NEXI - Robot with facial expressions

 

 

A latest invention by MIT Media Lab is a new robot that is able to show various facial expressions such as 'slanting its eyebrows in anger', or 'raise them in surprise', and show a wide assortment of facial expressions while communicating with people.

This latest achievement in the field of Robotics is named NEXI as it is framed as the next generation robots which is aimed for a range of applications for personal robots and human-robot teamwork.

DESIGNING

The head and face of NEXI were designed by Xitome Design which is a innovative designing and development company that specializes in robotic design and development. The expressive robotics started with a neck mechanism sporting 4 degrees of freedom (DoF) at the base, plus pan-tilt-yaw of the head itself. The mechanism has been constructed to time the movements so they mimic human speed. The face of NEXI has been specially designed to use gaze, eyebrows, eyelids and an articulate mandible which helps in expressing a wide range of different emotions.

The chassis of NEXI is also advanced. It has been developed by the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics UMASS (University of Massachusetts), Amherst. This chassis is based on the uBot5 mobile manipulator. The mobile base can balance dynamically on two wheels. The arms of NEXI can pick up a weight of up to 10 pounds and the plastic covering of the chassis can detect any kind of human touch.

CYNTHIA BREAZEAL: HEAD OF THE PROJECT

This project was headed by Media Lab's Cynthia Breazeal, a well known robotics expert famous for earlier expressive robots such as Kismet. She is an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT. She named her new product as an MDS (mobile, dextrous, social) robot.




FEATURES OF NEXI

Except a wide range of facial expressions, Nexi has many other features. It has self-balancing wheels like the Segway transporter, to ultimately ride on. Currently it uses an additional set of supportive wheels to operate as a statically stable platform in its early stage of development. It has hands which can be used to manipulate objects, eyes (video cameras), ears (an array of microphones), and a 3-D infrared camera and laser rangefinder which support real-time tracking of objects, people and voices as well as indoor navigation.

3-Dimensional Computer Processor

Scientist at University of Rochesterb have developed a new generation of Computer Processors. These processors are based on 3-Dimensional Circuits in contrary to 2-Dimensional Circuits of today.

This can be said as the next major advance in computer processors technology. The latest 3-D processor is running at 1.4 gigahertz in the labs of University.

PAST ATTEMPTS VS LATEST RESEARCH

In the past attempts of making 3-D chips, scientist were just making a stack of regular processors. But at University of Rochesterb it was designed and built specifically to optimize all key processing functions vertically, through multiple layers of processors, the same way ordinary chips optimize functions horizontally.

This design means that every tasks such as Synchronicity, Power Distribution, and Long-Distance Signaling are all fully functioning in three dimensions for the first time.

EBY FRIEDMAN: THE MAN BEHIND 3-D CHIPS

Eby Friedman and his students has designed this chip, which uses many of the tricks of regular processors, but also accounts for different impedances that might occur from chip to chip, different operating speeds, and different power requirements. According to Eby Friedman, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rochester and faculty director of the pro of the processor says:- "I call it a cube now, because it's not just a chip anymore. This is the way computing is going to have to be done in the future. When the chips are flush against each other, they can do things you could never do with a regular 2D chip"




TODAYS INTEGRATED CHIPS AND PROBLEMS

The problem with today's technology of integrated circuits is that, beyond a limit it is impossible to pack more chips next to each other which limits the capabilities of future processors. So number of integrated circuit designers anticipate someday expanding into the third dimension, stacking transistors on top of each other.

IMPORTANCE

Vertical Expansion of chips has lots of technical difficulties and the only solution to this is to design a 3-D chip where all the layers interact like a single system. According to Friedman: Getting all three levels of the 3-D chip to act in harmony is like trying to devise a traffic control system for the entire United States-and then layering two more United States above the first and somehow getting every bit of traffic from any point on any level to its destination on any other level-while simultaneously coordinating the traffic of millions of other drivers.
Now if we replace the two United States layers to something more complicated like China and India where the driving laws and roads are quite different, and the complexity and challenge of designing a single control system to work in any chip begins to become apparent.

The 3-D Chip is essentially an entire circuit board folded up into a tiny package. With this technology the chips inside something like an iPod could be compacted to a tenth their current size with ten times the speed.

