Bioinformatics

Human kind is on the brink of another revolution. There is no doubt that the mapping of the human genome completed in June 2000, is one of the greatest scientific advancements in history. All this has been made possible with the help of high-speed computers, which were necessary to analyze hundreds of terabytes of raw sequence data and correctly order the 3 billion base pairs of DNA that comprise the human genome. Such an achievement has led to the world taking a greater look at the promising field of bioinformatics.

Bioinformatics can be simply defined as “the study of information content and information flow in biological systems and processes”. The overwhelming popularity of the field has led to its application in the fields of drug design, gene therapy, gene modification technology and pharmacy. It has also greatly helped the emerging fields of biochip technology and microfluidic technology. Through such emerging fields, scientists and researchers the world over, seek to tap the potential of a booming bioinformatics field.

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Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems

Mobility is very important in our society. People live in one city and work in another. They go to visit friends and family living in different parts of the country. Even leisure time is not always spent in their residence. Despite the Indian government’s efforts to increase the use of public transportation, the car is still a widely used means of transportation. Every time someone travels from one location to another (by car), he or she first determines the best route to reach the destination. Depending on the time of day and the day of the week, this route may be different. For example, the driver may know that a certain road is always congested at a particular time and day. As a consequence, he chooses to use a different route to avoid this congestion.

Car navigation systems (or Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems) are being offered as a special feature of new cars of an increasing number of car-brands. These car navigation systems are capable of taking over some of the tasks that are performed by the driver such as reading the map and determining the best route to the destination. They should also take daily congestion patterns into account. Because a car navigation system uses a built-in computer to determine a route, it can compare many different routes and the user expects the system to determine the best possible or optimum route fast. This report is concerned with presenting the role of GIS- GPS integration in intelligent vehicle highway systems besides giving an in depth role of route planning algorithms that enable a car navigation system to plan optimum routes on very large real-world road networks in very little time, taking daily congestion patterns into account.


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Multinet

There are a number of scenarios where it is desirableto have a wireless device connect to multiple networkssimultaneously. Currently, this is possible only by using multiple wireless network cards in the device. Unfortunately, using multiple wireless cards causes excessive energy drain and consequent reduction of lifetime in battery operated devices. In this paper, we propose a software based approach, called MultiNet, thatfacilitates simultaneous connections to multiple networks by virtualizing a single wireless card. The wireless card is virtualized by introducing an intermediate layer below IP, which continuously switches the card across multiple networks. The goal of theswitching algorithm is to be transparent to the user who sees hermachine as being connected to multiple networks. We present thedesign, implementation, and performance of the MultiNet system.We analyze and evaluate buffering and switching algorithms interms of delay and energy consumption. Our system is agnosticof the upper layer protocols, and works well over popular IEEE802.11 wireless LAN cards.

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Automated text SUMMARIZATION

Over the past few years, especially with the emergence of the Internet, the exchange of information has increased immensely, affecting all of us. On the one hand, the scientific community makes us aware instantly of its scientific breakthroughs while on the other hand, journalists present reports from around the world in real time. The growing number of electronic articles, magazines and books that are made available everyday, puts more pressure on professionals from every walk of life as they struggle with information overload.

With the increasing availability of information and the limited time people have to sort through it all, it has become more and more difficult for professionals in various fields to keep abreast of developments in their respective disciplines A large portion of all available information today exists in the form of unstructured texts. Books, magazine articles, research papers, product manuals, memorandums, e-mails, and of course the Web, all contain textual information in the natural language form. Analyzing huge piles of textual information is often involved in making informed and correct business decisions.

By and large, we all have to deal with reviewing large volumes of textual information. This problem could be solved by the use of “Automated Text Summarization” systems. Such systems have been in research for over 50 years. It views a system that can model the information processing capabilities of the human brain. In general, systems based on traditional text summarization approaches analyzed a natural language text in a certain way at the level of individual sentences. The objective was to create a semantic representation of a sentence in the form of structured relations between important words comprising this sentence.

To solve this task, various previously developed linguistic molds were tried with the sentence and its components. When a mold matched the sentence well, a corresponding semantic construction was associated with the sentence. This technique provides a good first guidance for understanding the meaning of a text. But as it turns out, the main problem with this approach is that there can be too many different molds that one needs to build for analyzing different types of sentences. In addition, the list of exceptional constructions in this approach quickly grows prohibitively large. In other words, this approach works well only for a limited subset of natural language texts.

