IBM recently announced its sixth annual <a href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/university/students/contests/mainframe/students.html">Master the Mainframe Contest</a> for high school, college and university students across the United States and Canada. The contest is designed to get the <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/080310-the-lions-of-it-the.html">younger set</a> away from their <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/093010-apple-iphone-mainframe-app.html">iPhones</a> and Droids and get involved with some serious mainframe applications.
In the face of China wielding <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2010/0929/Perils-of-clashes-with-China-over-currency-and-rare-earth-exports">menacing control</a> over 97% of the world's rare earth materials, the U.S. House of Representatives recently <a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-6160">passed a bill</a> that would bolster R&D of the key elements and help find <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/100610-common-gadgets-may-be-affected.html?hpg1=bn">substitutions</a> for the materials.
Network management vendor William Data Systems says it has created an iPhone app that lets users manage IBM's z/OS mainframe environment.
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory researchers will next week detail a <a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/kim-retro.pdf">system</a> they say will make it easier for companies to recover from <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/092710-insider-threat-tips.html?source=nww_rss">security intrusions</a>.
Encryption is hot. Perhaps that's because its been around so long it's no longer seen as a black art. Or perhaps security issues have grown so prevalent, everyone wants some sort of encryption as a truly secure way of stopping the pain of those problems. Indeed whatever the reason, encryption technologies seem to be behind a series of important security happenings of late. Here's a look at some of the more interesting happenings shaping encryption today:
One of the more unique unmanned aircraft took a giant step toward reality this week when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency inked an agreement with Boeing to build the SolarEagle, a plane capable of remaining at heights over 60,000 feet for over five years.
After <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/021310-intel-experimental-processor.html?hpg1=bn#comments">years</a> of criticism, the Department of Justice <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/podcasts/panorama/2007/102407pan-arxan.html">today</a> set up a task force it says will <a href="https://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/012910-google-ip-struggles-fuel-us.html ">focus</a> exclusively on <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/26123">battling US and international intellectual property crimes</a>.
Fraudsters are <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/020909-social-networkings-security.html">targeting</a> social networking <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/022709-five-facebook-scams-protect-your.html">sites</a> with increased <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/092409-social-networking-sites-leaking-personal.html">frequency</a> and users need to take precautions, the FBI warned.
Some industry observers still like to talk down the prospects of the mainframe, saying it is not the corporate platform of the future, but the Big Iron keeps on ticking.
The quest to mimic the best parts of human brain function on a highly intelligent computer to decypher tons of data quickly is heating up.
IBM has received US$16.1 million (NZ$23.8 million) to develop its part of a Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DAPRA) research programme aimed at rapidly and efficiently putting brain-like senses into actual hardware and software, so that computers can process and understand data more rapidly.
IBM has now gotten $21 million to work on the programme known as Systems of neuromorphic adaptive plastic scalable electronics (SyNAPSE), which includes work from researchers at HRL Laboratories, that got $16.2 million in October 2008, and others such as HP.
According to DARPA, the SyNAPSE programme will create useful, intelligent machines. In DARPA language: the agency is looking to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that is scalable to biological levels. The goal is to develop systems capable of analyzing vast amounts of data from many sources in the blink of an eye, allowing the military to make quick decisions to have a significant impact on a given problem or situation.
According to DARPA, programmable machines are limited not only by their computational capacity, but also by an architecture requiring (human-derived) algorithms to both describe and process information from their environment. In contrast, biological neural systems such as human brains, autonomously process information in complex environments by automatically learning relevant and probabilistically stable features and associations.
When compared to biological systems for example, today’s programmable machines are less efficient by a factor of one million to one billion in complex, real-world environments. The SyNAPSE programme seeks to break the programmable machine archetype and define a new path forward, it stated.
DARPA goes on to say realising this ambitious goal will require the collaboration of numerous technical disciplines such as computational neuroscience, artificial neural networks, large-scale computation, neuromorphic VLSI, information science, cognitive science, materials science, unconventional nanometer-scale electronics and CMOS design and fabrication.
The agency ultimate envisions work in four key areas:
• Hardware implementation will likely include CMOS devices, novel synaptic components, along with combinations of hard-wired and programmable/virtual connectivity. These will support critical information processing techniques observed in biological systems, such as spike encoding and spike-time dependent plasticity.
• Architectures will support critical structures and functions observed in biological systems such as connectivity, hierarchical organisation, core component circuitry, competitive self-organisation and modulatory/reinforcement systems. As in biological systems, processing will necessarily be maximally distributed, nonlinear and inherently noise and defect-tolerant.
• Large scale digital simulations of circuits and systems will be used to prove component and whole system functionality and to inform overall system development in advance of neuromorphic hardware implementation.
• Environments will be evolving with virtual platforms for the training, evaluation and benchmarking of intelligent machines in various aspects of perception, cognition and response.
While SyNAPSE basically seeks to replicate human brain function, DARPA has another project that seeks to develop an artificial intelligence system that can read, learn and develop knowledge about all manner of digital material in a quick, cost-effective way. BBN Technology recently got $29.7 million to develop a prototype machine reading system that transforms prose into knowledge that can be interpreted by an artificial intelligence application.
The prototype is part of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency's Machine Reading Programme (MRP), which wants to develop systems that can capture knowledge from naturally occurring text and transform it into the formal representations used by AI reasoning systems.
The idea is that such an intelligent learning system could gather and analyze information from the web. These include international technological advances or plans and rhetoric of political organisations, as well as unleashing a wide variety of new military and civilian AI applications from intelligent bots to personal tutors according to DARPA.
The Department of Justice and FBI Wednesday said ongoing investigations have identified more than 1 million botnet crime victims.
If you don't like what you find or see about yourself on the Web there's a growing community of companies that can expunge or at least water down the bad stuff and save your reputation -- for a price, of course.
Cisco has developed a set of small smart robots, which can act as wireless communications relays, that sense when a mobile user is moving out of service range, and can follow the user to maintain connectivity.
They look a little like Legos on steroids and indeed, that's how they act. Called Superbots, these robots are made up of identical modular units that plug into one another to create robots that can stand, crawl, wiggle and roll.
IBM will spend US$40 million (NZ$65 million) over the next three years building and staffing an advanced technology lab in Russia.