TORCS car racing bots have improved significantly in the last years. We show that accurate curvature information for the upcoming corners enables offline learning a near-optimal driving style that consistently beats an expert human player (and the fastest currently known bots). Generalization to other tracks often, but not always succeeds, so that the method is extended by an online error corre...

We develop new techniques to map botnet membership using traces of spam email. To group bots into botnets we look for multiple bots participating in the same spam email campaign. We have applied our technique against a trace of spam email from Hotmail Web mail services. In this trace, we have successfully identified hundreds of botnets. We present new findings about botnet sizes and behavior wh...

Swarm robotics [3] is a relatively new and rapidly growing field in collective robotics. It involves the study of robotic systems made up of cooperating robots. I have been invited here to report on work we carried out in the SWARM-BOTS project, a project funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies program of the European Commission. This work is directly inspired by the collective behavior ...

1 Computing Science Department of the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. [email protected] 2 Information Systems and Statistics, Westf. Wilhelmsuniversität Münster, Germany. [email protected] 3 Nantes Atlantic Computer Science Laboratory (LINA) of the Université de Nantes, France. [email protected] 4 Cognitive Science and Psycholinguistics (LSCP) of ENS Ulm, Par...

[email protected] D U R I N G T H E P A S T F E W Y E A R S , W E have seen a shift in how systems are being attacked. After a successful compromise, a bot (also referred to as a zombie or drone) is often installed on the system. This small program provides a remote control mechanism to command the victim. Via this remote control mechanism, the attacker is able to issue arbitra...

A Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is a challenge-response test used on the Internet to prevent bots from accessing web services that are designed for humans. In this paper, we propose Automatic Game-based CAPTCHA Generation (AGCG), in which an AI system generates games that, when played, distinguish between humans and bots. The gamebased CAPT...

The increasing success of massively multi-player online games (MMOGs) is due to the fact that they allow players to explore huge virtual worlds and to interact in many different ways, either cooperating or competing. To support the implementation of ultra-scalable real-time strategy MMOGs, we are developing a middleware, called PATROL, that is based on a structured peer-to-peer overlay scheme. ...