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• 08 Feb ' 09:42

  Welcome to the February 8, 2012 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Obama to Announce $100 Million Plan to Train New Educators Groups: Congress Should Scrap SOPA, PIPA and Start Over Scripps Research and Technion Scientists Develop Biological Computer to Encrypt and Decipher Images Engineers Boost Computer Processor Performance By Over 20 Percent Google Unveils 'Secret Lab' for Radical Ideas Wolfram, a Search Engine, Finds Answers Within Itself How to Predict the Spread of News on Twitter MIT's New Free Courses May Threaten (and Improve) the Traditional Model, Program's Leader Says Italian Professor Launches Challenge to Google My Connectome, Myself To Make a Social Robot, Key Is Satisfying the Human Mind Double-Sided Touchscreen Changes When You Fold It Big Data's Arrival Obama to Announce $100 Million Plan to Train New Educators Washington Post (02/06/12) David Nakamura President Barack Obama has unveiled a plan to invest $100 million to help train 100,000 new educators over the next 10 years that is designed to address a shortage of U.S. mathematics and science teachers. Obama will ask Congress for $80 million to support new Education Department grants for colleges that develop innovative teacher-training programs. Two years ago Obama called on Congress and business leaders to help alleviate the lack of teachers with science, engineering, technology, and mathematics expertise. A group of 14 foundations, universities, businesses, and education groups responded to Obama's challenge by raising $22 million for the education plan, says Carnegie Corp.'s Talia Milgrom-Elcott. The money will be given to more than 100 organizations that provide teacher training and have gone through the application process, Milgrom-Elcott says. Private organizations such as Google, Teach for America, and the University of Chicago also have pledged resources to the cause, say White House officials. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. 15-year-olds placed in the bottom third and the bottom quarter for science and math literacy, respectively, among 30 developed countries.Groups: Congress Should Scrap SOPA, PIPA and Start Over IDG News Service (02/07/12) Grant Gross The U.S. Congress should do away with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), two controversial copyright enforcement bills, and start over with attempts to target foreign Web sites accused of infringement and counterfeiting, according to more than 70 industry groups. The bills would harm free speech, innovation, cybersecurity, and job creation, according to a letter the groups wrote to Congress. The letter noted that about 14 million people participated in 18 online protests against the bills. "The concerns are too fundamental and too numerous to be fully addressed through hasty revisions to these bills," the letter says. The letter asked lawmakers to determine the true extent of online infringement, questioning studies and numbers put forth by the bills' supporters. Although Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the lead sponsor of SOPA, has said that he doesn't plan to move forward with the legislation, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the lead sponsor of PIPA, plans to continue to push for that bill's passage. Leahy says he welcomes the input of others in improving the bill's provisions. "This is the time to suggest improvements that will better achieve our goals," he says.Scripps Research and Technion Scientists Develop Biological Computer to Encrypt and Decipher Images Scripps Research Institute (02/07/12) Mika Ono Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed a computer made entirely from biomolecules that can decipher images encrypted onto DNA chips. The scientists say their research is the first demonstration of a molecular cryptosystem of images based on DNA computing. "In contrast to electronic computers, there are computing machines in which all four components are nothing but molecules," says Scripps Research professor Ehud Keinan. He notes the hardware and software in the biological computers are complex biological molecules that activate one another to carry out some predetermined chemical work. The input is a molecule that undergoes specific, predetermined changes, following a specific set of rules, and the output of the chemical computation process is another well-defined molecule. The system is based on a 75-year-old design by Alan Turing. When appropriate software was applied to the biological computer, it could decrypt fluorescent images of the Scripps Research Institute and Technion logos. Keinan says biomolecular computing devices have advantages over electronic computers in specific applications, such as computing trillions of chemical steps in parallel.Engineers Boost Computer Processor Performance By Over 20 Percent NCSU News (02/07/12) Matt Shipman North Carolina State University (NCSU) researchers have developed a technique that combines graphics processing units (GPUs) and central processing units (CPUs) on a single chip, boosting processor performance by an average of more than 20 percent. "This approach decreases manufacturing costs and makes computers more energy efficient," says NCSU professor Huiyang Zhou. He notes that GPUs are capable of executing many individual functions very quickly, while CPUs are better at performing more complex tasks. "Our approach is to allow the GPU cores to execute computational functions, and have CPU cores pre-fetch the data the GPUs will need from off-chip main memory," Zhou says. He points out that the approach is more efficient than traditional methods because it enables CPUs and GPUs to do what they were designed to do. During initial testing, the researchers found that their approach improved fused processor performance by an average of 21.4 percent.Google Unveils 'Secret Lab' for Radical Ideas InformationWeek (02/06/12) Thomas Claburn Google recently held a private technology gathering for innovators, and plans to share some of the discussions and related materials through the Web site WeSolveForX.com. "Solve for X is a place where the curious can go to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems," Google says. "Radical in the sense that the solutions could help billions of people." The site is designed to be a forum for fostering discussion about seemingly insurmountable problems such as climate change and cancer. "The conference is driven by short, technology rich presentations on topics ranging from low-energy, low-cost water desalinization to stretchable silicon biosensors," says Google's Richard DeVaul. Other topics included using crowdsolved labor to tackle science problems, electronic-waste mining, transforming education, improving agriculture, synthetic biology, and carbon-negative biofuels. Google's Google X laboratory houses projects such as self-driving cars and robots. The secret lab might restore some luster to Google's image, which was slightly marred after the recent shutdown of Google Labs by CEO Larry Page.Wolfram, a Search Engine, Finds Answers Within Itself New York Times (02/06/12) Steve Lohr Stephen Wolfram is ready to unveil Wolfram Alpha Pro, an update to the three-year-old search engine that instead of mining the Web like Google and Microsoft's Bing, culls its own database to find answers to users' queries. Wolfram describes Alpha Pro as the next step of what can be accomplished with a computational knowledge engine. "We’re starting to have the ability to understand data and images in the way we understand text queries," Wolfram says. The original version of Wolfram Alpha was based on the knowledge base of Wolfram's Mathematica program, but the new version draws on many more subject domains, which should make it more useful to average users. Several large companies, including Microsoft, have licensed Wolfram Alpha technology to develop specifically tailored corporate versions of the Wolfram Alpha database, and about 25 percent of Wolfram Alpha queries come from Siri users. Wolfram Alpha is one of several efforts to develop greater understanding of semantics, says University of Washington computer scientist Oren Etzioni. "It raises the stakes for everyone around the table," Etzioni says.How to Predict the Spread of News on Twitter Technology Review (02/07/12) Bernardo Huberman and colleagues at Hewlett-Packard's Social Computing Lab have developed an algorithm that can predict how popular new stories will become. Journalists rely on their gut feeling and their understanding of the dynamics of their audience when they choose to write about topics, but the algorithm could automate this process. During a single week last August, the team examined the content of news stories and scored each article on the news source that generates and posts the article, the category of news, the subjectivity of the language, and the people and things named in the article. They measured the way the stories spread across the Twitter network to see which became popular and how quickly, then determined how an article's score in each criterion is linked to its eventual popularity. "Our experiments show that it is possible to estimate ranges of popularity with an overall accuracy of 84 percent considering only content features," the team says. The research could impact how articles are written and edited. News organizations could homogenize their stories to optimize them for the algorithm, but automation also could lead to more tightly written and better focused articles.MIT's New Free Courses May Threaten (and Improve) the Traditional Model, Program's Leader Says Chronicle of Higher Education (02/06/12) Jeffrey R. Young In an interview, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) provost L. Rafael Reif and professor Anant Agarwal say MITx, a new set of online courses, will be run separately from OpenCourseWare, which puts materials from its traditional courses online. MITx will focus on creating new courses designed to be delivered entirely online and for free to the public. Students who want a certificate after passing a series of online tests will have to pay a modest fee. To verify students, MIT plans to work with companies that offer testing sites around the world, including providing identity checks and proctoring services for the exams. Agarwal notes that MIT will give certificates with an actual letter grade for completing MITx courses. He also says the plan is to make the MITx software available online, and notes that there has been much interest from other universities and school systems in licensing the technology. "Our objective is to actually use MITx to even increase further what we do on campus, to make it stronger and to be able to resist and survive and do very well in this potential disruptive situation," Reif says. Agarwal believes that online technologies and mechanisms will improve the on-campus experience.Italian Professor Launches Challenge to Google Agence France-Presse (02/06/12) Google faces a new challenge from Italian computer science professor Massimo Marchiori, who launched a new search engine and social media network on Monday. Marchiori, who used to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developed the algorithm for the Internet page ranking service HyperSearch in the 1990s, and his research inspired future Google founder Larry Page. Marchiori, who currently teaches at the University of Padua, calls his new site Volunia. Users will be able to view the components of particular Web sites to find subjects of interest more quickly as well as interact with others who might be looking at the same Web pages. Marchiori says such functions will soon be incorporated into all the other major search engines, including Google and Yahoo! He describes the Web as a living place. "There is information but there are also people," Marchiori notes. "The social dimension is already present, it just has to emerge."My Connectome, Myself MIT News (02/07/12) Anne Trafton Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher Sebastian Seung studies brain connectome shapes and believes that they can reveal more about a person than their DNA can. Max Planck Institute of Medical Research neuroscientists have taken extremely thin slices of brain tissue and generated electron-microscope images of all the neural connections within each slice. However, Seung says mapping those connections could take 100,000 years for a single worker to trace the connections in one cubic millimeter of brain tissue. He has led a group of MIT researchers who have developed an artificial intelligence system to analyze the images. The system requires human guidance, and the researchers are enlisting the help of the general public through a Web site called eyewire.org. Eyewire project participants will guide the computer program when it loses track of where a neuronal extension goes in the maze of neurons. Seung says the research could be applied in futuristic applications, such as uploading human brain patterns into computers or freezing bodies to preserve them until technology is developed to bring them back to life.To Make a Social Robot, Key Is Satisfying the Human Mind Kavli Foundation (02/03/12) The Kavli Foundation recently brought together three pioneers in human-robot interactions to discuss advancements in social robotics, as well as the technological hurdles the field will face in the future. One of the keys for a successfully designed social robot is considering how it communicates verbally as well as physically through facial expressions and body language, says University of Southern California professor Maja Mataric. Another key is matching a robot's appearance to a human's perception of its abilities. University of California, San Diego professor Ayse Saygin found that as people observed highly human-like robots compared to less human-like robots, the brain detected the difference and did not respond well. "We found that when we matched the personality of the robot to that of the user, people performed their rehab exercises longer and reported enjoying them more," Mataric says. A social robot also should be able to learn socially, and Georgia Tech professor Andrea Thomaz has developed a robot that can learn from humans through speech, observation, demonstration, and social interaction. Thomaz says she is working to build the key components of social intelligence into her robots.Double-Sided Touchscreen Changes When You Fold It New Scientist (02/03/12) Duncan Graham-Rowe Juergen Steimle, a member of the Fluid Interfaces Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, has developed novel ways to interact with foldable displays. Steimle has created a projection-based display that tracks movement. The display uses six overhead infrared cameras and two high-definition digital projectors, and projects onto a passive white tablet also created by Steimle. The user holds the tablet, which contains sets of spring-loaded, reversible hinges so that they could be folded like a book or a pamphlet. The system monitors the way the tablet is folded, using the act of folding and the resulting form as a means of interaction, and will treat a flat tablet as one display and switch to a two-display mode when the tablet is bent in the middle. When the tablet is closed, the menu options can be displayed on the cover to alter the contents inside. Users also would be able to adjust the color, contrast, volume, and other settings because the cameras are able to detect the angle of rotation on the hinges. Steimle will present his work this month at the Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction Conference in Kingston, Ontario.Big Data's Arrival Inside Higher Ed (02/01/12) Paul Fain WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) researchers have created the Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework, a database that measures 33 variables for online coursework based on 640,000 online college students. The variables help track student performance and retention across a wide range of demographic factors. Six major for-profit institutions, research universities, and community colleges are sharing the information and tips on how to use the data. The researchers found that at-risk students do better if they ease into online education with a small number of courses, which contradicts traditional methods that promote full student immersion. The researchers say their work highlights the benefits of predictive analytics and "big data" in higher education. They say the framework could provide institutions with sophisticated information about small subsets of students. For example, Arizona-based Rio Salado, a two-year college, has used the database to create a student performance tracking system. The system measures student engagement through their Web interactions, how often the look at textbooks and whether they respond to feedback from instructors, as well as their performance in coursework. The researchers plan to begin a second round of data collection, with up to 18 new institutions. View Full Article | Return to Headlines

