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• 01 Jul 2009 13:45

  Welcome to the July 1, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Please Note: In observance of the Independence Day holiday, TechNews will not publish on Friday, July 3. Publication will resume on Monday, July 6. Chinese Delay Plan for Censor Software Scientists Create First Electronic Quantum Processor A Robot That Navigates Like a Person Organic Traffic Lights The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the Motorola Foundation Partner to Inspire Tomorrow's Innovators Embedded Electronics--Cars Get Cooperative Nurturing a Love of Math, Sciences Mobile TV Coming to Canada? Techies the Latest Weapon in Catching Car Thieves 'Mixed Reality' Human Helps Medical Students Learn to do Intimate Exams Virtual Rendering Data You Can Admire: Kwan-Liu Ma Converts Huge Data Sets into Illuminating Visualizations Chinese Delay Plan for Censor Software Wall Street Journal (07/01/09) P. A1; Chao, Loretta; Dean, Jason; Lin, Bai; et al. The Chinese government has postponed its mandate that manufacturers embed Web-filtering software in all new PCs sold in the country, in the wake of fervent opposition inside and outside China. The Xinhua news agency quoted a Ministry of Industry and Information Technology representative as saying that some PC makers claimed they did not have sufficient time to meet the July 1 deadline, in which case a delay was permissible. The postponement alleviates global PC companies' worries that complying with the rules would make them susceptible to legal liability and allegations of aiding censorship, yet they also were reluctant to openly challenge China's government, given the heavy concentration of both PC production and PC sales in the country. The Chinese government has said the purpose of implementing the Web-filtering software is to prevent youngsters from viewing online pornography and other "harmful content," and it insists that the software "definitely has no capability for collecting users' information or monitoring their Internet behavior." Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC) president Dean Garfield says the computer industry is in favor of enabling parents to block access to objectionable online material, but is against any requirement that specifies a particular company's product. Isaac Mao with Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society says the Chinese initiative "has lost legitimacy" and that the government's enforcement of the rule would be impossible. There also are indications that the plan has broadened public interest in China regarding questions about government inquisitiveness and censorship. The postponement does not signal the end of the issue, and a Hewlett-Packard representative said the company is collaborating with the ITIC "to seek additional information, clarify open questions, and monitor developments on this matter."Scientists Create First Electronic Quantum Processor Yale University (06/28/09) Muzzin, Suzanne Taylor Yale University researchers have led a research effort to develop the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, a major step toward the creation of a quantum computer. The researchers used a two-qubit superconducting chip to successfully run simple algorithms, including a search, marking the first demonstration of quantum information processing with a solid-state device. "Our processor can perform only a few very simple quantum tasks, which have been demonstrated before with single nuclei, atoms, and photons," says Yale professor Robert Schoelkopf. "But this is the first time they've been possible in an all-electronic device that looks and feels much more like a regular microprocessor." Yale postdoctoral associate Leonardo DiCarlo, the lead author of a paper on the discovery, says the key that made the two-qubit processor possible was getting the qubits to rapidly switch between the on and off states so they exchanged information quickly but only when the researchers wanted them to do so. This has not been possible using solid-state qubits because scientists could not get the qubits to maintain a specific quantum state long enough. The first qubits created about a decade ago were able to maintain specific quantum states for about a nanosecond, but the new qubits can maintain theirs for a microsecond, a thousand times longer. The researchers are now working to increase the amount of time the qubits maintain their quantum states so they can run more complicated algorithms. Schoelkopf says processing power increases exponentially with each qubit added, so the potential for advanced quantum computing is huge. However, he says it will still be a while before quantum computers can be used to solve complex problems.A Robot That Navigates Like a Person Technology Review (06/30/09) Corley, Anne-Marie European scientists have developed a new robot that navigates using human-like visual processing and object detection as a tool for investigating how the brain responds to its environment while the body is moving. "It seems to be a trend, from neuroscience to computer science, to look at the brain for designing new systems," says Tomaso Poggio of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Biological and Computational Learning. The wheeled machine features a movable head that sees stereoscopically with a pair of cameras, and is controlled by algorithms designed to imitate different components of the human visual system. The device employs a simulated neural network to update its position relative to its surroundings, continually adjusting to each new input in a mimicry of human visual processing and movement planning. The robot mirrors object recognition, motion estimation, and decision making to navigate around a room, moving toward specific targets while evading walls and impediments. Heiko Neumann with the University of Ulm's Vision and Perception Lab says neuroscientists typically concentrate on a specific aspect of vision and motion, but the creation of a real, human-like computer navigation model requires the integration of these various aspects into a "coherent model architecture." Project coordinator Mark Greenlee of Germany's University of Regensburg says that potential applications of the robot's technology could include intelligent wheelchairs capable of easy indoor navigation. Poggio says that we are "on the cusp of a new stage where artificial intelligence is getting information from neuroscience."Organic Traffic Lights Inderscience Publishers (06/26/09) Researchers in Germany believe organic computing has the potential to solve the problems of urban traffic systems, which rely on sensors and controllers. Using an organic approach, Holger Prothmann of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and colleagues have developed a decentralized traffic control system. "The organic approach is based on industry-standard traffic light controllers," Prothmann says. The researchers developed an observer/controller architecture, which enables the traffic light to respond to traffic flow and to forward information to traffic lights on nearby roads. Current systems use fixed timers that are unable to respond directly to traffic, and centralized systems are unable to respond optimally to changes in traffic on the roads. Working with colleagues at Karlsruhe and at Leibniz Universitat Hannover, Prothmann tested the decentralized traffic control system on roads in Hamburg, and found that it can reduce vehicle stops, delays, and the time needed to reach destinations. "The environmental and economic importance of traffic control systems combined with the distributed nature of traffic nodes and their constantly changing traffic demands make traffic light control an ideal test case for organic computing approaches," Prothmann says.The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the Motorola Foundation Partner to Inspire Tomorrow's Innovators Business Wire (06/25/09) Barrett, Jerri The Anita Borg Institute (ABI) for Women and Technology recently announced that the Motorola Foundation has awarded the institute a $30,560 Innovation Generation grant, which will fund a K-12 Computer Science Teacher Workshop at the 2009 Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing Conference. Conference attendees will discuss generating and implementing solutions based on teacher perspectives with community and national leaders. The Motorola Foundation's Innovation Generation grants support programs that engage students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to help students build the confidence and skills needed to succeed. ABI, working with the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) and the University of Arizona, will use the 2009 Grace Hopper Celebration to implement a new program designed to increase K-12 teachers' access and visibility to organizations and individuals in industry and academia dedicated to improving STEM education. The CSTA will provide best practices, workshop content, and resources to increase the success of K-12 teachers' efforts to interest girls and minority students in computer science, and the University of Arizona will provide a meeting place and increase community outreach efforts. The conference takes place September 30-October 3, in Tucson, Arizona.Embedded Electronics--Cars Get Cooperative ICT Results (07/01/09) The European EMMA project has developed a new middleware platform for embedded sensors called EM2P that acts as an interface between designers and the electronics. The project's researchers say that EM2P could lead to thousands of new applications in a variety of industries, starting with in-car electronics. Embedded sensor systems are often designed for a single task, but that functionality, such as detecting a sudden deceleration, could be used for a variety of other purposes and used with other sensors to create new applications. "We sought to hide the underlying complexity of in-car embedded sensors so that developers could quickly design new applications with existing electronics," says EMMA coordinator Antonio Marques Moreno. "EMMA will foster cost-efficient ambient intelligence systems with optimal performance, high reliability, reduced time-to-market, and faster deployment." Project participants hope that hiding the complexity of the infrastructure will open up interfaces to third parties. The EMMA project focused on transportation to test its system, since vehicles offer numerous opportunities to enhance road safety, such as creating communication channels between sensors within a car and other cars or street signs. Marques says one of EM2P's major strengths is scalability, since it has been designed to be able to work with an entire city's vehicle population.Nurturing a Love of Math, Sciences Baltimore Sun (06/29/09) P. 1; Walker, Childs Experts are concerned that not enough teachers who can arouse passion for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in public school students are being produced by the United States, which endangers the country's ability to keep up with economic competitors. "We know that the quality of math and science teachers is the most influential single factor in determining whether or not a student will succeed or fail in these subjects," said President Barack Obama in an April 27 address to the National Academy of Sciences. "Yet, in high school, more than 20 percent of students in math and more than 60 percent of students in chemistry and physics are taught by teachers without expertise in these fields." A strategy for addressing the STEM educator shortage involves a combination of sharper recruiting tactics buttressed by financial incentives, the establishment of streamlined programs for potential math and science teachers, and aggressive initiatives to make teaching careers more appealing to math and science professionals. Education officials and corporate leaders agree that the United States will suffer a dearth of future researchers, innovators, and engineers if fewer high school students are getting excited about STEM disciplines. Some universities have started programs designed to step up their production of math and science teachers. One such effort is UTeach, a program that mixes aggressive recruitment of math and science majors, challenging courses, heavy fieldwork, mentoring by practicing teachers, and postgraduate support. In July, a panel set up by Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley will unveil a plan to improve STEM education in the state, and one of its goals is a 300 percent increase in the number of STEM teachers produced by Maryland colleges and universities by 2015.Mobile TV Coming to Canada? CTV British Columbia (06/26/09) Khoshnevis, Kian Simon Fraser University (SFU) doctorate