ScienceDaily: Internet News

From chaos to order: How ants optimize food search

Posted: 26 May 2014 03:27 PM PDT

Ants are capable of complex problem-solving strategies that could be widely applied as optimization techniques. An individual ant searching for food walks in random ways. Yet the collective foraging behavior of ants goes well beyond that, a mathematical study reveals: The animal movements at a certain point change from chaos to order. This happens in a self-organized way. Understanding the ants could help analyze similar phenomena -- for instance how humans roam the Internet.

Privacy compliance for big data systems automated: Search engine code is moving target that eludes manual audits

Posted: 21 May 2014 10:38 AM PDT

Web services companies, such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft, all make promises about how they will use personal information they gather. Scientists have now automated the method to ensure that large codebases are operating in compliance with those promises and has deployed a prototype automated system on the data analytics pipeline of Bing, Microsoft's search engine.