Cloud Computing
Securing the cloud
June 10, 2013 7:21 am | by Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office | News | CommentsA team of researchers has developed a new encryption scheme, known as a functional-encryption scheme, that solves a major problem with homomorphic encryption. The scheme would let the cloud server to run a single, specified computation on the homomorphically encrypted result, without being able to extract any other information about it.
New theory could streamline operations management, cloud computing
May 1, 2013 11:22 am | by Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office | News | CommentsIt’s often said that we live in an age of increased specialization. But in a series of recent papers, researchers have shown that, in a number of different contexts, a little versatility can go a long way. Their theoretical analyses could have implications for operations management, cloud computing—and possibly even health care delivery and manufacturing.
Experts: North Korea training teams of “cyber warriors”
March 24, 2013 4:55 pm | by Youkyung Lee, AP Technology Writer | News | CommentsMalware shut down 32,000 computers and servers at three major South Korean TV networks and three banks last Wednesday, disrupting communications and banking businesses, officials said. Investigators have yet to pinpoint the culprit, but the focus remains fixed on North Korea, where South Korean security experts say Pyongyang has been training a team of computer-savvy "cyber warriors" as cyberspace becomes a fertile battleground in the standoff between the two Koreas.
Shimadzu, Integrated Analysis bring enterprise-level private-cloud services to laboratories
March 20, 2013 2:56 pm | News | CommentsIn today's laboratories, experimental data sets are growing larger, and critical tasks such as data storage, processing, mining, and sharing have become cumbersome, error prone, and expensive. The i3D Enterprise Service, offered by Shimadzu Scientific Instruments and Integrated Analysis Inc., overcomes these challenges by integrating storage, processing, and data mining in an enterprise-level private cloud.
Making cloud computing more efficient
March 13, 2013 8:10 am | by Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office | News | CommentsFor many companies, moving their Web-application servers to the cloud is an attractive option, since cloud-computing services can offer economies of scale, extensive technical support, and easy accommodation of demand fluctuations. But for applications that depend heavily on database queries, cloud hosting can pose as many problems as it solves. Researchers are developing a new system that could help solve these problems.
Researchers create an Internet for robots
March 11, 2013 9:57 am | News | CommentsSoftware engineers at five European universities have developed a cloud-computing platform for robots. The platform allows robots connected to the Internet to directly access the powerful computational, storage, and communications infrastructure of modern data centers—the giant server farms behind the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon—for robotics tasks and robot learning.
In death, Facebook photos could fade away forever
March 4, 2013 8:17 am | by Lauren Gambino, Associated Press | News | CommentsA grieving Oregon mother who battled Facebook for full access to her deceased son's account has been pushing for years for something that would prevent others from losing photos, messages and other memories—as she did. The Oregon Legislature took up the cause as well, only to be turned back by pressure from the tech industry, which argued that both a 1986 federal law and voluntary terms of service agreements prohibit companies from sharing a person's information. Still, lawmakers pushed forward, seeking to treat digital information, from photos to intellectual property, as material property for estate purposes.
IBM completes $1.3B acquisition of Kenexa
December 4, 2012 8:09 pm | by The Associated Press | News | CommentsIBM Corp. has completed its $1.3 billion acquisition of human-resources-management company Kenexa Corp. to expand its line of cloud-based software services. The deal was first announced in late August. About 2,800 Kenexa workers scattered across the U.S. and 20 other countries are now joining IBM, which is based in Armonk, N.Y. Kenexa is based in Wayne, Pa.
ORNL debuts Titan supercomputer
October 30, 2012 1:36 pm | News | CommentsThe U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory launched a new era of scientific supercomputing on Tuesday with Titan, a system capable of churning through more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second—or 20 petaflops—by employing a family of processors called graphic processing units first created for computer gaming. Titan will be 10 times more powerful than ORNL's last world-leading system, Jaguar.
Google opens window into secretive data centers
October 17, 2012 3:40 pm | by Michael Liedtke, AP Technology Writer | News | CommentsThrough a new website unveiled Wednesday, Google is opening a virtual window into the secretive data centers where an intricate maze of computers process Internet search requests, show YouTube video clips, and distribute email for millions of people. The photographic access to Google's data centers coincides with the publication of a Wired magazine article about how the company builds and operates them.
New tools will make sharing research data safer in cyberspace
September 28, 2012 4:51 am | News | CommentsNo longer limited to narrow focus groups, painstaking in-person surveys, or artificially controlled studies, researchers today have a far easier time compiling and manipulating large data sets. At the same time, however, sharing such data can be fraught with risks. Researchers with the “Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data” project at Harvard University aim to keep the flexibility and convenience of sharing large amounts of data while more fully protecting individual privacy.