Forget Windows: Midori is coming

 

WINDOWS is a name that has ruled the whole computer world since its first launch in November 1985. Since then it is like a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

With many advanced versions of Windows available today such as Windows XP, Windows Vista, it is the most used operating system in the world. In 2010, Microsoft is going to launch WINDOWS 2007, but now here is time to experience a yet another technology of operating systems.

Yes, MICROSOFT is working on a new generation of operating systems called Cloud-Based Operating System and rumors are there that MIDORI will be their first such operating system, which will replace Windows fully from computer map.

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE

MIDORI is an offshoot of Microsoft Research's Singularity operating system. In this the tools and libraries are completely managed code. MIDORI is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), will be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process.

MIDORI can be also seen as MICROSOFT'S answer those competitors who are applying "Virtualization" as a mean to solving issues within contemporary computing.

The main idea behind MIDORI is to develop a lightweight portable OS which can be mated easily to lots of various applications.

IMPORTANCE OF MIDORI

For knowing the importance of MIDORI you have to think about, how an operating system is loaded on a computer. Actually operating system is loaded onto a hard disk physically located on that machine. In this way, the operating system is tied very tightly to that hardware. As Windows is dependent on hardware, it might face opposition from contemporary ways of working because people are extremely mobile in using different devices in order get diverse information.

Due to this trend installing different applications on a single computer may led to different compatibility issues whenever the machine require updating. The new operating system will solve these problems by the concept of Virtualizing. This will solve problems such as widespread security vulnerabilities, unexpected interactions among different applications, failures caused by errant extensions, plug-ins, and drivers and many more.

ERIC RUDDER, Senior Vice President, Technical Strategy

The importance of this project for MICROSOFT can be understood by the fact that company choose Eric Rudder , former head of Microsoft's server and tools business and a key member of Chairman Bill Gates' faction of the company, to handle it.

WHEN WILL IT BE LAUNCHED

Just Wait and See. Microsoft has not declared any such date about launching of MIDORI, but there are rumors that this project is in incubation phase.

New version of Yahoo IM worm hits Skype too

This screenshot shows the different types of messages the worm distributes via Skype and Yahoo Instant Messenger.

 

On the heels of a worm that was installing backdoors on Windows systems via Yahoo Instant Messenger comes a new worm that is even more sophisticated in its social engineering and payload.

The malware arrives via instant message through Yahoo or Skype with any one of a number of messages, including "Does my new hair style look good? bad? perfect?" or "My printer is about to be thrown through a window if this pic won't come out right. You see anything wrong with it?" 

The message includes a link to a Web page that looks like it leads to a JPEG, or image file. When the link is clicked on, the browser displays an interface that looks like the RapidShare Web hosting site and offers up a ZIP file for download. The extracted file is actually an executable file with a .com extension.

The malware, detected as "W32.Skyhoo.Worm," disappears if the computer does not have Skype or Yahoo Messenger installed. It automatically sends messages with varying content and malicious links to contacts in the victim's IM list and automatically injects a malicious link in e-mail messages and Word or Excel files that the user is composing.

The worm also connects to an IRC server to receive remote commands, blocks antivirus software, uses a rootkit technique to hide its files and processes and automatically copies itself onto USB drives to spread.

This is the page that the malware displays if a victim clicks on the link in the message.

The internet, as imagined in 1965

Bloggers, mind control and the death of newspapers

A fascinating insight into how the world might look in the future, from the 1960s, comes courtesy of veteran science editor Nigel Calder.

As editor of the New Scientist in 1964 Calder commissioned a hundred scientists to imagine the world 20 years hence. What 'major technological revolutions' might we see? Number one was "the revolution in information", inspired by the British computing pioneer Maurice Wilkes, who turns 97 next month.

WorldBox

For the BBC three years later, the two mocked up what they called the World Box a networked computer, nicely illustrated here. It's uncanny now to look at the resulting consequences from digital networks the boffins predicted. These included ubiquitous communications and information services, government surveillance, "world wide instantaneous reporting", and "No more newspapers as we know them?".

"The work of commercial and professional organisations will be transformed," he predicted in 1969. There may be no very clear distinction between authors, scholars, publishers, librarians, television producers or anyone else who can be called an information mediator – but it will be their task to save mankind from drowning in its own information."

Calder invites us to have a giggle, but really it's not a bad list at all, and compared with the (cough) 'futurists' who have come and gone since, Calder and the participants did a good job. Alvin Toffler was repackaging these ideas, particularly mass amateurisation, many years later. As are thousands of Web 2.0 consultants today.

