And people said Microsoft didn’t care about virus issues? The technology used to fight spam is being explored as a logical model to attack the AIDS virus. Nebojsa Jojic, a University of Illinois scholar who has been involved in Microsoft Research for some time says that the patterns exhibited by the AIDS virus in some ways mimic the messages carried via spam. You can only change the pattern so much before it becomes ineffective. This may be the real story of Microsoft fighting viruses.
If the research is successful, it can be expanded to other illnesses. According to Microsoft Research pages, “Laboratory tests began this month on vaccine models developed using these Microsoft Research-aided approaches. The tests are the first step in what could be years of additional research and trials to determine the effectiveness of these models and determine if they could be used to develop vaccines for hepatitis C and other mutating viruses.”
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has more on the issue in a recent article.