NSF and Mozilla announce winning ideas for Internet of the future
September 26, 2012 6:30 pm | News | CommentsThis week, an open innovation challenge called Mozilla Ignite announced eight winning ideas for innovative applications that offer a glimpse of what the Internet's future might look like, and what the lives of Americans may look like as well. The challenge called for stellar application, or "app," ideas from anywhere in the world that would advance national priorities such as health care, public safety, clean energy, and transportation.
“Space travel” gives computers a more powerful way to detect threats
September 21, 2012 5:46 am | News | CommentsAs cloud computing is becoming more popular, new techniques to protect the systems must be developed. Computer scientists in Texas have developed a technique to automatically allow one computer in a virtual network to monitor another for intrusions, viruses or anything else that could cause a computer to malfunction. Dubbed “space travel”, the technique bridges the gap between computer hardware and software systems.
Researchers craft program to stop cloud computing problems
September 10, 2012 5:02 am | News | CommentsResearchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new software tool to prevent performance disruptions in cloud computing systems by automatically identifying and responding to potential anomalies before they can develop into problems.
Clinical trials get efficiency boost from virtual reality
August 31, 2012 6:45 am | News | CommentsTime-consuming, expensive, and often intrusive, clinical trials are nevertheless a necessity. Researchers at the University of Tennessee Space Institute in Tullahoma have developed an invention that makes clinical trials more efficient. Called "digital Eye Bank," the computer software eye modeling program can take data from eyes of patients' and build it into models from the commercial optics program to be used for researchers' virtual clinical trials.
Scientists create chemical “brain”
August 23, 2012 4:45 am | News | CommentsNorthwestern University scientists have connected 250 years of organic chemical knowledge into one giant computer network—a chemical Google on steroids. A decade in the making, the software optimizes syntheses of drug molecules and other important compounds and combines long (and expensive) syntheses of compounds into shorter and more economical routes.
An entirely new principle for information processing
August 15, 2012 8:10 am | News | CommentsResearchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany have developed a complex network computer that is equally capable of performing arbitrary calculations as conventional computer, but does this under completely different conditions. Instead of a 0s and 1s in a binary system, this computer can in principle compute from, or be built from, any oscillating system, like a pendulum.
Upgrading the Internet for the mobile age
August 2, 2012 10:23 am | News | CommentsWhen it comes to delivering data to users, the Web still works brilliantly. But for other functions such as allowing users to move between wireless networks or companies to shift traffic among servers, engineers are forced to implement increasingly cumbersome tweaks. A team of Princeton University researchers has released a plan to cut through that tangle and provide a simple solution to many of the problems involved with the Internet's growing pains.
Dealing with massive data from miniscule communities
August 2, 2012 5:32 am | News | CommentsIt’s relatively easy to collect massive amounts of data on microbes. But the files are so large that it takes days to simply transmit them to other researchers and months to analyze once they are received. Researchers at Michigan State University have developed a new computational technique that relieves the logjam that these “big data” issues create.
“Control-Alt-Hack” game lets players try their hand at computer security
July 24, 2012 5:28 pm | by Hannah Hickey | News | CommentsDo you have what it takes to be an ethical hacker? Can you step into the shoes of a professional paid to outsmart supposedly locked-down systems? "Control-Alt-Hack", a new card game developed by University of Washington computer scientists, gives teenage and young-adult players a taste of what it means to be a computer-security professional defending against an ever-expanding range of digital threats.
IBM’s augmented reality app designed to improve shopping
July 3, 2012 7:19 am | News | CommentsIBM Research scientists this week unveiled a first-of-a-kind augmented reality mobile shopping app that will make it possible for consumers to pan store shelves and receive personalized product information, recommendations and coupons while they browse shopping aisles.
Oracle purchases Collective Intellect
June 5, 2012 9:01 am | News | CommentsOracle has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Collective Intellect, a company that specializes in cloud-based social intelligence solutions that enable organizations to monitor, understand, and respond to consumers' conversations on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
New Google data shows Microsoft's piracy problems
May 25, 2012 6:21 am | by Michael Liedtke, AP Technology Writer | News | CommentsAccording to recent data released by Google, the search engine giant has logged more than 2.5 million requests in the last 11 months to remove links believed to be violating Microsoft’s copyrights. This exceeded the number of complaints about material produced by entertainment companies pushing for tougher online piracy laws.
Google strives to enlighten with new search tool
May 18, 2012 6:36 am | by Michael Liedtke, AP Business Writer | News | CommentsThe search engine giant has spent the past two years poring through online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the CIA Factbook and other sources to expand a database of 12 million items that it picked up as part of its 2010 acquisition of Metaweb. On Wednesday it used this massive database to launch a new feature that provides a summary of vital information alongside main search results.
Internet group: Quality over speed in new domains
May 8, 2012 2:59 pm | by Anick Jesdanun, AP Technology Writer | News | CommentsThree weeks ago, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers abruptly shut down a system for letting companies and organizations propose new suffixes, after it discovered a software glitch that exposed some private data. At the time, ICANN planned to reopen the system within four business days. But the system remains suspended.
