Thursday 30 May 2013
Wednesday 29 May 2013
Google I/O 2013 - live
Google's annual developer conference Google I/O is under way in San Francisco. Google Glass, the future of Android, and Chrome are set to be the hottest topics. Its strategy to take on Apple is also likely to feature. You can watch live below. I/O, by the way, is geek-speak for input/output. See the full schedule and follow our live blog of the keynote here
SAP Named Global Market Leader in Business Intelligence by Gartner
SAP today announced it has been positioned by Gartner as the leader in its Market Share Analysis: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management, 2012 report.* In the report SAP ranks number one with a 22.1 percent market share across business intelligence (BI), analytics and performance management in 2012. SAP was also recognized as a leader in the 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Suites.
“We believe to once again be named a leader in market share by Gartner is validation of our strategy of providing our customers with best-of-breed BI, analytics and performance management solutions,” said Adam Binnie, general manager and global vice president, Business Intelligence, SAP. “Our job at SAP is to help customers unlock the hidden value in their data. We are doing this by providing a holistic set of solutions and technologies that help organizations harness the power of big data, social, enterprise, mobile and cloud technologies to their strategic advantage.”
SAP is the leader in developing analytics solutions that help companies revolutionize their decision-making process. Organizations invest in SAP solutions to become more informed, aligned and adaptable in order to achieve amazing results. SAP recently announced innovations in BI, including SAP Lumira software, designed to provide one suite for all insight, one place for all information and one standard for enterprise BI. Analytics solutions from SAP generate a personal, trusted, interactive view of information from the chaos of big data, empowering individuals, teams and business networks to go beyond business as usual.
For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.
*Market Share Analysis: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management, 2012, Dan Sommer, Bhavish Sood, May 7, 2013.
New Software Spots, Isolates Cyber-Attacks to Protect Networked Control Systems
Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a software algorithm that detects and isolates cyber-attacks on networked control systems -- which are used to coordinate transportation, power and other infrastructure across the United States.
Networked control systems are essentially pathways that connect and coordinate activities between computers and physical devices. For example, the systems that connect temperature sensors, heating systems and user controls in modern buildings are networked control systems.
But, on a much larger scale, these systems are also becoming increasingly important to national infrastructure, such as transportation and power. And, because they often rely on wireless or Internet connections, these systems are vulnerable to cyber-attacks. "Flame" and "Stuxnet" are examples of costly, high-profile attacks on networked control systems in recent years.
As networked control systems have grown increasingly large and complex, system designers have moved away from having system devices -- or "agents" -- coordinate their activities through a single, centralized computer hub, or brain. Instead, designers have created "distributed network control systems" (D-NCSs) that allow all of the system agents to work together, like a bunch of mini-brains, to coordinate their activities. This allows the systems to operate more efficiently. And now these distributed systems can also operate more securely.
NC State researchers have developed a software algorithm that can detect when an individual agent in a D-NCS has been compromised by a cyber-attack. The algorithm then isolates the compromised agent, protecting the rest of the system and allowing it to continue functioning normally. This gives D-NCSs resilience and security advantages over systems that rely on a central computer hub, because the centralized design means the entire system would be compromised if the central computer is hacked.
"In addition, our security algorithm can be incorporated directly into the code used to operate existing distributed control systems, with minor modifications," says Dr. Mo-Yuen Chow, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper on the work. "It would not require a complete overhaul of existing systems."
"We have demonstrated that the system works, and are now moving forward with additional testing under various cyber-attack scenarios to optimize the algorithm's detection rate and system performance," says Wente Zeng, a Ph.D. student at NC State and lead author of the paper.
The paper, "Convergence and Recovery Analysis of the Secure Distributed Control Methodology for D-NCS," will be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Electronics, May 28-31, in Taipei, Taiwan. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Minus Environment, Patterns Still Emerge: Computational Study Tracks E. Coli Cells' Regulatory Mechanisms
Environment is not the only factor in shaping regulatory patterns -- and it might not even be the primary factor, according to a new Rice University study that looks at how cells' protein networks relate to a bacteria's genome.
The Rice lab of computer scientist Luay Nakhleh reported in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that when environmental factors are eliminated from an evolutionary model, mutations and genetic drift can give rise to the patterns that appear. They studied changes that show up in regulatory networks that determine the organism's characteristics.
Nakhleh and lead author Troy Ruths, a Rice graduate student, said their work is an important step toward understanding Cis-regulatory networks (CRNs), which play a dominant role in cells' information processing systems. Cis -- a Latin word for "on the same side as" -- regulators are regions of DNA (or RNA) that regulate the expression of genes located on the same DNA molecule.
The researchers generated 1,000 computer models of randomEscherichia coli regulatory networks and watched them evolve through millions of generations. However, they did not program into the models environmental factors that might have prompted change through natural selection. Their results supported other studies that suggested networks might evolve spontaneously through mutation, recombination, gene duplication and genetic drift.
Their "neutral evolutionary" approach sidestepped one taken by other researchers who, Nakhleh said, have tried to understand cellular protein networks by looking at motifs. These motifs are short sequences called subgraphs in the network that appear more frequently than is expected by chance alone. "Biological networks are complex systems, and the community has responded by developing lots of mathematical and sophisticated computational analysis tools to understand these networks," he said. Those researchers argued the emergence and conservation of these regulatory motifs were largely due to adaptation to environment; the Rice researchers argued that isn't necessarily so.
Nakhleh said he and Ruths decided to tie what scientists now know about the genome -- the entire collection of an organism's DNA -- to the evolution of such networks.
"Instead of jumping directly to the network, where we don't understand much, we decided to look back at our broad knowledge about the genome and link it to these networks," he said. "In this paper, we zoomed in on the issue of how much of what we see in the network is a result of neutral evolution, where there's no selection involved. How much of what we are seeing is a side effect, so to speak, of random mutations and genetic drift?"
The wealth of genomic data available for E. coli encouraged the Rice researchers to build a sophisticated model that matched Cis-regulatory networks to their related DNA. "If there is any model in the prokaryotic world that has been studied well and has data, it's E. coli," Nakhleh said.
Their conclusion, put simply by the paper, is that "neutral evolution acting on genomic properties" can indeed explain bacterial regulatory patterns.
"There are two sides to the paper," Nakhleh said. "One is that many of these motifs have nothing adaptive in their origin. They emerge because mutation is a random process.
"The second and, I think, more powerful part of the story is that for the first time, the extent of neutrality in a network has been quantified. … Our model will never be able to tell you, 'I can rule out adaptation from this.' What we are saying is that you do not need to invoke adaptation to explain what you are seeing.
"Now we can start to understand how changes at the genome level can result in how these networks form, what some researchers are calling the 'design principles' behind these networks," Nakhleh said. "I don't think there is anything being designed here, so to speak. Patterns emerge in response to mutations; genetic drift and selection then affect the frequencies of these patterns. We showed that genetic drift can explain much of these frequencies."
The National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Guggenheim Foundation supported the research. Nakhleh is an associate professor of computer science and ecology and evolutionary biology.
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