We can create software with 100 times fewer vulnerabilities than we do today, according to computer scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). To get there, they recommend that coders adopt the approaches they have compiled in a new publication. The 60-page document, NIST Interagency Report (NISTIR) 8151: Dramatically Reducing Software Vulnerabilities (link is external), is a collection of the newest strategies gathered from across industry and other sources for red…

Researchers of the University of Barcelona have developed a more efficient computational method to identify new drugs. The study, published in the scientific journal Nature Chemistry, proposes a new way of facing the discovery of molecules with biological activity. Since it is based on a different principle, this method complements conventional tools and allows going forward in the path of rational drug design. ICREA researcher Xavier Barril, from the Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences and Th…

New artificial intelligence software designed to spot new child sexual abuse media online could help police catch child abusers. The toolkit, described in a paper published in Digital Investigation, automatically detects new child sexual abuse photos and videos in online peer-to-peer networks. The research behind this technology was conducted in the international research project iCOP -- Identifying and Catching Originators in P2P Networks -- founded by the European Commission Safer Internet Pro…

The composer Johann Sebastian Bach left behind an incomplete fugue upon his death, either as an unfinished work or perhaps as a puzzle for future composers to solve. A classical music dataset released by University of Washington researchers -- which enables machine learning algorithms to learn the features of classical music from scratch -- raises the likelihood that a computer could expertly finish the job. MusicNet is the first publicly available large-scale classical music dataset with curate…

Children learn new words using the same method as robots, according to psychologists. This suggests that early learning is based not on conscious thought but on an automatic ability to associate objects which enables babies to quickly make sense of their environment. Dr Katie Twomey from Lancaster University, with Dr Jessica Horst from Sussex University, Dr Anthony Morse and Professor Angelo Cangelosi from Plymouth wanted to find out how young children learn new words for the first time. They pr…

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) have demonstrated malware that can turn computers into perpetual eavesdropping devices, even without a microphone. In the new paper, "SPEAKE(a)R: Turn Speakers to Microphones for Fun and Profit," the researchers explain and demonstrate how most PCs and laptops today are susceptible to this type of attack. Using SPEAKE(a)R, malware that can covertly transform headphones into a pair of microphones, they show how commonly used technology can b…

A trio of Clemson University scientists has unveiled a groundbreaking computational software called "GFlow" that makes wildlife habitat connectivity modeling vastly faster, more efficient and superior in quality and scope. After eight years of research and development, the revolutionary software was announced in the scientific journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Clemson University postdoctoral fellow Paul Leonard is the lead author of the article, "GFlow: software for modeling circuit theo…

Computer algorithms can automatically interpret echocardiographic images and distinguish between pathological hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and physiological changes in athletes' hearts, according to research from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), published online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. HCM is a disease in which a portion of the myocardium enlarges, creating functional impairment of the heart. It is the leading cause of sudden death in young …

A luxury vehicle today contains multiple computers. During an hour's drive, it thus produces multiple gigabytes of data. Even less expensive vehicles are now brimming with information technology. The growing interconnection of the individual components opens dangerous security holes. One of these has now been closed by computer scientists at the Center for IT Security and Privacy (CISPA) and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) -- with the help of software that manufactu…

Computer chips in development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison could make future computers more efficient and powerful by combining tasks usually kept separate by design. Jing Li, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UW-Madison, is creating computer chips that can be configured to perform complex calculations and store massive amounts of information within the same integrated unit -- and communicate efficiently with other chips. She calls them "liquid silicon." …