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• 06 Feb ' 10:19

  Welcome to the February 6, 2012 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Oscars Vote Vulnerable to Cyber Attack Under New Online System, Experts Warn In Interaction Design, Human Understanding Is Key Embodiment, Computation and the Nature of Artificial Intelligence Researchers Move Graphene Electronics Into 3D Google Supports Female Students in STEM Subjects Microsoft Researchers Say Anonymized Data Isn't So Anonymous PRACE to Establish Six Advanced HPC Training Centers Tailor-Made Search Tools for the Web Industry-Funded Software Research Goes Open Source Are the Days of Hands-Off Internet Policies Numbered? Harnessing the Predictive Power of Virtual Communities Green IT: In Search of an Energy Yardstick Oscars Vote Vulnerable to Cyber Attack Under New Online System, Experts Warn Guardian (United Kingdom) (02/02/12) Andrew Gumbel The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently announced that starting next year members will be able to vote for the Oscars using electronic ballots instead of the existing vote-by-mail system. However, many computer scientists believe the system will be vulnerable to attacks that could compromise the votes. "Everybody would like there to be secure Internet voting, but some very smart people have looked at the problem and can't figure out how to do it," says Stanford University professor David Dill. Researchers have listed multiple potential vulnerabilities to online voting systems, such as denial-of-service attacks, malware, and penetration of the server's security wall. The Academy is not the first organization to experiment with Internet voting, and several U.S. states have already adopted electronic-voting systems to help military personnel and other U.S. citizens living overseas submit their votes. However, serious problems have been exposed, such as a local election in Washington, D.C., in October 2010, during which University of Michigan researchers took control of the server software and were able to find out which citizens voted for specific candidates and even changed some votes.In Interaction Design, Human Understanding Is Key Silicon Republic (02/04/12) Laura O'Brien At the recent Interaction 12 conference in Dublin, designers were encouraged to develop a greater level of human understanding when creating user interfaces. Sprout founder Dirk Knemeyer says that interaction designers must become experts in human understanding to develop their craft. He says that since technology has become fully integrated into society, interaction designers should have some understanding of psychology, sociology, neuroscience, endocrinology, and economics to develop meaningful interfaces for the future. "What we know now is that even if you think you have a goal, it’s likely that it’s going to shift and change as you find your way to it because right now, the user is just going to muddle their way through a situation that’s emerged in their life," says Macquarium's Andrew Hinton. In addition, traditional user-testing may not get designers the answers they need, especially as the Web gets more social, says Dana Chisnell, co-author of the Handbook of Usability Testing. "We’re not sure how to do user research that’s going to tell us about what we really need to know about relationships," Chisnell says. In the future, products will be designed not at scale for mass audiences and demographics, but for individuals, Knemeyer predicts.Embodiment, Computation and the Nature of Artificial Intelligence Technology Review (02/06/12) Although many artificial intelligence researchers have adopted the idea that true intelligence requires a body, known as embodiment, a growing group of researchers, led by the University of Zurich's Rolf Pfeifer, say the notion of intelligence makes no sense outside of the environment in which it operates. Pfeifer and Zurich's Matej Hoffmann not only want to redefine artificial intelligence, they want to change the nature of computing itself. The researchers recently published a paper outlining several case studies that examine the nature of embodiment in different physical systems, such as the distribution of light-sensing cells in a fly's eye. The fly's computation is the result of simple motion-detection circuitry in the brain, the morphology or distribution of cells in the body, and the nature of flight in a three-dimensional universe. The researchers say that this, and other low level cognitive functions, such as locomotion, are actually simple forms of computation involving the brain-body-environment triumvirate, which is why the definition of computation needs to be expanded to include the influence of environment.Researchers Move Graphene Electronics Into 3D University of Manchester (02/03/12) Daniel Cochlin University of Manchester researchers have developed a potentially practical method for using graphene as the basic material for computer chips instead of silicon. The researchers suggest using graphene vertically as an electrode from which electrons tunneled through a dielectric into another metal, known as a tunneling diode. The researchers exploited graphene's unique trait that an external voltage can strongly change the energy of tunneling electrons. This new method resulted in a vertical field-effect tunneling transistor in which graphene is a critical ingredient. "I believe they can be improved much further, scaled down to nanometer sizes and work at sub-THz frequencies," says Manchester researcher Leonid Ponomarenko. The Manchester team made the transistors by combining graphene with atomic planes of boron nitride and molybdenum disulfide. "Tunneling transistor is just one example of the inexhaustible collection of layered structures and novel devices which can now be created by such assembly," says Manchester professor Konstantin Novoselov.Google Supports Female Students in STEM Subjects SmartPlanet (02/06/12) Charlie Osborne Google's Mind the Gap! program is aimed at encouraging female students to enter the engineering profession and help equalize the ratio of men and women in scientific and technology-driven industries, says Google's Michal Segalov. The program is a collaborative effort with the Israeli National Center for Computer Science Teachers, and includes monthly school visits for girls to the Google office in Israel and annual technology conferences at academic institutions. Google hopes that by exposing young women to careers in science, technology, engineering, and math fields, they will learn more about the opportunities available to them, changing the stereotype that those professions are male-oriented. Since the program began in 2008, more than 2,500 girls have visited the Google offices, and about 40 percent of those elected to pursue computer science as their high school major after attending.Microsoft Researchers Say Anonymized Data Isn't So Anonymous Network World (02/02/12) Tim Greene Data routinely gathered in Web logs, such as Internet Protocol (IP) address, cookies, operating systems, browser type, and user-agent strings can threaten online privacy because they can be used to identify the activity of individual machines, according to Microsoft researchers. However, they say an analysis of such data when anonymized can help detect malicious activity and improve overall Internet security. The researchers found that HTTP user-agent information can accurately tag a host with an accuracy of 92.8 percent when more than one user ID was linked to a single host, such as with a family that shares a single computer. The researchers also found that even anonymized data can leak information. "[C]oarse-grained IP prefixes achieve similar host-tracking accuracy to that of precise IP address information when they are combined with hashed [user-agent] strings," the researchers say. They aimed to determine how much identifying information gets revealed by common identifiers and to understand the patterns of aggregated activities and explore their implications. "Our analysis suggests that users who do not wish to be tracked should do much more than clear cookies," the researchers note.PRACE to Establish Six Advanced HPC Training Centers PRACE (02/02/12) The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) has selected the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the CSC-IT Center for Science, the University of Edinburgh, Cineca, Maison de la Simulation, and the Gauss Center for Supercomputing as PRACE Advanced Training Centers (PATCs). PATCs will provide training and education activities to the European research community on utilizing PRACE's computational infrastructure. PRACE ultimately wants the PATCs to serve as hubs and key drivers of European high-performance computing (HPC) education. "The establishment of the PRACE Advanced Training Centers is one of the most visible achievements of PRACE to the European researchers," says CSC's Pekka Manninen. "The PATC network enables us to synergize European HPC training activities for the benefit of the whole of Europe." PRACE has initially selected six of its member sites as PATCs, but it will assess the location centers every two years, and the sites may vary over time.Tailor-Made Search Tools for the Web Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (02/01/12) Fraunhofer Institute of Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS) researchers are working to bring semantic search to smartphones in the form of a new app. The Eat and Drink app is designed to scour the Web for reviews of restaurants, bars, and cafes, and provide recommendations for users. "There's no need to read through lengthy restaurant reviews, instead the app provides a summary of the special features and main aspects of a particular establishment," says Melanie Knapp, who developed the app with her team. "'Eat and Drink' provides information as to why a particular rating is positive or negative." Users launch an area or keyword search, and Eat and Drink will display the results in the form of tags. The researchers say the app semantically analyzes and processes unstructured text, down to the sentence level, using learning and pattern-recognizing methods to deliver results that are much more refined and far less cut-out in nature. They say the underlying technology also could be used to develop apps and programs for other sectors. For example, news organizations are interested in Quote, a semantic search engine for finding quotations of public figures.Industry-Funded Software Research Goes Open Source Campus Technology (02/01/12) David Raths Several large companies that fund software research on university campuses are engaged in open source research in the hope of drawing a thriving developer community. An example is the Science and Technology Centers (ISTCs) launched by Intel at Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of California, Berkeley. "The preferred [intellectual property (IP)] policy is to conduct open research wherein ISTC researchers, whether from academia or Intel, agree to not file patents and to publish all patentable inventions," Intel says. "All significant software developed in the course of conducting research will be released under an open source license." Each ITSC can support 10 to 15 faculty members and as many as 30 students. Consultant Melba Kurman notes that many companies are beginning to consider longer development timeframes, and she thinks open source is a solid solution in instances where patents are not vital. Kurman also lists other potential advantages of the open source licensing model, including its fit with a university's nonprofit, tax-exempt status, the avoidance of publication delays caused by patent applications, no need to haggle over IP terms between university and company researchers, and allowances for the research sponsor to bring in more companies to sponsor open source consortia.Are the Days of Hands-Off Internet Policies Numbered? Government Computer News (02/01/12) William Jackson The Internet will be a major topic of discussion when world leaders meet in December at the World Conference on International Telecommunications to review and revise the International Telecommunications Regulations, which were put into place in 1988 and at the time largely dealt with systems that linked telephones and peripheral devices such as fax machines. "There is an increasing amount of attention" on how the Internet should be governed and what the role of government and international bodies should be," notes former Bush administration United Nations (UN) representative David Gross. Some developing countries, including India, would like international bodies such as the UN's International Telecommunications Union to regulate the Internet, while nations such as China and Russia want a greater degree of control over the Web. Gross says the United States favors an open, cooperative approach. "The U.S. position has been the expectation, willingness, and desire that the entire world would come along for the ride," he says. The International Telecommunications Regulations have acted as international law since 1988, but a major issue at the December conference will be if and how the regulations should be applied to the Internet.Harnessing the Predictive Power of Virtual Communities AlphaGalileo (01/30/12) University of Ljubljana researchers say they have developed an algorithm that can detect virtual communities better than existing state-of-the-art algorithms. The propagation-based algorithm can extract both link-density and link-pattern communities without any prior knowledge of the number of communities. Classical communities are defined by their internal level of link density, while link-pattern communities are characterized by internal patterns of similar connectedness between their nodes. Ljubljana's Lovro Subelj and Marko Bajec tested the algorithm on 10 real-life networks, including social, information, and biological networks, and concluded that real-life networks appear to be composed of link-pattern communities that are interwoven and overlap with classical link-density communities. They hope to create a generic model to understand the conditions, such as the low level of clustering, for link-pattern communities to emerge, compared to link-density communities. The researchers say the model could be used to predict future friendships in online social networks, analyze interactions in biological systems that are hard to observe, and detect duplicated code in software systems.Green IT: In Search of an Energy Yardstick Computerworld (01/30/12) Mary Brandel The most widely used metric for measuring data centers' energy consumption is the Green Grid's Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) measure, but it does not reveal the amount of energy used per unit of work. The Green Grid and other industry groups are currently working on metrics that analyze the measurement of productive energy consumption. Many companies are using combinations of the available metrics, as well as developing their own metrics, to describe data center efficiency and productivity. "While not perfect, PUE does a good job of achieving a snapshot of how much electricity is powering what the data center is there to do," says Forrester Research's Doug Washburn. Other metrics being used include Carbon Usage Effectiveness, which addresses data-center-specific carbon emissions and is calculated by measuring total carbon dioxide data center emissions and dividing by equipment energy. Server Compute Efficiency and Data Center Compute Efficiency measure what proportion of work is useful. Data Center Energy Productivity aims to quantify the ratio of useful work produced by a data center to total energy consumed by it. "If you use one metric without the other, you can be fooling yourself," says the Green Grid's Katherine Winkler.

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• 04 Feb ' 01:07

  Welcome to the February 3, 2012 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. H-1B Workers Are Better Paid, More Educated, Study Finds Quarter of Tweets Not Worth Reading, Twitter Users Tell Researchers NIST to Fund Pilot Projects That Advance Trusted Identities in Cyberspace Scientific Visions That Take the Prize Artificial Intelligence: Getting Better at the Age Guessing Game A New System of Stereo Cameras Detects Pedestrians From Within the Car Learning From Clouds Past: A Look Back at Magellan Crowdsourcing Experts Team Up to Accelerate Cardiac Response Risk-Based Passenger Screening Could Make Air Travel Safer Fast and Easy Programming Mobile, Cloud, and Big Data Pros in High Demand for 2012 Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online University of Maryland M-Urgency App Streams Emergency Information H-1B Workers Are Better Paid, More Educated, Study Finds Computerworld (02/03/12) Patrick Thibodeau H-1B workers are better educated, earn more money, and are an average 10 years younger than U.S.-born workers, according to a Public Policy Institute of California study. The study found that the average annual earnings of H-1B workers are about 10 percent higher than the average annual earnings of U.S. workers, after adjustments for age, occupation, and education. Although the study's findings undercut some criticisms of the H-1B program, they also add support to the argument that the H-1B program helps employers save money by favoring younger workers over older ones. The study also found that less than 25 percent of U.S.-born technology workers have graduate degrees while close to one half of the H-1B workers have advanced degrees. "This research quite strongly points toward a highly educated group of workers, and there is really no evidence in our data that points to lower earnings," says Public Policy Institute of California economist Magnus Lofstrom. However, he notes that the age discrimination issue "remains a very important question that remains unanswered." The researchers based their study on data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service and the U.S. Census Bureau.Quarter of Tweets Not Worth Reading, Twitter Users Tell Researchers Carnegie Mellon News (PA) (02/01/12) Byron Spice Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Georgia Institute of Technology found that Twitter users rate only about a third of the tweets they receive as worthwhile. "If we understood what is worth reading and why, we might design better tools for presenting and filtering content, as well as help people understand the expectations of other users," says Carnegie Mellon's Paul Andre. The researchers created a Web site to evaluate tweets, and over a period of 19 days 1,443 visitors to the site rated 43,738 tweets from the accounts of 21,014 Twitter users they followed. The study found that Twitter users liked just 36 percent of the tweets and disliked 25 percent. However, the study participants were not fully representative of Twitter users, as most were referred to the study by technology-focused friends and Web sites and could be categorized as users who value sharing links and content. "Other groups within Twitter may value different types of tweets for entirely different reasons," says Georgia Tech's Kurt Luther. Andre says it could be possible to develop applications that can learn a user's preferences and filter out unwanted content.NIST to Fund Pilot Projects That Advance Trusted Identities in Cyberspace NIST (02/01/12) Gail Porter The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced a competition for pilot projects to facilitate progress toward improved systems for interoperable, trusted online credentials that go beyond user IDs and passwords. The competition will be managed by the national program office for the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). "We're looking for innovative approaches that can advance the NSTIC vision and provide a foundation upon which a trusted, user-centric identity ecosystem can be constructed," says NIST's Jeremy Grant. NIST, which anticipates funding five to eight projects for up to two years, seeks proposals that follow the four central principles guiding NSTIC, which includes identity solutions that are privacy-enhancing and voluntary, secure and resilient, interoperable, cost-effective, and easy to use. NIST notes several obstacles that have hindered wide marketplace deployment of identity solutions, including the need for technical standards that ensure interoperability among different identity authentication solutions, little clarity on liabilities when something goes wrong, no common standards for privacy protections and data reuse, and issues with ease of use for some authentication technologies.Scientific Visions That Take the Prize CCC Blog (02/02/12) Erwin Gianchandani The U.S. National Science Foundation and Science magazine recently announced the winners of the ninth International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, a joint effort to highlight the use of visualization for communicating science, engineering, and technology for education and journalistic purposes. First place went to the University of Washington's Seth Cooper and his team for the FoldIt project, a game that demonstrated it is possible to use crowdsourcing to solve very difficult scientific problems. Iowa State University's Eve Wurtele received an honorable mention for the Meta!Blast 3D Interactive Application for Cell and Molecular Biology. Meta!Blast communicates concepts of biology and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to high school students by providing a 3D world that mimics a photosynthetic cell. SpongeLab Interactive's Jeremy Friedberg also received an honorable mention for Build-a-Body, an interactive learning environment that helps users learn about the human anatomy. Green-Eye Visualization's Laura Lynn Gonzales also received an honorable mention for Powers of Minus Ten, an iPad app that enables users to examine the human body at different levels of magnification. Tata Consultancy Services' Muralitharan Vengadasalam received the People's Choice award for Velu the welder, which exposes users to basic welding skill sets.Artificial Intelligence: Getting Better at the Age Guessing Game A*STAR Research (02/01/12) A*STAR Institution for Infocomm Research scientists have developed the incremental bilateral two-dimensional linear discriminant analysis (IB2DLDA) algorithm, which they say can quickly scan through large databases of facial images. The researchers designed IB2DLDA so that it actively learns while it is scanning the database. The active learning approach significantly improves the efficiency of the algorithm and minimizes the number of samples that need to be labeled, reducing the time and effort required to program the computer. The researchers say the algorithm should make it easier to build facial age-classification systems into intelligent machines. The technology also could be applied to digital signage, in which the machine determines the age group of the viewer and displays targeted advertisements designed for that age group. "A vending machine that can estimate the age of a buyer could be useful for products that involve age control, such as alcoholic drinks and cigarettes," says A*STAR's Jian-Gang Wang. He also says the method is effective in solving problems with a large number of classes, and could be used for applications other than age estimation. "We are now planning to extend our method to other areas such as classifying human emotions and actions," Wang says.A New System of Stereo Cameras Detects Pedestrians From Within the Car Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (02/01/12) Researchers at the University of Heidelberg, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and the University of Alcala (UAH) have developed a system that identifies pedestrians in front of a vehicle using artificial vision. "The new system can detect pedestrians from within vehicles using visible spectrum cameras and can do so even at night," says UAH's David Fernandez Llorca. A key feature to the system is the use of a dense stereo system, which consists of two cameras that are 30 centimeters apart in a structure below the rear-view mirror. "Human beings are able to make out the distance and depth of objects thanks to our two eyes--the same occurs with artificial vision," Fernandez Llorca says. He says dense stereo vision allows for a much more precise real time recognition of the environment in front of the vehicle. During testing, pedestrian recognition was improved by a factor of up to 7.5 compared to non-dense systems, and animate objects, such as a small child running across the road, were detected in less than 200 milliseconds. The two cameras are connected to a processing unit based on field programmable gate array technology, which runs the artificial vision algorithm.Learning From Clouds Past: A Look Back at Magellan HPC in the Cloud (01/31/12) Tiffany Trader The Magellan project was launched to assess the potential role cloud computing could play in addressing the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science's computing requirements, especially those associated with fulfilling the needs of midrange computing and future data-intensive computing tasks. The project, which was discontinued after two years, found that scientific applications possess special requirements that demand customized cloud solutions, while applications with minimal communication and input/output are most appropriate for clouds. In addition, the project found that substantial programming and system administration support is required for clouds, and current open source virtualized cloud software stacks for production science use have significant challenges and gaps. The assessment's conclusions point to cloud technology being unable to measure up to a centralized supercomputer in many respects, but the delivery model still has practical applications. Cloud computing stands out particularly in terms of flexibility and responsiveness for certain workloads. Ultimately, cloud computing is a business model, according to the authors of a report on the Magellan project sponsored by the DOE's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research. The report says cloud services can complement, but not substitute for, centralized computing resources.Crowdsourcing Experts Team Up to Accelerate Cardiac Response University of Southampton (United Kingdom) (01/31/12) Joyce Lewis The University of Pennsylvania recently launched the MyHeartMap Challenge, inviting the public to participate by submitting geo-tagged pictures of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) in Philadelphia to create a location database of AEDs. Researchers at the University of Southampton, the Masdar Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, San Diego collaborated to compete in the challenge using social networks and crowdsourcing. The team or individual that finds and photographs the most AEDs in Philadelphia County over the next six weeks will receive $10,000. "Our team will use crowdsourcing to encourage people to report the location of AEDs, to verify other reports, and to recruit new participants," says Masdar Institute computer scientist Iyad Rahwan. He notes that although information verification is a difficult task, the team has developed methods for solving the problem through crowdsourcing. The team also will use the challenge to test their theoretical research on social network mobilization and incentivization as well as verification.Risk-Based Passenger Screening Could Make Air Travel Safer University of Illinois (01/31/12) Liz Ahlberg University of Illinois researchers recently examined the benefit of matching passenger risk with security assets and found that intensive screening of all passengers makes the system less secure by overtaxing security resources. "A natural tendency, when limited information is available about from where the next threat will come, is to overestimate the overall risk in the system, [which] actually makes the system less secure by over-allocating security resources to those in the system that are low on the risk scale relative to others in the system," says Illinois professor Sheldon H. Jacobson. He says with security resources devoted to too many low-risk passengers, those resources are less able to identify high-risk passengers. "The cost of such a system is prohibitive, and it makes the air system more vulnerable to successful attacks by sub-optimally allocating security assets," Jacobson says. The researchers developed three algorithms dealing with risk uncertainty in the passenger population. They then ran simulations to demonstrate how the algorithms, applied to a risk-based screening method, could estimate risk in the overall passenger population. The researchers found that risk-based screening increases the overall expected security. "The ideal situation is to create a system that screens passengers commensurate with their risk," Jacobson says.Fast and Easy Programming Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (01/30/12) Margarete Lehne A European Union consortium known as Algorithm parallelization for Multicore Architectures (ALMA) is developing a tool chain based on the open source software Scilab designed to simplify the development of software for embedded multicore processors. As part of ALMA, Scilab will be enhanced by downstream optimization stages, enabling intelligent parallelization and the distribution of applications to several processors. ALMA, which is led by Jurgen Becker and Michael Hubner from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology's Institute for Information Processing Technology, also will focus on a close co-design of software and hardware to develop a single tool chain that can efficiently be used in different multicore architectures. "In that way, we obtain a tool chain for easy programming from a higher level of abstraction, i.e. the programmer does not need detailed knowledge of the complex architecture," Hubner says. He notes that ALMA technology also will reduce development time and costs.Mobile, Cloud, and Big Data Pros in High Demand for 2012 InfoWorld (01/31/12) Ted Samson Companies are looking to hire and retain workers who are skilled in fields such as mobility, cloud computing, software development, and big data. A new Hackett Group report identifies Global 1000 companies' key priorities for the year, while Bluewolf's 2012 IT Salary Guide provides an in-depth look at information technology (IT) salaries and hiring trends. Company executives have identified the need to grow their emerging market presence as one of the most important priorities for 2012, the report notes. "Getting the right information to permit quick action can only be accomplished when mechanisms are in place to gather high-quality data, conduct rigorous analysis, and make decisions with confidence," the report says. "IT and other support functions overwhelmingly recognize this fact and are focusing their technology priorities for 2012 around the themes of improving the foundation of unified data (to create 'one source of truth') and being able to provide analysis and access to those findings." Bluewolf also identified several skills that are in high demand, including proficiency with Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce, and Google Apps. Companies are also looking for developers that know JavaScript and user interface design, according to Bluewolf.Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online The Chronicle of Higher Education (01/29/12) Jennifer Howard University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill researchers have developed Total-Impact (TI), a system to track the movement of research across the Web. TI is based on alternative metrics or altmetrics, an approach that aims to measure Web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked. The goal of the altmetrics movement is to track research's impact via the social Web. "As the volume of academic literature explodes, scholars rely on filters to select the most relevant and significant sources from the rest," says UNC graduate student Jason Priem. Researchers can go to the TI site and enter many forms of research, including blog posts, articles, data sets, and software. The Total-Impact system then searches the Internet for downloads, Twitter links, mentions in open source software libraries, and other indicators that the work is being noticed. "We've also gotten many requests from academic publishers and creators of scholarly Web applications to embed TI data into their pages" using the system's open application programming interface, Priem notes. He says the long-term goal is to completely change the way scholars and administrators think about academic impact and get them to move away from a "citation-fetishizing article monoculture."University of Maryland M-Urgency App Streams Emergency Information UMD Newsdesk (01/25/12) Lee Tune The University of Maryland (UMD) recently launched M-Urgency, a smartphone application that enables students, faculty, and staff to instantly share video, audio, and location information about an emergency with university police dispatchers. "We created this application to not only serve the university--a community of 50,000--but any city across the nation," says UMD professor Ashok Agrawala. "The technology, the way it is developed, can be deployed by anybody anywhere." As part of the M-Urgency system, anyone with a university ID who downloads the app can transmit audio and video to the public safety dispatcher, who will be able to locate the user through the phone's built-in locator tool. "It gives a lot of information that's not easily conveyable by words," Agrawala says. He notes that the app is based on research done at the Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab, which has reduced the background electronic noise in wireless systems that previously made it difficult to pinpoint exact locations. In the near future Agrawala plans to expand the Android-based app to the iPhone and add more functions, including the ability to pinpoint a user's location to within 10 feet.

