Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Changing the Landscape of Voting and Voter Registration through Universal Design

Dr. Juan E. Gilbert
School of Computing
Clemson University

12:00-1:00pm Wednesday, 28 March 2012
room 459 ITE Building, UMBC

Subsequent to the debacle of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, it became abundantly clear that America’s archaic voting system was in dire need of a major overhaul. Consequently, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines were purchased by several states. The use of these machines has not been without controversy with respect to security, trust and ease of use. Professors and security research teams have found several vulnerabilities in current voting technologies. In 2002, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was created to provide all citizens equal access to participate in the electoral process, regardless of ability. The Prime III voting system, http://www.PrimeVotingSystem.com , is a secure, multimodal electronic voting system that takes a universal design approach to address security, trust and ease of use. Dr. Gilbert and his research team were recently awarded a $4.5 million dollar grant from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to conduct research on accessible voting technologies.

Dr. Juan E. Gilbert is an IDEaS Professor and Chair of the Human-Centered Computing Division in the School of Computing at Clemson University where he leads the HCC Lab. He is also a Professor in the Automotive Engineering Department at Clemson University. Dr. Gilbert is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement Science (AAAS), an ACM Distinguished Scientist, National Associate of the National Research Council of the National Academies, an ACM Distinguished Speaker and a Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society. In 2011, Dr. Gilbert was given a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Engineering and Mathematics Mentoring by President Barack Obama.

Stripe, a San Francisco startup with an online-payment system, is hosting a simple online cybersecurity capture the flag (CTF) challenge. See their blog post for the details.

“The hardest part of writing secure code is learning to think like an attacker. For example, every programmer is told to watch out for SQL injections, but it’s hard to appreciate just how exploitable they are until you’ve written a SQL injection of your own.

We built Stripe Capture the Flag, a security wargame inspired by SmashTheStack’s IO, to help the community (as well our team!) practice identifying and exploiting common security problems.

After completing our CTF, you should have a greatly improved understanding of how attackers will try to break your code (and hopefully will have fun in the process!).”

If you can crack their system, they’ll send you a t-shirt. Since security is important to their business, maybe they will also talk to you about a job.

Google is sponsoring another AI Challenge Competition run by an independent group of volunteers that grew out of the Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo. The competition opens today and invites submissions of programs designed to control ants a simulated colony in competition with other colonies.

Ants is a multi-player strategy game set on a plot of dirt with water for obstacles and food that randomly drops. Each player has one or more hills where ants will spawn. The objective is for players to seek and destroy the most enemy ant hills while defending their own hills. Players must also gather food to spawn more ants, however, if all of a player's hills are destroyed they can't spawn any more ants.

The objective is to create a computer program (a bot) that plays the game of Ants as intelligently as possible. It is recommended that you use one of the starter packages as a starting point. If you are looking to get up and running as quickly as possible, check out the Five Minute Quickstart Guide. For more details about Ants beyond this introductory document, see the Game Specification.

The site has documentation, a tutorial and starter packages for windows and Linux in a variety of programming languages. Each package contains a simple working entry to use as a starting point, tools that allow you to run your bot and watch it play graphically, sample opponents that you can test your bot against, and maps you can use for testing. Once you've developed your bot, you can enter it at the website and watch your ant colony fight for domination against colonies created by other people from around the world.

The behavior of ants is a classic example of how the local interactions among individuals in a collection can give rise to interesting emergent behavior. This concept is important in the study of complex systems and was the subject of a recent special topics course taught by Professor Marie desJardins, Computation, Complexity, and Emergence.

Warner Brothers is said to have purchased the rights to a script The Imitation Game by screenwriter Graham Moore about British mathematician Alan Turing who made many important contributions to computer science. Leonardo DiCaprio is supposedly interested in playing Turing and is "chasing the project" and Ron Howard is rumored to be interested in in directing. The script is based on the Andrew Hodges' 2000 biography Alan Turing: The Enigma.

Turing is the famous English mathematician who made significant contributions to computer science in the 30s and 40s, including formalizations of computing and algorithms with the Turing machine and early work on Artificial Intelligence. During World War II he was was also a senior member of the British codebreaking and cryptanalysis group at Bletchley Park that broke the codes for the German Enigma machine.

