Droplets: Mobile Swarm computers project turns to crowdfunding - video

University of Colorado, Boulder researchers seek to build a swarm of Droplet robots and have turned to crowdfunding.

They have been working on a robotic platform to study swarming behavior; their goals are to test swarming algorithms on a large scale, bring Droplets into college classrooms, use Droplets to teach K-12 science, and provide Droplets for artistic use.

John Klingner, PhD candidate, computer science, said "We are ready to scale up" and they would now like to buy parts and pay for 1,000 robots to be assembled.

Droplets are an experimental research and educational platform, for large-scale swarming research, using an MIT License


A Droplet is a small mobile robot. The platform features include moving and communicating omni-directionally.

The platform has three components, the hardware, the embedded software and the software simulation environment.

The required infrastructure includes a powered floor. The hardware component includes the actual robot and the test bed/floor that experiments are run on.



The robots are Ping-Pong ball sized devices. They have RGB color and IR sensing, actuation using vibration motors and communication, using analog/digital IR sensors.

Nikolaus Correll, assistant professor, computer science, said that after working on this robotic platform they have now reached a stage where they want to mass-produce them.

The team has used a promotional video to highlight the potential educational value of their Droplets platform.

Klingner spoke about bringing the technology to a wider arena of students.

He talked about their hopes in giving small groups of students, say, 30 robots, with which they could test out some simple swarm algorithms individually and then, at the end of the course, bring all 300 or so robots together for a more complex task.

Correll said the Droplets would be valuable for use in high schools as well: "We are also looking to collaborate with local high schools in the area and use the swarm" to teach them not only about swarms but maybe also about organic chemistry, math, geometry and the immune system.


His interest in the Droplets project reflects his deeper interest in what such scientific exploration can reveal.

"The entire world is actually a swarm so everything you see is just a swarm of atoms working together and at some point those atoms make a cell and at some point those cells make molecules; they make brains; they make livers; and hearts."

At the end of the day, he said, "all of these things are swarms." As such, Correll said he was "very curious to understand what the principles and mechanisms are that drive these things."

Taking these robots and programming them, he added, might increase an understanding of how to recreate such phenomena.

In addition to educational value, Klingner noted that one of the things they were thinking about is mapping an oil spill.

Anshul Kanakia, PhD candidate, computer science, noted a scenario where one is out in the ocean, not knowing where the spill begins, and wanting a good real-time map of the spill.

Each individual robot could make a guess, all go up and surround it and "talk" to each other.

Meet "Flame", The Massive Spy Malware Infiltrating Iranian Computers

A massive, highly sophisticated piece of malware has been newly found infecting systems in Iran and elsewhere and is believed to be part of a well-coordinated, ongoing, state-run cyberespionage operation.

The malware, discovered by Russia-based anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab, is an espionage toolkit that has been infecting targeted systems in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, the Israeli Occupied Territories and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa for at least two years.

Dubbed “Flame” by Kaspersky, the malicious code dwarfs Stuxnet in size – the groundbreaking infrastructure-sabotaging malware that is believed to have wreaked havoc on Iran’s nuclear program in 2009 and 2010.

Although Flame has both a different purpose and composition than Stuxnet, and appears to have been written by different programmers, its complexity, the geographic scope of its infections and its behavior indicate strongly that a nation-state is behind Flame, rather than common cyber-criminals — marking it as yet another tool in the growing arsenal of cyberweaponry.

The researchers say that Flame may be part of a parallel project created by contractors who were hired by the same nation-state team that was behind Stuxnet and its sister malware, DuQu.

“Stuxnet and Duqu belonged to a single chain of attacks, which raised cyberwar-related concerns worldwide,” said Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and co-founder of Kaspersky Lab, in a statement.

“The Flame malware looks to be another phase in this war, and it’s important to understand that such cyber weapons can easily be used against any country.”