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• 01 Feb ' 09:42

  Welcome to the February 1, 2012 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Apple Fuels Silicon Valley Hiring Amid Bubble 2.0 Concern Political Borders Don't Stop Cyberattacks, But They Prevent Defense, Study Finds White House Office Studies Benefits of Video Games DARPA Announces Proposers Day for New PERFECT Program Industry Group Makes Fresh Push to Fight Phishing Tripping the Light Fantastic DARPA-Funded Hacker's Tiny $50 Spy Computer Hides in Offices, Drops From Drones Jumpstarting Computers With 3D Chips New Center Developing Computational Bioresearch Tool Apps for Day-to-Day Work Visual Nudge Improves Accuracy of Mammogram Readings Smarter Password Checker Lets You Compare With Others System Predicts Angina Pectoris Risk Apple Fuels Silicon Valley Hiring Amid Bubble 2.0 Concern Bloomberg (01/30/12) Heather Perlberg Silicon Valley companies are in the midst of a hiring boom not since the late 1990s as nearly 50 U.S. technology companies with a market value of more than $100 million increased employment by more than 50 percent in the last two years, according to Bloomberg. In addition, 74 companies in the software and services industry with at least $100 million in market value expanded their workforce by at least 10 percent over the last three years, more than any other industry Bloomberg measured. Meanwhile, some small and midsized businesses boosted payrolls by almost fivefold. Apple, Google, and Amazon were among those companies that increased their workforce by at least 50 percent in the last two years. The growth has led Silicon Valley companies to consider more workers from nontechnical backgrounds and extend their recruiting efforts nationwide. The trend is not showing signs of slowing down, as many companies, including Amazon and Facebook, plan to add thousands of jobs in 2012. Some companies are expanding their operations away from their traditional Silicon Valley homes, as Facebook and eBay plan to open offices in New York.Political Borders Don't Stop Cyberattacks, But They Prevent Defense, Study Finds Government Computer News (01/30/12) William Jackson Real-world political borders are hindering the defense of cyberspace, according to McAfee's new Cyber Defense Report. The study points to a dearth of common standards of behavior, objectives, and language in discussing cyberspace's inherent challenges. McAfee's Phyllis Schneck warns that "we've made a lot of progress, but our enemies are a lot better and faster than we are." The report revealed the results of a stress test applied to 21 countries, based on a cybersecurity maturity model devised by former U.S. deputy assistant secretary Robert Lentz. Included in the model are five stages of resilience against attacks, and none of the assessed nations achieved a rating of five stars. The U.S. received four stars based on contributing factors such as the government Computer Emergency Response Team, which has a contingency plan for cyberevents and participates in cybersecurity exercises. Overall, pessimism prevailed among the McAfee report's contributors that an international pact could supply a framework for cooperation. The study recommends establishing cyberconfidence building measures between nations as a substitute for a global treaty, or at least as an interim measure. Included would be agreements on "expectations about state behavior," says the Center for Strategic and International Studies' James A. Lewis.White House Office Studies Benefits of Video Games USA Today (02/01/12) Greg Toppo The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has assigned senior policy analyst Constance Steinkuehler to study video games for 18 months to determine if they have significant value as educational tools. The Entertainment Software Association estimates that almost 66 percent of U.S. households play video games, and since 1999, the percentage of gamers older than 50 has increased more than threefold. Last March President Obama said he wanted to create "educational software that's as compelling as the best video game." Steinkuehler says her mission is to develop "big, save-the-world games" across a wide range of subject areas and platforms. Another focus of her research is how well current games operate and which agencies already employ games. A highly lauded educational gaming experiment is Foldit, developed at the University of Washington's Center for Game Science. The game challenges players to learn about the shapes of proteins and compete online to fold them into configurations that boast maximum efficiency, and the solutions they arrive at could help researchers devise cures for various diseases. "It has basically shown that it is possible to create experts in a particular domain purely through game play," says Foldit co-creator Zoran Popovich.DARPA Announces Proposers Day for New PERFECT Program CCC Blog (01/31/12) Erwin Gianchandani The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA's) Microsystems Technology Office announced that it will hold a Proposers Day to launch the Power Efficiency Revolution for Embedded Computing Technologies (PERFECT) project. The event is designed to introduce the research community to PERFECT's vision and goals and facilitate interaction and coordination between prospective technology developers. The PERFECT program seeks to provide the technologies and techniques to overcome the power efficiency barriers that currently constrain embedded computing systems capabilities and limit the potential of future embedded systems. The PERFECT program will address five primary areas of technical research--Architecture, Concurrency, Resilience, Locality and Algorithms--as well as Simulation and Verification, which are support areas. DARPA plans to publish the PERFECT program's Broad Agency Announcement prior to the scheduled Proposers Day on Feb. 15.Industry Group Makes Fresh Push to Fight Phishing IDG News Service (01/30/12) Jeremy Kirk Companies including Facebook, Google, and PayPal are supporting the widespread use of Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC), a new technical specification designed to prevent phishing attacks. DMARC, which builds on DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF) systems, allows domain owners to ask receiving mail servers to discard mail that fails authentication tests. DMARC also enables organizations sending email to indicate whether they are using one or both of two security technologies to authenticate the sending of email messages. In the past, it has been difficult for email receivers to always authenticate messages sent with SPF or DKIM because of the use of third-party service providers, according to DMARC.org. The DMARC group wants the specification to become an industry standard and plans to submit a draft of the specification to the Internet Engineering Task Force. "Industry groups come and go, and it's not always easy to tell at the beginning which ones are actually going to generate good solutions," says Google's Adam Dawes. "When the right contributors come together to solve real problems, though, real things happen."Tripping the Light Fantastic Economist (01/28/12) Casio recently unveiled a prototype for a smartphone that can transmit data using light. The phone's screen flickers with varying intensity to transmit data to another device. The flickering is so slight that it is imperceptible to the human eye, but the camera on another phone can sense it at a distance of up to 10 meters. The technology is the basis for a fast and inexpensive wireless-communication system known as Li-Fi. To turn a light into a Li-Fi router involves changing its output to carry a message, and linking it with a network cable to a modem that is connected to a telephone or cable-broadband service. The University of Edinburgh's Gordon Povey notes that Li-Fi takes advantage of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which are more efficient than incandescent bulbs and fluorescent tubes. The Edinburgh researchers have transferred 130 megabits of data per second over about two meters using LEDs. Povey says that adapting existing LEDs to work with the sensors and light sources already found in smartphones and other devices will be the fastest way to bring Li-Fi to market. He notes that as light bulbs are gradually replaced by LEDs, every home, office, and public building could become a Li-Fi hotspot.DARPA-Funded Hacker's Tiny $50 Spy Computer Hides in Offices, Drops From Drones Forbes (01/27/12) Andy Greenberg U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency security researcher Brendan O'Connor has developed the Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors (F-BOMB), a sensor-equipped surveillance-capable computer that can be assembled for less than $50. The Linux-based F-BOMB is designed to be placed into an irretrievable position to collect data and send it back to the owner over any available Wi-Fi network. "If some target is surrounded by bad men with guns, you don't want to have to retrieve this, but you also don't want to have to pay $400 or $500 for every use," O'Connor says. The F-BOMB comes in various versions, including one that affixes to the Parrot Drone, siphoning power from the drone's rechargeable battery and allowing the user to hover over a target, land it on a roof, or drop the F-BOMB from a hook attachment on the drone. A version of the F-BOMB that runs on a module of AA batteries also is available for situations in which power is unavailable. O'Connor says a major advantage to using off-the-shelf parts is that the F-BOMB can be left behind without its components revealing who built it.Jumpstarting Computers With 3D Chips Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (01/27/12) Sarah Perrin Research on new 3D chips that promise to make computers faster and more efficient will be presented in a keynote presentation at the 2012 Interconnection Network Architectures Workshop. Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) scientists have developed a chip that is composed of three or more processors stacked vertically and connected together by several hundred very thin copper pillars. The wires pass through tiny openings made in the core of the silicon layer of each chip. "This superposition reduces the distance between circuits, and thus considerably improves the speed of data exchange," says Microelectronics Systems Laboratory researcher Yuksel Temiz. Until now, chips have been assembled horizontally via connections along their edges. The results of the research should allow for increased multitasking, more memory and calculating power, better functionality, and wireless connectivity. "It's the logical next step in electronics development, because it allows a large increase in terms of efficiency," says lab director Yusuf Leblebici. EPFL plans to make the technology available to academic researchers for further development before focusing on commercialization.New Center Developing Computational Bioresearch Tool University of Chicago (01/27/12) Steve Koppes University of Chicago researchers led by professor Gregory Voth are developing a technique that might lead to a new and simpler way to predict molecular motion inside a cell. The research is backed by a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which is being used to launch the Center for Multiscale Theory and Simulation. "What's impressive about Greg's team is the variety of theoretical and computational tools that it brings to bear," says NSF's Katharine Covert. The tools include a theoretical and computer simulation capability for describing biological systems at interconnected multiple scales. "This is what we call the multi-scale problem, and probably nowhere in the natural world does the multi-scale problem manifest as dramatically as in the biology regime," Voth says. The center will use an extensive new cyberinfrastructure network, which will provide a wide range of computational equipment, software, and techniques to support its work. One of the center’s most important computational tools is a technique called coarse-graining, which is a way of simplifying a complex problem in a mathematically precise way, with real-world physics built in.Apps for Day-to-Day Work Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (01/27/12) Fraunhofer Institute researchers are developing several smartphone applications, including one designed to help farmers organize their harvest and one that provides support for business travelers. The farming application will help farmers keep track of how large their fields are, how much time the workers need, and which seed and pest controls they should use. The app also will describe the technological services that harvesting machinery provides and where mobile devices can be effectively used. The researchers tested the application at different times, which helped them design it to the farmers' specifications, says Fraunhofer's Ralf Carbon. Another Fraunhofer-developed application is designed to simplify the management and recording of business travel expenses. When travelers arrive at their place of employment, the app is activated and the smartphone stores the data, time, and location, while assigning the data to the correct business trip. Normally travelers must save all their receipts from public transportation and meals. However, the app enables users to take pictures of their receipts, and then it automatically assigns and stores the photos.Visual Nudge Improves Accuracy of Mammogram Readings Washington University in St. Louis (01/26/12) Diana Lutz Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Rochester Institute of Technology have developed subtle gaze direction technology for use in interpreting mammograms and other visual search tasks. To direct the gaze, the researchers changed the brightness of an area in the peripheral field of view to draw the viewer's focus to that area. However, the stimulus was subtle because the viewer's gaze is monitored in real time by an eye-tracking device and the modulations to the peripheral vision are terminated before the eye fixates on them. In their study, the researchers used a database of mammograms that included both images and text files that contains coordinates of abnormalities and their size. Rochester professor Reynold Bailey hired an expert to view and mark 65 images from the database, and his scanpath was recorded using an eye-tracking system. The expert's gaze direction then was used to guide a group of novices, while a control group viewed the mammograms without gaze manipulation. The novices who were guided were significantly more accurate than the control group. Gaze manipulation also could be used to improve tumor-recognition software.Smarter Password Checker Lets You Compare With Others New Scientist (01/27/12) Jacob Aron Researchers at INRIA and Ruhr University have developed a system designed to rate passwords relative to those already stored in a Web site's database, rather than follow rules for password strength. The password strength checker can tell users if their password is among the weakest 5 percent on a site and encourage them to choose a stronger alternative. Existing password strength checkers might offer vague strength messages based on the length or number of special characters, but the researchers' system focuses on each sequence of characters within a password and compares them to a site's database to see how often those sequences occur in other passwords. However, experts note that comparing a password to others could be risky. The researchers say it never uses an entire password for comparisons, only sequences of a certain length, and adds that a certain amount of noise is included in sequences to make it difficult for database-stealing hackers to reconstruct a valid password.System Predicts Angina Pectoris Risk RUVID (01/26/12) The University of Valencia's Intelligent Data Analysis Laboratory (IDAL) has assisted the Hospital Clinic's cardiology service in developing a tool for assessing the risk of angina pectoris. Patients often come to the emergency department suffering from chest pain of unclear origin, and acute myocardial infarction sometimes is not suspected. Doctors will be able to use the system for making daily decisions on whether patients are suffering from the condition. The tool predicts angina pectoris risk on the basis of the standard clinical assessment results of emergency rooms and takes into account chest pain and data related to patient's medical records. The success rate for cases of patients not suffering from angina pectoris is 92 percent, which tops the clinical standards to apply these methods. The researchers say the Web interface makes the tool easy to use and enables it to be consulted from any emergency point that has Internet access. The IDAL research group specializes in developing systems based on computational intelligence to draw information related to different science and engineering fields. View Full Article | Return to Headlines