One aspect of the Intertubes that predictions from the 60s didn't cover was the way in which the information networks would be used for exchanging media. Given the expense of core memory then, it was probably unimaginable. It needed the mass production of lots of cheap transistors before that became a possibility.

Also on the scientists' list from the era was the possibility of climate control, globalisation (what's called 'footloose industries'), and longer life. These reflect an optimism and confidence in human technological progress quite absent today.

Then again, a couple of other items show some of the paranoia of the late 60s too. There's concern about "mind control" and "Loss of individuality by surgical implantation?".

New attack bypasses virtually all AV protection

Bait, switch, exploit!

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco 

Researchers say they've devised a way to bypass protections built in to dozens of the most popular desktop anti-virus products, including those offered by McAfee, Trend Micro, AVG, and BitDefender.
The method, developed by software security researchers at matousec.com, works by exploiting the driver hooks the anti-virus programs bury deep inside the Windows operating system. In essence, it works by sending them a sample of benign code that passes their security checks and then, before it's executed, swaps it out with a malicious payload.

The exploit has to be timed just right so the benign code isn't switched too soon or too late. But for systems running on multicore processors, matousec's "argument-switch" attack is fairly reliable because one thread is often unable to keep track of other simultaneously running threads. As a result, the vast majority of malware protection offered for Windows PCs can be tricked into allowing malicious code that under normal conditions would be blocked.

All that's required is that the AV software use SSDT, or System Service Descriptor Table, hooks to modify parts of the OS kernel.

"We have performed tests with [most of] today's Windows desktop security products," the researchers wrote. "The results can be summarized in one sentence: If a product uses SSDT hooks or other kind of kernel mode hooks on similar level to implement security features it is vulnerable. In other words, 100% of the tested products were found vulnerable."

The researchers listed 34 products that they said were susceptible to the attack, but the list was limited by the amount of time they had for testing. "Otherwise, the list would be endless," they said.

The technique works even when Windows is running under an account with limited privileges.

Still, the exploit has its limitations. It requires a large amount of code to be loaded onto the targeted machine, making it impractical for shellcode-based attacks or attacks that rely on speed and stealth. It can also be carried out only when an attacker already has the ability to run a binary on the targeted PC.

Still, the technique might be combined with an exploit of another piece of software, say, a vulnerable version of Adobe Reader or Oracle's Java Virtual Machine to install malware without arousing the suspicion of the any AV software the victim was using.

"Realistic scenario: someone uses McAfee or another affected product to secure their desktops," H D Moore, CSO and Chief Architect of the Metasploit project, told The Register in an instant message. "A malware developer abuses this race condition to bypass the system call hooks, allowing the malware to install itself and remove McAfee. In that case, all of the 'protection' offered by the product is basically moot."

A user without administrative rights could also use the attack to kill an installed and running AV, even though only admin accounts should be able to do this, Charlie Miller, principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, said.

Worm spreading via Yahoo Messenger !!!

A worm is spreading via Yahoo Instant Messenger Thursday that tricks people into downloading what they think is a photo from a friend but is instead malware that installs a backdoor on Windows systems and spreads to a victim's IM contacts.

The worm arrives via a message from a contact with the word "photo" or "photos" and a smiley face icon, along with a link to a Web site resembling a Facebook page, MySpace page, or some other page where photos might reside.

If the user clicks on the link on a Macintosh system, an executable file will be downloaded, but no further action will occur. On a Windows system, the executable will download and if the user runs the file, the computer will become infected and the malicious message will be distributed to all of the IM contacts.
"Once run, the worm copies itself to %WinDir%\infocard.exe, then it adds itself to the Windows Firewall List," modifies registry keys, and stops the Windows Updates service, according to Symantec.

Symantec detects the malware as W32.Yimfoca and said it affects Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows Me, Windows Vista, Windows NT, Windows Server 2003, and Windows 2000.

"It's very dangerous," Zulfikar Ramzan, technical director at Symantec Security Response, said in an interview. "When you get an IM from someone you know you're more likely to click on it."

The worm drops software onto infected computers that can be used to turn them into zombies on a botnet, he said. But, once that back door is on the compromised system anything really is possible, he added.
BitDefender said in a blog post that the "aggressive" worm is part of a family of worms that can intercept passwords and other sensitive data.