Turing was prosecuted by the British government in 1952 for being a homosexual which is thought to be the cause of his apparent suicide by cyanide poisoning in 1954. In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

Google unveiled its new web programming language Dart today. It's described as a "class-based optionally typed programming language for building web applications". Dart has a native virtual machine and can also be compiled into JavaScript, allowing it to run on current browser. Google says it it exploring adding the Dart virtual machine to the Chrome Browser.

Dart's syntax is familiar, if boring, making it easy for current programmers to adapt.

main() {
  var name = 'World';
  print('Hello, $name!');
}

The source code for the Dart to javascript compiler as well as examples and tools is available online in the Dart Google Code Site.

Google hopes that Dart will replace JavaScript as the main built-in scripting language in web browsers. The design goals for the new language are said to include fixing many of Javascript's flaws, better performance, better support for large-scale projects" and improved security features.

WIle Dart doesn't push the programming language envelope, it looks like a welcome improvement over Javascript.

Ruling limits use of statistical reasoning in legal arguments

A UK judge in murder trial ruled that Bayes' Theorem and similar statistical analyses can no longer be used to argue for the soundness of evidence in such trials. The Guardian has the story, A formula for justice.

"It's not often that the quiet world of mathematics is rocked by a murder case. But last summer saw a trial that sent academics into a tailspin, and has since swollen into a fevered clash between science and the law.
    At its heart, this is a story about chance. And it begins with a convicted killer, "T", who took his case to the court of appeal in 2010. Among the evidence against him was a shoeprint from a pair of Nike trainers, which seemed to match a pair found at his home. While appeals often unmask shaky evidence, this was different. This time, a mathematical formula was thrown out of court. The footwear expert made what the judge believed were poor calculations about the likelihood of the match, compounded by a bad explanation of how he reached his opinion. The conviction was quashed.
    But more importantly, as far as mathematicians are concerned, the judge also ruled against using similar statistical analysis in the courts in future. It's not the first time that judges have shown hostility to using formulae. But the real worry, say forensic experts, is that the ruling could lead to miscarriages of justice."

A group of UK academics, statisticians, forensic scientists and lawyers have been formed to try to address the problem bad statistical arguments in the courts. "We want to do what people failed to do in the past, which is really get the legal profession and statisticians and probability guys understanding each other's language."

Bayesian networks have become widely used in computing and information systems to model and reason about uncertainty and as prt of the foundation for artificial intelligence, machine learning and data mining.

Do you know the right programming languages? Depending on your objective, the most important one to know might be Java, Python, PhP, C, or even Haskell.

IEEE Spectrum has a short article on The Top 10 Programming Languages that is based on data from David Welton's Programming Languages Popularity site which "attempts to collect a variety of data about the relative popularity of programming languages"

The Atlantic has a short article on estimating the cost to the US economy of the popular angry birds game available on most smartphones.  Their estimate?  $1.5 billion dollars a year.

"Every March, it is a requirement that every newspaper and website in every town in the United States run a story about how much money American companies lose because people watch the NCAA basketball tournament instead of working. Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, the consulting firm that makes such estimates, has tried their hand at other games recently, too. A couple years ago, they gave a number for fantasy football, saying the hobby costs companies $10.5 billion in lost wages. So, when I heard today that people play 200 million minutes of Angry Birds a day, I wanted to know if the company had ever looked into lost productivity resulting from those dastardly pigs and their winged assassins. Sadly and inexplicably, they haven't. So, after looking at their methodology, I came up with my own estimate. Here it is."

You can read the full article here.

A new Google technical report, Trends in Circumventing Web-Malware Detection documents that it has become difficult to identify malicious Web sites as antivirus software is becoming less effective against them. The researchers analyzed four years' worth of data from 160 million Web pages using its Safe Browsing service, which warns users when they attempt to visit a site thought to have malware. Attackers have developed evasion techniques to avoid having their sites flagged as malicious. ACM TechNews notes that

"One of the ways hackers get around virtual machine-based detection is to require the victim to perform a mouse click, which triggers the site to automatically execute an attack. Browser emulators can malfunction when the malicious code is scrambled. A new, more complex JavaScript code is designed to stop emulated browsers and make manual analysis of the code more difficult, according to the Google engineers. Google also has come across IP cloaking, where a malicious Web site will refuse to serve harmful content to specific IP ranges, especially those used by security researchers. In August 2009, Google found that about 200,000 sites were using IP cloaking."

See also an article on NetworkWorld.

In his 2003 TED talk, George Dyson tells stories from the birth of the modern computer — from its 17th-century origins to the hilarious notebooks of some early computer engineers.