Entry 10: Ada Lovelace

Who was Ada Lovelace?



Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace lived from December 10, 1815 to November 27, 1852 and was an English mathematician and writer who was chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Ada had an unusual upbringing for an aristocratic girl in the mid-1800s and at her mother's insistence, tutors taught her mathematics and science. Such challenging subjects were not standard fare for women at the time, but her mother believed that engaging in rigorous studies would prevent Lovelace from developing her father's moody and unpredictable temperament. At the age of 17, Ada met Charles Babbage, a mathematician and inventor. The pair became friends, and the much older Babbage served as a mentor to Ada. Through Babbage, Ada began studying advanced mathematics with University of London professor Augustus de Morgan. Ada described how codes could be created for the device to handle letters and symbols along with numbers. She also theorized a method for the engine to repeat a series of instructions, a process known as looping that computer programs use today. For her work, Ada is often considered to be the first computer programmer.

The Analytical Engine



The Analytical Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete. The logical structure of the Analytical Engine was essentially the same as that which has dominated computer design in the electronic era. The input, consisting of programs and data was to be provided to the machine via punched cards, a method being used at the time to direct mechanical looms. Three different types of punch cards were used: one for arithmetical operations, one for numerical constants, and one for load and store operations, transferring numbers from the store to the arithmetical unit or back. For output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter and a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read in later. It employed ordinary base-10 fixed-point arithmetic

References

http://www.biography.com/people/ada-lovelace-20825323

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

Entry 9: Alan Turing

Who was Alan Turing?

Alan Mathison Turing was born on June 23, 1912, in London, England. At a young age, he displayed signs of high intelligence, which some of his teachers recognized, but did not necessarily respect. When Turing attended the well-known independent Sherborne School at the age of 13, he became particularly interested in math and science. After Sherborne, Turing enrolled at King's College in Cambridge, England, studying there from 1931 to 1934. As a result of his dissertation, in which he proved the central limit theorem, Turing was elected a fellow at the school upon his graduation. Over the next two years, Turing studied mathematics and cryptology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1938, he returned to Cambridge, and then took a part-time position with the Government Code and Cypher School, a British code-breaking organization.

During World War II, Turing was a leading participant in wartime code-breaking, particularly that of German ciphers. He worked at Bletchley Park, the GCCS wartime station, where he made five major advances in the field of cryptanalysis, including specifying the bomb, an electromechanical device used to help decipher German Enigma encrypted signals. Shortly after World War II, Alan Turing was awarded an Order of the British Empire for his work. 

The Enigma

The Enigma machines were a series of electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines developed and used in the early to mid twentieth century to protect commercial, diplomatic and military communication. Like other rotor machines, the Enigma machine is a combination of mechanical and electrical subsystems. The mechanical subsystem consists of a keyboard, a set of rotating disks called rotors arranged adjacently along a spindle, and one of various stepping components to turn at least one rotor with each key press. The mechanical parts act in such a way as to form a varying electrical circuit. When a key is pressed, one or more rotors move to form a new rotor configuration, and a circuit is completed. The Enigma transformation for each letter can be specified mathematically as a product of permutations.

References

http://www.biography.com/people/alan-turing-9512017

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine

Entry 8: Encryption Technology

Terrorist Attacks and Technology 

In light of the recent terrorist attacks in London when Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old Briton, drove a car into pedestrians, killing three of them, and then fatally stabbed a police officer, British government officials are planning to meet with representatives of American technology companies to demand that they do more to help in the fight against terrorism and online hate speech. This is the latest move in a widening global push against encryption technology that blocks access to the private messages of criminal and innocent users alike. Amber Rudd, Britain’s home secretary, said that the country’s intelligence agencies should have access to encrypted messages sent through WhatsApp, an instant-messaging service owned by Facebook.

Neil Basu, a deputy assistant commissioner for the Metropolitan Police Service, stated that Mr. Masood’s communications on the day of the attack remained of high interest, and he asked London residents to come forward with any information they had on his activities or state of mind. A key statement from Mr. Basu is that, “I know when, where and how Masood committed his atrocities, but now I need to know why. Most importantly, so do the victims and families.” It is only having access to the encrypted communication that the London Police force will be able to gain these answers. 

While law makers and regulators in Europe and around the world now want Silicon Valley companies to do more to tackle potential threats, such tech companies and digital rights advocates have said such efforts would infringe on human rights because providing the authorities with access to such messaging services would require weakening their overall levels of encryption. Recently, a German government minister, Heiko Maas, said that he would propose new legislation that could fine tech companies around $50 million if they failed to stop hate speech being spread on digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube.

