CYBER PEEPING TOM

The growth of shared wireless computer networks has increased the risk that someone is eavesdropping on your Internet communications, according to researchers in Car-negie Mellon University’s school of computer science and college of engineering.

To keep away such cyber peeping toms, the researchers have developed a low-cost way to thwart what they call man-in-the-middle attacks.

These types of attacks occur when an attacker tricks a computer user into believing he or she has established a secure link with a site—such as a bank. Actually, the user is communicating with the attacker’s computer, which is eavesdropping on information and relaying it between the user and the bank, said researcher David Andersen, an assistant professor of computer science at the university in Pittsburgh.

The upswing in wireless connections to the Internet has increased the risk of man-in-the-middle attacks, he added.

A user who thinks he is linked to an airport or coffee shop wi-fi connection may actually be linked to a laptop of someone just a few seats away.

“A lot of people wouldn’t even know they’ve been attacked,” Andersen said. “It’s very, very easy for someone to convince you to go through their computer when making connections through public wi-fi.”

The researcher’s attack-thwarting system, called Perspectives, relies on a set of friendly Web sites the developers call notaries.

The notaries help authenticate secure Web sites by querying the site. Then, they essentially check in with each other to ensure that they’ve all received the same authentication information from the secure site. Should a notary receive authentication information which doesn’t match that received by the browser or other notaries, the computer user may be under attack, Andersen said.

The researcher team comprises Andersen; Adrian Perrig, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and public policy, and Dan Wendlandt, a Ph.D. student in computer science.

They’ve incorporated Perspectives into an extension for the Mozilla Firefox version browser. It can be downloaded free at www.cs.cmu.edu/~perspectives/firefox.html.

FLUID GAMING MOVEMENT

Your avatar likely doesn’t move as gracefully as you.

The people who create interactive video games can have problems representing realistic body gestures. Now, researchers at two European universities have developed a method they say translates smooth, fluid, actual body movements to computerized video games with relative ease.

Often, motion-capture technology is used to record human movement. The technology relies on human models wearing special suits outfitted with receivers and sensors, which relay gesture information into a computer. The information is then turned into the codes used when programming the games.

But the researchers—electrical engineering professors Pedro Correa of The Université Catholique de Louvain, in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, and Ferran Marqués of the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain—say they’ve come up with a technique to more easily capture real-life body movements and display them in three dimensions on a computer.

The technique uses two video cameras to record human movement. Because the method is relatively straightforward, it can be used in real time on any personal computer and works well for creating games on a small scale, Correa said.

The recorder uses a video camera to photograph a person’s outline. There’s no need for the recorder or the subject to wear or use any other specialized equipment. The images are analyzed to identify head, hands, and feet. An algorithm calculates the person’s extremities.

The overall outline is analyzed to create morphological skeletons upon which a label is assigned to each extremity. The skeletons’ extremities are then represented with colored dots for tracking in two dimensions and can be transcribed into a computer for further programming.

To obtain the same information in three dimensions, the same steps are taken with an additional camera, Correa said.      

MOLECULES IN 3-D

Real life doesn’t appear in two dimensions, so why should a med-ical encyclopedia?

Biologists and biochemists can access 3-D images of proteins and other molecules on the new Proteopedia Web site (www.proteopedia.org), which links written information with 3-D structural information.

The lowdown on proteins: A visitor can view 3-D models at proteopedia.com
from different angles and at various resolutions.

The site acts as a wiki to which users post and update entries. Members of the scientific community can request a user account to edit existing pages and to create new ones.

The resource was developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, by researchers Jaime Prilusky, Eran Hodis, and Joel Sussman. They described Proteopedia in the open-access journal Genome Biology.

The wiki displays the protein structures and other molecules in interactive images surrounded by descriptive text. The structure’s appearance changes to reflect the concept explained in the text, Sussman said. This makes the complex structural information readily accessible and comprehensible, even to nonstructural biologists, he added.

THERMODYNAMICS ONLINE

Looking for an A to Z guide to thermodynamics, heat and mass transfer, and fluids engineering online? It’s what a Web site called Thermopedia says it can deliver.

A to Z: The Thermopedia Web site grew out of the Encyclopedia of Heat and
Mass Transfer.

The site is an affiliate of Begell House Inc. of Redding, Conn., which publishes books and journals on a range of science and engineering subjects. Thermopedia evolved from a Begell House publication, Encyclopedia of Heat and Mass Transfer.

According to Yelena Sharfeyeva, publisher of Thermopedia, Begell House updated the encyclopedia and put it online with interactive features. A reference, for instance, is linked to the appropriate source if it is available online. To further expand research abilities, a feature called RelatesLink takes users to other publishers’ material related to a particular search subject.

FLYING CAD FILES

One French mold maker says that its new 3-D viewing tool acts as a kind of CAD e-mail.

A three-dimensional viewer has cut in half the time the automotive mold maker spends translating the CAD files it receives from potential customers. The viewer reads all CAD files and formats, no matter the program in which they originated.

Before bringing in the viewer, engineers at the Pernoud Group of Oyonnax, France, spent a good deal of time converting and reading CAD files received from potential customers. The files were used to help create quotes for the customers. Engineers spent about 10 to 15 minutes converting each file. And many quotes called for several conversions, said Gilles Pernoud. He and his brother are chief executive officers of the company.

