Matt Shipman

For software programmers, security tools are analytic software that can scan or run their code to expose vulnerabilities long before the software goes to market. But these tools can have shortcomings, and programmers don’t always use them. New research from National Science Foundation-funded computer science researcher Emerson Murphy-Hill and his colleagues tackles three different aspects of the issue. “Our work is focused on understanding the developers who are trying to identify security vulnerabilities in their code, and how they use (or don’t use) tools that can help them find those vulnerabilities,” says Murphy-Hill, an associate professor of computer science at...

Old habits are hard to break – and few habits are as hard to break as smoking cigarettes. But new technology could help people understand what triggers their craving for a cigarette, and use that information to cut back on smoking. That’s the idea behind Nicotrax – a smart cigarette case that communicates with a smoker’s smartphone to record who the smoker is with as well as where and when a smoker reaches for a cigarette. That data is used to identify triggers for smoking – the specific circumstances in which a smoker is more likely to light up....