student Cheng-Hsin Hsu, along with SFU graduate students Yi Liu and Cong Ly, and their supervisor Mohamed Hefeeda, has designed algorithms and prototypes of mobile TV base stations that enable devices such as cell phones to receive TV programming. Similar technologies are already available in Europe and Asia, but Hsu says those technologies are very sensitive and unreliable. "The technology has been there for a couple of years, but not here," Hsu says. "There are clearly some problems with it that prevent its deployment in North America. We are trying to optimize the broadcast networks to a stage where Canadian TV companies will consider them." Hsu's research has resulted in improved mobile TV broadcast performance and cell phones that broadcast more channels at once while reducing their channel-switching delay. Hsu also has improved the overall broadcast quality and extended battery life, which are features that are missing in mobile broadcast TV systems overseas. Hsu is currently working to establish mobile TV broadcasts through Wi-Fi and other wireless networks.Techies the Latest Weapon in Catching Car Thieves Computerworld Australia (06/25/09) Edwards, Kathryn Researchers at the University of Technology, Sydney, (UTS) Australia, have developed software that uses new imaging technology to enable moving police cars to automatically detect stolen cars in traffic. The new imaging techniques, which are based on hexagonal pixels instead of the traditional square pixels, allow a computer connected to a camera to accurately identify and read license plate numbers in real time. Geoff Hughes at Australia's National Motor Vehicle Theft Reduction Council says the technology could be placed in fixed speeding cameras, which often cannot differentiate between plates from different states. The technology is based on the development of spiral architecture, a data structure in which images are represented as collections of hexagonal pixels. UTS professor Xiangjian He says hexagonal pixels create images with smoother edges than square pixels, and can provide pictures of equal quality using 13 percent fewer pixels. "It's not a new idea, but what our team has done is use hexagonal pixels to develop much better methods of curve detection than is possible with square pixels, and this has opened the way for much quicker and more accurate shape identification," He says. Outside of law enforcement, the technology could improve digital cameras and object recognition capabilities in robots.'Mixed Reality' Human Helps Medical Students Learn to do Intimate Exams University of Florida News (06/23/09) Hoover, Aaron The University of Florida is using a life-sized computer avatar on a flat screen and a mannequin with prosthetic body parts to teach medical students how to perform exams that they would otherwise rarely get to perform of real people. Working with the Medical College of Georgia and three other universities, University of Florida engineers developed a hybrid computer/mannequin that enables medical students to correctly perform breast exams and learn how to talk to patients to obtain important information. The training technique is important because correct examinations and good doctor-patient communication are critical to obtaining successful medical treatments, says Florida professor Benjamin Lok. "Studies have shown that communication skills are actually a better predictor of outcome than medical skills," Lok says. The hybrid computer/mannequin patient talks to students and can respond using a computer speech and voice recognition system created by the researchers. The interaction is unscripted, but follows a typical pattern for a woman's visit to her doctor, and features both verbal and tactile challenges for medical students. Students need to obtain the patient's medical history, listen and empathize with her concerns, and respond to her questions, all while performing the physical exam, which requires the correct palpitating technique and proper pressure. Sensors inside the prosthetic breast provide pressure information through different colors on a virtual breast on screen. Engineers can program the system to have or not have an abnormality, which would alter the conversation.Virtual Rendering The Engineer (United Kingdom) (06/17/09) Researchers at the universities of Bangor and Bradford plan to combine digital imagery with a computer function known as bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) in an effort to create a virtual rendering technique that could be used to replace cadaveric-based training. "Medical students do a lot of work by cutting up cadavers, but when they look at other tissues of the cadaver, the colors have already changed," says Bangor University professor Nigel John. "So when the students go from the cadaver lab to operating on a real person, it doesn't look quite like what they are used to and this can cause some difficulties." The concern over the accuracy of cadaveric-based training has resulted in its decline in recent years. However, using digital imagery with BRDF could be helpful because it has the potential to show how light reflects on opaque surfaces. A trial of the technique on patients undergoing brain surgery is scheduled for September. Data You Can Admire: Kwan-Liu Ma Converts Huge Data Sets into Illuminating Visualizations CITRIS Newsletter (06/09) Slack, Gordy The University of California, Davis' Visualization and Interface Design Innovation lab, run by professor Kwan-Liu Ma, seeks to render massive data sets into insightful visualizations that are explorable and workable. "By employing our visualization techniques we are able to let researchers see the full extent of their data at the highest possible resolution and in both three-dimensional space and the temporal domain," Ma says. "So scientists can begin to visualize things they just couldn't see in the past." In some instances the data has such a high level of detail that visualizations such as Ma's must be used prior to the validation of hypotheses. In other cases, the visualizations permit researchers to see relationships they may be unaware of. Ma says his team devised a user interface that enables researchers to move between different spaces so they can analyze the interaction between different factors at different levels. Ma's visualization software lets scientists zoom in on feature surfaces and move closer and further away from the surfaces, studying these different features at different scales. Ma wants users of his tools to be able to "visualize the process of visualization itself," noting that "if we can convey what has been done to the data to generate the image they're working with--not just the information loss but also the important mapping done to the data to get the image--then the user can have much greater control."

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• 29 Jun 2009 15:36

  Welcome to the June 29, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. And the Winner of the $1 Million Netflix Prize (Probably) Is ... Computer Failures Are Probed in Jet Crash Metrorail Crash May Exemplify Automation Paradox U.S. and Russia Differ on a Treaty for Cyberspace CIFellows Status Report Designers to Share Real-World Experiences at the 46th Design Automation Conference User Track Graduate Science Enrollment Rises, Bringing More Diversity The Grill: Using Computer Models to Predict War Holt: When it Comes to Voting, a Paper Ballot System Is a Must IBM Aims for a Battery Breakthrough Less Fuss, More Muscle in Quantum Data Transfer Report Calls for Grassroots But Comprehensive Changes And the Winner of the $1 Million Netflix Prize (Probably) Is ... New York Times (06/26/09) Lohr, Steve After three years and more than 50,000 entries, a multinational team claims that it has met the requirements of Netflix's $1 million contest to develop a powerful algorithm that is at least 10 percent better at suggesting movies than the Cinematch software the company currently employs. The accuracy of Netflix's recommendations have a major impact on the service's appeal to its customers, so the movie rental service started a contest in October 2006, offering $1 million to the first contestant to improve their recommendation system's accuracy by at least 10 percent. A coalition of four teams, calling itself BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, which includes statisticians, machine-learning experts, and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada, and Israel, declared that it has developed a program that improves accuracy by 10.05 percent. Following the rules of the contest, other contestants have 30 days to try to do better. The contest has been praised as an example of prize economics and the crowdsourcing of innovation. BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos is a collection of the 2007 and 2008 winners of the Netflix Progress Prizes, which were awarded annually to the teams that made the most progress toward the 10 percent improvement objective. "What we've seen is that collaboration has taken hold," says Netflix's Steve Swasey. "They realized how difficult the challenge is, and they have assembled people with complementary skills."Computer Failures Are Probed in Jet Crash Wall Street Journal (06/27/09) P. A1; Pasztor, Andy; Michaels, Daniel Aviation investigators looking for a cause of the crash of Air France Flight 447 believe that a rapid chain of computer and equipment failures may have stripped the flight crew of the airplane's automation technology, which pilots generally rely on to control large jets. The possible scenario behind the jet's crash starts with malfunctioning airspeed sensors and rapidly evolves to what appears to be widespread computer failures, according to people familiar with the investigation. The initial physical evidence recovered from the crash, and automatic maintenance messages sent by the aircraft, indicates that the plane bucked through heavy turbulence caused by a thunderstorm, without the full protection of its flight-control systems, which experts say many pilots now take for granted. Investigators believe the pilots, having only backup instruments, had difficulty restarting flight-management computers and the plane may have started breaking up due to excessive speed. The investigators stress that it is too early to determine any specific causes. Regardless of the final findings, the crash is already prompting some flight safety experts to question whether pilots are trained enough to handle widespread flight-computer failures. Most modern jetliners are essentially completely automatic, and pilots generally just monitor instruments and rarely interfere with controls. If computer failures occur in today's increasingly computerized jetliners, many safety experts question how proficient most crews will be in trying to rely on less high-tech backup systems.Metrorail Crash May Exemplify Automation Paradox Washington Post (06/29/09) P. A9; Vedantam, Shankar The fatal collision of two trains on Washington, D.C., Metro's Red Line may come to symbolize the core problem of automation, which is the relationship between humans and their automated control systems. "The better you make the automation, the more difficult it is to guard against these catastrophic failures in the future, because the automation becomes more and more powerful, and you rely on it more and more," says University of Wisconsin at Madison professor John D. Lee. As such systems become more reliable, the greater the likelihood that supervising humans will become less focused, which makes it increasingly probable that unanticipated variables will tangle up the algorithm and lead to disaster. The University of Toronto's Greg Jamieson notes that many automated systems explicitly instruct human operators to disengage, as they are designed to remove human "interference." "The problem is when individuals start to overtrust or over rely or become complacent and put too much emphasis on the automation," he says. Lee, Jamieson, and George Mason University psychologist Raja Parasuraman say there is growing agreement among experts that automated systems should be designed to augment the accuracy and performance of human operators rather than to replace them or make them complacent. A number of studies illustrate that operators can retain their alertness and skills through regular training exercises in which they switch from automated to manual control. Parasuraman has determined that "polite" feedback from a machine can enhance the machine-operator relationship to facilitate measurable safety improvements.U.S. and Russia Differ on a Treaty for Cyberspace New York Times (06/28/09) P. A1; Markoff, John; Kramer, Andrew E.; Wong, Edward; et al. The United States and Russia disagree about