What is Encryption?

 The tech companies in question say they cannot hand over such information because internet messages are sent through so-called end-to-end encryption. This technology scrambles messages to make them indecipherable to anyone but their intended recipient. It also makes messages unreadable when they pass through an app’s server, meaning companies do not have the ability to provide the information to law enforcement even if they wanted to.

Encryption is used to protect data both while it is being sent across a network, data in transit, and stored, such as on a hard drive, smartphone or flash drive, data at rest. The primary purpose of encryption is to protect the confidentiality of digital data stored on computer systems or transmitted via the Internet or other computer networks. Modern encryption algorithms play a vital role in the security assurance of IT systems and communications as they can provide not only confidentiality, but also authentication, integrity, and non-repudiation. 

Data which is referred to as plaintext, is encrypted using an encryption algorithm and an encryption key. This process generates a ciphertext that can only be viewed in its original form if decrypted with the correct key. Decryption is simply the inverse of encryption, following the same steps but reversing the order in which the keys are applied. 

References

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/technology/whatsapp-rudd-terrorists-uk-attack.html?_r=0&referer=

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/encryption

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption

Entry 7: Cybersecurity

What is cybersecurity?

Cyberspace and its underlying infrastructure are vulnerable to a wide range of risk stemming from both physical and cyber threats and hazards. Sophisticated cyber actors and nation-states exploit vulnerabilities to steal information and money and are developing capabilities to disrupt, destroy, or threaten the delivery of essential services. As Americans become more reliant on modern technology, we also become more vulnerable to cyberattacks such as corporate security breaches, spear phishing, and social media fraud. Law enforcement performs an essential role in achieving our nation’s cybersecurity objectives by investigating a wide range of cyber crimes, from theft and fraud to child exploitation, and apprehending and prosecuting those responsible. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) works with other federal agencies to conduct high-impact criminal investigations to disrupt and defeat cyber criminals, prioritize the recruitment and training of technical experts, develop standardized methods, and broadly share cyber response best practices and tools.

Cybersecurity and Computer Science

Criminal investigators and network security experts with deep understanding of the technologies malicious actors are using and the specific vulnerabilities they are targeting work to effectively respond to and investigate cyber incidents. The mission of DHS’s Network Security Deployment (NSD) division is to improve cybersecurity to federal departments, agencies, and partners by developing the technologies and establishing the services needed to fulfill CS&C’s cybersecurity mission. NCPS is an integrated system-of-systems that delivers a range of capabilities, including intrusion detection, analytics, intrusion prevention, and information sharing. These capabilities provide a technological foundation that enables DHS to secure and defend the federal civilian government’s information technology infrastructure against advanced cyber threats.

One of DHS’s key technologies within the NCPS is EINSTEIN. EINSTEIN allows DHS to both detect cyber attacks targeting federal civilian government networks and actively prevent potential compromises. The EINSTEIN program also serves as a platform to aggregate federal civilian executive branch traffic so that DHS can implement new and advanced protections. In other words, by putting all federal government traffic through a few locations, DHS can easily add security tools to those locations.

References
https://www.dhs.gov/topic/cybersecurity
https://www.dhs.gov/topic/combating-cyber-crime
https://www.dhs.gov/cybersecurity-overview
https://www.dhs.gov/einstein

Entry 6: Grace Hopper

Who was Grace Hopper?

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and admiral in the United States Navy. In 1944, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer and invented the first compiler for a computer programming. The Harvard Mark I computer was a general purpose electromechanical computer that was used in the war effort during the last part of World War II. She received the Naval Ordnance Development Award for her pioneering applications programming success on the Mark I, Mark II, and Mark III computers.

Admiral Hopper conceptualized how a wider audience could benefit from the computer if there were tools that were both programmer and application-friendly. In pursuit of her vision she risked her career in 1949 to join the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation to provide businesses with computers. Pursuing her belief that computer programs could be written in English, Admiral hopper moved forward with the development of the Business Oriented compiler for the UNIVAC computer, later known as FLOW-MATIC. Using FLOW-MATIC, Admiral Hopper and her staff were able to make the UNIVAC understand twenty statements in English. This compiler was a precursor for the Common Business Oriented Language, or COBOL, a widely adapted language that would be used around the world.

About COBAL

COBAL (Common Business Oriented Language) is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use.  It was created as part of a US Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. COBOL has an English-like syntax, which was designed to be self-documenting and highly readable. However, it is verbose and uses over 300 reserved words. In contrast with modern, succinct syntax like y = x;, COBOL has a more English-like syntax (in this case, MOVE x TO y). COBOL code is split into four divisions (identification, environment, data and procedure) containing a rigid hierarchy of sections, paragraphs and sentences.

