The Big Data Brain Drain Why Science is in Trouble

I dont often blog about academia, but my colleague, Mark Wilson, has brought this fascinating blog article, called The Big Data Brain Drain: Why Science is in Trouble to my attention. It basically makes the case that academic science is in trouble because the skills it requires are either very much in demand by industry and commerce (i.e, the ability to analyse big data) and that the skills required to create scientific software to do just this are not well rewarded inside academia. I encourage you to read the article yourself.

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Why attend USENIX Enigma

Parisa Tabriz, Security Princess & Enigma Program Co-Chair

Last August, we announced USENIX Enigma, a new conference intended to shine a light on great, thought-provoking research in security, privacy, and electronic crime. With Enigma beginning in just a few short weeks, I wanted to share a couple of the reasons I’m personally excited about this new conference.

Enigma aims to bridge the divide that exists between experts working in academia, industry, and public service, explicitly bringing researchers from different sectors together to share their work. Our speakers include those spearheading the defense of digital rights (Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now), practitioners at a number of well known industry leaders (Akamai, Blackberry, Facebook, LinkedIn, Netflix, Twitter), and researchers from multiple universities in the U.S. and abroad. With the diverse session topics and organizations represented, I expect interesting—and perhaps spirited—coffee break and lunchtime discussions among the equally diverse list of conference attendees.

Of course, I’m very proud to have some of my Google colleagues speaking at Enigma:

• Adrienne Porter Felt will talk about blending research and engineering to solve usable security problems. You’ll hear how Chrome’s usable security team runs user studies and experiments to motivate engineering and design decisions. Adrienne will share the challenges they’ve faced when trying to adapt existing usable security research to practice, and give insight into how they’ve achieved successes.
• Ben Hawkes will be speaking about Project Zero, a security research team dedicated to the mission of, “making 0day hard.” Ben will talk about why Project Zero exists, and some of the recent trends and technologies that make vulnerability discovery and exploitation fundamentally harder.
• Kostya Serebryany will be presenting a 3-pronged approach to securing C++ code based on his many years of experiencing wrangling complex, buggy software. Kostya will survey multiple dynamic sanitizing tools him and his team have made publicly available, review control-flow and data-flow guided fuzzing, and explain a method to harden your code in the presence of any bugs that remain.
• Elie Bursztein will go through key lessons the Gmail team learned over the past 11 years while protecting users from spam, phishing, malware, and web attacks. Illustrated with concrete numbers and examples from one of the largest email systems on the planet, attendees will gain insight into specific techniques and approaches useful in fighting abuse and securing their online services.

In addition to raw content, my Program Co-Chair, David Brumley, and I have prioritized talk quality. Researchers dedicate months or years of their time to thinking about a problem and conducting the technical work of research, but a common criticism of technical conferences is that the actual presentation of that research seems like an afterthought. Rather than be a regurgitation of a research paper in slide format, a presentation is an opportunity for a researcher to explain the context and impact of their work in their own voice; a chance to inspire the audience to want to learn more or dig deeper. Taking inspiration from the TED conference, Enigma will have shorter presentations, and the program committee has worked with each speaker to help them craft the best version of their talk.

Hope to see some of you at USENIX Enigma later this month!

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Why Watson and Siri Are Not Real AI

A recent article from Popular Mechanics 

raises the common argument that what people call AI actually isnt AI. This argument is based on John Searles Chinese Room thought experiment in which he clearly demonstrates that computers just manipulate symbols. They do not, cannot, ane never will understand what those symbols mean. However, Alan Turing, the father of AI, never claimed that machines would understand. His test for machine intelligence, now called the Turing Test, he originally called "the imitation game." He envisaged that computers would "imitate" intelligence not be intelligent in the sense that we are. Read the Popuar Mechanics article but keep this in mind - its ok for computers to imitate intelligence using different techiques to people just as its ok for planes to fly without flapping their wings like birds.




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Why We Need to Tame Our Algorithms Like Dogs

Algorithms control our daily lives, wether were aware of it or not. Algorithms run riot in financial markes; they predict the weather and electricity demand; they price insurance and decide how many doctors to schedule to the emergency room on any given night. They even decide what groceries to stock in your local supermarket. Given algorithms (hidden) importance it therefore makes sense that they work for  us. An interesting article in Wired makes the point that our algorithms need to evolve alongside us, much as dogs have, to become useful servants.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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Why do big IT projects fail

It probably doesnt matter which country you live in youll be familiar with news stories of large government IT projects that have either failed completely to deliver or have gone seriously over budget and resulted in numerous bugs. Listen to this recent radio interview by University of Auckland Computer Science Lecturer, Paul Ralph; he says "when it comes to the public procurement of big software design projects - dont! He says the total cost of larger IT projects always cost more than everyone thinks, theyre almost impossible to accurately forecast in advance, and innovation is constantly undermined by the tender process."


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