the best way to shield computer systems and the Internet from the growing menace of cyberattacks, with Russia favoring an international pact akin to those negotiated for chemical weaponry and the United States preferring better cooperation between international law enforcement organizations. Russia's proposed treaty would prohibit a country from clandestinely incorporating malicious codes or circuitry that could be later triggered remotely in the event of war. "We really believe it's defense, defense, defense," says an anonymous official of the U.S. State Department. "They want to constrain offense." U.S. officials are particularly opposed to agreements that would permit governments to censor the Internet, arguing that they would provide cover for repressive regimes. They also are concerned that a treaty would be ineffective because determining if a cyberattack is perpetrated by a government, a hacker loyal to that government, or an independent rogue agent is nearly impossible. U.S. officials say the discord over the proper cyberdefense approach has impeded global law enforcement cooperation, especially since a substantial number of the assaults against U.S. government targets originate from China and Russia. The Russians, meanwhile, perceive the lack of an accord as encouraging a cyberarms race. The Pentagon intends to set up a military cybercommand to get ready for both offensive and defensive cyberwarfare.CIFellows Status Report Computing Community Consortium (06/27/09) Lee, Peter; Lazowska, Ed The Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Project has received 526 applications for CIFellowships from 145 distinct colleges and universities. The applications reveal a total of 949 different applicant-mentor pairs, with mentors from 198 universities, companies, and non-profits. Twenty-seven percent of the applicants are female, 42 percent are U.S. citizens, 5 percent are permanent residents, and 6 percent come from an underrepresented racial/ethnic group. AI/Machine Learning/Robotics/Vision was the leading research subdiscipline for the applicants at 21 percent, followed by Networks/Operating Systems at 9 percent, Scientific/Medical Informatics at 8 percent, Hardware/Architecture at 7 percent, HCI/CSCW at 7 percent, and Information Assurance/Security/Privacy/Cryptography at 7 percent. More than 1,200 people have expressed interest in hosting a CIFellow. The Selection Committee has begun the review process, and the final decisions could be made as early as July 10.Designers to Share Real-World Experiences at the 46th Design Automation Conference User Track Business Wire (06/25/09) The new User Track at the 46th Design Automation Conference (DAC) technical program will feature more than 80 technical papers and posters presented by designers from around the world. The User Track will focus on innovations in tool use and design methodologies throughout the design process, from system design exploration and embedded software synthesis in the front end to constraint generation and physical verification at the back end. User Track co-chair Leon Stok says the program will give designers a unique opportunity to learn from other designers how design tools can be applied to solve complex design problems. "Based on the incredible industry response and exciting lineup of presentations, we anticipate that User Track will be a very valuable part of DAC this year for all who participate," says Tufts University's Soha Hassoun, the other co-chair. The User Track features nine sessions over three days, covering a variety of front- and back-end design processes, such as power planning and analysis and real-world timing analysis. A Font-End Power Panning and Analysis session will feature a NEC presentation on their use of an automated flow to pre-characterize the power consumption of a set of basic components. The Timing Analysis in the Real World session will have representatives from Atmel Corp., the European Space Agency, FishTail Design Automation, Fujitsu, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Texas Instruments, who address issues involved in mixing gate-level and transistor-level timing analysis, among others. DAC, co-sponsored by ACM, takes place July 26-31 in San Francisco.Graduate Science Enrollment Rises, Bringing More Diversity InformationWeek (06/25/09) Claburn, Thomas Enrollment in graduate science and engineering (S&E) programs has risen to new levels, including greater percentages of non-White ethnic groups and women, according to a new National Science Foundation (NSF) report. The report says the recent growth toward ethnic and racial diversity represents the largest change in the demographic composition of S&E graduate students in the United States. White, non-Hispanic students accounted for 71 percent of all U.S. citizens and permanent residents enrolled in these programs in 2000, according to the report, but only 66 percent in 2007. The NSF report also says that enrollment in U.S. S&E programs grew by about 3.3 percent in 2007, the largest annual growth rate since 2002, and almost double the 1.7 percent growth rate in 2006. The number of post-doctoral appointments at academic institutions also reached a new record, about 36,000, up from about 30,000 in 2001. The proportion of men to women among U.S. citizens and permanent residents enrolled in U.S. S&E programs was divided 52 percent to 48 percent, and among foreign students men outnumbered women 66 percent to 34 percent. U.S. citizens and permanent residents represented the majority of graduate students, according to the report, but the majority of postdoctoral appoints, 58 percent, were given to temporary visa holders.The Grill: Using Computer Models to Predict War Computerworld (06/22/09) Forrest, Sara New York University professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has developed a computer model that can forecast the outcomes of international conflicts, and the U.S. Defense Department has found the model very useful. De Mesquita says the model begins by assuming that everyone is interested in two dimensions on any policy issue--getting the outcome as close to what they desire as possible, and getting credited as playing an essential role in reaching or thwarting an agreement. "The model estimates the way in which individual decision-makers trade off between credit and policy outcomes," he notes. De Mesquita says the model has been generally welcomed by people more oriented toward quantitative modeling, while those who tend to focus on area studies or historical case study analysis have been less receptive. "The problems I look at with my model typically involve many dozens of players, sometimes more than 200," he says. "There is no way to construct biased data to produce a desired outcome except to make the data appear transparently wrong to anyone looking at the data." The model is founded on game theory, and De Mesquita points out that advances in computing power have made this kind of modeling unrestrained by memory or processing limitations.Holt: When it Comes to Voting, a Paper Ballot System Is a Must NewJerseyNewsroom.com (06/22/09) Lagomarsino, Andy New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt (D) recently reintroduced the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, a bill that would create a national voting standard that would require paper-ballot voting systems and accessible ballot-marking devices coupled with routine random audits of electronic voting tallies. "Congress should pass a national standard ensuring that all voters can record their votes on paper and requiring that in every election, randomly selected precincts be audited," Holt says. In every federal election since 2003, when the Help America Vote Act was enacted, citizen watchdog groups have collected information on voting machine failures. In 2004, the Election Incident Reporting System received more than 4,800 voting machine complaints from all but eight states, and in 2006 a sampling of voting machine problems gathered by election integrity groups and the media exposed more than 1,000 incidents in more than 300 counties in all but 14 states. In 2008, the Our Vote Live hotline received almost 2,000 voting machine problem reports in all but a dozen states, and 19 states conducted completely unauditable elections. Paperless electronic voting is preferred by many election officials, but it is unverifiable and unauditable, and computer scientists say that computers are unreliable without an independent audit mechanism. "The clear trend is towards paper ballots," says Holt. "In fact, every jurisdiction that has chosen to change its voting system since 2006 has chosen to use paper ballots with optical scan counting. That should be the standard."IBM Aims for a Battery Breakthrough BusinessWeek (06/23/09) Hamm, Steve IBM has announced a multiyear effort to increase the performance of rechargeable batteries 10-fold, with the goal of designing batteries that enable electric vehicles to travel 300 to 500 miles on a single charge. Currently, electric vehicles can only go about 50 to 100 miles before needing to recharge. "We want to see if we can find a radically different battery technology," says Chandrasekhar Narayan, manager of Science & Technology Organization at IBM Research's Almaden lab. IBM is leading a consortium that will develop batteries using lithium and oxygen instead of the potentially combustible lithium-ion mix that is commonly used in consumer electronics and early electric vehicle batteries. The new batteries also could be used to store energy in electric grids. Industry and government leaders have called for this type of effort due to concern that the U.S. will miss out on the switch from gasoline to electricity as the primary power source for light vehicles. The concern is that the U.S. dependency on the Middle East for oil will be replaced by a new dependency on Asia for batteries. "We lost control of battery technology in the 1970s," says former Intel chairman Andy Grove. "Battery technology will define the future, and if we don't act quickly it will go to China and Japan." IBM expects approximately 300 top scientists and battery experts to attend a conference on the project scheduled for late August. Narayan says that IBM's expertise in nanotechnology, materials science, chemistry, and supercomputing makes it well-positioned to lead the project, and he "we'll know in two years if there are any show-stoppers."Less Fuss, More Muscle in Quantum Data Transfer ANU News (06/22/09) Cox, Penny Australian National University (ANU) researchers have discovered a more efficient way to use light to convey information. The approach to generating quantum entanglement, or coding information in the physical relationship between two objects, uses fewer light beams and components. "Until now, the amount of information that could be conveyed using optical entanglement was limited by levels of complexity," says lead researcher Jiri Janousek from ANU's ARC Center of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics. "The ability to scale up information transfer is hampered by the fact that you need to increase the number of nonclassical light sources, splitters, and receivers each time you want to add another channel of information." The researchers' findings on mode manipulation in light indicates only one light source and one receiver is needed for optical entanglement, which suggests that it would be easier to scale up for conveying more information channels. Janousek sees the approach playing a role in the development of quantum technologies such as quantum communication and information processing, and even quantum computers.Report Calls for Grassroots But Comprehensive Changes Science (06/19/09) Vol. 324, No. 5934, P. 1498; Mervis, Jeffrey A $1.5 million study from the Carnegie Corp. of New York focuses on weaknesses in U.S. math and science education. The report calls for more comprehensive math and science content, higher standards and evaluation, improved training for educators, and more innovative institutions. The success of this initiative requires participation from all stakeholders, including business leaders, politicians, principals, and professors. The report supports current reform initiatives, which include a 46-state consortium that aims to develop a common set of "fewer, clearer, and higher" reading, math, and science standards. At the study's rollout, Carnegie commissioners noted that the improvement of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education will demand far more than simply requiring yearly student progress on reading and math tests. "Even though the target is better math and science education, you probably can't achieve it without looking at the entire system," said commissioner Katherine Ward. The study supports a strategy that involves scaling up what U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan terms local "islands of excellence" such as Urban Advantage, a program that taps the resources of New York City museums to teach middle school science. Among the things the program does is fulfill a requirement that all eighth-graders in the New York public schools carry out a long-term scientific investigation. - May Require Paid Subscription