Under her direction, the Navy developed a set of programs and procedures for validating COBOL compilers. This concept of validation has had widespread impact on other programming languages and organizations; it eventually led to national and international standards and validation facilities for most programming languages.

Today the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women In Computing Conference is a technical conference that encourages women to become part of the world of computing, while the Association for Computing Machinery offers a Grace Murray Hopper Award.

References 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
http://www.biography.com/people/grace-hopper-21406809
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-story.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Syntax

Entry 5: To Remake a World Facebook Helped Create

Facebook


When people hear the name Mark Zuckerberg it is immediately associated with Facebook. Facebook is the largest social network accross the globe. About 85% of of Facebook's 1.86 billion members live outside of the U.S. and Canada. The California based company has offices everywhere from Amsterdam to Jakarta, Indonesia, to Tel Aviv. On Thursday February 16, Zuckerberg released a 5,800-word manifesto that apears closer to utopian social guide than business plan. He described his desired to remake Facebook in a way that counters isolationism, promotes global connections and addresses social ills while also cementing Facebook's central role as a builder of online “community” for its nearly 2 billion users.

Zuckerberg wrote, “our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community — for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.” One method of implementation to develop this safe social infrastructure is through using artificial intelligence to start making the sorts of judgments that Facebook sometimes bobbles. AI systems could also comb through the vast amount of material users post on Facebook to detect everything from bullying to the early signs of suicidal thinking to extremist recruiting.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is simply intelligence exhibited by machines where research looks any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal. Currently artificial machines are able to successfully understand human speech, compete at a high level in strategic game systems, self-drive cars, intelligently route content delivery networks, and interpret complex data. A neural network is an interconnected group of nodes, akin to the vast network of neurons in the human brain. Today, neural networks are often trained by the backpropagation algorithm in which the algorithm repeats a two phase cycle, propagation and weight update. When an input is presented to the network, it is propagated forward through the network until it reaches the output layer. The output of the network is then compared to the desired output, using a loss function which is a function that maps an event or values of one or more variables onto a real number intuitively representing some "cost" associated with the event, and an error value is calculated for each of the neurons in the output layer. The error values are then propagated backwards, starting from the output, until each neuron has an associated error value which roughly represents its contribution to the original output.

References

• http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-zuckerberg-vision-20170217-story.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_function

Entry 4: Defense Against Code Copycats

Snap Inc.

As social media becomes a more relevant aspect in the lives of humans around the world, companies like Snap Inc. which owns the popular application, Snapchat, and Facebook which owns Instagram are constantly competing to come up with the next best feature. This past year, Snap Inc. filed for public offering and hired Swiss engineer to help defend their products against copycats. Laurent Balmelli helped to co-found the startup Strong.Codes, a maker of tools that obscures software code and makes it harder for competitors to reverse engineer or take a part and copy the code. The startup was founded by a team of academics with expertise in cryptography and software protection. The company says on its website, “our goal is to make software piracy much more expensive and complicated.” The main feature of that Snap Inc. is trying to protect is their ability to create stories and the facial recognition features associated with taking photographs. Instagram has recently produced stories quite similar to Snapchat's feature.

Strong.Codes
Strong codes offers software protection against reverse-engineering through jailbreak detection, complex obfuscation techniques, improved tamper-proofing, and Multi-IDE, file-based configuration of protections settings  based on the latest LLVM 3.9 which is information on the compiler infrastructure. Jailbreaking is the modification of a smartphone or other electronic device to remove restrictions imposed by the manufacturer or operator, e.g. to allow the installation of unauthorized software. Obfuscation is the action of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible. The code used by Strong.Codes is universal meaning that their solution works on all major software platforms, such as Windows, OS X, GNU/Linux, iOS, Android and others. It supports C/C++ and Objective-C, among other programming languages.

Using software like strong.codes to protect companies unique programs is necessary in today's technological world. As technology continues to advance, those with knowledge of computer science are going to be highly sought out to work to protect public social media companies.

Resources

• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-08/snap-linked-to-swiss-startup-that-fights-product-copycats
• https://strong.codes/#home
• https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=jailbreak+
• http://releases.llvm.org/3.9.1/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

Entry 3: Using Big Data to Combat Human Trafficking

Orphan Secure 

Partnered with NGOs, law enforcement agencies, corporations, and private citizens across the globe, Orphan Secure which was founded in 2013 works to extract intelligence and insight from large and complex collections of data sets to identify and rescue victims of trafficking by targeting those organizations and bringing them to justice.  As part of an effort to combat child sex trafficking around the globe, Orphan Secure launched the "FREEDOM!" app, an anti-human trafficking mobile application available in 10 languages. The team at Orphan Secure is taking a direct action by consulting and training international orphanages threatened by civil unrest, war, or criminal activity and conducting security and vulnerability assessments in order to provide solutions. Additionally, they collect and disseminate big data to which is leading to the identification and rescue of victims of human and child sex trafficking.