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• 30 Jan ' 12:44

  Welcome to the January 30, 2012 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Technology That Translates Content to the Internet Protocol of the Future Oxford, Harvard Scientists Lead Data-Sharing Effort Car Control Software Chaos Revealed in Major Safety Study Using Real-Time Road Traffic Data to Evaluate Congestion FBI Seeks Data-Mining App for Social Media Sensor Networks Could End Parking Rage Web App Could Find Out If a Song Has the X Factor What Your Online Friends Reveal About Where You Are Sunderland University Boffins Study the Science of Sadness and Smiles New Model Shows How Often to Review Material for Flashcard Programs Touchscreen Democracy for the Twitter Generation Researchers Devise New Means for Creating Elastic Conductors Technology That Translates Content to the Internet Protocol of the Future Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain) (01/30/12) Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) researchers working on the Trilogy project have developed technology that enables Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) users to access Internet content that is currently only available to IPv4 users. "Machines that only have IPv6 cannot communicate with those that only have IPv4, which is the case with the majority of those being used to connect to the Internet today, and vice versa," says UC3M professor Marcelo Bagnulo. The researchers developed NAT64 and DNS64, translation tools that can understand both protocols. The Trilogy project aims to improve the quality of the information flow and the internal workings of the Web, which is characterized by the interrelation of routing systems and congestion control systems. "At present they function independently, because the mechanism that decides where the data will flow through does not take into consideration how much other data is flowing through that same path," Bagnulo says. Trilogy aims to help these systems work in a more coordinated way. For example, the UC3M researchers also have designed, implemented, and standardized the multipath transmission control protocol in the Internet Engineering Task Force.Oxford, Harvard Scientists Lead Data-Sharing Effort Harvard University (01/29/12) More than 50 collaborators at over 30 scientific organizations worldwide, led by researchers at the University of Oxford and Harvard University, have developed a common standard that will enable scientists to share data from different databases in fields ranging from genetics to environmental studies. The new standard provides a way for researchers in different fields to coordinate each other's findings by combining the different data sets. "We are now working together to provide the means to manage enormous quantities of otherwise incompatible data," says Oxford's Susanna-Assunta Sansone. The data-sharing effort's online presence is known as the ISA Commons. "One of the things that I find most empowering about this effort is that now small research groups can begin to store laboratory data using this framework, complying with community standards, without their own dedicated bioinformatics support," says the University of Cambridge's Jules Griffin. Sansone says a common standard was necessary due to the deluge of data and technologies used by scientists. "There are hundreds of new technologies coming along but also many ways to describe the information produced," she says. "We can take a jigsaw puzzle of different sciences and now fit the many pieces together to form a complete picture."Car Control Software Chaos Revealed in Major Safety Study Computerworld UK (01/28/12) Leo King While automated software control systems are increasingly being used in vehicles, safety authorities do not have enough expertise to measure or regulate them, according to a recent U.S. National Research Council (NRC) report. The report describes a situation in which car makers are producing vehicles controlled mostly by software, but industry regulators have very limited ability to judge their safety or ascertain the cause of incidents. "A standing advisory committee is one way the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) can interact with industry and with technical experts in electronics to keep abreast of these technologies and oversee their safety," says NRC chair Louis Lanzerotti. NRC says the advisory committee needs a panel of individuals with backgrounds central to the design, development, and safety assurance of car electronics systems, including experts in software and systems engineering, in human factors, and in electronics hardware. In addition, the report says the NHTSA must become more proactive in technology development, including assessing how drivers interact with electronic systems. "In the future, the possibility of electronics leading to increasingly autonomous vehicles presents a new set of safety challenges and will demand even more agency planning and foresight," the report says.Using Real-Time Road Traffic Data to Evaluate Congestion University of Cambridge (01/26/12) Cambridge University researchers are working on the Transport Information Monitoring Environment (TIME) project, which aims to provide data that enables businesses, government, and the public to make better use of roads. The TIME project has re-purposed data sources from Cambridgeshire County Council and Stagecoach, adding them to a system that can transport, collect, and analyze data. The researchers collected bus position data because the movement of buses gives a good idea of the traffic conditions in general. The researchers also collected real-time traffic light data using the Split Cycle Offset Optimization Technique and demonstrated how that data can be combined with bus data to give buses priority at traffic lights. By archiving the data and analyzing it statistically, TIME researchers can determine the effects of exceptional circumstances, such as scheduled work by utilities, accidents in the city, or closure of the surrounding roads on vehicle speeds throughout the city. "Our approach has helped us both quantify the effects of congestion on urban road networks and visualize the consequences in a variety of formats," says Cambridge researcher Richard Gibbens.FBI Seeks Data-Mining App for Social Media InformationWeek (01/26/12) Elizabeth Montalbano The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wants to develop a data-mining application that will enable the agency to monitor social media network activity for intelligence purposes, according to a request for information (RFI) posted on FedBizOpps.gov. The agency is interested in a "geospatial alert and analysis mapping application" that will allow its Strategic Information and Operations Center to "quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats," the RFI says. The tool would be in the form of a "secure, lightweight Web application portal, using mashup technology" with unlimited flexibility to adapt to changing threats, and have the ability to automatically search and scrape social networking and open source news Web sites for information about breaking world events. The FBI plans to use the tool to share information with intelligence partners to coordinate and synchronize awareness of events. Users of the tool must have access to a common operating dashboard for viewing both unclassified open source information feeds and tools to analyze social media during a developing crisis. The tool also would enable users to conduct relevant keyword searches on popular information sites on the Internet.Sensor Networks Could End Parking Rage Technology Review (01/25/12) Kevin Bullis The anger many drivers feel from having to search and wait for parking spaces to open up might be quelled by arrays of networked sensors embedded in city streets, a solution that also could help reduce traffic accidents, pollution, and congestion. "Most city parking is mismanaged or not managed at all, because you can't manage what you can't measure," says University of California, Los Angeles professor Donald Shoup. "Sensing networks, by revealing what's happening in parking spots, will change the way cities work." San Francisco has deployed SFPark, the most advanced U.S.-based smart parking system, with funding from a $19.8 million U.S. Department of Transportation grant. The system uses magnetic sensors installed into the asphalt under 8,200 street parking spaces, and collects data on thousands more parking spots in garages and from smart parking meters. The information is connected to a central management system, while motorists can employ a Web site or smartphone app to access data about where parking is available and how much it costs, in real time. A similar smart parking system is under construction in Los Angeles, with sensors to be deployed at approximately 7,000 street-side parking spots within the next several months.Web App Could Find Out If a Song Has the X Factor University of Bristol News (01/25/12) Joanne Fryer University of Bristol researchers have developed a Web application that enables amateur musicians to score their own songs to determine if they have hit potential. The application is based on research that suggests it is possible to predict hits in the United Kingdom's top 40 singles charts. "The hit potential equation is based on today’s music, so people scoring old songs will be estimating their hit potential today, not at the time they were released," says Bristol's Tijl de Bie. The application enables users to score many existing songs by title and band name, as well as their own songs. The researchers used musical features such as tempo, time signature, song duration, and loudness to program the application. The researchers note that an important qualitative difference with previous studies is the use of an adaptive machine-learning method to account for evolving musical tastes.What Your Online Friends Reveal About Where You Are New Scientist (01/25/12) Jacob Aron Even if users take standard precautions on social media sites, they still unwittingly leak vital information through their friends. "You can actually infer a lot of things about people, even though they are pretty careful about how they manage their online behavior," says the University of Rochester's Adam Sadilek, who has developed a dynamic Bayesian network, a system for predicting a Twitter user's location by examining where their friends are. The system can correctly place a user within a 100-meter radius with up to 85 percent accuracy. The researchers tested the system on more than 4 million tweets from users in Los Angeles and New York City, who had location data enabled. The researchers found that two weeks of location data on an individual, combined with location data from their nine most sharing friends, is enough to place that person within a 100-meter radius with 85 percent accuracy. Meanwhile, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed Jeeves, a programming language that automatically enforces privacy policies. Jeeves lets a programmer delegate privacy responsibilities and concentrate on the actual function of their code, says MIT’s Jean Yang.Sunderland University Boffins Study the Science of Sadness and Smiles Sunderland Echo (UK) (01/24/12) Sue Kirby University of Sunderland researchers are using Jacobs University-developed technology as part of a global project to better understand society's cultural differences. The technology involves the use of biosensors that can interpret subjects' states of mind as they respond to different activities. Software captures data from the sensors in the form of graphs, where peaks represent the various emotional responses, which can then be compared to the activity the person was involved in. The use of the Jacobs University technology was part of the Education in Cultural Understanding Technology Enhanced (eCUTE) project, a three-year research program to develop cultural awareness by engaging young people with characters in a virtual world. Eight research institutions across Europe are involved in the eCUTE project. "This is an incredibly prestigious project which will have real world impact," says Sunderland researcher Lynne Hall. She notes that the researchers "will be looking at eCUTE's user-experience evaluation. It's an area where Sunderland is incredibly strong and has proven experience in assessing computing projects of this scale."New Model Shows How Often to Review Material for Flashcard Programs Cornell Chronicle (01/24/12) Bill Steele Cornell University graduate student Tim Novikoff has developed a mathematical model for educational software. "The model is based on what the psychologists have been finding out about the process of learning, and we're hoping it can provide a language for new kinds of educational software," says Cornell professor Jon Kleinberg. In a paper describing the model, the researchers say the goal is infinite perfect learning, in which new items can be added forever and every item is continually reviewed. An alternative is cramming, in which the students aims to learn a finite list of items in a specified period of time. The researchers suggest three ways of scheduling material for infinite perfect learning--the recap method, the slow flashcard method, and the hold-build method. The model is meant to be a framework that defines the spacing constraints of a theoretical student. Novikoff says a programmer needs the formal mathematical model to develop an educational program's algorithms. He says that eventually it could be possible to analyze data from students to develop an average set of constraints that educational software can use as a base from which it adjusts to fit different students.Touchscreen Democracy for the Twitter Generation Lancaster University (01/24/12) Lancaster University researchers have developed an interactive touchscreen display to help give teenagers a more active voice in community life. The display has been installed at the Queen Elizabeth School (QES) by computing researchers from Lancaster’s InfoLab21 in collaboration with the University of Oulu. The display enables students to upload photos of themselves and give their views about their local area in an interactive way. Thus far, about 200 responses have been gathered, and they will be fed back to the town council as part of a broader community consultation. The project "looks at how we can leverage the potential of online social media to bring communities closer and help them work together in dealing with key local issues that affect them," says Lancaster professor Awais Rashid. The material will be recorded and displayed on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. "It’s appealing because it’s not just a piece of paper, the screens are a lot more fun which makes you want to use them," says QES student Michael Harkness. The display is part of the U.K.'s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's YouDesignIt project, an 18-month effort to produce blueprints for next-generation online social networking mechanisms.Researchers Devise New Means for Creating Elastic Conductors NCSU News (01/24/12) Matt Shipman North Carolina State University (NCSU) researchers have developed a method for creating elastic conductors made of carbon nanotubes, which they say could lead to the large-scale production of a new generation of elastic electronic devices. "We’re optimistic that this new approach could lead to large-scale production of stretchable conductors, which would then expedite research and development of elastic electronic devices," says NCSU professor Yong Zhu. He says stretchable electronic devices would be both more resilient and able to conform to various shapes, with applications in clothing, implanted medical devices, and sensors. The researchers' method involves placing aligned carbon nanotubes on an elastic substrate using a transfer printing process. The substrate is then stretched, which separates the nanotubes while maintaining their parallel alignment. When the substrate relaxes, the nanotubes buckle, creating what looks like a collection of parallel lines on a flat surface. Zhu says this new method will make manufacturing elastic conductors much more efficient. "For example, roll-to-roll printing techniques could be adapted to take advantage of our new method," he says.