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• 26 Jun 2009 17:32

  Welcome to the June 26, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. IBM Claims Privacy Breakthrough for Cloud, Data Metro Control System Fails Test Intel's Mukherjee Wins ACM Award for Advancing Reliability of Computer Architecture Design Molecular Typesetting--Proofreading Without a Proofreader One-Stop Shop for Grid Computing Iranian Protesters Avoid Censorship With Navy Technology Community Colleges Mobilize to Train Cybersecurity Workers New Internet2 CTO Pushes Multicast, IPv6 Simpler Data Visualization Pattie Maes on Interfaces and Innovation Scars, Marks, and Tattoos: A Soft Biometric for Identifying Suspects and Victims Researchers Mull STEM Gender Gap IBM Claims Privacy Breakthrough for Cloud, Data InternetNews.com (06/25/09) Goldman, Alex A lattice approach could be used to develop fully homomorphic encryption solutions, says IBM researcher Craig Gentry, a Stanford University Ph.D. candidate. Gentry's research, which was recently published in the Proceedings of the 2009 ACM International Symposium on Theory of Computing, describes the technique as using an encryption scheme that can evaluate its decryption circuit. A fully homomorphic encryption system could potentially offer unlimited mathematical operations for analyzing encrypted information, compared with the limited operations of normal lattice encoding. Such operations conducted on encrypted text would be more efficient and affordable. Data security, cloud computing, and antispam efforts all stand to benefit from the ability to manipulate data while leaving it encrypted. "This is ... one of the most remarkable crypto papers ever," says PGP cryptographer Hal Finney. "I have to go back to Godel's and Turing's work to think of a comparable example."Metro Control System Fails Test Washington Post (06/26/09) P. A2; Sun, Lena H.; Glod, Maria Federal investigators with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) say a train control system, which should have prevented the deadly Washington, D.C., Metrorail accident on June 22 in which nine people were killed, failed in a test conducted on June 25th. In a simulation performed by the NTSB investigators, a train was positioned in the same location as the train that was rear-ended. The system failed to detect the position of the parked train. Investigators did not say what caused the malfunction or whether the system failure was the cause of the crash. However, the test results confirm earlier findings of "anomalies" in an electrical track circuit in the crash area. The results of the simulation indicate that the oncoming train may not have received information that a train was stopped ahead. The steel rails show evidence that the operator of the moving train activated the emergency brakes before the crash. If the train protection system is working correctly, when one train enters a buffer zone between trains the computer will deploy the breaks on the train and force it to stop. During the past decade Metro has had problems with components in its signal system. In 1999, the agency discovered that critical relays were failing prematurely. The relays transmit the signals that automatically control speed, braking, and switches. All Metro trains will be operated manually, instead of by the onboard computers, until an inspection of all 3,000 track circuits has been completed, which could take several weeks. - May Require Free Registration Intel's Mukherjee Wins ACM Award for Advancing Reliability of Computer Architecture Design ACM (06/23/09) Gold, Virginia ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture presented Shubu Mukherjee with its 2009 Maurice Wilkes Award on June 23 during the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in Austin, Texas. The annual Maurice Wilkes Award was created to honor individuals who have made significant achievements in computer architecture. Mukherjee, an Intel principal engineer and director of the company's Simulations and Pathfinding for Efficient and Reliable Systems Group, has helped make microprocessors and other silicon chips more reliable by introducing a method of computing soft error rate (SER) that identifies prime candidates for error protection. The technique also makes it easier for chipmakers to determine whether structures need protection to maintain reliability. Mukherjee's work cleared the way for cost-effective solutions for weighing a processor's SER against performance, power, and area. The award comes with a $2,500 prize.Molecular Typesetting--Proofreading Without a Proofreader University of Leeds (06/23/09) Computer scientists at the universities of Leeds and Bristol have modeled how the body builds proteins correctly. A protein is created by copying a gene on a human's DNA to a template, known as RNA, and RNA polymerases carry out the copying process by acting as an old-fashioned newsprint typesetter. Serving as a molecular machine, RNA polymerase constructs RNA by reading the DNA and adding new letters to the RNA one at a time, says Netta Cohen at the University of Leeds' School of Computing. A letter is not always incorporated at the right spot, but RNA polymerases operate intelligently in that they will remove the last few letters when they detect an error. The new model provides insight into a copying process that has only recently been linked to the building of proteins. "In fact, there is more than one identified mechanism for ensuring that genetic code is copied correctly," Cohen says. "The challenge now is to find out--through a combination of experimental biology and modeling--which mechanism is dominant."One-Stop Shop for Grid Computing ICT Results (06/26/09) The European Union-funded Phosphorus project aims to make accessing grid computing easier by bridging the networking and grid worlds through the development of protocols and software that allow users to obtain a scheduled or immediate high-performance grid connection using a quick and inexpensive network. "Large grids with enormous processing power connected via high-bandwidth optical networks are essential to many scientific applications today, but establishing dedicated connections to those resources on demand can be a costly process in terms of both time and effort," says Artur Binczewski, from the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre in Poland. The Phosphorus project uses a Network Service Plan to ensure interoperability between existing network resource provisioning systems, such as ARGON, DRAC, UCLP-ARGIA, and GMPLS, to access the local resources of autonomous network domains in multiple countries. The project also developed Grid-enabled GMPLS, a new, advanced version of the ASON/GMPLS connection management architecture and protocols. Binczewski says the Phosphorus approach makes it easier to find, allocate, and provide network and grid resources, whether scheduled in advance or on demand. "It is an entirely new model in which network and grid resources make users aware of their availability, whether for five minutes or several days," he says. The approach has been successfully tested in four trials involving data-intensive applications.Iranian Protesters Avoid Censorship With Navy Technology Washington Times (06/26/09) Lake, Eli Some Iranian protestors dissatisfied with their government's response to the disputed election are using The Onion Router (TOR), an Internet encryption program originally developed by the U.S. Navy, to bypass Iran's censorship efforts. Designed 10 years ago as a way to secure Internet communications between ships at sea, TOR has become an important proxy for Iranians looking to access blocked Web sites. The system of proxy servers that disguise a user's Internet traffic is currently run by the nonprofit Tor Project, which says that TOR connections have jumped 600 percent since the mass protests in Iran started following the election. Iran, with more than 20 million Internet users out of a population of 70 million people, has a well developed blogosphere. TOR has enabled Iranians to visit government-banned Web sites and avoid detection by the authorities. The Tor Project provides the service by routing Web requests through several different computer servers around the world. While other proxy servers are available, TOR is considered the best because it is an encrypted network of multiple nodes, with each node unlocking encryption to the next node. Wired.com editor Noah Shachtman says TOR is different from other methods of evading Internet censorship because it is "all but impossible for governments to track Web sites a TOR user is visiting. TOR is a great way to give Ahmadinejad's Web censors headaches."Community Colleges Mobilize to Train Cybersecurity Workers Chronicle of Higher Education (06/26/09) Vol. 55, No. 40, P. A17; Parry, Mark Some experts project that the Obama administration's cybersecurity push will expand two-year colleges' role in supplying cybersecurity workers to government agencies, but among the challenges they must overcome is the struggle to train and hold onto qualified cybersecurity educators. Obama's proposed 2010 budget includes $64 million in funding for the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advanced Technological Education program, whose projects include the establishment of a platform for cybersecurity education at community colleges. "The time is really ripe for community colleges' role in this area of technology to expand, be recognized, to get the kind of support that it needs," says NSF program director Corby Hovis. "All of the stars, I think, are aligned for this." Colleges are offering cybersecurity courses in anticipation that digital forensics and other cyberdefense areas will be a major source of future career opportunities. The NSF-supported CyberWatch consortium was established to build up the information-security workforce, and most of CyberWatch's 27 member colleges offer degree programs in technical assurance. One CyberWatch member, Anne Arundel Community College, developed a curriculum with National Security Agency representatives and other advisers that has been partially or completely adopted by nine colleges in the Washington, D.C., area. Consultant Daniel G. Wolf has advised companies to look to community college students for their cybersecurity needs, but University of Tulsa computer scientist Sujeet Shenoi says most community college cybersecurity education programs leave a lot to be desired.New Internet2 CTO Pushes Multicast, IPv6 Network World (06/23/09) Marsan, Carolyn Duffy Randy Frank has been appointed chief technology officer of the Internet2 university consortium. He says in an interview that the Internet2 functions as an academic network with which institutions can "experiment with all the technologies that we're no longer able to drive adoption on the commodity network." Frank says that Internet2 collaborates with leading organizations around the world to construct a global research network, and he cites the Dynamic Circuit Network (DCN) currently establishing dedicated high-performance connections through alliances with sister European and Asian networks. "With DCN, you can build a network where one is able to dial up--figuratively speaking of course--a sustained amount of bandwidth for a short period of time without the expense of dedicated circuits," he says. Among the initiatives Frank champions is multicasting, which Internet2 is enabled for. "We can send a single stream across the Internet and not replicate anything unnecessarily," he notes. Frank also is a heavy supporter of IPv6, and he stresses that organizations similar to Internet2 need to increasingly push the benefits of IPv6. Frank points out that unlike network address translation, IPv6 will not lead to situations in which multiple people use the same address space during mergers and acquisitions. He also praises Internet2's Shibboleth middleware technology, which builds a model to permit cross authentication so that campuses can verify the trustworthiness of other campuses' authentication model.Simpler Data Visualization Technology Review (06/25/09) Greene, Kate Stanford University researchers have developed Protovis, a set of tools that simplifies the process of building complex data visualizations. Although Protovis requires