Prof. Daniel Kahneman: "Thinking, Fast and Slow" - Video

Public Lecture by Prof. Daniel Kahneman

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Aula, University of Zurich

DARPA MUSE: Deep program analysis, and big data analytics, create public database

DARPA's MUSE seeks to leverage deep program analysis and big data analytics to create a public database containing mined inferences about salient properties, behaviours and vulnerabilities of software drawn from the hundreds of billions of lines of open source code available today.

The program aims to make significant advances in the way software is built, debugged, verified, maintained and understood, and to enable the automated repair of existing programs and synthesis of new ones.

During the past decade information technologies have driven the productivity gains essential to U.S. economic competitiveness, and computing systems now control significant elements of critical national infrastructure.

As a result, tremendous resources are devoted to ensuring that programs are correct, especially at scale.

Unfortunately, in spite of developers' best efforts, software errors are at the root of most execution errors and security vulnerabilities.

To help improve this state, DARPA has created the Mining and Understanding Software Enclaves (MUSE) program.

MUSE seeks to make significant advances in the way software is built, debugged, verified, maintained and understood.

The collective knowledge gleaned from MUSE's efforts would facilitate new mechanisms for dramatically improving software correctness, and help develop radically different approaches for automatically constructing and repairing complex software.

Suresh Jagannathan

"Our goal is to apply the principles of big data analytics to identify and understand deep commonalities among the constantly evolving corpus of software drawn from the hundreds of billions of lines of open source code available today," said Suresh Jagannathan, DARPA program manager.

"We're aiming to treat programs—more precisely, facts about programs—as data, discovering new relationships (enclaves) among this 'big code' to build better, more robust software."

Central to MUSE's approach is the creation of a community infrastructure that would incorporate a continuously operational specification-mining engine.

This engine would leverage deep program analyses and foundational ideas underlying big data analytics to populate and refine a database containing inferences about salient properties, behaviours and vulnerabilities of the program components in the corpus.

If successful, MUSE could provide numerous capabilities that have so far remained elusive.

"Ideally, we could enable a paradigm shift in the way we think about software construction and maintenance, replacing the existing costly and laborious test/debug/validate cycle with 'always on' program analysis, mining, inspection and discovery," Jagannathan said.

"We could see scalable automated mechanisms to identify and repair program errors, as well as tools to efficiently create new, custom programs from existing components based only a description of desired properties."

Diversity at CERN: Great science needs great people

Great science needs great people, a look at diversity at CERN. 

A word from the DG: Strength in diversity 

The CERN Diversity Programme 

Panel Discussion: Opening Up Network Hardware

OCP Summit V - January 29, 2014 - San Jose Convention Center, San Jose, California "Opening Up Network Hardware" - Najam Ahmad (Director, Infrastructure, Facebook); JR Rivers (Co-founder and CEO, Cumulus Networks); Martin Casado (Chief Architect, Networking, VMware); Matthew Liste, (Managing Director, Core Platform Engineering, Goldman Sachs); Dave Maltz (Partner Development Manager, Microsoft)

Dr Brene Brown on Vulnerability - TED Video

Dr Brené Brown is a research professor and best-selling author of "Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead" (Penguin Portfolio, 2013).

She has spent the past decade studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame.

Explore: Stephen Fry explains Cloud Computing - Animated Video

Stephen Fry explains the history of computer thinking and the revolution of utility in cloud computing in this 5 minute animation.

This is a paid advert from Databarracks a UK company who provide Infrastructure, Disaster Recovery and Backup services from some of the most secure data centres in the world.

This video re-iterates the belief that an English person 'invented' or 'created' the internet. This, of course is a matter of conjecture and is unlikely to be the case.

Eugene Kaspersky speaking about Cyber Attacks to Australian Press Club 2013

A speech by Eugene Kaspersky at the Press Club in Canberra, Australia. The broad talk was designed to bring non-tech journos up to speed on infosec issues.

In it, he said a engineer friend told him Stuxnet had 'badly infected' the internal network of a Russian nuclear plant after the sophisticated malware caused chaos in Iran's nuclear facilities in Natanz.

The malware, widely considered to have been developed by the US Government as a means to disrupt Iran's nuclear enrichment plans, had crossed a physically separated 'air-gapped' network in the Russian plant after it was carried across on a USB device.