3-D mail: A new 3-D viewer for a French mold maker, The Pernoud Group,
means that engineers can open CAD files from potential customers
automatically—skipping the conversion step.

Although the company generates about 350 quotes each year, only 10 to 15 percent become actual orders, Pernoud said. Much time was spent converting information that was ultimately not used.

Installing the WorkXPlore viewer from Sescoi of Southfield, Mich., helped cut data handling and quote time by half, Pernoud said.

With the 3-D viewer, engineers can open CAD files automatically—without the conversion step. It now takes Pernoud only minutes to confirm to a customer that it can make the mold.

The viewer is also helpful when Pernoud interacts with its own suppliers. When sourcing, Pernoud may request quotes from three different suppliers and each supplier had to be provided with approximately 10 drawings. 

Previously, Pernoud spent a lot of time and money on draft-ing, paper, and postage costs to communicate with these suppliers. And response times were slow, Pernoud said. 

Now, engineers can simply e-mail files in the viewing format to suppliers and customers for easy reading.

“Like e-mail, WorkXPlore is now our most effective tool for communicating and sharing information inside and outside the company,” Pernoud said.

REPORT SHOWS HIGH-END COMPUTING’S POTENTIAL
by Alan S. Brown

Researchers will quickly affirm that more powerful computers lead to new scientific discoveries and engineering breakthroughs. With increased pressure on federal budgets, however, the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy want more than generalities. They want a better way to evaluate proposals for new scientific high-end capability computing programs.

A new report from the National Research Council, The Potential Impact of High-End Capability Computing on Four Illustrative Fields of Science and Engineering, may not provide a road map, but it does offer examples of how government agencies can analyze future scientific computing needs.

The report examined four fields: atmospheric science, chemical separations, astrophysics, and evolutionary biology. They share several requirements in common. Today, high-end computing involves massively parallel computers that break large modeling problems into fragments shared among multiple computer processors. Yet only a small fraction of important algorithms can take advantage of 100 processors, much less the hundreds or thousands of processors in the largest computers. The report also sees a need for better ways to handle vastly different size and time scales, so models can link nanoscale molecular interactions that take place in picoseconds with climate models that predict global warming over many years.

Weather forecasting and climate simulation are one of the illustrations given by the report. To accurately forecast the weather beyond a few hours takes enormous computing power. When models run on larger computers, they can incorporate more data on the physics, chemistry, and biology of the atmosphere, land, and ocean, as well as such local features as lakes, ridges, and variations in moisture. Improved high-end computing would enable researchers to improve the accuracy of weather forecasts, predict severe weather, and understand how the global carbon cycle will change our climate over the next 100 years.

To predict climate change is to tackle a fundamental question that researchers cannot possibly answer through laboratory experimentation alone. Only sophisticated computer models, which can be verified through laboratory testing and environmental data, provide a way to run an experiment on the entire Earth.

As the National Research Council points out, models provide insights into other “grand challenge” questions as well, such as how species originate and how galaxies, quasars, and black holes form, and how they evolve.

Investing in high-end computing—not just hardware, but also software, education, and training—may make it possible to answer those questions in the future. 

BRIEFLY NOTED

CADLearning of Bedford N.H., has released a video tutorial series for users of Autodesk AutoCAD LT 2009. The series is available online or via DVD. The instructor explains multiple techniques for each job, using the various interfaces available in AutoCAD. /// Forming Technologies Inc. of Oakville, Ontario, which makes software for the design, simulation, and costing of sheet metal components, has released FormingSuite Fast Incremental. The explicit incremental analysis tool is based on LSTC LS-Dyna solver. /// Mechanical Simulation Corp. of Ann Arbor, Mich., has upgraded its truck simulation tool, TruckSim, to version 7.01. The software is used to simulate the dynamic behavior of heavy-duty trucks and tractor-trailers made up of varied combinations of axles, dual wheels, asymmetric steering systems, and single or multiple trailers. /// Consulting and research firm CIMdata of Ann Arbor, Mich., has made available its annual PLM Market Analysis Report. The report provides detailed information and analysis on the worldwide PLM market. /// Bricsys of Merrimack, N.H., has released version nine of its Bricscad CAD product. /// DP Technology of Camarillo, Calif., has upgraded its CAM application to ESPRIT 2009. /// Fishbowl Solutions Inc. of Minneapolis has released Inspection Report Automation, an out-of-the-box solution for PTC’s Pro/Engineer. The software package automatically creates inspection report spreadsheets, which are often needed during the quality assurance phase of a product’s release. /// Metris of Leuven, Belgium, is now shipping its LC60D digital 3-D line scanner. The scanner is used in the digital inspection process to scan parts. /// Open Cascade S.A.S. of Paris has upgraded its simulation integration tool, Open Cascade Technology, to version 6.3. /// Formerly known as TekSoft Inc., Geometric Technologies Inc. of Scottsdale, Ariz., has released a new version of its CAM software, CAMWorks 2009. /// Visual Components of Helsinki, Finland, has upgraded its software for 3-D factory simulation. The current software version is designated Visual Components 2009.