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• 27 Jan ' 18:42

  Welcome to the January 27, 2012 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. SOPA's Big Brother Signed by EU Nations Amid Widespread Protests Stanford Software Allows Aero-Engineering Students to Focus on Aircraft Design Instead of Computer Code Big Victory on Internet Buoys Lobby DMCA Jailbreaking Provisions Up for Renewal, Possible Expansion Patent Office Expands Outreach for Innovation Honors Contest Aims to Inspire Students to Create Healthcare Apps USAID Posts Draft RFA With Emphasis Spanning Analytics Computer Coding: Not for Geeks Only Virtual Projection Team Puts iPhone Writing on the Wall IT Salaries Rising for Experienced Employees: Dice Report Ten Technologies That Will Shake the CE World Lenovo to Launch App Programming Class Could the Internet Ever Be Destroyed? SOPA's Big Brother Signed by EU Nations Amid Widespread Protests IDG News Service (01/26/12) Jennifer Baker The European Union (EU) recently signed the controversial Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) despite widespread opposition. The worldwide agreement aims to enforce intellectual property rights and fight online piracy and illegal software. However, ACTA's opponents claim it goes beyond the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act because it encourages Internet service providers to police the Internet without any legal safeguards. The most controversial part of ACTA allows countries to introduce a three-strikes rule, which would require Internet users to be cut off if they continue to download copyright material after receiving two warnings. The agreement still must pass through the European Union's ratification procedure and digital rights groups are pushing for the European Parliament to reject it. ACTA has been controversial from the start due to secrecy imposed by the U.S. and data privacy issues. Opposition to the agreement already has broken out in Poland, where more than 10,000 people took to the streets in protest, and the Polish branch of the Anonymous hacktivist group attacked government Web sites. ACTA already has been signed by the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, and Singapore.Stanford Software Allows Aero-Engineering Students to Focus on Aircraft Design Instead of Computer Code Stanford Report (CA) (01/24/12) Andrew Myers Stanford University researchers have developed Stanford University Unstructured (SU2), an open source computational fluid dynamics application that models the effects of fluids moving over aerodynamic components. The researchers say SU2 incorporates everything engineers need to develop a complete design loop for optimizing the shapes of aerospace systems. The software was designed as an alternative to commercial programs, which offer similar capabilities but can be prohibitively expensive. "The commercially available software is out of reach for most students, and does not allow for modifications to the source code that are needed for doctoral-level research," says Stanford's Francisco Palacios, who led the SU2 development team. SU2 is a freely customizable program, and developers, designers, and engineers are encouraged to customize it to fit their needs. "We welcome corrections, additions, and improvements to our application," Palacios says. Documentation and training also are available via Stanford's Aerospace Design Lab Web site, which includes a public forum where users and developers can seek advice and post questions.Big Victory on Internet Buoys Lobby New York Times (01/26/12) Somini Sengupta The recent successful protest movement by both consumer groups and companies to defeat antipiracy legislation in Congress lends credence to the possibility that the Internet industry and politically active Web users are a force to be reckoned with. It is highly unlikely that corporate lobbying by itself could have influenced political opinion in Washington, D.C. about the antipiracy bills. "It's the first emergence of a broad-based Internet community that brings together not only tech giants and the users, but all the young innovators and investors," notes Center for Democracy and Technology president Leslie Harris. Debate is brewing online over what issues the movement should focus on next. For example, some activists want to block legislation that would force Internet providers to retain data on users' online travels. "No one can predict what will catch on," says Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. "If [the Stop Online Piracy Act] and [the Protect Intellectual Property Act] are any indication, if it's something that threatens the Internet, I believe we can recreate this." New America Foundation fellow Rebecca MacKinnon says the protest movements signaled that the Internet as well as digital rights and liberties are clearly perceived by many people as political freedoms.DMCA Jailbreaking Provisions Up for Renewal, Possible Expansion BYTE (01/26/12) Serdar Yegulalp An important part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which allows users to circumvent protections on smartphones, will expire later this year. However, if the U.S. Congress renews the DMCA, circumvention could be broadened to cover other devices as well. The U.S. government granted an exception to the DMCA for jailbreaking in 2010, after the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other groups petitioned for one. The EFF stated that jailbreaking was a form of fair use under U.S. copyright law, and the U.S. Library of Congress agreed. However, Apple says jailbreaking results in copyright infringement because it allows pirated copies of Apple copyrighted content and other third-party content such as games and applications to play on the iPhone. A circumvention expansion would allow the DMCA exception to cover personal computers protected by a UEFI secure-boot system. However, Apple argues that increased jailbreaking would make it easier for either facet of the devices to be compromised. The EFF is soliciting people to speak up in favor of the jailbreaking exemption, as is the Software Freedom Law Center.Patent Office Expands Outreach for Innovation Honors InTech (01/12) The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is working to build on the diversity of last year's honorees for the U.S.'s highest award for technological achievement. For the 2012 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, USPTO is expanding its nationwide call for nominees. In 2011, honorees were awarded the medal for a wide variety of achievements. "We want to honor this nation's creative geniuses," says USPTO's Richard Maulsby. "This medal goes to innovators whose talent helps guarantee U.S. leadership in technology across the board." The congressionally authorized medal highlights the national importance of technological innovation to inspire people to pursue technical careers and keep the United States at the forefront of global technology and economic leadership. “There are thousands of U.S. inventors who have produced great ideas," Maulsby says. "This is an opportunity to recognize them and showcase their work.” Detailed information on the requirements for submitting a nomination is available for download at www.uspto.gov/about/nmti/guidelines.jsp. Completed nominations must be submitted to USPTO by March 31.Contest Aims to Inspire Students to Create Healthcare Apps Healthcare IT News (01/25/12) Bernie Monegain The Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering have launched the Go Viral to Improve Health contest, a competition to spur undergraduate and graduate students to create health-related applications. The contest is the second annual collegiate challenge designed to inspire students to work in interdisciplinary teams and transform health data into mobile apps, online tools or games, or other innovative products that solve health problems. The team that designs the best application will receive a $10,000 prize, and the second and third place teams will receive awards of $5,000 and $3,000, respectively. Entries will be rated on their design, usability, and how well they integrate public health data. Participating teams must have between two and five members, including at least one undergraduate or graduate student pursuing a health-related degree and one undergraduate or graduate student pursuing a degree in computer science, engineering, or a related major. Teams must use data from the Health Indicators Warehouse, a large collection of health data and indicator sets made available by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.USAID Posts Draft RFA With Emphasis Spanning Analytics CCC Blog (01/24/12) Erwin Gianchandani The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is calling on universities and research institutions as it looks for novel ways to define and solve developmental challenges. Computing will likely play a key role for a new program that seeks "to advance evidence-based analysis and test new solutions, to champion and incubate creative approaches to accelerate solutions to traditional development challenges, and to encourage universities to assist in addressing development problems through sustainable, creative, multidisciplinary approaches," according to a draft request for applications. The program will fund new development centers that will address USAID's need for development data and analysis, as well as test and scale new models and technologies for development. The initiative also will engage new solvers, incentivize new solutions, and foster new approaches for development. The agency will fund single-university centers, at $1 million to $2 million annually for five years, and will fund consortia centers comprising three to four academic institutions and including developing country partners, at $5 million annually for five years.Computer Coding: Not for Geeks Only Bloomberg Business Week (01/26/12) Barrett W. Sheridan; Brendan Greeley People in traditionally non-technological careers increasingly are embracing software programming as a way to advance their careers. Programming is becoming "a much more fundamental piece of knowledge, similar to reading or writing," says Union Square Ventures' Andy Weissman. The number of college students pursuing computing science degrees rose 14 percent between 2007 and 2009, according to the Computing Research Association. Meanwhile, non-college students are accessing new resources, such as Codecademy, to develop their software development skills. Codecademy, which was founded in 2001 by former Columbia University students Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, offers free interactive tutorials that guide users as they write and test lines of JavaScript code directly in their browser windows. "We wanted to mirror the experience of what developers go through, learning by doing," Sims says. “There’s a cohort of hundreds of thousands of people who are all learning at the same time, and they’ll be conversational in how to build basic Web applications and sites at the end of the year.” Free online classes from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also are encouraging people to learn about computer science. "The introductory computing class has, on YouTube alone, over 2 million hits for the videos," notes Stanford professor Mehran Sahami.Virtual Projection Team Puts iPhone Writing on the Wall PhysOrg.com (01/26/12) Nancy Owano Researchers at the University of Calgary, Columbia University, and the University of Munich have developed Virtual Projection, a method for using a handheld device to project images on a display. The researchers say Virtual Projection is based on tracking a handheld device without an optical projector and allows selecting a target display on which to position, scale, and orient an item in a single gesture. A user holds the phone to the target computer screen while the device's camera captures and compares images from the screen to determine the location. The information is then passed back to the computer screen via Wi-Fi to place the projection on the screen. "While Virtual Projection has the clear downside that it requires a suitable display and does not work on any regular surface, we can at least fix some of the downsides of its real-world mode," says Calgary's Dominikus Baur. The Virtual Projection system consists of an unmodified iPhone, a server that runs on a Windows PC, and a Wi-Fi connection. The researchers say Virtual Projection could provide a pervasive, everyday opportunity for communication.IT Salaries Rising for Experienced Employees: Dice Report eWeek (01/24/12) Nathan Eddy Technology professionals enjoyed their largest annual salary growth since 2008, according to Dice's 2012-2011 Salary Survey. Technology professionals on average received salary increases of more than 1 percent, raising their average annual earnings from $79,384 in 2010 to $81,327 in 2011. In addition, the average bonuses were up 8 percent to $8,769, and the number of technology professionals receiving bonuses was up 32 percent in 2011. The industries most likely to pay out bonuses were telecommunications, hardware, banking, utilities and energy, and software. Silicon Valley’s annual salary of $104,195 was the highest in the United States, and was 5 percent year over year. However, the Dice survey also found that 12 of the top 20 cities for technology jobs had above average wage growth. "Compensation has mustered some momentum, as more and more top tech markets are notching increases in pay," says Dice's Tom Silver. "Silicon Valley’s compensation moved first and wrote the playbook for highly qualified tech professionals to ask for more--whether that be in Seattle, Houston, or Raleigh." For example, Dice found that average salaries were up 5 percent in Chicago and Seattle, and they were up 4 percent in Denver and Dallas/Ft. Worth.Ten Technologies That Will Shake the CE World EE Times (01/24/12) Ten technologies showcased at the recent International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) could alter the industry's landscape in 2012. In 2012 mobile device makers will begin integrating complete inertial navigation units with pre-calibrated accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers. Meanwhile, graphics processing unit-based computing will get a boost from system- and software-level support due to the addition of application programming interfaces, as well as parallel-capable programming languages such as CUDA, DirectX compute, and OpenCL. CES also highlighted the importance of Google Android, which likely will be the software platform that enables many of the most interesting and diverse devices to emerge in the next decade. Windows 8, the first version of Microsoft's operating system to support both ARM and X86 processors, also will have a big impact. In addition, companies such as Microsoft, Texas Instruments, and FlashScan3D are developing touch-free human-machine interfaces, building on the success of other interfaces such as the Xbox Kinect. Other promising technologies include talkative intelligent agents, such as Apple's cloud-based Siri, which can answer questions in a naturally conversational way and could make search engines obsolete. - May Require Free Registration Lenovo to Launch App Programming Class U.S. News & World Report (01/24/12) Jason Koebler Lenovo is collaborating with the National Academy Foundation to teach teens how to design, program, and market their own Android apps. Lenovo and the foundation will offer an app programming class in five U.S. high schools in the spring, and expand the pilot program to 70 schools nationwide in the fall. Students will be required to take an introductory programming course before they are admitted into the 12-week program. Participants will work in small groups, use the standard Android developer toolkit to create their own app, and eventually release their app on the Android market. "We want to make sure they have a good experience doing something that is potentially marketable at the end of the course," says Lenovo's Michael Schmedlen. "We want students to be prepared for the future." A Lenovo survey found that 80 percent of teens are interested in learning how to create apps, and nearly 25 percent believe app development will be the most marketable technology skill in the future. The program will make the curriculum, materials, and lectures available free online for teachers who want to emulate the class.Could the Internet Ever Be Destroyed? Scientific American (01/12) Natalie Wolchover There are many aspects of the Internet that are under threat of loss or ruination. Although the Net can survive and recover from in-country physical damage, it is possible that one country could hinder another's access to its share of the Internet via severance of the cables that relay data between nations, warns Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) computer scientist David Clark. More potentially harmful to the Web's status quo existence than physical damage is government suppression or censorship, although experts such as Clark and MIT economist William Lehr note that workarounds to such blockage will inevitably surface, as the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt demonstrated. In fact, such developments have sparked an Internet arms race, and Lehr points out that "the tools for fighting the war are mostly defensive, but also can be offensive." Imposing a tax on Internet access or raising the price of access so most people cannot afford it is an even more subversive measure that governments could apply toward crippling Web use. Lehr also warns that the openness of the Internet could be lost or greatly reduced through poor regulation, and he says new security models should be developed to ensure privacy and security without impeding the Web's functionality.