some programming knowledge, it is designed to be easy to use for someone without significant programming experience, says Stanford professor and Protovis creator Jeff Heer. He says the level of programming needed for Protovis is only slightly higher than HTML, but lower than JavaScript. A major benefit of Protovis is that it is structured so that people who think in terms of visualizations first and then data should find the tools easy to use, Heer says. Protovis enables users to create simple building blocks, such as the colors and shapes they need in the visualization, and piece the blocks together to create a complete picture. Protovis is currently in an alpha release, but has been adopted by the Mozilla foundation and will be used in an upcoming version of the Thunderbird email client to help users visualize email data, Heer says. "With Protovis, you think first and foremost in visual marks on a page," he says. "It is our belief that this would make visualizations easier to learn and easier to modify."Pattie Maes on Interfaces and Innovation Mass High Tech (06/19/09) Connolly, James M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Pattie Maes, who leads human-computer interface research at MIT's Media Lab, says in an interview that current computers and interfaces are not ideal for information access. She describes the Media Lab as an interdisciplinary center of development into new technologies designed to empower people, and notes that her work aims to develop specific products as well as inspire other people to incorporate her insights into other products. The lab gets most of its funding from industry and involves close industry collaboration, and Maes points out that "with all the development that has happened in the last 10 to 15 years, there's new appreciation for people to see themselves as creative consumers and producers." She sees the do-it-yourself movement gaining momentum, as well as innovation in the hardware space with advancements such as the Apple iPhone and the Microsoft Surface table. "This is really the first time in 40 or 50 years that we are venturing out of the typical interface of a mouse and a keyboard and a screen," Maes observes. "It's encouraging that in the commercial area there is now some interest in thinking beyond the form factor of the typical computer." Maes sees less innovation in the software space.Scars, Marks, and Tattoos: A Soft Biometric for Identifying Suspects and Victims SPIE (06/15/09) Jain, Anil; Lee, Jung-Eun A variety of biometric systems capable of matching fingerprints, faces, and irises are already in use by law enforcement agencies to identify suspects and victims. However, there are numerous situations in which primary biometric traits are either unavailable, are difficult to capture, or where the quality of the image is too poor. In such situations, "soft" biometric traits such as height, sex, eye color, ethnicity, scars, marks, and tattoos can help identify a person. Tattoo patterns are regularly cataloged when booking suspects. Based on an ANSI/NIST-ITL (Information Technology Laboratory) standard, each image is manually labeled into one of 70 categories and stored with a suspect's criminal history record. Unfortunately, matching tattoos is a time-consuming, subjective process, and the simple class descriptions do not include all the semantic information present in an image. SPIE has developed an automatic tattoo matching system called Tattoo-ID, which uses content-based image retrieval based on tattoo features, such as color, shape, and texture, instead of labels or keywords. Tattoo-ID provides users with a group of images that most closely resemble the queried tattoo. User feedback, based on the retrieved images, can be used to refine feature extraction and the matching capabilities. Tattoo-ID also uses class and subclass labels so users can specify the tattoo image and ANSI/NIST categories, to keep the system compatible with current law enforcement practices.Researchers Mull STEM Gender Gap Education Week (06/17/09) Vol. 28, No. 35, P. 1; Viadero, Debra Studies indicate that although U.S. women have achieved parity or near-parity with men on science and math achievement tests, the top levels of many such fields still boast more men than women. A number of studies over the past several years are starting to imply that there may be a simpler underlying explanation for this gender gap than people have assumed, such as women's desire to have careers compatible with family life and a lack of interest in science and math. "One of the things that has to be filtered into the mix is that those girls, who, at a young age, have high quantitative scores are more likely to have high verbal scores than boys are," notes Cornell University psychologist Stephen J. Ceci. He and two colleagues determined in a study that women earn almost 50 percent of all doctoral degrees in certain fields such as biological sciences, but their numbers are far lower in other science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines. One reason for this disparity is that women leave STEM careers at two times the rate that men do, and Ceci speculates that this trend may be partly attributable to the fact that more women than men classify themselves as "home-centered" as opposed to "careerist." "Women tend to look for careers where you can combine work and family," says Meredith College economist E. Ann York. Experts say that women also tend to gravitate toward compassionate fields such as healthcare and environmental studies, where the focus is on making a difference in people's lives. Some experts, such as University of Colorado professor Margaret A. Eisenhart, believe that bridging the gender gap requires addressing the issue that girls receive little relative exposure to careers in STEM fields. - May Require Free Registration

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• 24 Jun 2009 18:34

  Welcome to the June 24, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. NTSB to Look at Possible Computer Role in D.C. Crash IBM, Cray Lead Top 500 Supercomputer Rankings Living Safely With Robots, Beyond Asimov's Laws Where's the 'C' in STEM? Bringing Girls and Boys to Computer Science With 'Alice' Traveling the Web Together Beating the Bullies--Changing Real-World Behaviour Through Virtual Experience House S&T Committee Discusses Cyberspace Policy Review Report With Federal Agencies Indiana University, Technische Universitat Dresden Collaborate on Improved Life Sciences Data Transfer Interactive Robot Guided By Sensors--Not Remote Computer Scientists Model Cell Division Managing the Data Deluge NTSB to Look at Possible Computer Role in D.C. Crash Computerworld (06/23/09) Thibodeau, Patrick The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will explore whether computer systems, sensors, or cell phones contributed to the deadly Washington, D.C., Metrorail accident on June 22 in which nine people were killed. Although there are several other possible reasons for why the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) train crashed into the rear of another train, the WMATA computer systems will likely be closely examined because they are designed to prevent such rear-end accidents. The computer systems are constantly making decisions on train speed using data from track-bed sensors that monitor train movement. NTSB investigators will likely try to rule out possible causes, such as a misconfigured control system, a physical computer or hardware failure, or a security breach, says consultant Kegan Kawano. Security breaches have been known to happen in transportation systems, and Kawano says he is aware of 10 security incidents in transit systems since 2003. For example, a Polish teen allegedly derailed a train by hacking the network, and in 2003 a widespread worm affected systems used by rail hauler CSX Corp., causing the company to stop some passenger and freight service. Kawano says the design of rail automation systems is so unique that hackers often cannot figure out how to access them. NTSB investigator Debbie Hersman also says the agency will examine the actions of onboard operators and investigate the possibility of a mechanical failure.IBM, Cray Lead Top 500 Supercomputer Rankings Network World (06/23/09) Brodkin, Jon The top two computers from last year are still the most powerful machines on the newest release of the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites list. The total combined performance of all the machines on the list reached 22.6 petaflops, nearly twice the combined performance of last year's list. The top machine remains the IBM Roadrunner system at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has a performance of 1.105 petaflops. The Cray XT5 Jaguar system at Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory remains the second most powerful supercomputer, with a performance of 1.059 petaflops. The highest-ranking new supercomputer on the list is the JUGENE, an IBM BlueGene/P system in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich research center. JUGENE, which runs 825.5 trillion calculations per second and is capable of a theoretical peak performance of more than a petaflop, took over the third spot on the list, displacing a NASA machine called Pleiades. Only two supercomputers in the top 10 are located outside the United States, JUGENE and Europa, a computer at the Juelich research center that is capable of 274.8 trillion calculations per second. The last machine on the list, which runs 17.1 trillion calculations per second, would have placed 274th only six months ago.Living Safely With Robots, Beyond Asimov's Laws PhysOrg.com (06/22/09) Zyga, Lisa As robots increasingly move from industrial environments to the real world, human safety has become an important issue. Unlike industrial robots that perform repetitive tasks in controlled environments, household and real-world robots will have a relative amount of autonomy, and will work in ambiguous, human-centered environments. Before such robots become widespread, regulators are trying to determine how to approach the safety and legal issues that may arise. In a study published in the International Journal of Social Robotics, researchers proposed a framework for a legal system for next-generation robot safety issues. The goal is to ensure safer robot design through safety intelligence and to provide a method for handling accidents when they occur. The guiding principle of the study's proposed system is to categorize robots as third-existence entities, since they are neither living or biological (first existence), or non-living/non-biological (second existence). Third-existence entities will resemble living things in appearance and behavior, but will not be self-aware. Robots are currently legally classified as second existence, or human property, but the authors believe that a third-existence classification could simplify incidents involving accidents and responsibility. A major component of integrating robots into human society will involve dealing with open texture risk, or risk that occurs due to unpredictable interactions in unstructured environments, such as getting robots to understand the subtleties of human language.Where's the 'C' in STEM? ACM (06/24/09) The Computer Science and Information Technology (CS&IT) Symposium will take place Saturday, June 27, 2009, in Washington, D.C. Computer science education must not be left out of the initiative to define strong standards for science, technology, engineering and math for K-12 students, says Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CTSA), which is hosting CS&IT. "Inclusion in the larger skills and standards discussion will put us on the right path to ensuring that students have access to the skills and rigorous courses they need to thrive in the globalized knowledge economy," Stephenson says. CTSA cites the recent study by ACM and WGBH, which found that 74 percent of boys view majoring in computer science favorably, but only 32 percent of girls do. CS&IT will offer sessions on timely issues such as communicating the importance of computational thinking across all subjects and attracting minorities and girls to computing. Speakers at CS&IT, which is held in conjunction with the National Educational Computing Conference, will include University of California, Irvine professor Debra Richardson, who will discuss the need to better prepare K-12 students for college. "This year's symposium will not only show computing educators how to leverage the latest tools and technology to effectively teach computer science, but it will also give them the knowledge needed to ignite students' passion to excel at and pursue computing fields," Stephenson says.Bringing Girls and Boys to Computer Science With 