Random Accesses

Software vulnerabilities that take days or weeks to fix may one day be a thing of the past. A team of researchers have presented new software, called ClearView, that automatically patches errors in deployed software in a matter of minutes.

As Technology Review reports, ClearView works without assistance from humans and without access to a program’s underlying source code. Instead, it monitors the behavior of a binary: the form the program takes in order to execute instructions on a computer’s hardware.

A paper, Automatically Patching Errors in Deployed Software, published by the Association for Computing Machinery, explains how ClearView works as five sequential steps.

Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1879&tag=col1;post-1879

A novel navigation system under development at Microsoft aims to tweak users' visual memory with carefully chosen video clips of a route. Developed with researchers from the University of Konstanz in Germany, the software creates video using 360-degree panoramic images of the street that are strung together. Such images have already been gathered by several different mapping companies for many roads around the world. The navigation system, called Videomap, adjusts the speed of the video and the picture to highlight key areas along the route.

"What we wanted to do is build a system where we could give [drivers] those visual cues before they got into the car," says Billy Chen, a researcher at Virtual Earth Labs, the research division of Microsoft Virtual Earth. Ideally, he says, the driver would feel as if she's driven the route before, even if she's never been on those streets.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23711/?a=f

New research from the University of Southampton has demonstrated that it is possible for communication from person to person through the power of thought alone.

Looking to take brain-computer interfaces (BCI) to the next level, Dr. Christopher James from the University’s Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, set out to show that brain-to-brain (B2B) communication is possible. Utilizing electrodes, computers, and the internet, he claims that his experiment is a “proof of concept” that shows, for the first time, true brain to brain interfacing.

Dr James noted: “Whilst BCI is no longer a new thing and person to person communication via the nervous system was shown previously in work by Professor Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading, here we show, for the first time, true brain to brain interfacing.

Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1819

The physicists at UC San Diego that a year ago created the first integrated circuit using particles called excitons, now have discovered a technique that allows for operation at commercially cold temperatures.

This brings the possibility of a new type of extremely fast computer based on excitons closer to reality. When commercialized, the technology could speed computing and communications by better integrating electronic circuits and optical data communications.

Leonid Butov, a professor of physics at UCSD, is leading the research team that previously demonstrated an integrated circuit capable of working at 1.5 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero, or minus 457 degrees Fahrenheit. That temperature is less than the average temperature of deep space (-454.67 F), and achievable only in special research laboratories.

But now, the scientists report that they succeeded in building an integrated circuit that operates at 125 degrees Kelvin (minus 234 degrees Fahrenheit), a temperature that can be “easily” attained commercially with liquid nitrogen, a substance that costs about as much per liter as gasoline. The discovery is detailed in the latest online issue of the journal Nature Photonics.

Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1793

For decades, researchers have been trying to combine semiconductor materials that have different and potentially complementary characteristics into a single microchip. Now, an MIT team has finally succeeded in this effort, an advance that could point to a way of overcoming fundamental barriers of size and speed facing today's silicon chips.

The standard semiconductor material for most of today's computer chips is silicon, and the main way engineers have improved the speed of silicon chips so far is to keep making them smaller. But silicon chips are now approaching their fundamental size limits, says Tomas Palacios, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "We won't be able to continue improving silicon by scaling it down for long," he says. "It's very difficult to make them a lot smaller."

Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/palacios-chip-091509.html