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• 25 Jan ' 08:49

  Welcome to the January 25, 2012 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Europe Weighs Tough Law on Online Privacy Google Looks to Speed Up the Internet Massive Courses, Sans Stanford Neural Network Learns to Identify Group Sizes Without Knowledge of Numbers Collision in the Making Between Self-Driving Cars and How the World Works The Mathematics of Taste Where Creativity Meets Technology Twitter Bots Create Surprising New Social Connections Next Generation of Supercomputers Requires Radical Redesign Life-Like Robot Being Built in Ottawa Lab 10 New Open Source Projects You May Not Know About OK, Computer DARPA Set to Develop Super-Secure 'Cognitive Fingerprint' Europe Weighs Tough Law on Online Privacy New York Times (01/23/12) Somini Sengupta Europe is considering new legislation that would force Internet companies to obtain explicit consent from consumers about the use of their personal data, delete that data forever at the consumer’s request, and face fines for failing to do so. The regulations would require Web sites to tell consumers why their data is being collected and retain it for only as long as necessary. "Companies must be transparent about what they are doing, clear about which data is being used for what," says the European Commission's Viviane Reding. The European Parliament will deliberate on the proposal this year and it could go into effect as soon as 2014. One of the most contested provisions of the proposal is the right to be forgotten, which refers to an Internet user’s right to demand that their accumulated data on a particular site be deleted forever. Critics warn that it is not as simple as pressing delete, as data is often transferred or licensed to third parties. "You’re not going to get a unilateral right for someone to say I want you to destroy all the information you have about me," says Intel's David Hoffman. The European regulation could serve as a blueprint for other countries.Google Looks to Speed Up the Internet InfoWorld (01/24/12) Paul Krill Google researchers want to overhaul the Internet's Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) transport layer and have suggested ways to reduce latency. According to the company's Make the Web Faster team, the key to reducing latency is saving round trips. The researchers recommend increasing the TCP initial congestion window to improve TCP speed. "The amount of data sent at the beginning of a TCP connection is currently three packets, implying three round trips to deliver a tiny, 15K-sized content," says Google's Yuchung Chen. "Our experiments indicate that IW10 [initial congestion window of 10 packets] reduces the network latency of Web transfers by over 10 percent." Google also wants the initial timeout reduced from three seconds to one second. The company has developed the TCP Fast Open protocol, which reduces application network latency, and proportional rate reduction for TCP, and the team is encouraging its use. Google's work is open source and disseminated through the Linux kernel, Internet Engineering Task Force standards proposals, and research publications to encourage industry involvement.Massive Courses, Sans Stanford Inside Higher Ed (01/24/12) Steve Kolowich Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun and University of Virginia professor David Evans have launched Know Labs, a for-profit enterprise designed to offer affordable high-quality college courses to tens of thousands of students through Udacity, an online learning portal. Thrun will teach a course on autonomous vehicles and Evans will teach an introductory course in computer science. Although Thrun's course will require some background in mathematical and engineering concepts, Evans' course will be targeted to students with no background in computer science. "The goal is to have a course that anyone who is willing to put in the effort will be able to take," Evans says. The Know Labs model is based on the success of Stanford's open online courses, which debuted last fall. The advanced online class in artificial intelligence, taught by Thrun and Google's Peter Norvig, attracted 160,000 enrollees, 20,000 of whom completed all of the coursework. The artificial intelligence course was intended as a proof-of-concept for Know Labs' course-delivery model, says company co-founder David Stavens. "We really see this new online class not just as a means to offer free education, but also as a way for some of our most talented students to find new, better jobs," Thrun says.Neural Network Learns to Identify Group Sizes Without Knowledge of Numbers PhysOrg.com (01/23/12) Bob Yirka Universita di Padova cognitive science researchers Ivilin Stoianov and Marco Zorzi have demonstrated approximate number sense (ANS) in an artificial intelligence network. The researchers used a neural network that learns to recognize images and to respond to what it has seen, feeding it 51,800 images, each a unique layout of rectangles of various sizes. The system generated new images that revealed an awareness of the relative size of different groups without having to perform any counting. The team then used another program that enabled the system to compare different groups seen during the first run, and the system made educated guesses on which was bigger or smaller. The researchers believe the system made educated guesses on group size similar to the way the process occurs in the human brain. The research is a key step in creating machines that think rather than simply crunch numbers. For example, computer systems that can learn to use ANS could be integrated into robots to make them more useful.Collision in the Making Between Self-Driving Cars and How the World Works New York Times (01/23/12) John Markoff The legal and ethical implications of autonomous vehicles recently were discussed by Silicon Valley technologists, legal scholars, and government officials at Santa Clara University. Google has demonstrated that autonomous vehicles could replace human drivers and greatly reduce human error, which causes most of the 33,000 deaths and 1.2 million injuries that occur in the U.S. each year. Google's autonomous vehicles currently have driven 200,000 miles without an accident. Nevada was the first state to legalize driverless vehicles, and similar laws have been introduced in Florida and Hawaii. However, several issues, such as whether police should have the right to pull over autonomous vehicles, are unresolved, according to the University of Minnesota's Frank Douma. "It’s a 21st-century Fourth Amendment seizure issue," Douma says. The U.S. government does not have enough information to determine how to regulate driverless technologies, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's O. Kevin Vincent. Even after intelligent cars match human capabilities, significant issues, such as legal liability and insurance, would remain, says Stanford University's Sven A. Beiker. In addition, autonomous vehicles rely on global positioning systems and satellite data, which are vulnerable to jamming by computer hackers.The Mathematics of Taste MIT News (01/24/12) Larry Hardesty Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers used genetic programming, in which mathematical models compete with each other to fit the available data and then cross-pollinate to produce more accurate models, to analyze taste-test data. Swiss flavor company Givaudan asked researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) to help interpret the results of taste tests in which 69 subjects assessed 36 different combinations of seven basic flavors. For each subject, the researchers randomly generated a mathematical function that predicted scores according to the concentrations of different flavors. After all of the functions were assessed, the best ones were recombined to produce a new generation of functions, and the whole process was repeated about 30 times. To establish the model's accuracy, the CSAIL researchers developed another model to validate their approach. Taste preference "is a pretty brilliant area in which to apply the evolutionary methods--and it looks as though they're working, also, so that's exciting," says Hampshire College professor Lee Spector.Where Creativity Meets Technology Boston Globe (01/22/12) D.C. Denison In an interview, Jennifer Chayes, managing director of Microsoft Research New England, says the industry represents science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) wrong to young people, especially women, who often have an image of a nerdy guy at a computer, programming. Chayes, who chose science over a career in visual arts, says STEM fields can be very creative and collaborative, noting that she has never just sat at a computer and programmed. Chayes says she always works with other people and loves the human interaction, which is what she tries to explain to young women. "I love when another person's thinking sparks something in my mind, and my thinking sparks something in others." Chayes also notes that Microsoft employs a lot of nontechnical people to better understand how people want to use technology, adding that technology is moving toward greater interaction with social sciences. "So much of technology really depends on this interaction of engineering and technology with social sciences," she says. "So if someone gets interested in the social sciences, and starts doing work in this space, I think they put themselves in a much better position to get reemployed."Twitter Bots Create Surprising New Social Connections Technology Review (01/23/12) Mike Orcutt A group of freelance Web researchers have created a Twitter bot, called a socialbot, that can fool users into thinking the bots are real people and serve as virtual social connector, accelerating the natural rate of human-to-human communication. The system grew out of the Web Ecology Project, an independent research group focused on studying the structure of social media phenomena. Some of the Web Ecology Project researchers, led by Tim Hwang, created their own organization, called the Pacific Social Architecting Corp., to continue the development of socialbots. In further experiments, the group tracked 2,700 Twitter users, divided into randomly assigned target groups of 300, over 54 days. The first 33 days served as a control period, during which no socialbots were deployed. Then, during the 21-day experimental period, nine bots were activated, one for each target group. On average, each bot gained 62 new followers and received 33 incoming tweets. The researchers also found that there was a 43 percent increase in human-to-human follows, after the socialbots were introduced, compared to the control period.Next Generation of Supercomputers Requires Radical Redesign Mother Nature Network (01/22/12) Jeremy Hsu The next generation of exascale supercomputers could complete one billion billion calculations per second, which would be 1,000 times faster than today's most powerful supercomputers. However, just one exascale system would require the power equivalent to the maximum output of the Hoover Dam. Researchers recently gathered to discuss the challenges of supercomputing energy efficiency during a workshop held by the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) at Brown University. "We've been increasing computing power by 1,000 fold every few years for a while now, but now we've reached the limits," says ICERM director Jill Pipher. The U.S. Department of Energy wants to develop an exascale supercomputer that would use less than 20 megawatts of power by 2020, which would require a drastic change in computer architecture. Changing computer architecture would also require a rewrite of the software programs that run on conventional computers. "Now, if you're building these new machines, you're going to have to try writing programs in different ways," Pipher says. One promising solution is using graphics processing units (GPUs) instead of central processing units (CPUs). GPUs use almost eight times less energy than a CPU per computer calculation.Life-Like Robot Being Built in Ottawa Lab CBC News (Canada) (01/20/12) University of Ottawa researchers are developing a robot that mimics a human face's expressions and a human hand's tactile processes, which they say could be useful in fields such as nursing, nuclear plant maintenance, and explosive detail disposal. The key part of the technology is a touch-sensitive artificial skin made of elastic silicon and embedded with tactical and temperature sensors, which can sense contact, as well as the profile, temperature, and elasticity of object surfaces. The researchers, led by Ottawa's Emil Petriu, are using a robot as their test subject, replacing its mechanical parts with the more life-like parts. "It's critical that they should have a warm, fuzzy feeling or they don't feel human," Petriu says. The researchers embedded tubes that circulate hot water in the artificial skin to match natural skin temperature. The researchers also mounted a set of actuators, which serve as artificial muscles, to the anatomically correct skull, which the researchers hope will result in a highly life-like face.10 New Open Source Projects You May Not Know About PC World (01/20/12) Katherine Noyes Black Duck Software recently announced the winners of its fourth annual Open Source Rookies of the Year program, bringing attention to lesser-known open source software projects. Two of the 10 winners are Bootstrap, a toolkit from Twitter for developing Web applications and sites, and BrowserID, a secure, decentralized, open source, cross-browser way for signing onto Web sites based on the user's email address. Black Duck described Canvas as "the only commercial open source learning management system (LMS) and the only LMS native to the cloud." Cloud Foundry is an open platform-as-a-service that provides a choice of clouds, developer frameworks, and application services. Moai is a mobile platform for game developers that offers cloud-based game services and rapid development of iOS, Android, and Chrome titles using the Lua scripting language. Mooege, OpenShift, Orion, rstat.us, and Salt are the other winners. "The data underlying the 2011 Open Source Rookies list is consistent with shifts we see in our day-to-day business, where cloud, mobile, and gaming draw great support from involved communities of open source developers," says Black Duck Software CEO Tim Yeaton.OK, Computer ITPro (01/19/12) Stephen Pritchard Voice-control systems, which have seen a boost in popularity since the release of Apple's Siri voice-recognition technology, have many everyday applications, especially in fields that require hands-free controls, such as transport, logistics, and manufacturing. Another growth market for the technology is voice biometrics. There are currently 10 million voice prints in use worldwide, and that number is expected to reach 25 million by 2015, according to Nuance. The growth is being driven by a greater use of voice biometrics for customer authentication, especially in financial services, says Opus Research, which predicts that the use of voice biometrics will grow steadily as the technology becomes more accurate and more responsive. Although accuracy, both with false positives and false accepts, has been an issue, improved algorithms, faster processors, and better microphones on mobile handsets have helped to address the problem. Also driving the voice application market are companies being pushed by regulation and security breaches to fortify their data access controls. In addition, businesses prefer voice biometrics because it requires relatively little technology, and it is less intrusive for users than other biometrics. DARPA Set to Develop Super-Secure 'Cognitive Fingerprint' Network World (01/17/12) Michael Cooney U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) researchers are developing security technologies that go beyond recognizing complex passwords. DARPA's Active Authentication program aims to develop "novel ways of validating the identity of the person at the console that focus on the unique aspects of the individual through the use of software-based biometrics." Active Authentication focuses on the computational behavioral traits that can be observed through how people interact with the world. Such systems might look at the unique words a user types or examine the length of sentences and use of punctuation to determine user authenticity, says DARPA's Richard Guidorizzi. Other examples of the computational behavior metrics of the cognitive fingerprint include keystrokes, eye scans, how the user searches for information, how the user selects information, how the user reads the material selected, eye tracking on the page, the speed with which the individual reads the content, and the methods and structure of communication. DARPA says the authentication platform will be developed with open application programming interfaces to allow for the integration of future software or hardware biometric innovations. View Full Article | Return to Headlines

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• 23 Jan ' 13:08

  Welcome to the January 23, 2012 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. U.S. Tech Firms Add Jobs Despite Automation A Big Leap Toward Lowering the Power Consumption of Microprocessors SOPA, PIPA Stalled: Meet the OPEN Act Gaming Technology for Calculating Floods China's Dark Horse Supercomputing Chip: FeiTeng 10 Government Ideas to Spur Innovation UN Sets Stage for Blazing Fast Mobile Devices Pentagon-Funded Games Would Crowdsource Weapons Testing Quantum Mechanics Enables Perfectly Secure Cloud Computing NYC Opens First High School for Software Engineering Must-Have Robots Come Nearer With Software Explosion Next Battle Over Net Ramps Up Worldwide U.S. Tech Firms Add Jobs Despite Automation Computerworld (01/23/12) Patrick Thibodeau Even as U.S. companies increase their investments in automation, the information technology (IT) industry continues to hire workers, according to recent Forrester Research and U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) studies. Employment in software and IT services is on the rise as more of the economy moves online. Meanwhile, the value of the output generated by manufacturing employees in the last decade has doubled, which means that it now takes far fewer people than it did 10 years ago to produce a product, according to NSF. Manufacturing in the U.S. is increasingly becoming the assembly of components that are brought in from overseas; it is also increasingly automated, says Forrester's Andrew Bartels. The U.S. tech industry employed 3.2 million workers at the end of 2011, a net gain of 42,000 over 2010 despite job losses in the telecommunications sector, according the Forrester report. However, Forrester notes that the U.S. tech sector added 131,000 jobs in 2011 in services and software development, which represents six percent of the total new private-sector jobs created since 2010's first quarter. Forrester predicts a continued rise in software and services employment in 2012, and sees tech purchases rising about six percent.A Big Leap Toward Lowering the Power Consumption of Microprocessors University of Texas at Austin (01/20/12) Daniel Oppenheimer University of Texas at Austin researchers have developed systematic power profiles of microprocessors, which they say could help lower the energy consumption of both small cell phones and giant data centers. The researchers say the results could help companies such as Google, Apple, Intel, and Microsoft make software and hardware that will lower the energy costs of very small and very large devices. "The less power cell phones draw, the longer the battery will last," says University of Texas at Austin professor Kathryn McKinley. "If the application writer could analyze the power profile, they would be motivated to write an algorithm that pings it half as often to save energy without compromising functionality." She says the future of software and hardware design involves power profiles becoming a consideration at every stage of the process. "In the past, we optimized only for performance," McKinley says. "If you were picking between two software algorithms, or chips, or devices, you picked the faster one." She notes that there are still applications in which speed remains the primary consideration. However, she says "there are a lot of other areas where you really want to consider the power usage."SOPA, PIPA Stalled: Meet the OPEN Act PC World (01/22/12) Christina DesMarais Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) recently introduced the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, which he says provides stronger intellectual property (IP) rights for U.S. artists and innovators while protecting the openness of the Internet. The OPEN Act would give oversight to the International Trade Commission (ITC), focusing on foreign-based Web sites. "If the ITC investigation finds that a foreign registered Web site is ‘primarily’ and ‘willfully’ infringing on the IP rights of a U.S. rights holder, the commission would issue a cease and desist order that would compel payment processors (like Visa and PayPal) and online advertising providers to cease doing business with the foreign site in question," according to Issa's Web site. Technology companies such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have voiced their support for the OPEN Act, in contrast to their opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protection Intellectual Property Act, which were recently put on hold after a vast online protest. However, the Motion Picture Association of America says the bill goes too easy on Internet piracy. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has introduced the OPEN Act in the U.S. Senate.Gaming Technology for Calculating Floods Research Council of Norway (01/19/12) Norunn K. Torheim; Thomas Keilman SINTEF ICT researchers have developed simulation technology that could save lives and reduce the damage from floods. The simulation technology uses graphics cards that can process more calculations simultaneously, enabling the system to extract much higher capacity from each computer, says SINTEF ICT's Jens Olav Nygaard. The researchers developed software that accelerates the simulation of shallow-water waves several hundredfold. "If a dam breaks and we enter this into the simulation program, we can calculate how the water will flow, including water levels, faster than it occurs in reality, [and] based on the simulation we can determine which areas may need to be evacuated," Nygaard says. The system also can be used for flood-prone areas where other conditions such as landslides can cause flooding. "We still need powerful computers, but with our technology the simulation process goes much faster than before," Nygaard says.China's Dark Horse Supercomputing Chip: FeiTeng HPC Wire (01/19/12) Michael Feldman Chinese researchers at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) are developing the FeiTeng processor, an architecture that could launch Chinese supercomputing past the exascale barrier. FeiTeng was specifically designed for high-performance computing (HPC) and its original version delivered a peak performance of 16 gigaflops, consuming just 8.6 watts of power, which would yield an energy efficiency of about 1.8 gigaflops per watt. The NUDT researchers also developed a programming language called SF95, which extended FORTRAN95 with 10 compiler directives to utilize the architecture. China wants to develop and use domestic microprocessors for its HPC industry, and it is likely that the FeiTeng processors will replace both Intel and NVIDIA chips in a future NUDT supercomputer. China's currently most powerful machine, Tianhe-1A, is powered by Intel Xeon and NVIDIA Tesla chips.10 Government Ideas to Spur Innovation InformationWeek (01/19/12) Rob Preston A new U.S. Department of Commerce report argues for rigorous federal government investment in the country's innovative capacity to spark economic growth and nurture the creation of high-paying, sustainable jobs. Among the policy proposals presented by the report are support for continued, stable basic research funding, and the augmentation and extension of the research and development tax credit to create incentives for long-term private-sector investment. The report also recommends accelerating the commercialization of ideas, although this practice must be tempered with caution so that the government does not try to select commercial winners by determining which specific concepts qualify for funding. In addition, the report urges greater investment in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. The Obama administration suggests financing more grants and structuring more public-private alliances to offer STEM education to more disadvantaged and underrepresented students, as well as raising funding for STEM teacher training. The broadest and most vague of the report's recommendations involves guaranteeing the existence of conditions that enable private enterprise to flourish. The report also calls for reform of the intellectual property system in order that it continue "to function in a way that encourages growth."UN Sets Stage for Blazing Fast Mobile Devices Associated Press (01/19/12) John Heilprin The United Nations has approved new standards for the IMT-advanced system, which should make the next generation of mobile technology 500 times faster than 3G smartphones. International Mobile Telecommunications, also known as the current 3G mobile technology, has been widely used since 2000. The IMT-advanced system will use the radio frequency spectrum more efficiently, and devices will need less bandwidth to access the Internet, stream videos, and transfer data. Some observers call the new standards true 4G, or the fourth generation of mobile wireless standards. "This means absolutely no time to get a page open," says the International Telecommunication Union's Francois Rancy. Devices will be able to obtain data fast enough to download most TV shows in about 20 seconds and CDs in about a minute. "This is what people are really asking for now," Rancy notes. The technology will likely show up in smartphones, tablets, and other devices in two years.Pentagon-Funded Games Would Crowdsource Weapons Testing NextGov.com (01/19/12) Dawn Lim The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing Crowdsourced Formal Verification, a set of computer games designed to refine the way weapons systems are tested to ensure they are free from software errors and security bugs. DARPA says the goal is to create puzzles that are "intuitively understandable by ordinary people" and could be solved on laptops, smartphones, tablets, and consoles. The agency says the games' solutions will be collected into a database and used to improve methods for analyzing software. Crowdsourcing formal verification would help the Pentagon cut costs while it deals with a shortage of computer security specialists. "This is particularly an issue for the Department of Defense because formal verification, while a proven method for reducing defects in software, currently requires highly specialized talent and cannot be scaled to the size of software found in modern weapon systems," DARPA says. However, some security professionals are unsure if the program can meet its ambitious goals. It would be more cost-effective for the government to focus efforts on ensuring that software is secure while it is being engineered instead of after it has been deployed in systems, says Cigital's Gary McGraw.Quantum Mechanics Enables Perfectly Secure Cloud Computing University of Vienna (01/19/12) University of Vienna researchers say that secure cloud computing can be achieved using the principles of quantum mechanics and quantum computing. The researchers envision a future in which quantum computing capabilities only exist in a few specialized facilities around the world, and users would then interact with those facilities to outsource their quantum computations. However, the researchers say that global cloud computing needs to become safer to ensure that users' data remains private. Quantum computing "can preserve data privacy when users interact with remote computing centers," says Vienna researcher Stefanie Barz. She says that quantum computing enables the delegation of a quantum computation from a user who does not hold any quantum computational power to a quantum server, while guaranteeing that the user's data remains private, a process known as blind quantum computing. Blind quantum computing involves the user preparing multiple qubits in a secret state and sending those qubits to the quantum computer, which entangles the qubits according to a standard scheme. The user tailors measurement instructions to the specific state of each qubit and sends them to the quantum server. The results of the computation are then sent back to the user who can interpret and use the results of the computation.NYC Opens First High School for Software Engineering Government Computer News (01/19/12) Kathleen Hickey New York City will create its first public high school dedicated to training students in software development. The Academy for Software Engineering will open in September, offering a full academic program designed to prepare students for college, but the non-vocational school will be available to any student who is interested in computer science. The school is the brainchild of Mike Zamansky, a teacher at Stuyvesant High School, and it will be financially backed by venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who plans to attract other investors and industry support. The school has the potential to train many software engineers who are not at the top of their class academically, says board member Joel Spolsky. When all four grades are enrolled in 2015, the school could have between 420 and 460 students, notes Frank Thomas with the city's Department of Education. The U.S.'s high schools are "not producing even remotely enough programmers to meet the hiring needs of the technology industry," Spolsky says. "I predict that [the school] will be overwhelmed with applicants and this will be the most popular new school in New York City in years."Must-Have Robots Come Nearer With Software Explosion New Scientist (01/19/12) Celeste Biever Several new robotics designs were shown at the recent Homebrew Robotics Club meeting at Willow Garage. GRASP lab researchers demonstrated software that enables Willow Garage's PR2 robot to identify and read signs, as well as predict the movement of people and navigate around them. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers used a PR2 robot to help a quadriplegic man move objects around his house and control a computer mouse. Willow Garage’s ROS robot operating system manages the PR2 robot's hardware and provides an interface between it and new software. Since ROS is open source, the navigation continues to improve as researchers add their modifications to the central software bank. Meanwhile, Ologic's Ted Larson developed Phonedox, a smartphone robot that runs on Google's Android operating system. "We think cell phones are going to be the new way to make the next hot robot," Larson says. Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed DragonBot, an inanimate stuffed dragon that turns into a robot when a cell phone is inserted. DragonBot is constantly connected to the Internet via the cell phone connection, and its memories and personality can be stored in the cloud. The cloud also enables the robots to communicate with each other, making each individual more intelligent. - May Require Free Registration Next Battle Over Net Ramps Up Worldwide Politico (01/18/12) Eliza Krigman Countries that are part of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) are in the process of negotiating a treaty that could affect the governance of the Internet. Between now and December, ITU member nations will negotiate the terms of a new set of rules known as International Telecommunication Regulations, which will replace a 1988 treaty that established basic parameters for the interconnection of international phone networks. Some proposals that are under consideration by ITU member nations could possibly give governments more control over Web content and the conduits that are used to carry it to end users. The new rules could help countries try to recoup some of the revenues they lost as a result of the decline of international calls. One way that could happen is by having the ITU play a bigger role in regulating peering and termination charges. In addition, some developing countries may want to charge Web sites such as Google or Facebook on a per-click basis to generate more revenue for their state-owned phone companies. Critics of the proposals say they would increase the likelihood of Internet censorship, while supporters say the rules would move the Internet away from U.S. control and toward international control.