'Alice' Duke University News & Communications (06/22/09) Basgall, Monte An animation program called Alice, developed by the late Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University, is being used by computer scientists around the country to engage young students in computer programming by encouraging them to create their own worlds, without realizing they are actually writing code. Duke University professor Susan Rodger says attracting females is key to the future of computer science. In 2008, only 11.8 percent of U.S. bachelor's degrees in computer science were awarded to women, according to the Computing Research Association. Rodger believes that Alice breaks down stereotypes about what computer science is, and gets students involved by challenging them with problems and allowing them to invent scenarios within virtual worlds that are created by the students and populated with the objects, animals, and characters that they choose. "It's a very easy way to learn programming if you've never done it before," she says. "It's hard to make mistakes. What you learn in the process are computer science concepts." Rodger has introduced Alice in Durham-area middle schools, and the National Science Foundation has funded similar programs in Denver, San Jose, Charleston, S.C., and Oxford, Miss. Duke also is hosting Alice events for teachers, including a symposium and a series of workshops, to encourage them to incorporate Alice into their classes.Traveling the Web Together Technology Review (06/23/09) Naone, Erica Researchers from the College of William & Mary have developed real-time collaborative browsing (RCB) software that makes it easier for users to interact with each other while browsing the Web. Several ways of navigating the Internet collaboratively already exist, but all of them are limited in some way, such as not allowing users to browse together at the same time or limiting interactions on a single Web page. Screen sharing can allow users to browse together as if sharing a single machine, but such programs usually require connecting to an outside server. William & Mary professor Haining Wang says that with RCB, only the person leading the session needs to have the browser extension installed, and all other users only need a standard Web browser. The leader uses RCB to generate a session URL that can be sent to other participants, who can click on the link to join up with the leader. Once connected, both users can interact with a Web page and follow links, with all actions being funneled through the host's browser. The host can add or remove participants as needed, connecting up to 10 participants without a significant drop in performance, though the researchers say RCB works best between two people. RCB is not yet available to the public, but the researchers recently presented their work at the Usenix Technical Conference.Beating the Bullies--Changing Real-World Behaviour Through Virtual Experience ICT Results (06/22/09) The European Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction (eCIRCUS) project aims to create virtual worlds with characters that children can interact and empathize with on such a powerful level that it helps them change their own behavior. The project has developed two programs, FearNot! and ORIENT, to give students helpful roles in interactive virtual worlds that can encourage them to change their thoughts, feelings, and actions. ECIRCUS researchers first focused on helping children who were the victims of bullying by drawing from recent psychological theories that highlight the importance of feelings for changing how people treat each other. The researchers updated the FearNot! computer program, which was developed as part of an earlier European research effort, by expanding and enriching its content, and made the program more open-ended. For example, the researchers gave virtual bullying victims the ability to remember strategies they have tried, which enable the characters to reject approaches that have failed, and ask the children in the same situation to find better solutions. In the second program, ORIENT, three students are equipped with various handheld control devices and sent as a team to save the planet Orient, a virtual planet populated by frog-like aliens called Sprytes. Students must learn about the Sprytes and empathize with them to help them. The purpose of ORIENT is to make players feel alone in an alien culture, and to help them learn to appreciate people who are different.House S&T Committee Discusses Cyberspace Policy Review Report With Federal Agencies Computing Research Association (06/19/09) Gandomi, Nathan The U.S. House Science and Technology Committee recently held a hearing to review responses from the Department of Homeland Security, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in regards to the Obama administration's recently released Cyberspace Policy Review report. The report presents several near- and mid-term actions that involve federal agency efforts in research and development, education, standards, information coordination, and interagency collaboration. Technology and Innovation Subcommittee chairman David Wu (D-Ore.) said previous federal cybersecurity efforts were too "output oriented" and not "outcome driven," and was hopeful that the new administration will focus on achieving fewer breaches of federal systems, reducing incidents of identity theft, and ensuring the security of smart grid systems and health IT systems. Research and Science Education Subcommittee chairman Daniel Lipinski (D-Ill.) argued for greater collaboration between public and private sectors to expose weaknesses in security and share breach information, and for a multidisciplinary approach to cybersecurity to provide a better understanding of how people interact with computers and information. Cita Furlani, director of NIST's Information Technology Laboratory, said NIST will work with federal, state, local, private, and academic institutions to develop information security standards. Jeannette Wing, assistant director of NSF's Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering, called for increased cybersecurity research openness and more collaborative research between industry and academia.Indiana University, Technische Universitat Dresden Collaborate on Improved Life Sciences Data Transfer Indiana University (06/19/09) Information technology leaders from Indiana University (IU) and Germany's Technische Universitat Dresden (TUD) recently announced a collaborative effort to improve the levels of cooperation between scientists and medical researchers in the United States and Europe. Other partners in the effort include the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) at TUD, and Indiana University's Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) and School of Informatics. The first project the two universities will work on involves developing new approaches to biological data set management and trans-Atlantic data transfer. "IU and PTI are doing work related to data management that holds significant value both within the state of Indiana and internationally," says PTI executive director Craig Stewart. UI technologists are currently visiting Dresden, Germany, to work with ZIH on optimizing trans-Atlantic data transfers, using IU's high performance data storage system, the Data Capacitor. The researchers also are developing new techniques for managing data sets, particularly those from the biological sciences. "Having the ability to quickly access very large data sets across the Atlantic greatly expands the potential for successful international research collaboration and new scientific and medical discoveries," says Data Capacitor project leader Stephen Simms.Interactive Robot Guided By Sensors--Not Remote Futurity.org (06/16/09) Leonard, Jenny Brown University professor Chad Jenkins and his team have developed a robot capable of holding a conversation, gesturing, and following a human's movement without using remote control devices. "We need robots that can adapt over time, that can respond to human commands and interact with humans," says Jenkins, the director of Brown's Robotics, Learning, and Autonomy (RLAB) group. One of RLAB's projects uses robotic soccer and a Nintendo Wii remote to enable users to control robots in the game from the robot's perspective. "The player sees what the robot sees, and decides what it should do in a given situation," Jenkins says. "The person knows what he wants the robot to do, yet the robot's control policy--the entity that makes decisions for it--may not be capable of reflecting that." The input from the human players is used to refine the robot control policy, helping the robot to improve its locomotion and manipulation skills. In another RLAB project, the objective is make robots more closely reflect the will and behavior of humans. Using a NASA humanoid upper-body robot, the researchers are using motion-capture systems to record human movement in three dimensions and translate that movement into digital models that can be used to create a more effective robot control policy. The new policy has enabled the robot to replicate basic human motion and manipulate objects. Jenkins also is developing interfaces that could be used with a neural cursor control system developed by Brown neuroscience professor John Donoghue.Computer Scientists Model Cell Division Harvard University (06/18/09) Rutter, Michael Patrick Harvard University computer scientists have developed a model for studying the arrangement of tissue networks that are created by cell division. "We developed a model that allows us to study the topologies of tissues, or how cells connect to each other, and understand how that connectivity network is created through generations of cell division," says Harvard professor Radhika Nagpal. "Given a cell division strategy, even if cells divide at random, very predictable 'signature' features emerge at the tissue level." The new framework could create new insights on how multicellular systems achieve, or fail to achieve, robustness from the seemingly random behavior in groups of cells, and help researchers looking to artificially emulate complex biological behavior. Using the computational model, Nagpal and her colleagues demonstrated that the regularity of the tissue can act as an indicator for inferring properties about the cell division mechanism itself. "Even with modern imaging methods, we can rarely directly 'ask' the cell how it decided upon which way to divide," Nagpal says. "The computational tool allows us to generate and eliminate hypotheses about cell division." The researchers plan to use the new model to detect and study mutations that adversely affect cell division processes in epithelial tissues, which can cause cancer. "One day we may even be able to use our model to help researchers understand other kinds of natural cellular networks, from tissues to geological crack formations, and, by taking inspiration from biology, design more robust computer networks," Nagpal says.Managing the Data Deluge University of Texas at Austin (06/05/09) Dubrow, Aaron; Singer-Villalobos, Faith The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas recently unveiled the Corral, a central repository for data collections designed to handle the processing requirements of data-driven science. Corral features 16 server nodes and 1.2 petabytes of storage, which is four times larger than any other data-collection resource on the TeraGrid. Larger and more sophisticated computing and visualization systems, such as the Ranger, Lonestar, and Stallion, generate immense amounts of data, which needs to be properly stored and managed. Furthermore, traditional data-collection repositories, such as museums and physical archives, are renovating themselves for the 21st century. Corral addresses the need for digital preservation and document and specimen management, and provides archives that allow data to be shared and explored more thoroughly than previously possible. "We're ahead of the curve in terms of providing this kind of dedicated data collection and application resource," says Chris Jordan, who is responsible for data infrastructure at TACC. "A lot of other sites are doing data collections, but very few sites are providing this kind of universally accessible, unified resource." TACC expects the repository to be completely full within two years and has designed the system so that it can be made up to 10 times larger. "The advantage of having Corral is that we have the ability to offer services based on new methodologies, and to support them in a very flexible way," Jordan says. "This gives us the opportunity to learn what some of the best practices are and share that information with a wide variety of projects."

