NEW DELHI: MIT?s Technology Review magazine has named Sumeet Singh and five other Indians as the nation?s top 35 innovators under age 35. Singh is honored for his project yielding a new way to identify worm and virus attacks across the Internet or other high-speed networks almost as soon as outbreaks occur. The six Indians are Prithwish Basu of BBN Technologies, Ram Krishnamurthy of Intel, Ashok Maliakal of Lucent Technologies? Bell Laboratories, Anand Raghunathan of NEC Laboratories America, Jay Shendure of Harvard Medical School and Sumeet Singh of Cisco Systems Inc. Indian-Americans comprise just less than one percent of the country's population, but their contribution to innovative technology is 12-17 percent according to the "Tech Review" Magazine. The honorees are selected by the editors of the magazine in collaboration with a prestigious panel of judges from major institutions and corporations. The winners will be featured at the 2006 Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT. Singh started his research as a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at University of California San Diego?s Jacobs School of Engineering. He developed the fundamental approach ? called ?content sifting?. During the summer of 2004, taking a break from his Ph.D, he co-found a company Netsift, Inc that was acquired by Cisco Systems Inc. one year later for approximately $30 million in cash and options, where Singh currently works. He then created early prototypes in 2004 when instantaneous identification of a worm or virus outbreak across a network was widely viewed as an impossible problem. Singh?s contribution to this open problem in network security, however, demonstrated that heavy network traffic can be filtered and both identify outbreaks almost as soon as they occur and generate a ?fingerprint? or signature of the virus or worm. These signatures are typically about 40 characters in length. Network engineers can use these to block the malicious traffic or otherwise contain the outbreak. The algorithms search for strings of 1s and 0s that occur more frequently than you would expect based on usual network activity. Within this subset of network traffic, the algorithms look for communication patterns in which the same string of characters goes from many sources to many destinations, a rare pattern in network traffic that often indicates a virus or worm outbreak. ?Once you identify the strings, you can tell everyone,? explained George Varghese, co-founder of NetSift, Inc., and a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD?s Jacobs School of Engineering who has just finished a yearlong stint at Cisco Systems Inc. Varghese was one of Singh?s Ph.D. co-advisors. The team worked on their ?content sifting? technology to identify worms and viruses not flagged by network security companies. ?In some cases, we detected and identified worms and viruses a few hours before existing security vendors. In other cases, we had them a few days before,? said Singh. Most of the TR35 winners for 2006 focus on Internet-related issues, but this year?s TR35 list also includes researchers working in the fields of telecommunications, nanotechnology, biotechnology, computer hardware, software, transportation and energy research. According the Jason Pontin, Editor-in-Chief of Technology Review: ?The TR35 is an amazing group of people. Their accomplishments are likely to shape their fields for decades to come.?