Voting Machines and Their Lack of Safety

With the hilarious, sad, and downright generally lacking presidential election that is occurring, it is hard to not pay attention as this election process plays out. November 8^th is coming and this is probably one of the most important elections for eligible voters to actually get out to vote in.

Researchers at Princeton University, in addition to some Computer Science graduate students, worked to see how they could hack a voting machine to change the outcome of a casted vote to test the security of the voting system.  A professor, by the name of Andrew Appel, and many other professors and graduate students showed how they could hack the AVC (Advantage Voting Machines) used in many states. They found that when they studied the source code of the AVC Advantage that it does not follow best software engineering practices and that the Independent Test Authority report does not accurately and sufficiently assess the security of the AVC Advantage. There were at least two program bugs that slipped through the ITA review according the professors.

There were also some ‘user interface design flaws’ of the AVC Advantage which has the potential to cause inaccuracy in recording votes. Ballots are prepared and results are tallied with a Windows application called “WinEDS” that runs on computers. ‘The votes cast on an individual machine are recorded in the same cartridge, which poll workers bring to election headquarters after polls close. The voting machines are left at the polling places for a few days until the trucking company picks them up at election headquarters in each county’. This allows ample time for a dedicated and fully intentioned hacker to do their work. In addition, the source code of the WinEds application appears to be written by another company and sold to AVC Advantage. This could lead to loss of accuracy and reliability because the company that creates and issues the voting machines didn’t even write the code it uses which could lead to some holes in security.

When it comes to something such as voting for a president for one of the most influential countries in the world, there should be greater research into how to make the voting system safer so that it can truly reflect a Democracy.

References:

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/appel-evt09.pdf

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-elections-russia-hack-how-to-hack-an-election-in-seven-minutes-214144

http://citp.princeton.edu/research/voting/

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/news/princeton-computer-science-hub-voting-technology-policy

Algorithm Connecting Students at MIT

There are approximately seven billion people in the world who live both near and far from us. With advancements in technology we are able to connect with people from all walks of life and just about every part of the world. Two MIT graduate students, Mohammad Ghassemi and Tuka Al-Hanai, are trying to get in on the trend of people wanting to connect over their electronic devices. They created an algorithm that connects students at MIT for friendly lunch dates to meet people all across campus that they likely wouldn’t meet otherwise.

They first started with a Google doc which they sent to the student body so that they could sign up for said lunch dates once a week for the semester. The form is essentially a survey that asks you questions to test your compatibility with another person. Both of the students had experience with the branch of Computer Science involving artificial intelligence and they developed an algorithm together for their project that they call ‘Maven’. The algorithm involves link analysis, which you can read about in one of my previous blogs, to analyze the links made between two people. The more connections, the higher chance of two people being matched together.

Many people at the University say that they enjoy this program as it allows them to make friends easier and to not have the fear that freshmen often feel of going to an event by themselves. The love of this program is shown as,“93 percent of participants said that they rate the program four or above”. Hopefully this can be brought to the University of Richmond to help students acclimate better to campus life.

References:

https://anniecoops.com/tag/connections/

https://www.eecs.mit.edu/news-events/media/algorithm-connects-students-most-interesting-person-theyve-never-met

Developments at MIT: Automated Screening for Childhood Communication Disorders

Children with speech and language disorders, especially under the age of six, often do not  have their disabilities caught early due to lack of identification of the issue from parents and teachers. If the disorders are not caught early in the child’d development, it can lead to academic and social anxiety as the children become older. It is a fact that 60% of kids go undiagnosed until after kindergarten which is an unnecessarily high number. MIT’s researchers at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are trying to reduce that percentage by generating a computer system that can automatically screen young children for speech and language disorders. The team of computer scientists have made steady progress but have not  yet completed their work. 

The system works by first analyzing audio recordings of children’s performances on standardized storytelling tests. The scientists plan on making the screening of the children speech completely automated and possibly making it accessible through phones and tablets for low-cost screening for large amounts of children. Two graduate students in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT used machine learning (which you can read about in one of my previous blog posts) to search through large sets of training data for patterns that correspond to particular classifications. The graduate students identified 13 acoustic features of children speech that their machine learning system could search and correlate to a specific disorder. The machine learning was trained on three different tasks: identifying any impairment, identifying language impairments and identifying speech impairments. 

There was an issue with considering age and gender as those both can affect how a child speaks. One of the graduate students used a statistical analysis mechanism called residual analysis to identify correlations between subjects age and gender and the features of their speech. The student then altered the correlations before she fed the data to the machine learning algorithm. This advancement could lead to more children having their speech disorders corrected before it becomes a large negative part of their lives.

References:

http://news.mit.edu/2016/automated-screening-childhood-communication-disorders-0922

Tesla's New Innovation: the Model X

Of the many car brands available to the public for consumption, Tesla, in my opinion,  has had the most ground breaking innovations presented within the last 10 or even 20 years. They have recently come out with a new masterpiece called the Tesla Model X that is a beautiful, sleek car with more to it than meets the eye. It is the fastest sport utility vehicle in history with 289 miles of range and can accelerate from zero to 60 miles in 2.9 seconds. In addition, the car has a 100 kWh battery which means it takes no gas and is pollution free. The car has falcon wings which means that the doors open up onto the roof of the car instead of to the side like standard cars and also has a panoramic windshield which allows the passengers and driver to have a larger view of the outside world than they would in a mundane car.

This car also has the very cool feature of autopilot which matches highway speeds and stop-and-go traffic with ease and can even scan for parking spaces and parallel park the car for you! This feature uses a camera, radar, and ultrasonic sensors to work properly. There are 12 ultrasonic sensors that are placed around the bumpers and sides of the car and can detect objects up to 16 feet away. These sensors, the front radar camera, and the GPS of the car all collect data that is combined in the system of the car to be able to drive without hitting anything in its vicinity. The car is coded to have a predetermined scope in which it identifies the range of space in which surrounds the car to make sure that the car is moving in a direction with nothing in front of it for at least some distance. Essentially it looks to see "if'" there is something in the way of the car then drive the car out of the way or stop the car, "else if" keep driving down same path. 

This model is my favorite of all the Tesla models as it is an SUV that has a lot of space, is versatile in harsh weather conditions, and is still energy and fuel efficient. If you would like to learn more my references below are very informative when looking at the new model so feel free to check them out!

References:

http://insideevs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/model-x-signature-P90D-250-miles.jpg

http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/what-is-tesla-autopilot