Security firm Bkis also has information on the worm, which has been spreading throughout the week.
Yahoo said in a blog post that it was aware of the issue and working to address it.

"We recently learned of an issue where some users have received spam messages from their contact list.

Yahoo Messenger has quickly worked to resolve the situation," the post said. "As always, we recommend that any Yahoo Messenger user who receives a suspicious instant message with a link first IM their friend to ensure the message is legitimate before moving forward. Users should not download executable (.exe) files that are sent through Yahoo Messenger." Internet users should also keep their antivirus up to date, Yahoo recommended.

Web Services

Web services are typically application programming interfaces (API) or web APIs that can be accessed over a network, such as the Internet, and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services.

In common usage the term refers to clients and servers that communicate over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) protocol used on the web. Such services tend to fall into one of two camps: Big Web Services[1] and RESTful Web Services.

"Big Web Services" use Extensible Markup Language (XML) messages that follow the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) standard and have been popular with traditional enterprise. In such systems, there is often a machine-readable description of the operations offered by the service written in the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The latter is not a requirement of a SOAP endpoint, but it is a prerequisite for automated client-side code generation in many Java and .NET SOAP frameworks (frameworks such as Spring, Apache Axis2 and Apache CXF being notable exceptions). Some industry organizations, such as the WS-I, mandate both SOAP and WSDL in their definition of a web service.
Web services in a service-oriented architecture.

More recently, REpresentational State Transfer (REST) (RESTful web services are those conforming to the REST constraints) the REST web services have been regaining popularity, particularly with Internet companies. By using the PUT, GET and DELETE HTTP methods, alongside POST, these are often better integrated with HTTP and web browsers than SOAP-based services. They do not require XML messages or WSDL service-API definitions.

Web API is a development in web services (in a movement called Web 2.0) where emphasis has been moving away from Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) based services towards more direct Representational State Transfer (REST) style communications.[2] Web APIs allow the combination of multiple web services into new applications known as mashups.[3]

When used in the context of web development, web API is typically a defined set of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request messages along with a definition of the structure of response messages, usually expressed in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format.

When running composite web services, each sub service can be considered autonomous. The user has no control over these services. Also the web services themselves are not reliable; the service provider may remove, change or update their services without giving notice to users. The reliability and fault tolerance is not well supported; faults may happen during the execution. Exception handling in the context of web services is still an open research issue.

USE OF WEB SERVICE :


Web services are a set of tools that can be used in a number of ways. The three most common styles of use are RPC, SOA and REST.
[edit] Remote procedure calls
Architectural elements involved in the XML-RPC.

RPC Web services present a distributed function (or method) call interface that is familiar with many developers. Typically, the basic unit of RPC Web services is the WSDL operation.

The first Web services tools were focused on RPC, and as a result this style is widely deployed and supported. However, it is sometimes criticized for not being loosely coupled, because it was often implemented by mapping services directly to language-specific functions or method calls. Many vendors felt this approach to be a dead end, and pushed for RPC to be disallowed in the WS-I Basic Profile.

Other approaches with nearly the same functionality as RPC are Object Management Group's (OMG) Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), Microsoft's Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) or Sun Microsystems's Java/Remote Method Invocation (RMI).
[edit] Service-oriented architecture

Web services can also be used to implement an architecture according to Service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts, where the basic unit of communication is a message, rather than an operation. This is often referred to as "message-oriented" services.

SOA Web services are supported by most major software vendors and industry analysts. Unlike RPC Web services, loose coupling is more likely, because the focus is on the "contract" that WSDL provides, rather than the underlying implementation details.

Middleware Analysts use Enterprise Service Buses which combine message-oriented processing and Web Services to create an Event-driven SOA. One example of an open-source ESB is Mule, another one is Open ESB.
[edit] Representational state transfer

Representational State Transfer (REST) attempts to describe architectures which use HTTP or similar protocols by constraining the interface to a set of well-known, standard operations (like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE for HTTP). Here, the focus is on interacting with stateful resources, rather than messages or operations.

An architecture based on REST (one that is 'RESTful') can use WSDL to describe SOAP messaging over HTTP, can be implemented as an abstraction purely on top of SOAP (e.g., WS-Transfer), or can be created without using SOAP at all.

