said.
Prior to the development of the Federated Model for Cyber Security, the exchange of hostile activity was solely on the shoulders of the human element. In cyber attacks, every second counts and the quicker that such information can be securely shared, will assist in strengthening others against similar attacks. With millions of cyber security probes a day, the human element will not be successful alone.
"This program addresses the need for the exchange of hostile activity information, with the goal of reducing the time to react across the complex. History has shown, hostile activity is often targeted at more than one location, and having our defenses ready and armed will assist greatly." Skwarek said.
Currently, the program is capable of transmitting information regarding hostile IP addresses and domain names, and will soon be able to share hostile email address and web URLs to others in the Federation.
The development of this program led to Skwarek along with Argonne's cyber security team members Matt Kwiatkowski, Tami Martin, Scott Pinkerton, Chris Poetzel, Gene Rackow and Conrad Zadlo winning the DOE's 2009 Cyber Security Innovation and Technology Achievement Award.
The Federated Model for Cyber Security has proved to be an important cyber security and communication tool. Use in the private sector, as well as in institutions with heavy collaborative efforts, can realize an operational gain by leveraging the power of sharing and learning from others on what they see and defend against on a daily basis.
Adapted from materials provided by DOE/Argonne National Laboratory.

Tracking The Life And Death Of News

SOURCE

ScienceDaily (July 14, 2009) — As more and more news appears on the Internet as well as in print, it becomes possible to map the global flow of news by observing it online. Using this strategy, Cornell computer scientists have managed to track and analyze the "news cycle" -- the way stories rise and fall in popularity.

Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science at Cornell, postdoctoral researcher Jure Leskovec and graduate student Lars Backstrom tracked 1.6 million online news sites, including 20,000 mainstream media sites and a vast array of blogs, over the three-month period leading up to the 2008 presidential election -- a total of 90 million articles, one of the largest analyses anywhere of online news. They found a consistent rhythm as stories rose into prominence and then fell off over just a few days, with a "heartbeat" pattern of handoffs between blogs and mainstream media. In mainstream media, they found, a story rises to prominence slowly then dies quickly; in the blogosphere, stories rise in popularity very quickly but then stay around longer, as discussion goes back and forth. Eventually though, almost every story is pushed aside by something newer.
"The movement of news to the Internet makes it possible to quantify something that was otherwise very hard to measure -- the temporal dynamics of the news," said Kleinberg. "We want to understand the full news ecosystem, and online news is now an accurate enough reflection of the full ecosystem to make this possible. This is one [very early] step toward creating tools that would help people understand the news, where it's coming from and how it's arising from the confluence of many sources."
The researchers also say their work suggests an answer to a longstanding question: Is the "news cycle" just a way to describe our perception of what's going on in the media, or is it a real phenomenon that can be measured? They opt for the latter, and offer a mathematical explanation of how it works.
The research was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference June 28-July 1 in Paris.
The ideal, Kleinberg said, would be to track "memes," or ideas, through cyberspace, but deciding what an article is about is still a major challenge for computing. The researchers sidestepped that obstacle by tracking quotations that appear in news stories, since quotes remain fairly consistent even though the overall story may be presented in very different ways by different writers.
Even quotes may change slightly or "mutate" as they pass from one article to another, so the researchers developed an algorithm that could identify and group similar but slightly different phrases. In simple terms, the computer identified short phrases that were part of longer phrases, using those connections to create "phrase clusters." Then they tracked the volume of posts in each phrase cluster over time. In the August and September data they found threads rising and falling on a more or less weekly basis, with major peaks corresponding to the Democratic and Republican conventions, the "lipstick on a pig" discussion, rising concern over the financial crisis and discussions of a bailout plan.
The slow rise of a new story in the mainstream, the researchers suggest, results from imitation -- as more sites carried a story, other sites were more likely to pick it up. But the life of a story is limited, as new stories quickly push out the old. A mathematical model based on the interaction of imitation and recency predicted the pattern fairly well, the researchers said, while predictions based on either imitation or recency alone couldn't come close.
Watching how stories moved between mainstream media and blogs revealed a sharp dip and rise the researchers described as a "heartbeat." When a story first appears, there is a small rise in activity in both spheres; as mainstream activity increases, the proportion blogs contribute becomes small; but soon the blog activity shoots up, peaking an average of 2.5 hours after the mainstream peak. Almost all stories started in the mainstream. Only 3.5 percent of the stories tracked appeared first dominantly in the blogosphere and then moved to the mainstream.
The mathematical model needs to be refined, the researchers said, and they suggested further study of how stories move between sites with opposing political orientation. "It will be useful to further understand the roles different participants play in the process," the researchers concluded, "as their collective behavior leads directly to the ways in which all of us experience news and its consequences."
Adapted from materials provided by Cornell University.