Philosophers and AI researchers may argue the point, but Bruce Donald believes his microscopic invention qualifies as a robot. Donald’s machine is about as wide as a strand of human hair. He likens it to a car, because it’s controllable: “You can steer it anywhere on a flat surface, and drive it wherever you want to go.” Unlike previous attempts at such a microelectromechanical system, Donald’s robot has no tether, but operates via electrical charges on a silicon grid. It’s a real speed demon, proceeding in nano-sized hops (one billionth of a meter, 20,000 times per second), ultimately achieving two millimeters per second, or the equivalent on a more human scale of 80 kilometers per hour. To the tunes of a Strauss waltz, Donald demonstrates two robots dancing in straight and wavy lines around each other, and then coupling to form a single system.

Donald envisions many possible applications for this work. Since his robots can push and shove things in their path, and can also latch onto each other, they might prove quite useful assisting in techniques involving protein design, manipulation of cells and biomedical engineering. The next five to 10 years, Donald predicts, will see an even smaller generation of robots, which “will be doing useful things in the lab.”

Building Very Small Mobile Micro-Robots

The Lemelson Center’s mission:
• To document, interpret, and disseminate information about invention and innovation
• To encourage inventive creativity in young people
• To foster an appreciation for the central role invention and innovation play in the history of the United States

Lemelson Center: Explore invention at the Lemelson Center

Technology Review spoke with Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, to get a hint of what we can expect from search technology in the years to come.

This interview is pretty fluffy, but this comment was notable:

Norvig: I think another focus is to understand how people interact with Google and interact with each other on the Web, in general. How do people operate in these social networks? Understanding that question can help us serve them better.

The Future of Search

If, say, a computer were used to diagnose a patient's symptoms and recommend treatment, and the result was flawed, could the computer be held responsible? If so, then it is hard to see why computers should not be recognised for good work as well.

Stephen Emmott and Stephen Muggleton are developing an “artificial scientist” that would be capable of combining inductive logic with probabilistic reasoning. Such a computer would be able to design experiments, collect the results and then integrate those results with theory. Indeed, it should be possible, the pair think, for the artificial scientist to build hypotheses directly from the data, spotting relationships that the humble graduate student or even his supervisor might miss.

In the future, PhD's will have access to an automated thesis defense module.

Computing and biology | Arresting developments

If you want to stop hackers from invading your network, first you've got to invade their minds.

Is this for real? Apparently.

In (some parts of?) Asia it is reportedly one of the three most popular certifications.

I learned a new term today: "left hat" hacker. As far as I can tell, this is the invention of one Malaysian reporter; no one else is using it.

EC-Council | Certified Ethical Hacker

"The economies of the Middle East are the fastest growing in the world. So what do they do? They buy planes. But five years ago it was like, 'Who are these guys?'"

... modern Dubai seems built on hyperbole.

Halliburton is moving its headquarters from Houston to Dubai.

... the Mall of Arabia, the world's largest shopping mall.

"One of the issues becoming obvious in the aviation industry is that it is not about the United States anymore. It's an extraordinary shift in power."

See also:

Mubadala Development Co. and Lockheed Martin will create a UAE-based company to service Block 60 F16 fighter planes in the Persian Gulf emirate, an executive said Tuesday.

The UAE has begun to take delivery of 82 of Lockheed's latest Block 60 F16 fighters.

The objective is to diversify away from heavy reliance on oil and energy and to develop the sustainability of a broad-based economy for the fast-growing United Arab Emirates.

Emirates aims to redraw world aviation map

Herb Lin's latest report.

In the past several years, cybersecurity has been transformed from a concern chiefly of computer scientists and information system managers to an issue of pressing national importance.

Today, there is an inadequate understanding of what makes IT systems vulnerable to attack, how best to reduce these vulnerabilities, and how to transfer cybersecurity knowledge to actual practice. For these reasons, and in response to both legislative and executive branch interest, the National Research Council (NRC) established the Committee on Improving Cybersecurity Research in the United States. The committee was charged with developing a strategy for cybersecurity research in the 21st century.

... The committee identified several principles that should shape the cybersecurity research agenda:

Conduct cybersecurity research as though its application will be important.
Hedge against uncertainty in the nature and severity of the future cybersecurity
Ensure programmatic continuity.
Respect the need for breadth in the research agenda.
Disseminate new knowledge and artifacts (e.g., software and hardware prototypes) to the research community.

...

Toward a Safer and More Secure Cyberspace

These are my notes from the keynote session MapReduce, BigTable, and Other Distributed System Abstractions for Handling Large Datasets by Jeff Dean.

The talk was about the three pillars of Google's data storage and processing platform; GFS, BigTable and MapReduce.

...

Google hires smart people and lets them work in small teams of 3 to 5 people. They can get away with teams being that small because they have the benefit of an infrastructure that takes care of all the hard problems so devs can focus on building interesting, innovative apps.

Are your hard problems taken care of?

If not, find three smart people.

Google Scalability Conference Trip Report

We analyze three new consumer electronic gadgets in order to gauge the privacy and security trends in mass-market UbiComp devices.

Our study of the Slingbox Pro uncovers a new information leakage vector for encrypted streaming multimedia. By exploiting properties of variable bitrate encoding schemes, we show that a passive adversary can determine with high probability the movie that a user is watching via her Slingbox, even when the Slingbox uses encryption. We experimentally evaluated our method against a database of over 100 hours of network traces for 26 distinct movies.

Despite an opportunity to provide significantly more location privacy than existing devices, like RFIDs, we find that an attacker can trivially exploit the Nike iPod Sport Kit's design to track users; we demonstrate this with a GoogleMaps-based distributed surveillance system. We also uncover security issues with the way Microsoft Zunes manage their social relationships.

We show how these products' designers could have significantly raised the bar against some of our attacks. We also use some of our attacks to motivate fundamental security and privacy challenges for future UbiComp devices.

Devices That Tell On You

“We are clearly at the point where captchas have hit diminishing returns.”

Have captchas become too hard for humans?