News Update :: Tuesday, April 4, 2006

• 04/03/06

CT News Update:
An Online Newsletter from Campus Technology

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News for Tuesday, April 4, 2006

1] Carnegie Mellon Inaugurates Department of Machine Learning
2] Harvard, Berkeley Study: Phishing Victims Missing the Boat
3] U.S. News Rankings: MIT Tops, Followed by the Usual Suspects
4] Rensselaer 1998 Grad Endows Quarter-Million Dollar Fellowship
5] Contracts, Deals, Awards in Higher Education
6] MIT Media Labs Device Signals if You Are Being Annoying

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1] Carnegie Mellon Inaugurates Department of Machine Learning

Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science is re-christening its Center for Automated Learning and Discovery (CALD) as the Department of Machine Learning to recognize advances in the science of machine learning and its significance to computer vision, speech recognition, and data mining. Tom M. Mitchell, the Fredkin Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Learning, heads the department. It is the first to offer a Ph.D. in the field of machine learning.

The roots of machine learning extend back almost 50 years, when a few researchers began to explore whether it was possible to develop software that could improve its performance by learning from experience. In speech recognition systems, for instance, machine learning has proven to be vital not only for initially training the system to understand the spoken word, but also for customizing each system to respond to the speech patterns of individual users. 'The niche where machine learning will be used is growing rapidly as applications grow in complexity and as we develop more accurate learning algorithms,' Mitchell said.

'The transition from the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery to the Machine Learning Department recognizes the emergence of machine learning as a rigorous academic discipline,” said Randal Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science. Bryant added that the discipline had “fostered especially strong ties between the School of Computer Science and the Statistics Department, providing computer scientists with more rigorous mathematical tools, and statisticians with new challenges and opportunities.'

2] Harvard, Berkeley Study: Phishing Victims Missing the Boat

Researchers from Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley have found that the high rate at which people are tricked by email-based “phishing” attacks is due mainly to the fact that many users still don’t comprehend the most basic Internet security warnings and precautions.

Rachna Dhamija at Harvard and J.D. Tygar and Marti Hearst at Berkeley, writing in a paper called “Why Phishing Works,” said they analyzed a large set of captured phishing attacks and developed hypotheses about the types of users that are vulnerable to the attack strategies. Then they assessed their hypotheses in a study that asked 22 people to look at 20 Web sites and asked them to determine which ones were fraudulent.

“We found that 23 percent of the participants did not look at browser-based cues such as the address bar, status bar and the security indicators, leading to incorrect choices 40 percent of the time,” the researchers wrote. “We also found that some visual deception attacks can fool even the most sophisticated users. These results illustrate that standard security indicators are not effective for a substantial fraction of users, and suggest that alternative approaches are needed. ”

The researchers also found the best phishing site was able to fool more than 90 percent of participants. Pop-up warnings about fraudulent certificates also proved ineffective with 15 out of 22 participants.

To download the paper, visit:
http://people.deas.harvard.edu/~rachna/
papers/why_phishing_works.pdf

3] U.S. News Rankings: MIT Tops, Followed by the Usual Suspects

It’s that time of year again. U.S. News & World Report has released its annual rankings of higher education institutions. Most of the usual suspects held rank, proving once again how difficult it is to dislodge an incumbent, whether that’s a brand, a politician, or a group of dedicated trustees.

According to the magazine, the top graduate departments of engineering are located in these schools in declining order: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign, Purdue University, the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Southern California, and the California Institute of Technology.

The top four graduate departments in computer engineering are located at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of California at Berkeley. The top graduate electronic and communications engineering programs can be found at MIT, Stanford and U.C. Berkeley.

For more information, visit
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/home.htm

4] Rensselaer 1998 Grad Endows Quarter-Million Dollar Fellowship

Ajit Prabhu, who earned 1998 masters degree in biomedical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic University, announced he would contribute $250,000 to the school’s endowment. Interest from the gift will fund fellowships to support master’s and doctoral degree candidates, with a preference for those studying biomedical engineering.

Prabhe is now chief executive officer of QuEST, a provider of product development and engineering to companies in the aerospace, automotive, energy, and industrial products fields. He also earned a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Old Dominion University, Virginia, and a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Karnataka University, India.

'Hailing from a small town in India, born and brought up in a middle-class family, going to America for education in itself was a dream,” said Prabhe.

For more information, visit
http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/
mar312006/update920302006331.asp

5] Contracts, Deals, Awards in Higher Education

>>> The University of Minnesota, which serves 60,000 students on five campuses, is consolidating its storage resources onto a single high-performance storage area network, or SAN. 'It's a typical story for university environments,' said Carl Follstad, manager of data management services at the university. 'We had a lot of little islands of storage, perfectly reliable, but not scalable. There were also requirements for information-sharing between systems that couldn't be met because they were not connected. The next natural step was to consolidate storage onto a SAN.'

The university is using Cisco Inc. fabric switches and directors to build the storage area network. The new environment hosts 300 terabytes of storage, 300 ports, and 60 hosts all interconnected by Fibre Channel technology. Hosted data can include anything from student content and materials, data warehouses, and imaging applications to production and research databases.

For more information visit
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps5023
/products_case_study0900aecd802b1d7f.shtml

>>> Tulane University’s Center for Applied Environmental Public Health extended its license for LearnLinc virtual classroom. The center currently offers two to three courses each night, four nights a week, three semesters a year through the virtual classroom from iLinc Communications. With the company’s support, the center was able to get its distance learning network back online within weeks of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

To learn more, visit
http://interestalert.com/story/siteia.shtmlStory=st/sn/
03280000aaa01351.prn&Sys=siteia&Fid=EDUCATIO
&Type=News&Filter=Education

>>> Duke University has joined the Open Student Television Network (OSTN), which offers collegiate television programming over a nationwide network of campus affiliates. OSTN currently runs programming ranging from morning talk shows like 'Good Morning Emerson' from ECTV at Emerson College, soap operas like 'Ivory Tower' from HRTV at Harvard University, and dating shows like 'Blind Date' from YTV at Yale University.

OSTN uses Abilene -- Internet2's nationwide high-speed backbone network -- to deliver OSTN student-produced programming to Internet2's 3 million users at 208 campuses and 34 state education networks. As an Internet2 member, Duke University can receive OSTN programming from the Abilene network.

For more information, visit
http://www.ostn.tv

6] MIT Media Labs Device Signals if You Are Being Annoying

MIT's Media Lab researchers are working on a computer-based prosthetic device that can let you know if you are boring people. The Emotional Social Intelligence Prosthetic Device was developed to help people with autism keep track of how they are being received by those around them. The device was created to help ease the discomfort that autistic people feel when those around them suddenly become annoyed or want to leave. Some people with autism struggle by being unable to pick up signals from people showing boredom or confusion.

The device is a camera, small enough to be attached to a pair of glasses, that is attached to a hand-held computer. The computer runs software that recognizes images and the emotions that those images suggest. In a recent test, the software was demonstrated to show whether a person was agreeing, disagreeing, concentrating, or showing disinterest, from only a few seconds of video footage. When someone you are talking to is acting bored or disinterested, the computer would vibrate, letting the camera-wearer know an emotional change is occurring in the other person.

For more information visit:
http://affect.media.mit.edu/projectpages/esp/

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Campus Technology 2006

July 31-August 3
Boston, MA

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