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Acoustic Cryptanalysis

One of the methods for extracting information from supposedly secure systems is side-channel attacks: cryptanalytic techniques that rely on information unintentionally leaked by computing devices. Most side-channel attack research has focused on electromagnetic emanations (TEMPEST), power consumption and, recently, diffuse visible light from CRT displays. The oldest eavesdropping channel, namely acoustic emanations, has received little attention. The preliminary analysis of acoustic emanations from personal computers shows them to be a surprisingly rich source of information on CPU activity. Acoustic cryptanalysis is a side channel attack which exploits sounds audible or not, produced during a computation or input-output operation by computer workstations, impact printers, or electromechanical cipher machines. We will look at the possible attack method, attempt to analyze the risk of the method and give pointers for further research. In 2004, Adi Shamir and Eran Tromer demonstrated that it may be possible to conduct timing attacks against a CPU performing cryptographic operations by analysis of variations in its humming noise. In 2004, Dimitri Asonov and Rakesh Agarwal of the IBM Almaden Research Center announced that computer keyboards and keypads used on telephones and automated teller machines (ATMs) are vulnerable to attacks based on differentiating the sound produced by different keys.. By analyzing recorded sounds, they were able to recover the text of data being entered. These techniques allow an attacker using covert listening devices to obtain password, passphrases and personal identification number (PINs) and other security information. In 2005, a group of UC Berkeley researchers performed a number of practical experiments demonstrating the validity of this kind of threat.

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Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

Think about all of the information that people access on the Web on a day-to-day basis: news headlines, search results, “What’s New”, job vacancies, and so forth whose content changes on an unpredictable schedule. A large amount of this content can be thought of as a list.

Most people need to track a number of these lists, to see if there is any new content. But this becomes difficult once if there are more than a handful of sources. This is because they have to go to each page, load it, remember how it’s formatted, and find where they last left off in the list.

Email notification of changes was an early solution to this problem. Unfortunately, when people receive email notifications from multiple websites they are usually disorganized and can get overwhelming, and are often mistaken for spam. RSS is a better way to be notified of new and changed content. Notifications of changes to multiple websites are handled easily, and the results are presented to people in well organized and distinct from email.

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SUN SPOT SYSTEM

The Sun Small Programmable Object Technology (SPOT) is new sensor network hardware with full Java support that has been introduced by Sun Microsystems. It is a state-of-the-art WSN platform that provides much more computational power and memory than the previous generations of very limited sensor nodes. The most notable feature of the Sun SPOT platform is that it runs Java as its native programming language on bare metal. This allows sophisticated algorithms to be implemented on the sensors nodes easily.A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a wireless network consisting of spatially distributed autonomous devices using sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants, at different locations.Sun Small Programmable Object Technology is a wireless sensor network (WSN) mote (an electronic communication device meant to be the size of a particle of dust). The device is built upon the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Unlike other available mote systems, the Sun SPOT is built on the Squawk virtual machine.

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Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA)

Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) is a technology that connects regular unlicensed wireless networks to GSM networks. The wireless networks are currently limited to Bluetooth and 802.11, but soon others will follow. UMA defines a UMA Network Controller, UNC, which connects to the GSM mobile network using standard A/Gb connections, replacing GSM’s Base Station Controller (BSC). All GSM services are tunneled through the IP pipe, including GPRS. Of course, data transfer speeds are quite a lot faster than with cellular access (UMA Technology).

Calls and data connections feature seamless handover between cellular and UMA, as well as roaming back to cellular if UMA isn’t available. UMA enabled phones can use any standard 802.11 access point for connection, though naturally the AP must provide network access for the user. The network features multiple UNCs, one of which is a default one. The default UNC chooses another UNC for the mobile terminal if needed, based on the network topology.

The mobile terminal connects to the UNC via unlicensed wireless networks and fixed line, using point-to-point IPSec encryption. The UNC contains a security gateway (SGW), which takes care of the IPSec tunnel and IKEv2 authentication (Mobile Pipeline). The subscribers are identified by SIM credentials, and the SGW is connected to GSM’s AAA service for subscriber authentication.

Calls are transferred through IP bearers (RTP and UDP), using the same data flow as with VoIP networks. GPRS connections are carried by TCP using a lightweight UMA-RLC protocol, which is suitable for always-on broadband connections. (Mobile Pipeline). Right now, there are no phones implementing UMTS and UMA at the same time – only handoff between GSM and UMA exists. At the moment, the UNC does not support all of the UMTS services, so development still goes on (In Code 2006).

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