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• 20 Jan ' 11:13

  Welcome to the January 20, 2012 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Public Outcry Over Antipiracy Bills Began as Grass-Roots Grumbling The Faster-Than-Fast Fourier Transform CCC Launches Undergraduates Summer Research Listing Site Software Could Spot Face-Changing Criminals Yahoo! Predicts America's Political Winners Federal Researchers Push Limits of Cloud Computing Cracking Open the Scientific Process A New Artificial Intelligence Technique to Speed the Planning of Tasks When Resources Are Limited Improving Web Search Map Making, Made Easy Computer Models That Predict Crowd Behavior Could Be Used to Prevent the Spread of Infections at Mass Gatherings Robots for Brain Surgery? EU Project Shows How Microsoft to Launch Real-Time Threat Intelligence Feed Public Outcry Over Antipiracy Bills Began as Grass-Roots Grumbling New York Times (01/19/12) Jenna Wortham; Claire Cain Miller Online protests against two U.S. antipiracy bills were backed by 115,000 Web sites and prompted 3 million people to email Congress and voice their opposition to the legislation, according to Fight for the Future. The protests demonstrate the growing power of the Internet and social media to influence public policy and forced many lawmakers to change their positions on the bills. The protests are offshoots of a broader grass-roots movement whose origins can be traced to some less-mainstream Web segments, such as the Reddit social news site. "The tech community is using its own technology to rally around the issue," notes Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Conway. The movement against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act began to gather momentum when the blogging service Tumblr added a feature that blacked out the dashboard users see when they log in and directed them to information about SOPA. Reddit members started tracking down SOPA advocates and pressuring them to drop support for the bill or lose business. New York University professor Clay Shirky compares the SOPA protest movement to a 21st century phone tree, noting that "it pervaded people's consciousness more and more as time went on."The Faster-Than-Fast Fourier Transform MIT News (01/18/12) Larry Hardesty Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers say they have developed an algorithm that improves on the fast Fourier transform (FFT). They say the algorithm could be particularly useful for image compression, enabling smartphones to wirelessly transmit large video files without draining their batteries or consuming their monthly bandwidth allotments. FFT takes a digital signal containing a certain number of samples and expresses it as the weighted sum of an equivalent number of frequencies. The new algorithm determines the weights of a signal's most heavily weighted frequencies, and if the signal is sparse enough, the algorithm can sample it randomly instead of reading the entire signal. The researchers' algorithm relies on dividing a signal into narrower slices of bandwidth, so that a slice will generally contain only one frequency with a heavy weight. The MIT researchers also developed a more efficient technique that borrows a signal-processing method from 4G cellular networks. The algorithm "greatly expands the number of circumstances where one can beat the traditional FFT," says University of Michigan professor Martin Strauss.CCC Launches Undergraduates Summer Research Listing Site CCC Blog (01/06/12) Erwin Gianchandani The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is offering a new Web site for listing undergraduate summer research positions. Researchers will be able to post their summer research opportunities on the listing site for free. The site will enable students to find summer research programs, and will enable the CCC to promote a pipeline of young talent for careers in computing research. The CCC's relatively new Computer Science Research Opportunities & Graduate School (CSGS) site will offer a link to the listings. The CSGS site provides information on summer research opportunities, a Q&A on "why do research," and links to summer programs from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Research Experiences for Undergraduates, the CRA Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research, and Canadian Collaborative Research Experiences for Undergraduates, among others. Students also will be able to find information and advice on applying to graduate school in computing fields. Features of the CSGS site include Q&As with faculty from around the U.S. and current Ph.D. students, and a "Day in the Life" blog about student graduate school experiences.Software Could Spot Face-Changing Criminals New Scientist (01/18/12) Jacob Aron University of Notre Dame researchers have developed facial-recognition software that can match faces before and after plastic surgery. The researchers found that matching individual facial features was more successful than trying to match whole faces. The researchers, led by Kevin Bowyer and Gaurav Aggarwal, were inspired by a facial-recognition technique known as sparse recognition, which matches an image of a face by comparing it with combinations of individual features from faces already in the database. However, the new system uses two databases, one of which is full of random faces while the other contains all of the before surgery pictures. When an after surgery picture comes up, it is analyzed against the pictures in the before database, developing a composite picture. If the composite picture created using the after picture matches closely with any of the composite pictures derived from the before pictures, the two are declared a match. Combining the matches of all facial features gave the team a 78 percent success rate when comparing pre- and post-surgical photos.Yahoo! Predicts America's Political Winners Technology Review (01/19/12) Christopher Mims Yahoo! researchers are using prediction markets, polls, Twitter sentiment analysis, and search query trends to create a political prediction engine called the Signal. The researchers, led by Yahoo!'s David Rothschild and Dave Pennock, plan to create data visualizations that convey probability to the general public. They say the key to the system is called Fantasy Politics, which is based on Yahoo!'s success with fantasy sports and enables users to bet on the outcomes of almost anything. Pennock says users’ bets will take Yahoo!'s political prediction markets to a level of complexity and predictive power not seen elsewhere. The prediction markets run by the Signal are constantly polled, as are the results of Yahoo! search queries. In addition, Rothschild says Twitter sentiment analysis can provide a level of detail unmatched by polls because polls are generally binary systems, while Twitter sentiment can be analyzed as a fluctuating scale. Prediction markets already seem better than polls at taking the longevity of a trend into account. For example, in the recent Republican Presidential primary race various candidates took turns at the top of polls, but Intrade and other prediction markets monitored by the Signal always had Mitt Romney coming out ahead. Pennock, who crunches the numbers for the Yahoo! team, says their latest result puts the chances for President Obama's victory at 52.9 percent.Federal Researchers Push Limits of Cloud Computing InformationWeek (01/18/12) John Foley Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently completed the Magellan project, which determined that although cloud computing offers many advantages for scientific researchers, there are several hurdles to overcome, including a steep learning curve, performance and scalability shortcomings, and missing pieces in the cloud software stack. The report also found that commercial cloud services could be several times more expensive than the high-performance computing (HPC) environments they currently operate. In general, "the cloud is seven to 13 times more expensive," according to the report. However, the report also provides insights into some of the ways cloud computing could be used for leading-edge research. Magellan researchers concluded that the cloud model is well suited to certain types of scientific applications, specifically those with minimal communications, but it cannot outperform HPC systems for most national lab requirements. The Magellan team found that the top motivations for using the cloud are easing access to computing resources, the ability to control the software environment, and the ability to share the setup of software and experiments with peers.Cracking Open the Scientific Process New York Times (01/17/12) Thomas Lin Dissatisfied with a traditional scientific research publication process that practices elitism while also being expensive, protracted, and hidebound, proponents of open science support a friction-free online collaborative environment that promotes faster knowledge sharing. Momentum is building for such concepts, as is the establishment of open access archives and journals such as arXiv and the Public Library of Science. One open science venture that is growing increasingly popular is ResearchGate, a social networking site where scientists can answer each other's queries, exchange papers, and find collaborators. ResearchGate's membership currently tops 1.3 million, says founder and researcher Ijad Madisch. Although editors of traditional scientific journals say open science may be positive from a theoretical perspective, they note that the scientific community itself is very conservative in practice. Established journals also contend that such conservatism is needed to defray the costs of peer-reviewing and publishing research. Still, some scientists are refusing to provide peer reviews for scientific journals and instead are participating in open online communities. "We’re not talking about new technologies that have to be invented," says the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Scott Aaronson, an active member of MathOverflow. "Journals seem noticeably less important than 10 years ago.”A New Artificial Intelligence Technique to Speed the Planning of Tasks When Resources Are Limited Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain) (01/17/12) Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (UC3M) researchers have developed an artificial intelligence technique that can automatically create plans and quickly solve problems in situations with limited resources. They say the technique can be applied to logistics, autonomous control of robots, fire extinguishing, and online learning. The goal is to get the system to independently find an ordered sequence of actions that will enable objectives to be reached. "With regard to time, our technique is three to 10 times faster, and with regard to quality, our solutions offer similar quality to that obtained by the best technique that is currently available," says UC3M's Angel Garcia Olaya. "Now we are making modifications that we hope will allow us to give still greater quality to our solutions." The technique can be applied to any industry in which it makes sense to implement automatic planning. For example, Spain's Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce used the technique to create a system of automatic planning for the multimodal transport of goods. The researchers also are using the system in conjunction with the European Space Agency for planning and observation operations in space.Improving Web Search Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) (01/16/12) New algorithms developed by Victoria University of Wellington researcher Daniel Crabtree would enable search engines to better understand the meaning of a user's query. Crabtree notes, for example, that a search for "jaguar" would yield mixed results that include the animal, the car, and even an Apple operating system or the 1980s video game console. "Search engines currently don't deal with that ambiguity because they simply search for Web pages that contain the words you've entered," he says. Crabtree's algorithms cluster pages together to separate different interpretations, and they use statistical language models to "see through" the search terms and capture the intended meaning of a query. He says the model recognizes word order to help search engines group them together and return what the user is "really searching for." Crabtree has tested the model on a small scale. "Search engines don’t appear to have improved that much in recent years," he says. "That’s partly because they’ve been focused on other issues, such as revising their search algorithms to stop spam or companies ‘gaming’ the search results."Map Making, Made Easy Harvard Gazette (01/17/12) Peter Reuell Harvard University researchers have developed WorldMap, a cloud-based open source Web map-making platform that facilitates the use of large, detailed datasets and supports a number of formats. The researchers say WorldMap will make it easier for scholars to share maps and other geospatial data, and increase the amount of high-quality spatial data in the public sphere. Scholars will be able to integrate data from various sources by overlaying data in their own computers with materials on the Web, as well as incorporate paper maps, perform online digitizing, and link locations to other media. WorldMap is a collaborative tool, and all participants in groups will have editorial rights to interactive publications for large audiences, and users will be able to keep information private before making it available to larger groups for refinement and releasing it to the public. A beta version of the program was released last July, and it already has 1,250 users from more than 100 countries that have contributed more than 1,700 mapping layers and created more than 500 map collections to support their research. New features under development include the ability to visualize change over time, searching place names for current and historic locations, and creating and editing online map layers.Computer Models That Predict Crowd Behavior Could Be Used to Prevent the Spread of Infections at Mass Gatherings University of Bristol News (01/16/12) Joanne Fryer University of Bristol researchers are studying how crowd behavior can be sensed, analyzed, and modeled, and explain how this knowledge can be used to manage environments in which mass gatherings (MGs) take place to improve safety and security. The researchers note that although the objective of MGs is to bring people together, crowd management strategies aim to keep people separated. The researchers developed agent-based computer models with fine-scale data from actual movements of individuals taken from detailed video recordings, global positioning systems, or mobile phone tracking to identify points of congestion and overcrowding that are useful for crowd management. The models were used for the Notting Hill Carnival to simulate the ways crowds interact and disperse under different conditions of movement and congestion. The researchers also describe how models of crowd movement can be adapted to take into account other scenarios, such as how individuals in confined spaces might spread disease through their proximity. "Such models would allow us to test various interventions on a virtual population with a computer and measure their success rates before testing them on real populations, possibly saving both resources and life," the researchers say.Robots for Brain Surgery? EU Project Shows How CORDIS News (01/13/12) A European Union-funded research group has developed the Robot and Sensors Integration as Guidance for Enhanced Computer Assisted Surgery and Therapy (ROBOCAST) project, a robotic system that can help neurosurgeons perform keyhole brain surgery. ROBOCAST is equipped with enhanced memory features, 13 types of movement, and haptic feedback, which enables physicians to assess tissue and perceive the amount of force applied during surgery. The system uses hardware known as mechatronics, which constructs the robot's body and nervous system, as well as software that provides intelligence. The software consists of a multiple robot, an independent trajectory planning, an advanced controller, and a set of field sensors. The ROBOCAST robot can find its miniature companion robot through six degrees of freedom, moving from left to right, up and down, and backward and forward, all of which work together to find the robot's companion in a three-dimensional space. The miniature robot holds the probe that is used during surgery. The robot is currently being tested on dummies to ensure accurate performance during keyhole surgeries.Microsoft to Launch Real-Time Threat Intelligence Feed Network World (01/12/12) Colin Neagle Microsoft announced plans to launch a real-time threat intelligence feed at the recent International Conference on Cyber Security. The project’s goal is to stream the company's security information on dangerous and high-profile threats to organizations running the gamut from business partners and private corporations to domestic and foreign governments. If the beta test is successful, Microsoft may make the feed publicly available. Microsoft's T.J. Campana says the feed will serve as a Hadoop-based cluster merged with Windows Server, streaming information from a database that now contains data on the Kelihos botnet Microsoft first reported on in September. "I don't see a decrease in threats, but I do see this [feed] limiting the possible damage from a given threat as the community will be able to respond faster," says Lumension analyst Paul Henry. Microsoft will need to allay the concerns of privacy skeptics, particularly since the feed will circulate Internet Protocol addresses of systems that are discovered to be elements in large botnets. However, Henry says that security threat information can be exchanged without causing privacy infringement, noting that the Microsoft feed will bear a similarity to practices at the SANS Internet Storm Center.