What is Big Data?

Big data is a term for a data set that is so large or complex that they are unable to be dealt with by traditional data processing applications. Due to the size and complexity of such data sets processing challenges include analysis, capture, data curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, querying, updating and information privacy. The size of big data sets are constantly changing ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data making it intolerable to capture, curate, manage, and process data within a reasonable amount of time. In 2000, a C++-based distributed file-sharing framework for data storage and query was developed in order to deal with big data sets. In 2004, Google produced a process called MapReduce which uses a similar architecture to the C++ framework created in 2000. Google's concept provides a parallel processing model where queries are split and distributed across parallel nodes and processed in parallel.

Resources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data 

Entry 2: Amazon's Alexa

Who is Alexa?

As technology continues to advance, companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon are continuing to compete to come out with the next best thing to improve our daily lives. This past year, Amazon came out with the first sophisticated home based virtual assistant, called "Alexa." While smart phones are the most convenient personal assistant while on the go, they are not convenient when someone is working at home. The Amazon Echo and now the Amazon Dot house the Internet-connected, Alexa-powered speaker that answers questions and runs apps.  When prompted through voice commands Alexa can play music through multiple different applications, check the weather in your set location, check for traffic, set timers, and even order goods off of your Amazon.com account. These are just a few of the countless functions that Alexa can perform. Through this technology, Amazon is building an invisible operating system for running a broad range of aspects of daily life. Once of main advantage's of Amazon's Alexa over other products put out by Google or Apple is that, "Amazon isn't partial to any particular platform the way Google may be with Android or Apple with iOS, allowing Alexa to offer the same experience with little influence based on the other devices a user may own."


How Alexa Works

What makes this product unique is that the Echo and Alexa are not one in the same. Alexa is the voice assistant while Echo is simply Alexa's "first customer." Amazon is using a typical operating system to control the home. First, the company created a simple “Skills” framework that allowed smart devices to connect to Alexa and be controlled through a relatively strict verbal framework.

While I do not see the absolute necessity for owning an Amazon Echo, I have used the tool in multiple situations and can attest that it is a highly intelligent piece of technology and is pretty fun to use.

References 

• http://time.com/4624067/amazon-echo-alexa-ces-2017/
• https://stratechery.com/2017/amazons-operating-system/

Entry 1: Biometric Security

Human Biometrics

Biometrics are the measurable parameters related to human characteristics that make each human being unique. These metrics include finger prints, palm prints, retinal scans, facial recognition and DNA. The analysis and comparison of these metrics are now being used by computer scientists for security purposes.  Because biometric identifiers are unique to each individual it tightens security by making identity verification more reliable than a passport or drivers license that can easily be forged. The most common form of Biometric Security that we see today is Apple's use of the fingerprint to unlock the latest models of the iPhone. Each person has a unique fingerprint that they input into the iPhone's memory and when the correct fingerprint is scanned and recognized, the iPhone becomes unlocked. Due to the uniqueness of biometric identifiers they are difficult to forge, but if forged a person's entire identity is compromised.

Woodrow Hartzog, an Associate Professor of Law at Samford University stated, "[Biometrics] can be great because they are really secure. It’s hard to fake someone’s ear, eye, gait, or other things that make an individual uniquely identifiable. But if a biometric is compromised, you’re done. You can’t get another ear.”

Biometric Security and Computer Science

Computer science is crucial for the success of biometric identification. "Biometric identification refers to any technology that does one of two things: identifies you or authenticates your identity. For identification, an image is run against a database of images. For authentication, an image has to be accessed from the device to confirm a match. The latter is typically used for unlocking computers, phones, and applications." In this case the data are a human's unique biometric characteristics. While this technology has rapidly expanded since Apple's introduction of the fingerprint scanner in 2013,  police have been using fingerprints to identify suspects since the 1980s.

References

• https://www.wired.com/2016/03/biometrics-coming-along-serious-security-concerns/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometrics
• http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/biometrics.html
• http://www.inquisitr.com/846786/thermal-imaging-next-big-thing-in-biometric-security/
• http://www.sgssystems.com/security-systems-west-midlands/biometric-security-systems/