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• 22 Jun 2009 11:54

  Welcome to the June 22, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology Ties That Bind: Organizing Large-Scale HPC in the European Union IT Careers Aren't Cool Enough for Canadian High School Students Cell Phones That Listen and Learn Plan to Teach Military Robots the Rules of War Intel Toots Its Research Horn for Chips--and More EU Lays Out Plans for the 'Internet of Things' ORNL Finding Could Help Electronics Industry Enter New Phase Researchers Ready Personal Energy Monitoring Devices Computer Idle? Now You Can Donate Its Time to Find a Cure for Major Diseases The A-Z of Programming Languages: Erlang Vanderbilt Doctors and Software Engineers Pioneer an Advanced Sepsis Detection and Management System Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology Wall Street Journal (06/22/09) P. A1; Rhoads, Christopher; Chao, Loretta Iran has developed a sophisticated system for monitoring and censoring the use of the Internet by its citizens, enabling it to examine and control the content of individual online communications on a wide scale. Technology experts both inside and outside Iran say the country's efforts to monitor Internet information far surpasses blocking access to Web sites or cutting Internet connections. The ongoing political turmoil has shown that Iran has the ability to perform deep-packet inspections, which enables government authorities to block communications, monitor and gather information on individuals, and alter communications for disinformation purposes. The "monitoring center," installed within the Iranian government's telecom monopoly, was part of a larger contract between Iran and a joint venture that included mobile-phone networking technology, says Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, which includes Siemens AG and Nokia. "If you sell networks, you also, intrinsically, sell the capability to intercept any communication that runs over them," Roome says. In recent months, the Iranian government has experimented with the monitoring technology, but had not used it extensively until the recent unrest. "We didn't know they could do this much," says a network engineer in Tehran. "Now we know they have powerful things that allow them to do very complex tracking on the network." Networking engineers familiar with the system say Iran can control all online communications from a single chokepoint, where emails and social-networking sites are monitored for keywords.Ties That Bind: Organizing Large-Scale HPC in the European Union HPC Wire (06/19/09) West, John E. The European Union (EU) is making a substantial investment in pan-European resources in an effort to place its members on the cutting edge of the computational space. "Supercomputers are the 'cathedrals' of modern science, essential tools to push forward the frontiers of research at the service of Europe's prosperity and growth," says EU commissioner Viviane Reding. However, it is not easy or inexpensive to construct a large-scale supercomputing infrastructure to support research and industrial goals. Still, it is hoped that the EU's collective resources may make it possible for a strong high-performance computing (HPC) player to enter an arena currently dominated by the United States and Japan. The EU and individual members acting in tandem have vowed to establish a supranational supercomputing infrastructure, and the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) consortium is a key nexus of the EU's HPC effort. DEISA's Hermann Lederer describes the infrastructure as "a European counterpart of [the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded] TeraGrid." DEISA partners are linked to users and each other through the TransEurasia Information Network and the National Research and Education Networks, while the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative encourages researchers to greatly increase their understanding of vital research issues. The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe is a vehicle through which the EU and European HPC leaders hope to further expand their investment in global computational leadership by setting up three to five "tier 0" facilities with petascale capacity to focus on broader EU science and industrial research objectives.IT Careers Aren't Cool Enough for Canadian High School Students Computerworld Canada (06/17/09) Kavur, Jennifer A study by the Conference Board of Canada for the Canadian Coalition for Tomorrow's IT Skills (CCICT) and Bell Canada found that high school students place a greater emphasis on the coolness and fun factor of a job, even over job security and salary, and that many students are not drawn to information and communications technologies (ICT) careers because they do not believe the work is fun or cool enough. The report, "Connecting Students to Tomorrow's Jobs and Careers," is based on interviews with 1,034 students in grades 9 and 10 from Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax. Nearly 77 percent of the students believe ICT jobs offer average or above average pay, 74 percent believe ICT jobs provide average or above average job security, and 37 percent believe ICT jobs are above average in terms of creativity. However, 31 percent believe ICT jobs are not fun, and 25 percent believe ICT jobs are uncool. "Whether students regard ICT-related careers as appealing or not appear to depend critically on whether they regard ICT jobs as interesting, fun, and cool," the report says. The results of the study support many of the initiatives the CCICT has been working on during the past year, says CCICT executive board vice president Terry Power. Power says many assumptions on why kids were staying away from ICT revolved around parents getting burned from the dot-com crash, or high school counselors warning about ICT jobs being outsourced. However, the study found that students are staying away from ICT because of its uncool image.Cell Phones That Listen and Learn Technology Review (06/22/09) Grifantini, Kristina A cell phone would be able to track the behavior of its user with SoundSense, new software developed by Dartmouth College researchers. SoundSense automatically classifies sounds as "voice," "music," or "ambient noise," but the user also can train it to recognize unfamiliar sounds. When a sound is frequently picked up via the microphone on a cell phone, SoundSense gives it a high "sound rank" and asks the user whether it is significant and if he or she wants to label the sound. In tests, the software correctly determined when the user was in a particular coffee shop, walking outside, brushing her teeth, cycling, and driving a car. "The SoundSense system is our first step in building a system that can learn [user behavior] on the go," says project leader and Dartmouth professor Tanzeem Choudhury. Monitoring everyday sounds via cell phones has the potential to provide people with much information on their daily activities, which could be used to improve their personal healthcare needs or time-management skills. SoundSense does not use a lot of power, sends data elsewhere for processing, stores raw audio clips, and can be told to ignore certain sounds.Plan to Teach Military Robots the Rules of War New Scientist (06/18/09) Simonite, Tom Georgia Institute of Technology robotics engineer Ron Arkin is researching how military robots could be programmed to act ethically and obey the rules of engagement and has developed an "ethical governor" intended to guarantee that robotic aircraft follow a set of ethical guidelines in combat. He is demonstrating the system in simulations based on recent campaigns by U.S. troops in the Middle East. The simulations show that the system is able to identify a group of enemy soldiers but does not fire because they are inside a cemetery, and firing would violate international law, or that the system can limit a robot's fire to weapons that would only damage an enemy vehicle but not any surrounding vehicles or buildings. To develop the software, Arkin used studies of military ethics and conversations with military personnel, with the objective of reducing non-combatant casualties. Arkin emphasizes that his research, which is funded by the U.S. Army, is not intended to develop prototype battle robots. "The most important outcome of my research is not the architecture, but the discussion that it stimulates," Arkin says. He believes that the development of machines capable of determining when to use lethal force is inevitable, which means it is critical that when such robots are developed that they are capable of being trusted.Intel Toots Its Research Horn for Chips--and More CNet (06/18/09) Shankland, Stephen Intel's recent Research Day provided demonstrations and previews of the variety of projects that extend beyond the company's core computer processor business. Projects on display included efforts to improve WiMax regional wireless network technology, advance mobile device processing capabilities while reducing energy consumption, refine software to make large-scale data storage faster, and transmit electricity wirelessly within a small room. Intel's CTO Justin Rattner also announced that the Corporate Technology Group at Intel will now be called Intel Labs, and will focus on evaluating not only what technology works, but discovering what does not before Intel invests significant funds in that area. Intel also emphasized its efforts to break into the mobile device market. Those efforts include the Atom chips and its next-generation Moorestown processors, which feature lower energy consumption requirements. Intel demonstrated technology that enables a Moorestown system to use less power by using a more aggressive version of existing power-saving techniques, including sending a computer into sleep mode as frequently and deeply as possible. Moorestown also makes platform-level engineering easier by combining numerous computer system elements onto a single processor and integrating graphics, a memory controller, and other elements into a system-on-a-chip, which makes it simpler for one part of a chip to signal when it is idle and does not need power, or when it is about to be busy and needs more power.EU Lays Out Plans for the 'Internet of Things' VNUNet (06/18/09) Bailey, Dave The European Commission (EC) has developed a 14-point action plan to address some of the problems that could develop when everyday objects such as food packaging and prescription drug containers are equipped with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags as part of an effort to create an "Internet of things." Such a network could have a number of benefits, including the ability of food packaging to record temperatures along a supply chain or warn patients when they are taking two prescription drugs that are incompatible with one another. However, a number of problems could begin appearing when the use of RFID technology increases, including issues with governance, privacy, and data protection. The EC says the action plan will address these issues and help Europeans benefit from the development of an Internet of things. Meanwhile, the EC is planning to gather a representative group of stakeholders in Europe to monitor the development of the Internet of things. However, the network's development could be hampered by the fact that Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) has yet to be introduced. The EC says IPv6 is necessary for dealing with the large number of IP addresses that will be created by putting RFID tags on everyday objects.ORNL Finding Could Help Electronics Industry Enter New Phase Oak Ridge National Laboratory (06/16/09) Walli, Ron Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have made a discovery that could lead to smaller, faster, more powerful, and more energy-efficient devices. The discovery revolves around a method to measure the intrinsic conducting properties of ferroelectric materials, which has been considered a promising material for several decades but had not been proven in an experiment. However, ORNL researchers Peter Maksymovych, Stephen Jesse, Art Baddorf, and Sergei Kalinin from the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences believe that they have made a breakthrough. "For