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• 18 Jan ' 12:22

  Welcome to the January 18, 2012 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Protest on Web Uses Shutdown to Take on Two Piracy Bills State Budget Cuts for Research Universities Imperil Competitiveness, Report Says U.S. Loses High-Tech Jobs as R&D Shifts Toward Asia Coding Playoffs Feature Dueling AIs ISC Looking for Programmers to Help Complete BIND 10 Surgical Robots to Provide Open-Source Platform for Medical Robotics Research Wristband Plugs You Into Smart Buildings Tracking Tool Could Prevent the Spread of Disease at Olympics At CES, a Preview of Tomorrow's Wearable Computers Google's Marissa Mayer Says More Women Needed in Tech New Software Designed to Improve Politics Class of 2011 Scores Higher-Paying Jobs The Keys to Helping Patients, on the GP's Computer Protest on Web Uses Shutdown to Take on Two Piracy Bills New York Times (01/17/12) Jenna Wortham; Eric Lichtblau; Edward Wyatt A Web-wide protest against two pieces of U.S. Internet piracy legislation that includes a one-day shutdown of Wikipedia represents a political flashpoint for a relatively young and unstructured industry. "This is the first real test of the political strength of the Web, and regardless of how things go, they are no longer a pushover," says Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu. The Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate seek to discourage the illegal downloading and streaming of TV shows and movies online and have the support of major media outfits. However, the bills give rise to fears by the tech industry that they will give media companies too much power to close sites suspected of copyright abuse. "For the first time, it's very clear that legislation could have a direct impact on the industry's ability to do business," says New York Tech Meetup's Jessica Lawrence. "This has been a wake-up call." Internet companies are concerned that the legislation's broad definitions of terms such as search engine could make Web sites of all sizes required to monitor all material on their pages for potential violations. The bills' biggest proponents dispute the tech industry’s chief complaint that they will negatively impact the average Internet user or disrupt their online activities.State Budget Cuts for Research Universities Imperil Competitiveness, Report Says Chronicle of Higher Education (01/17/12) Emma Roller Public research universities have faced state budget cuts of 20 percent from 2002 to 2010, according to a new U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) report. Enrollment at U.S. research institutions has continued to expand in spite of state budget trimming, but National Science Board chairman Ray M. Bowen says "the decline in support for postsecondary education, especially public research universities, is a cause for great concern as we examine the condition of U.S. global competitiveness." The NSF study also found that Asian students are earning more science and engineering degrees than U.S. students, while a large percentage of doctoral degrees at U.S. universities are being awarded to foreign students. Colleges and universities double as both the chief source of basic research in the U.S. and as a training ground for new researchers, and although industry support for academic research and development has dropped by 1 percentage point, federal funding and institutions' own cash reserves have exhibited relative stability for the past two decades, the NSF report notes. The number of bachelor's degrees awarded in the U.S. has risen by more than 50 percent in the past 20 years, with science, technology, engineering, and math degrees comprising 33 percent of the total.U.S. Loses High-Tech Jobs as R&D Shifts Toward Asia Wall Street Journal (01/18/12) James R. Hagerty The U.S. is losing high-tech jobs as American companies expand their research and development (R&D) labs in Asia, according to the U.S. National Science Board. These companies hope to tap a broader pool of scientific talent, design products for overseas markets, and gain favor with foreign governments by conducting more research abroad. Although U.S.-based labs have developed new products such as the iPad tablet and the Kindle e-book reader, those products are manufactured in Asia, which increases fears among industry experts that more R&D will flow to Asia. In the six years preceding 2009, about 85 percent of the growth in R&D workers employed by U.S.-based multinational companies has been abroad, according to a National Science Board report. Meanwhile, U.S. employment in high-technology manufacturing has decreased 28 percent since 2000 to 1.8 million jobs, mostly due to more efficient manufacturing techniques and the recession, according to the report. Many companies are largely opening up new labs in areas with high concentrations of engineering and scientific talent, notes the report, which states that 56 percent of the world's engineering degrees awarded in 2008 were in Asia, compared with just 4 percent in the U.S. - May Require Paid Subscription Coding Playoffs Feature Dueling AIs Baseline (01/17/12) Tim Moran The International Collegiate Programming Finals is a competition for graduate and undergraduate students featuring teams of two to five members from universities such as Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Purdue, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The goal of the coding competition is mostly fun, with the winning team receiving a one-of-a-kind trophy upon which the winners' names will be engraved, according to Windward, the competition's sponsor. Each team must write “a game AI” (artificial intelligence), and the teams will play against each other, with up to six or eight AIs being permitted at once. The AIs will then play against each other, and after 10 runs the team with the highest total score wins. The competition allows the teams to write their entries in C#, C++, Java or Python. The daylong competition takes place Jan. 28, 2012. "Why should the sports teams be the only ones to compete with the other schools?" says Windward David Thielen. "This gives the [computer science] students the opportunity to compete [too]."ISC Looking for Programmers to Help Complete BIND 10 Techworld (01/16/12) Joab Jackson The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) is looking for programmers to help develop the next generation of the open source Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) domain name server software. ISC recently held the BIND Open Day, during which ISC's Shane Kerr discussed strategies for getting contributions from a wider range of developers and users. "If other people are working on the code, they are more likely to solve the problems they have," Kerr says. ISC hopes to have a production version of BIND 10 ready by the end of 2012. BIND 10 will use different components from BIND 9, and the project's programmers are developing much of the software from scratch. Kerr says the modular approach will make it easier for outside developers and users to contribute because they will not have to understand the whole system to contribute one specific feature. In addition, he says "we expect [the new approach] to be a lot more resilient with coding bugs, which has been the source of most of the security problems with BIND 9."Surgical Robots to Provide Open-Source Platform for Medical Robotics Research UW News (WA) (01/12/12) Hannah Hickey University of Washington researchers have developed Raven, a robot with wing-like arms that will be sent to seven campuses across the U.S. and form the basis of the first common research platform for developing surgical robots. "With everyone working on the same, open source platform we can more easily share new developments and innovations," says Washington professor Blake Hannaford. The researchers are making Raven's software work with the Robot Operating System, a popular open source robotics code, so groups can easily connect the Raven to other devices. "Each lab will start with an identical, fully operational system, but they can change the hardware and software and share new developments and algorithms, while retaining intellectual property rights for their own innovations," says University of California, Santa Cruz professor Jacob Rosen. The latest version of Raven has more compact electronics and dexterous hands that can hold surgical tools. “Researchers and funding agencies are tired of one-off robots--they want to pursue projects that use standardized platforms,” Hannaford says. “This is where the field is going.”Wristband Plugs You Into Smart Buildings New Scientist (01/16/12) Niall Firth Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed WristQue, a low-power wristband device that works with sensors embedded in buildings to monitor how users feel and continually adjust the environment to keep them happy. WristQue is the key to controlling "the immersive world of interactive media that will one day surround us," says MIT's Joe Paradiso. Each WristQue band is equipped with a microprocessor and environmental sensors that detect changes in temperature, humidity, and light. "People can gesture with Kinect but it doesn't know who you are--we're thinking of a device that can do that, but without distracting you like a [personal digital assistant]," Paradiso says. In addition, environmental sensors outside the building enable the system to know the likely temperature change inside a room if the windows are opened. The researchers expect the finished system to include location information and extra controls that will enable users to control nearby electronic devices. "It will know who you are, where you are, and will have pointing sensors to let you interact with displays," Paradiso says.Tracking Tool Could Prevent the Spread of Disease at Olympics The Engineer (United Kingdom) (01/16/12) Infectious disease outbreaks around the world could be tracked by using new technology developed by Canadian researchers. The Web-based software has been designed to monitor news reports of outbreaks and combine them with real-time information on air-travel patterns. "An integrated platform of this kind could help identify infectious disease outbreaks around the world that could threaten the success of MGs [mass gatherings] at the earliest possible stages," says lead researcher Kamran Khan at St Michael's Hospital. The technology also could "provide insights into which of those outbreaks are most likely to result in disease spread into the MG and identify the most effective public health measures to mitigate the risk of disease importation and local spread, all in near real time." The tool, called Bio.Diaspora, predicts the number and origins of travelers to MGs, and directs disease surveillance of locations where there will be large population movements to the host city of an MG. The team modeled London for the 2012 Olympic Games, and found that measles in Berlin might be a concern for public health officials. The researchers say Bio.Diaspora could complement existing disease surveillance systems, and would need to be integrated at local and global levels to provide the best information.At CES, a Preview of Tomorrow's Wearable Computers Technology Review (01/17/12) Tom Simonite The recent Consumer Electronics Show enabled big companies to meet small ones to exchange ideas that could become key consumer technologies in the future. One of those companies, Lumus Optics, demonstrated prototype glasses that display translucent imagery that fills the wearer's view like a 10-foot-wide TV. The glasses rely on a computer or phone to provide the imagery. "Once you have it, the community of developers will bring stuff we haven't thought of yet, the same as with touchscreens and the iPhone," says Lumus Optics' Ari Grobman. Vuzix displayed its augmented-reality technology, which is designed for military and industry applications. The industrial version is intended for applications such as overlaying schematics of a machine onto the vision of a mechanic. Aurasma has developed an application that can recognize images or landmarks and add virtual three-dimensional (3D) objects. The application also works with hand gestures, making virtual content interactive. "We're trying to move things on to the point where this is the way you get your information, rather than having to use a Web browser," says Aurasma's Matt Mills. Sensics demonstrated its Smart Goggles, which features a video display that immerses the wearer in a virtual 3D environment.Google's Marissa Mayer Says More Women Needed in Tech Computerworld (01/13/12) Sharon Gaudin Despite recent advances by women in high-tech fields, there is still much room for growth, according to a group of female tech executives speaking at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. "Right now, it's a really great time to be a woman in technology, but there aren't enough women in technology," says Google vice president Marissa Mayer. She says part of the problem is that the U.S. is not producing enough computer scientists as a whole. "We need a lot more people and if we grow that number, then the number of women, by nature, goes up," Mayer says. She says more effort is needed to push high schools to develop computer science courses. "Imagine if we had 200,000 or 500,000 students graduating from high school every year who have taken computer science, as well as calculus," Mayer says. She notes that just two percent of Google engineers say they were exposed to computer science in high school. Nevertheless, Cisco Systems chief technology officer Padmasree Warrior says that much progress has been made in getting more women to work in high-tech. "If you look at two of the largest tech companies today, IBM and [Hewlett-Packard], they have women CEOs and there are a lot of women in tech who have made progress in our lives," Warrior says.New Software Designed to Improve Politics Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (01/12/12) A team of experts in political science and simulations and computing technologies, belonging to a group of 17 partners in Europe and China, including Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) researchers, are working on the FUPOL project, which aims to create software that will enable politicians to analyze opinions expressed in social networks. FUPOL project researchers are developing artificial intelligence tools to automatically collect, analyze, and interpret the opinions expressed by Internet users. The goal is to make it easier for government organizations to understand the needs of its citizens and improve social policies. The UAB researchers, led by Miguel Mujica Mota and Miguel Angel Piera, are developing social behavior simulation models. "The project will contribute to the sustainable development of cities and will lower the barrier between citizens and politicians," Mota says. The working plan includes five field research projects in China, Croatia, Cyprus, Italy, and United Kingdom, focusing on the political areas of urban planning, land use and sustainable development, migration, and urban segregation.Class of 2011 Scores Higher-Paying Jobs CNNMoney (01/12/12) Blake Ellis Engineering students secured the highest-paying jobs among 2011 graduates, according to a new survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Engineering majors had an average starting salary of $61,872 upon graduation, which represents a 1.5 percent increase from the previous year. Computer engineering students were the highest paid of all engineering majors, earning an average starting salary of $70,400 a year. Computer science majors scored the highest average starting salary after engineering graduates, at $60,594, and they saw the biggest increase in pay out of all the disciplines. The average starting salary for computer science graduates increased 4.1 percent from 2010. Meanwhile, mathematics and science graduates earned an average starting salary of $40,204. Overall, the average starting salary rose 2.3 percent for graduates from 2010 to $41,701. Every discipline saw its average salary increase last year.The Keys to Helping Patients, on the GP's Computer Basque Research (01/11/12) Prentsa Bulegoa A research team at the University of the Basque Country, consisting of nine researchers and four physicians, is developing a technological platform to help general practitioners diagnose patients. "We have to get the best practices in the clinical guidelines executed on computer, and turn the process unto a rapid one," says team leader Juan Manuel Pikatza. He says a key challenge is inputting the clinical guidelines into the program and assimilating everything that the specialists want to transmit. The tool also contains the Unified Medical Language System, which has nearly 2 million concepts, each of which is accompanied by a standard definition. "By inputting all this information we can create a high level diagnosis-treatment system," Pikatza says. So far the researchers have computerized one guideline on hyperamonemia and two on asthma. "All this is something that has to be done, there is unanimity on it within the scientific community," Pikatza says. He notes that the technology also could be used by students in specialization courses, such as resident medical intern courses.

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