WSDL version 2.0 offers support for binding to all the HTTP request methods (not only GET and POST as in version 1.1) so it enables a better implementation of RESTful Web services.[8] However, support for this specification is still poor in software development kits, which often offer tools only for WSDL 1.1.

What is a Web service?
Many people and companies have debated the exact definition of Web services. At a minimum, however, a Web service is any piece of software that makes itself available over the Internet and uses a standardized XML messaging system.
XML is used to encode all communications to a Web service. For example, a client invokes a Web service by sending an XML message, then waits for a corresponding XML response. Because all communication is in XML, Web services are not tied to any one operating system or programming language--Java can talk with Perl; Windows applications can talk with Unix applications.
Beyond this basic definition, a Web service may also have two additional (and desirable) properties:
First, a Web service can have a public interface, defined in a common XML grammar. The interface describes all the methods available to clients and specifies the signature for each method. Currently, interface definition is accomplished via the Web Service Description Language (WSDL). (See FAQ number 7.)
Second, if you create a Web service, there should be some relatively simple mechanism for you to publish this fact. Likewise, there should be some simple mechanism for interested parties to locate the service and locate its public interface. The most prominent directory of Web services is currently available via UDDI, or Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration. (See FAQ number 8.)
Web services currently run a wide gamut from news syndication and stock-market data to weather reports and package-tracking systems. For a quick look at the range of Web services currently available, check out the XMethods directory of Web services.

What is new about Web services?
People have been using Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) for some time now, and they long ago discovered how to send such calls over HTTP.
So, what is really new about Web services? The answer is XML.
XML lies at the core of Web services, and provides a common language for describing Remote Procedure Calls, Web services, and Web service directories.
Prior to XML, one could share data among different applications, but XML makes this so much easier to do. In the same vein, one can share services and code without Web services, but XML makes it easier to do these as well.
By standardizing on XML, different applications can more easily talk to one another, and this makes software a whole lot more interesting.


Web services make possible the exchange of data in the form of XML messages between heterogeneous systems. Although remote access of data and application logic is not a new concept, doing so in a loosely coupled fashion is. Previous attempts, such as DCOM, IIOP, and Java/RMI, required tight integration between the client and the server and used platform and implementation specific binary data formats. While such protocols require a particular component technology or object-calling convention, Web services do not. The only assumption made between the client and the server is that recipients will understand the messages they receive. In other words, the client and server agree to a contract, in this case described using WSDL and XSD, and then communicate by generating messages that honor the contract over a specified transport like HTTP. As a result, programs written in any language, using any component model, and running on any operating system can access Web services. Furthermore, the flexibility of using a text format like XML makes possible the message exchange to evolve over time in a loosely coupled way. This loose coupling is mandatory in environments where the simultaneous updating of all parties in the message exchange is not possible.

You create Web services using the ASP.NET page framework, enabling these Web services to access the many features of the .NET Framework, such as authentication, caching, and state management. Because ASP.NET and the .NET Framework are the basis for Web services in managed code, developers can focus on creating or accessing Web services without needing to write infrastructure code.

In the ASP.NET application model, Web pages intended for the browser use the .aspx extension. To differentiate Web services from regular ASP.NET pages, Web services use the .asmx extension.

There are two fundamental roles when working with Web services:

*

Creating a Web service — When you create an XML Web service, you are creating an application that exposes functionality to XML Web service clients.
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Accessing a Web service — When you access a Web service, your client application locates, references, and uses the functionality contained within a separate Web service. The client of an XML Web service is typically an application that is able to send, receive, and process messages to and from the Web service. However, the minimum requirement is that the client must be able to send messages to the Web service. This includes all applications using the .NET Framework.

Web services can be either stand-alone applications or sub-components of a larger Web application. For example, suppose you are creating a Web application that sells books online. Your Web application might interact with Web services as follows:

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Creating Web service — Your application exposes its order processing logic as a Web service, which your affiliate Web sites can in turn use in their Web applications to sell books through your online store without requiring their customers to visit your site.
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Accessing Web service — Your application accesses Web service provided by another online company that specializes in writing and supplying book reviews for online booksellers. When a visitor to your online store views the details of a particular book, they also see the reviews of that book on the same page.

Remember, Web services are accessible from just about any other kind of application, including other Web services, Web applications, Windows applications, and console applications. The minimum requirement is that the client must be able to send messages to the Web service.