In last week’s PBS NOVA scienceNOW program, What Will the Future Be Like?, David Pogue imagined what the Tech page of The New York Times might look like 10, 20, or 30 years from today and offered his predictions about the technologies that will transform your life and the lives of your grandchildren.

Mobile phones that read your mind? Video games that can cure cancer? Wearable robots that give you the strength of Ironman? David Pogue predicts which technologies will transform daily life for you — and your grandkids. These advancements are already taking shape in laboratories around the world — and gadgets that once were purely science fiction are on the verge of becoming as common as the iPhones and Androids Pogue reviews every day.

In last week’s PBS NOVA scienceNOW program, What Will the Future Be Like?, David Pogue imagined what the Tech page of The New York Times might look like 10, 20, or 30 years from today and offered his predictions about the technologies that will transform your life and the lives of your grandchildren.

Mobile phones that read your mind? Video games that can cure cancer? Wearable robots that give you the strength of Ironman? David Pogue predicts which technologies will transform daily life for you — and your grandkids. These advancements are already taking shape in laboratories around the world — and gadgets that once were purely science fiction are on the verge of becoming as common as the iPhones and Androids Pogue reviews every day.

MALARIA FACTS

• Of the 300-500 million clinical cases of malaria that occur globally each year, 90 percent of them are in Africa. 
    
• Malaria is endemic in more than 90 countries. 
    
• Forty percent of the world population is at risk for malaria. 
    
• Ten percent of world population gets sick each year with malaria.

DEATH BY MALARIA

• Number of fatal cases of malaria each year: over 1 million
    
• Most common age at death: 4 years 
    
• Every 30 seconds, a child dies of malaria
    
• Five percent of African children are killed by malaria, almost 3,000 each day, or the equivalent of seven jumbo jets full of children crashing every day. 
    
• Up to 23 percent of African infants are born with the malaria parasite.

A free screening of the new film Codebreaker will be shown on Thursday, November 29 at 5:30pm in Hodson Auditorium at johns Hopkins University. The screening will be followed by a reception and question and answer session with the film's executive producer, Patrick Sammon.

Codebreaker tells the remarkable and tragic story of one of the 20th century's most important people. Alan Turing set in motion the digital revolution and his World War II codebreaking helped turn the tide of war. This maverick British genius is one of the most important scientists ever, yet few people have heard his name, know his story, or understand his legacy. Historians say by breaking the Nazis' Naval Enigma code, Turing helped shorten the Second World War by two years, saving millions of lives. As the founding father of computer science and artificial intelligence, Alan Turing envisioned our digital world long before anyone else. Built on a solid historical foundation of true events, Turing is our storyteller as he defiantly searches for answers. Documentary elements seamlessly interconnect with drama scenes to offer a three dimensional picture of Turing, his accomplishments, his tragic end, and his lasting legacy. (Running time 81 minutes). Learn more about Codebreaker and view a two-minute trailer at www.turingfilm.com.

MS Thesis Defense

Smartphone Application and Data Privacy Control Using Semantically Rich Reasoning and Context Modeling

Dibyajyoti Ghosh

9:00am Tuesday, 20 November 2012, ITE 325B, UMBC

We present our ongoing work on user data and contextual privacy preservation in mobile devices through semantic reasoning. Recent advances in context modeling, tracking and collaborative localization has led to the emergence of a new class of smartphone applications that can access and share embedded sensor data. Unfortunately, this also means significant amount of user context information is now accessible to applications and potentially others, creating serious privacy and security concerns. Mobile OS frameworks like Android lack mechanisms for dynamic privacy control. We show how data flow among applications can be successfully filtered at a much more granular level using semantic web driven technologies that model device location, surroundings, application roles as well as context-dependent information sharing policies.

Committee members:

• Prof. Anupam Joshi (Chair)
• Prof. Tim Finin
• Prof. Yelena Yesha
• Prof. Shujia Zhou