Early analysis of Flame by the Lab indicates that it’s designed primarily to spy on the users of infected computers and steal data from them, including documents, recorded conversations and keystrokes. It also opens a backdoor to infected systems to allow the attackers to tweak the toolkit and add new functionality.

The malware, which is 20 megabytes when all of its modules are installed, contains multiple libraries, SQLite3 databases, various levels of encryption — some strong, some weak — and 20 plug-ins that can be swapped in and out to provide various functionality for the attackers.

It even contains some code that is written in the LUA programming language — an uncommon choice for malware.

Kaspersky Lab is calling it “one of the most complex threats ever discovered.”

“It’s pretty fantastic and incredible in complexity,” said Alexander Gostev, chief security expert at Kaspersky Lab.

Flame appears to have been operating in the wild as early as March 2010, though it remained undetected by antivirus companies.

“It’s a very big chunk of code. Because of that, it’s quite interesting that it stayed undetected for at least two years,” Gostev said. He noted that there are clues that the malware may actually date back to as early as 2007, around the same time-period when Stuxnet and DuQu are believed to have been created.

Gostev says that because of its size and complexity, complete analysis of the code may take years.

“It took us half-a-year to analyze Stuxnet,” he said. “This is 20-times more complicated. It will take us 10 years to fully understand everything.”

Kaspersky discovered the malware about two weeks ago after the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union asked the Lab to look into reports in April that computers belonging to the Iranian Oil Ministry and the Iranian National Oil Company had been hit with malware that was stealing and deleting information from the systems.

The malware was named alternatively in news articles as “Wiper” and “Viper,” a discrepancy that may be due to a translation mixup.

Kaspersky researchers searched through their reporting archive, which contains suspicious filenames sent automatically from customer machines so the names can be checked against whitelists of known malware, and found an MD5 hash and filename that appeared to have been deployed only on machines in Iran and other Middle East countries.

As the researchers dug further, they found other components infecting machines in the region, which they pieced together as parts of Flame.

Kaspersky, however, is currently treating Flame as if it is not connected to Viper, and believes it is a separate infection entirely. The researchers dubbed the toolkit “Flame” after the name of a module inside it.

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Canadian Physicists predict cooler computers

Canadian physicists say they have discovered new behaviours of light occurring within photonic crystals.

University of Toronto quantum optics researchers Professor Sajeev John and doctoral student Xun Ma said their findings could lead to faster optical information processing and compact computers that don't overheat.

"We discovered that by sculpting a unique artificial vacuum inside a photonic crystal, we can completely control the electronic state of artificial atoms within the vacuum," Ma, lead author of the study, said. "This discovery can enable photonic computers that are more than 100 times faster than their electronic counterparts, without heat dissipation issues and other bottlenecks currently faced by electronic computing."

John said he and Ma designed a vacuum in which light passes through circuit paths whose character changes drastically and abruptly with the wave length of the light.

"A vacuum experienced by light is not completely empty, and can be made even emptier," said John. "It's not the traditional understanding of a vacuum."

Ma added: "In this vacuum, the state of each atom -- or quantum dot -- can be manipulated with color-coded streams of laser pulses that sequentially excite and de-excite it in trillionths of a second. These quantum dots can in turn control other streams of optical pulses, enabling optical information processing and computing."

The research is reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Vintage (old) Computer Fair 2009

"Pre-modern" computers will be exhibited at the sixth annual Vintage Computer Festival at New Jersey's InfoAge Science Center.

All exhibitors are required to have live demos, making it quite a hands-on experience. "Imagine a car show where you get to drive every car!" organizers promise.

If you're up for a big road trip after the festival, you can bask in the history of video games at the National Center for the History of Electronic Games in Rochester, N.Y., – about six hours away by car. An option for West coasters is the Computer History Museum, open year-round in Mountain View, Calif.

Of course you could just check out the stuff you have in the garage and attic. Come on! Get those Spectrums, Amiga's and Sinclair's out of their cryo-chambers!