This is the third of a series of posts advertising internship positions at FXPAL for the summer of 2010.  A listing of all blog posts about our 2010 internship positions is available here.

Significant privacy issues arise when personal data is stored and analyzed. This issue is exacerbated when part or all of the storage and analysis is outsourced to a third party. To support such analysis in an awareness system, while addressing the privacy concerns, we are building into our system a facility that supports computation of simple statistics on encrypted data. This facility can be extended in a number of ways to support a greater variety of computations. There are a wealth of research questions related to designing such a system to support the types of computations useful to our application while choosing the best tradeoffs in terms of storage, bandwidth, division of labor between the third party and the clients, computation time at encryption, time to compute the statistics, and time to decrypt.

Prospective candidates should be enrolled in a PhD program and have significant experience in privacy and security, particularly computation on or search of encrypted data.

The intern will be hosted by Eleanor Rieffel.  For more information on the FXPAL internship program, please visit our web site.

A multinational team announced on January 7th that they, together with hundreds of computers, running for two years, carrying out about 2^67 instructions, factored RSA-768.  For more details, see their paper. They suggest that this result should encourage everyone to follow NIST’s recommendation to phase out 1024-bit RSA keys.

At CES 2010 this year, Microsoft talked about Ray Kurzweil’s Blio Reader, a piece of software designed to display and interact with books on a desktop PC, a laptop, or a tablet computer. The idea,  similar to Microsoft’s Reader software from about ten years ago, is to forego the low-power bistable display-style computers (e.g., Kindle, Nook, etc.) and leverage people’s existing (or new) PCs for reading and interacting with books. All in all, it’s probably the right way to go for several reasons:

• You don’t force people to buy yet another devices and carry yet another charger,
• You don’t worry about the book form-factor unless the person wants to get a slate, and
• You can take advantage of powerful CPUs and capable displays that can actually bring interactivity to reading.

And of to top it off, this software will be free. Who wouldn’t want that?

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Collaborative and cooperative aspects of information storage, seeking and retrieval have become a hot topic in recent years e.g. [1,2,4]. The acknowledgment that information seeking is a collaborative activity is part of a trend toward foregrounding the social in system design [5].

We wrote this in the introduction of a SIGGROUP report on a CSCW 1998 workshop on, you guessed it, Collaborative and Co-operative Information Seeking in Digital Information Environments. Plus ça change. The workshop was organized by Elizabeth Churchill, Joe Sullivan, Dave Snowdon and me. It is interesting to go back and read the position papers submitted by Mark Ackerman, Andrew Cohen, Jesus Favela, Mark Ginsburg,  Tom Gross, Timothy Koschmann, Joseph McCarthy, Alan Munro, Kevin Palfreyman,  Volker Paulsen, Alfredo Sanchez, Stefan Scholze, John Thomas, Michael Twidale, Volker Wulf, and Guillermo Zeballos.

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Just when you thought browser wars were a thing of the past, here comes Google Chrome. In a bid to increase its browser’s market penetration, Google announced Quick Scroll, a Chrome extension that enhances Google’s search results by highlighting matching passages that may not be easy to find otherwise.

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Which research result excited you the most in the past year? We’re not asking for the one you thought most important, or the one that would be most exciting to everyone, but which one got you, personally, most excited.

I’ll start things off with a result that delighted me so much I went around smiling all day, only feeling sad that more people couldn’t appreciate it! The result, that appeared in two papers almost simultaneously, is that some quantum states are too entangled to be able to compute one way. The result enchants me because it is surprising, fundamental, and related to topics close to my heart. Prior to these papers, the conventional wisdom held that more entanglement could only help quantum computation. It came as a complete surprise that it could hurt!  Dave Bacon writes beautifully and succinctly about these startling results in his viewpoint, published in Physics, about the two papers published together in Physics Review Letters 102 last May. Here I give an briefer account in order to explain why these result delighted me so much.

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In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that one of my favorite topics is classical results informed by the quantum information processing viewpoint. There are now sufficiently many such results that Drucker and deWolf have written a survey, “Quantum Proofs for Classical Theorems.” I was surprised last month, when another such  example popped up in one of the biggest cryptographic results of 2009, Craig Gentry’s discovery of a fully homomorphic encryption scheme.

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Wiley’s Handbook of Technology Management, which includes my entry on Quantum Computing, just appeared. I received my tome in the mail today. It is definitely the biggest, weightiest, and most expensive publication I’ve contributed to yet! I was only willing to write the entry if I could also post it on the ArXiv. Wiley agreed, so you can find my entry on the ArXiv as “An Overview of Quantum Computing for Technology Managers.”

I hope the entry conveys the excitement of the field while eliminating some of the hype.  It is focused on what is known about what quantum computers can and cannot do. It does not try to explain how they do what they do. (For that, my tutorial with Wolfgang Polak remains a good starting place.) While the entry discusses well known aspects of quantum computation, such as Shor’s algorithm, quantum key distribution, and quantum teleportation,  it also discusses many lesser known results including more recent algorithmic results and established limitations on quantum computation. I had the pleasure of writing about some of my favorite topics in quantum computing, including purely classical results inspired by the quantum information processing point of view, the elegant cluster state model of quantum computation, and Aaronson’s suggestion that limits on computational power be considered a fundamental guiding principle for physical theories, much like the laws of thermodynamics.

Comments and questions welcome!

ReBoard is a system we built at the lab to automatically capture whiteboard images and make them accessible and sharable through the web. A technical description of the system is available here. At CHI 2010, Stacy Branham will present an evaluation of ReBoad that she conducted over the summer as an intern at FXPAL¹.

Until then, check out our dorky demonstration video!

And be sure to watch the other videos of the latest and greatest FXPAL technologies.

1. The paper is
“Let’s go from the whiteboard: Supporting transitions in work through whiteboard capture and reuse” by Stacy Branham, Gene Golovchinksy, Scott Carter, and Jacob Biehl.

Let’s do an experiment. Here’s a TREC topic that specifies an information need

Food/Drug Laws

Description: What are the laws dealing with the quality and processing of food, beverages, or drugs?

Narrative: A relevant document will contain specific information on the laws dealing with such matters as quality control in processing, the use of additives and preservatives, the avoidance of impurities and poisonous substances, spoilage prevention, nutritional enrichment, and/or the grading of meat and vegetables. Relevant information includes, but is not limited to, federal regulations targeting three major areas of label abuse: deceptive definitions, misleading health claims, and untrue serving sizes and proposed standard definitions for such terms as high fiber and low fat.

Below are links to four documents that have been identified by some systems as being relevant to the above topic. Are they?

(I apologize in advance for the primitive nature of this form and its many usability defects.)