In an article on Wired News' GadgetLab blog, Associate Professor David Ackley talked about programming the 'Illuminato X Machina', a motherboard prototype, that uses separate modules each of which has its own processor, memory, storage and communications. The article was quickly picked up by tech hub Slashdot and sparked discussions among it's tech savvy users. Prof. Ackley was also featured in popular gadget blog Gizmodo.
Each square cell of 'Illuminato X Machina' serves as a mini-motherboard and network node; the cells can route power among themselves and decide to accept or reject incoming transmissions and programs independently. By varying the count, connections, and programming of a set of modules, aggregate computers can be created with properties tuned to the task at hand.
Although the 'Illuminato X Machina' is not yet generally available, UNM students will be building them into 'computer collectives' in Prof. Ackley's Fall 2009 class on 'Robust Physical Computation'.
Related links: David Ackley; Illuminato X Machina; Wired News' GadgetLab blog article; Slashdot article; Gizmodo article.
Professor Darko Stefanovic's research on molecular computing was featured in an article at the June 2009 issue of Nature Phyiscs (Vol 5, No. 6). The article, "Attack of the cyberspider", (subscription required) emphasizes his joint research with Prof. Milan Stojanovic of the Department of Medicine at Columbia University on molecular computing and control.
Prof. Stefanovic and his colleagues used single-stranded DNA to design a number of simple logic gates based on chemical activity. Their implementation works in solution and can be used to carry out information processing in biological fluids. The article predicts that future molecular control systems will be able to detect specific DNA sequences, for example, and to release specific drugs or molecules in response. Their recent development, molecular spiders - biomolecular systems having two to six extended deoxyribozymes attached to a protein - is also discussed in the article.
Prof. Stefanovic's work in biomolecular computation has earned him a number of NSF grants and he was also named the School of Engineering's Regents' Lecturer, based on his outstanding research, teaching and service accomplishments.
Related links: Darko Stefanovic; Nature Physics; Molecular Computing Group; Molecular spiders
Doctoral student Hairong Lei recently served as a software session chair for the 2009 International Conference on New Trends in Information and Service Science. He also presented his paper, "Software's Eight Essentials" at the conference. The proceedings will be published by the IEEE's Computer Science series.
Lei has previously worked at Microsoft and Philips in Seattle, and has M.S. degrees from Utah State University and the Beijing Institute of Tech. Lei has been working with Professor Joe Kniss, on "Supervised Manifold Distance Segmentation." His recent publications include "Protein-Protein Interaction Prediction Using Single Class SVM" and "Modular High-Speed Adaptive Optics System."
Congratulations Lei
Related Links : Professor Joe Kniss; Related news on UNM Today;
Cleve Moler, co-creator of the MatLab software used worldwide by scientists and engineers, was recently featured in an article in the New Mexico Business Weekly. Moler served as Chair of the Computer Science department in the 1980s and later became Chief Scientist at The Mathworks™, developers of MatLab. The article also features a quote from current chair Stephanie Forrest.
Albuquerque's ABC affiliate, KOAT 7, interviewed Prof. Jed Crandall on August 3rd, 2008 about his ConceptDoppler project, a kind of automated weather report tool for censorship. With the Olympics in Beijing starting August 8th, 2008, the media has taken a renewed interest in Chinese Internet censorship.
ConceptDoppler has shown that the Chinese Internet censorship is not a true firewall. It tests keywords from the Chinese wikipedia and has discovered that on 28% of the tested network paths, the data made it through. They also noted that filtering in general was most erratic when traffic was busy. Those curious about which keywords are blacklisted can take a look at them on the ConceptDoppler site.
Update: The August 6th issue of the Albuquerque Journal has a story about Jed Crandall's work. The article is available on the website (subscription or free trial pass required).
Update 2: Jed Crandall was interviewed August 7th on Santa Fe Public Radio (KSFR). Listen to the interview. (MP3)
Video of the interview is available in Windows Media and Quicktime formats.
Related links: Jed Crandall's home page; Chinese wikipedia; ConceptDoppler; Interview in Windows Media format; Interview in Quicktime format; KSFR Interview in MP3 Format
In an article on NetworkWorld, the CS Dept's Associate Chair George Luger is quoted, discussing the real-world uses of artificial intelligence (AI) and where the field is headed. The article was picked up by tech hub Slashdot not long after. George literally wrote the book on AI—the sixth edition of Artificial Intelligence was recently released.
Related links: Prof. George Luger; NetworkWorld article; Slashdot article; AI 6th Edition website
Aaron Clauset (a recent CS Dept. alumnus now at the Santa Fe Institute), Prof. Cris Moore, and Mark Newman (Univ. of Michigan) published "Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networks" (subscription required) in Nature. The paper in the prestigious journal offers a general technique to divide network vertices into groups and sub-groups, and argues that "...hierarchy is a central organizing principle of complex networks, capable of offering insight into many network phenomena." The Nature article was also featured on Slashdot.
Related links: Aaron Clauset; Cris Moore; Nature article; Slashdot Article
Josh Karlin, a PhD student in the CS Dept, has a website hosted here at the CS Dept. called the Internet Alert Registry (IAR) which monitors Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) updates for anything suspicious. BGP is how the various networks that make up the Internet communicate routing information to each other.
His IAR was recently highlighted when an ISP in Pakistan, attemping to implement a government-ordered censoring of YouTube, inadvertently broadcast information that prevented users worldwide from accessing the wildly popular home of viral videos.
The incident, which lasted around 2 hours on February 24, 2008, was mentioned in InformationWeek, as a site helping to highlight the problem by listing dozes of potentially suspicious changes to BGP per day. A paper with co-authors Jennifer Rexford and Dept. Chair Stephanie Forrest, offers a way to greatly mitgate the security issues with BGP with Pretty Good BGP.
Related links: Information Week article; Renesys blog entry; IAR site; Jennifer Rexford; Stephanie Forrest
New CS professor Jed Crandall and a research team at UC Davis have been studying the Chinese firewall, and getting noticed in place like Slashdot and on the BBC web site for their surprising findings. They found that contrary to expectations, the firewall did not always stop censored traffic at the border of the network. Using an automated tool called ConceptDoppler, a sort of weather report for censorship, they tested various censored phrases from the Chinese wikipedia and discovered that as often as 28%, the data made it through.
Related links: Jed Crandall; Slashdot; BBC; eWeek
Aaron Clauset attended the unclassified part of the Community Wide Predictive Analysis Workshop, held December 5th at the MITRE Corporation, (a sponsor along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, DOD, and the Defense Intelligence Agency). Clauset presented "Scale Invariance in Global Terrorism" (PDF, 263Kb), which he wrote with Maxwell Young. The report, mentioned in The Economist and Nature, finds that the relationship between the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks is scale-free.
Related links: "Scale Invariance in Global Terrorism" (PDF, 263Kb); MITRE; Aaron Clauset; Maxwell Young
KOB TV Channel 4 news recently interviewed Ed Angel about the ARTS Lab, which uses an interdisciplinary approach to bringing science and art together to catalyze the development of New Mexico's media industry. It features prominently in Gov. Bill Richardson's Media Industries Strategic Plan. Download the video clip (31 Meg, MPEG format).
Related links: Ed Angel, ARTS Lab, MISP, Video Clip
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