Technical Committee News

There have been reports that the entire US power grid can suffer a major blackout nationwide by an attack on merely 9 of its 55,000 substations, if planned intentionally. This may sound suspicious, but on a smaller scale, how vulnerable is a regional electrical power grid, say the San Francisco Bay area, the heart of high-tech industry, under major outage or malicious penetrations?

A team led by Stanford electrical engineers has compressed a completely sequenced human genome to just 2.5 megabytes – small enough to attach to an email. The engineers used what is known as reference-based compression, relying on a human genome sequence that is already known and available. Their compression has improved on the previous record by 37 percent. The genome the team compressed was that of James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA more than 60 years ago

Precision medicine is a new model of health care which gains insights from an individual's history and biology patterns, to create more precise diagnosis and treatment, at a lower cost. Precision medicine is a big data problem. Despite the completion of Human Genome Project more than ten years ago and the development in the field as a whole, precision medicine is still not a routine practice of medicine due to the lack of appropriate technical work and software platforms.

The complexity we are involved in, nowadays, is the result of the very fast changing of the world scenario from the point of view of social life, economy, shortage of resources, etc. Internet and social networks, a kind of virtual cyber-skin embracing the planet, have tightly interconnected people, infrastructures and economic systems. All these changes have been fostered by technology innovation and we can only expect, due to the pace of technology innovation, that more changes are to come.