Americans drink from the kitchen tap without worrying about pathogens or microbes, even though water utilities might be vulnerable to bio-terror attacks or natural contaminants. But now, a software can help combat these.

Thanks to CANARY event detection software, an open-source software developed by Sandia National Lab with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), public water systems can be protected through timely detection of such threats.

The software tells utility operators within minutes whether something is wrong with their water, giving them time to warn and protect the public.

And it is improving water quality by giving utility managers more comprehensive real-time data about changes in their water.

‘People are excited about it because it’s free and because we’ve shown that it works really well,’ said Regan Murray, acting associate division director at EPA’s Water Infrastructure Protection Division, according to a Sandia statement.

CANARY is being used in Cincinnati and Singapore, and Philadelphia is testing the software system. A number of other US utilities also are evaluating it.

Sean McKenna, the Sandia researcher who led the team that developed CANARY, said people
began to pay attention to the security of the nation’s water systems after 9/11.

CANARY, which runs on a desktop computer, can be customised for individual water utilities, working with existing sensors and software. It works at lightning speed, McKenna said.

McKenna and Murray said CANARY could have lessened the impact of the nation’s largest public water contamination.

They were referring to the 1993 cryptosporidiosis outbreak in the US which killed dozens, made more than 400,000 ill and cost over $96 million in medical expenses and lost productivity, according to reports.

‘If you don’t have a detection system, the way you find out about these things is when people get sick

Source:http://www.khaleejtimes.com/Displayarticle09.asp?section=technology&xfile=data/technology/2011/July/technology_July45.xml

Google’s chief lawyer Kent Walker says that the smartphone industry is using patents in an arms race that is “gumming up the works of innovation” and that the US government needs to rein in their use.

The company is facing a huge lawsuit from database company Oracle, which is claiming billions in damages over what it says is infringement in Google’s widely-used Android operating system, while handset makers such as HTC and Samsung face claims from companies including Microsoft that their Android devices infringe its software patents.

“It’s hard to find what’s the best path – there’s so much litigation,” Walker said in an interview with the wire agency Bloomberg. “We’re exploring a variety of different things.”

But Walker said that patents meant “the tech industry has a significant problem” and that “software patents are kind of gumming up the works of innovation.”

Google lost out in an auction of Nortel patents at the beginning of July when a consortium including Apple and Microsoft bid $4.5bn for the rights covering a number of mobile phone technologies.

Walker declined to say whether Google will bid for InterDigital – a patent-holding company which has filed suit against Nokia and China’s Huawei – or the digital-imaging patents of Eastman Kodak, or any other specific portfolio. He said it’s unclear if the $4.5 billion winning bid for the Nortel patents is a sign that other sales will be equally large. “We want to be disciplined about how we approach all this stuff,” Walker said. “We’re looking for a reasonable alternative, but we want to make sure Google, and the companies Google partners with, aren’t shut out of the opportunity to bring great new products and features to consumers.”

But the problem of software patents in particular is increasingly seen as a drag on innovation within the US. After a US-based company, Lodsys, which holds some patents that may be infringed in smartphone apps, sued independent developers, a number of British developers withdrew their products from US sale, saying the cost of business there was too high.

Software patents such as Lodsys’s are not directly applicable in Europe, but there are fears that attempts by the US to align patent law will bring them in and have the same chilling effect now being seen across the Atlantic.

Android is now the most widely used mobile operating system, with 38.9% of the worldwide smartphone market, compared with 18.2% for Apple’s iPhone, which has passed Nokia’s formerly dominant Symbian, according to research firm IDC.

But beneath the sales figures, a furious set of patent battles is continuing. Apple has ongoing patent cases against Samsung Electronics, HTC and Motorola Mobility Holdings over their Android-based phones; each has in response filed patent suits against Apple. Microsoft and Motorola Mobility also have filed patent suits against each other; Microsoft has successfully sued HTC and extracted a per-handset royalty on its Android handsets, and is now suing Samsung. Nokia won a patent settlement from Apple which gave it a €448m boost to its quarterly results. And Microsoft has a pending complaint against Barnes & Noble over its Nook e-reader.

The cases have been filed with the International Trade Commission, which has the power to block imports of products found to infringe U.S. patents.

“Each side can blow the other up on some level – everybody can block the other’s products from coming to market,” Walker said. “You create this mutually assured destruction scenario, but it’s very expensive to get all those munitions.”

Google has been hesitant to use patents to file suits against other companies, he said.

“Buying patents so you can hit the other guy, it’s not good form,” Walker said. “You hate to unilaterally disarm here, but we haven’t in our history.”

The company is providing support and technical help to companies that make products for the Android operating system and are being sued, either by rival companies such as Apple and Microsoft, or by small patent owners that don’t make products.

“We’ll be fine,” Walker said. “We have the resources to balance the scales here.”

Source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/26/google-software-patents-warning

If you’re like most people, you give yourself high ratings when it comes to figuring out when someone’s trying to con you. Problem is, most people aren’t actually good at it–at least as far as detecting fake positive consumer reviews.

Fortunately, technology is poised to make up for this all-too-human failing. Cornell University researchers have developed software that they say can detect fake reviews (PDF). The researchers tested the system with reviews of Chicago hotels. They pooled 400 truthful reviews with 400 deceptive reviews produced for the study, then trained their software to spot the difference.

The software got it right about 90 percent of the time. This is a big improvement over the average person, who can detect fake reviews only about 50 percent of the time, according to the researchers.

They say people fall into two camps. One type accepts too much at face value and doesn’t reject enough fake reviews. The second type is overly skeptical and rejects too many real McCoys. Despite their very different approaches, each camp is right about half the time.

The Cornell system is similar to software that sniffs out plagiarism. While the plagiarism software learns to spot the type of language a specific author uses, the Cornell software learns to spot the type of language people use when they’re being deceptive in writing a review, said Myle Ott, the Cornell computer science graduate student who led the research.

The software showed that fake reviews are more like fiction than the real reviews they’re designed to emulate, according to the researchers. In part, deceptive writers used more verbs than real review writers did, while the real writers used more punctuation than the deceptive writers. The deceptive writers also focused more on family and activities while the real writers focused more on the hotels themselves.

The research team’s next steps are to use the technique with other types of service reviews, like restaurant reviews, and eventually try it with product reviews. The idea is to make it harder for unscrupulous sellers to spam review sites with fictitious happy customers.

Of course, just about any technology can be used for good or evil. The Cornell fake review spotter “could just as easily be used to train people to avoid the cues to deception that we learned,” Ott said.

This could lead to an arms race between fake review producers and fake review spotters. Ott and his colleagues are gearing up for it. “We’re considering… seeing if we can learn a new set of deception cues, based on fake reviews written by people trained to beat our original system,” he said.

Source:http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20083200-1/cornell-software-fingers-fake-online-reviews/