Carnegie Mellon Technique Accelerates Biological Image Analysis

Carnegie Mellon University Lane Center for Computational Biology researchers have improved an algorithm that automatically analyzes cell cultures and biological specimens. The new technique improves the efficiency of the belief propagation algorithm, a widely used method for drawing conclusions about interconnected networks and promises to allow for more accurate analysis [...]

Electronic ‘Pet’ Could Replace Passwords and PINs

Northumbria University psychologist and computer scientist Pamela Briggs and Newcastle University computer scientist Patrick Olivier say portable electronic pets capable of recognizing their owner’s voice and walking style could replace passwords and PINs to secure personal information. Instead of storing a person’s biometric signature in a database, that [...]

New Software Allows ISPs and P2P Users to Get Along Without Getting Too Cozy

Northwestern University researchers have developed Ono, software that eases the strain that peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing services place on Internet service providers (ISPs). Ono allows users to efficiently identify nearby P2P users and requires no cooperation or trust between ISPs and P2P users. Ono, the Hawaiian word for delicious, [...]

Closing the Achievement Gap in Math and Science

The latest results from the National Science Foundation’s Math and Science Partnership (MSP) program show that elementary and middle-school students have improved their proficiency in math and science, and that the achievement gaps between African-American and Hispanic students and white students in elementary school math, and between African-American and white [...]

White House Plans Proactive Cyber-Security Role for Spy Agencies

The White House could soon announce a policy in which U.S. spy agencies would play a role in collecting intelligence on cybersecurity threats, said an anonymous administration official. The official noted that the intelligence community is uniquely poised to counter cyberattackers who are continuously developing new intrusion strategies and [...]

Pursuing the Next Level of Artificial Intelligence

Stanford University researcher Daphne Koller’s work in artificial intelligence, which has earned her the first-ever ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences, taps an 18th-century probability theorem, and her methods have been used to enhance computer vision systems and in understanding natural language, while future applications are expected to drive [...]

How To Keep Your Virtual Servers Safe

Virtualization requires the same security as a physical system, including antivirus, intrusion-protection and intrusion-detection systems. It also poses some unique threats, such as the virtualization application itself being prone to attack. We spoke with one expert to learn more about the risks and how to keep your virtual servers safe.

Yahoo Searches Will Use McAfee for Security Alerts

On Tuesday, Yahoo and McAfee announced a partnership to make the Yahoo Search experience safer. Launched in beta, the new SearchScan feature, powered by McAfee SiteAdvisor technology, offers always-on alerts for sites with security concerns involving spyware, adware and other malicious software. McAfee SiteAdvisor tests and rates nearly every trafficked site on the Internet.
SearchScan [...]

Oracle: ‘We just don’t care’ about Sun-MySQL Merger’

Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect predicts the Sun-MySQL merger will have little impact on his company or on Linux.
In an interview with the Linux Foundation, Edward Screven, who reports directly to Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison, maintains Sun’s patronage of its open source rival won’t affect Oracle sales. MySQL is an open source database, while Oracle’s database [...]