Language analysis predicts a coming betrayal

Being betrayed is worse than just being attacked. Someone you trusted as a friend and ally suddenly stabs you in the back.

According to a team of researchers at Cornell Univ., the Univ. of Maryland and the Univ. of Colorado, there are subtle linguistic clues that predict when a betrayal is coming. Humans are poor at noticing them, but computer analysis can detect them.

Crash-tolerant data storage

In a computer operating system, the file system is the part that writes data to disk and tracks where the data is stored. If the computer crashes while it’s writing data, the file system’s records can become corrupt. Hours of work could be lost, or programs could stop working properly.

At the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers will present the first file system that is mathematically guaranteed not to lose track of data during crashes. Although the file system is slow by today’s standards, the techniques the researchers used to verify its performance can be extended to more sophisticated designs. Ultimately, formal verification could make it much easier to develop reliable, efficient file systems.

Searching big data faster

For more than a decade, gene sequencers have been improving more rapidly than the computers required to make sense of their outputs. Searching for DNA sequences in existing genomic databases can already take hours, and the problem is likely to get worse.

Recently, Bonnie Berger’s group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has been investigating techniques to make biological and chemical data easier to analyze by, in some sense, compressing it.

Supercomputers enlisted to shed light on photosynthesis

Computing—the creation of supercomputers, above all—enables scientists and engineers to analyze highly complex physical processes using simulation techniques. In this case, researchers in the UPV/EHU's Dept. of Computer Architecture and Technology and the Dept. of Materials Physics are collaborating with researchers from various universities (including the Univ. de Coimbra, Univ. de Barcelona, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Martin-Luther-Univ. Halle-Wittenberg, Univ. of Liege) to analyze the photosynthesis process basing themselves on various theories because the way in which plants absorb light remains a mystery.