years, the challenge has been to develop a nanoscale material that can act as a switch to store binary information," Maksymovych says. "Harnessing this functionality will ultimately enable smart and ultra-dense memory technology." The researchers have demonstrated a giant intrinsic electroresistance in conventional ferroelectric films, in which flipping the spontaneous polarization increased conductance by up to 50,000 percent. Ferroelectric materials can retain their electrostatic polarization and are used for piezoactuators, memory devices, and radio-frequency identification tags. The key distinction of ferroelectric memory switches is that they can be tuned using the thermodynamic properties of ferroelectrics, which can be used to minimize the power needed to record and read information.Researchers Ready Personal Energy Monitoring Devices EE Times (06/17/09) Walko, John Embedded data mining, inertial sensors, and global positioning systems are used in a wireless device being developed to monitor the amount of energy a person consumes on a daily basis. Developed by researchers at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory, the Personal Energy Meter (PEM) would record everything from the energy consumed while traveling, the heating and appliances people use, to the indirect energy used as a result of consuming manufactured food and goods. "Our Personal Energy Meter builds on existing environmental foot-printing efforts by considering if it is possible to apportion a fair share of the energy consumed by an activity or artifact down to a personal level," says Cambridge's Computer Lab Simon Hay. "We believe that it is possible to make the process virtually automatic, so that PEM users are free to go about their day normally without manually entering data." The PEM could be created as a separate device, but also could be incorporated into a mobile phone. The project is part of Computing for the Future of the Planet, a larger research program at the university.Computer Idle? Now You Can Donate Its Time to Find a Cure for Major Diseases University of Delaware (06/16/09) More than 6,000 volunteers around the world are contributing computing power to the University of Delaware (UD) in an attempt to help biomedical researchers find cures for HIV, Parkinson's, arthritis, and breast cancer. UD's Docking@Home project is using the computing power to model and simulate the combinations of molecules and their binding orientations, or docking, in an effort to discover candidates for new drugs. The computer users are helping UD complete 30,000 docking tasks a day, according to professor and project leader Michela Taufer. The volunteers are using the open source program Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing to enable UD to automatically access their computers when idle. UD also is developing software for ExSciTecH, an immersive volunteer computing system to explore science, technology, and health, which will enable volunteers to "throw" a molecule into a protein with a Nintendo Wii. "Other people do yoga with a Wii," Taufer says. "We are doing science."The A-Z of Programming Languages: Erlang Computerworld Australia (06/16/09) Edwards, Kathryn Erlang programming language creator Joe Armstrong says the language stemmed from an Ericsson research project to improve programming telephony applications. The problem it intended to address was writing a control program for a small telephone exchange in the best way. Armstrong says the language was released as open source to encourage its proliferation outside of Ericsson, and he notes that Erlang is most appropriate for writing defect-tolerant servers. "In the Erlang world we have over 20 years of experience with designing and implementing parallel algorithms," he says. "What we lose in sequential processing speed we win back in parallel performance and fault-tolerance." Armstrong agrees that Erlang's development will be driven by programming languages' increased exploitation of threading because of multicore processors. "As each new version of Erlang is released, we hope to improve the mapping onto multicores," he says. Armstrong says that Erlang appears to be headed along a path in which it will help shape the design of future programming languages, and he speculates that "as systems evolve Erlang will be there someplace as we figure out how to program massively fault tolerant systems."Vanderbilt Doctors and Software Engineers Pioneer an Advanced Sepsis Detection and Management System VUCast (06/15/09) Salisbury, David F. Researchers from Vanderbilt University's Medical Center and Institute for Software Integrated Systems have developed a real-time system for sepsis detection. In May, the system was tested in the medical center's intensive care unit, and this summer an automated decision support system will be added to help guide attending physicians through complex sepsis treatments. "This is an effort to use the power of informatics to move from reactive to proactive medical treatment by creating tools to support the use of evidence-based clinical guidelines," says Vanderbilt HealthTech Laboratory director Peter Miller, who is overseeing the project. Sepsis occurs when bacteria invade the body from wounds or intravenous lines, which over-stimulates the body's immune system and causes inflammatory and abnormal clotting responses. Sepsis can result in organ failure and death. The system features an automated early detection system that alerts doctors that a patient may be developing sepsis, based on temperature, heart rate, respiration rate, and white blood count. Creating the system involved developing a special modeling language specifically designed for clinical decision-making. Although the language is specific to sepsis management, the underlying technical infrastructure can be used to model almost any medical protocol, says Vanderbilt graduate student Janos Mathe.

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• 20 Jun 2009 04:47

  Welcome to the June 19, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. China Intent on Requiring Internet Censor Software Carnegie Mellon Develops Java Programming Tools Employing Human-Centered Design Techniques O'Brien: Gap Between Boys and Girls Persists in Tech IBM Investing $100 Million in Mobile Research Games Without Frontiers Scientists Create Hybrid System of Human-Machine Interaction Contracts Without Lawyers? Futurephile: A World With Less Waiting Staying Ahead of the Game Japan Explores Using Cell Phones to Stop Pandemics New Exotic Material Could Revolutionize Electronics The Grill: Jane Margolis China Intent on Requiring Internet Censor Software New York Times (06/19/09) P. A8; Wong, Edward; Vance, Ashlee U.S. computer manufacturers say the Chinese government is standing firm on its requirement that all new computers sold in China beginning in July come with pre-installed censorship software, contrary to previous reports. In addition to the censorship software, an employee in Beijing's Spiritual Civilization Office says the Chinese government plans to recruit 10,000 volunteers to monitor online content by the end of the summer. The online-monitoring effort is part of a plan to "purify social civilization," the employee says. The Chinese government also is extending its control over the Internet by directly warning some online services. For example, the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center, a government-support Internet watchdog group, recently criticized Google's Chinese-language Web site for linking to "pornographic and vulgar" sites, and said that Google must eliminate the offending links. China's efforts so far to block content that is either pornographic or potentially damaging to the Communist Party has largely been circumvented by savvy computer users, leading to China's new requirement. Many people say the censorship software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, will be used to block Web sites with unfavorable political content, though officials insist the software will be used primarily to block pornographic content. Computer experts also have discovered major security vulnerabilities that would enable hackers to easily hijack the computers.Carnegie Mellon Develops Java Programming Tools Employing Human-Centered Design Techniques Carnegie Mellon News (06/17/09) Spice, Byron Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers have developed Jadeite and Apatite, two tools designed to help programmers choose between the thousands of options available in the application programming interfaces (APIs) used to write Java applications. Jadeite and Apatite use human-centered design techniques to reduce the amount of time and guesswork that often is needed when working with Java APIs. Selecting APIs is a key aspect of Java programming, but it is not intuitive, says CMU professor Brad A. Myers. More than 35,000 methods are listed in 4,100 classes in the current Javadoc library of APIs, and more are being added with each Java update. Myers says working with Java APIs is a problem for developers at all levels. Jadeite (Java Documentation with Extra Information Tacked-on for Emphasis) improves usability by enhancing existing Javadoc documentation. For example, Jadeite displays the names of API classes in font sizes that correspond with how often they are used, based on Google searches, helping programmers avoid rarely used classes. Apatite (Associative Perusal of APIs That Identifies Targets Easily) allows programmers to browse APIs by association to see what packages, classes, and methods are often used with each other. Apatite also uses statistics on the popularity of each item to provide weighted opinions of the most relevant items.O'Brien: Gap Between Boys and Girls Persists in Tech San Jose Mercury News (CA) (06/16/09) O'Brien, Chris A recent ACM study concluded that there is still a major gap between how teenage girls and boys view computers and careers in computer science. The nationwide ACM survey of college-bound high school students age 13 to 17 found that 45 percent of boys thought majoring in computer science would be "very good" while only 10 percent of girls shared that viewpoint. There were also major disparities when asked about different technical tasks, such as learning a new software program, setting up a wireless network, or editing music or video on a computer, with boys consistently giving more confident responses than girls. "Using technology doesn't necessarily enhance your idea of creating technology," says Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology president Telle Whitney. "If you think about how you think about your car, it kind of makes sense. I think many girls are like that." In the ACM study, when asked to do a word association based on computers, boys responded with words like design, games, and video, while girls responded with words like boring, hard, and nerd. "As long as teenagers believe that computer science is boring, difficult, anti-social, or doesn't have much impact on solving the world's problems, they're unlikely to choose it for their future," the study says. Whitney says the Borg Institute is working to change these misconceptions among young women by arguing that computer skills are necessary for success in a world that is increasingly dominated by technology. Whitney believes that much of the change will come from establishing mentoring programs so girls can find successful role models in the technology industry. "One of our messages is that you can like pink and you can like princesses and still be good at programming a computer," she says.IBM Investing $100 Million in Mobile Research CNet (06/17/09) Whitney, Lance IBM has announced that it will spend $100 million during the next five years on a research project designed to make mobile technology and communications more efficient and easier to use. "Mobile devices are gradually becoming ubiquitous and helping us transcend many boundaries--geographical, economic, and social, among others," says IBM Research-India director Guruduth Banavar. "With high penetration, a simple user interface, and significant cost advantage for end users, mobile telephony holds the future of communication and exchange of information for the enterprise." IBM plans to focus on mobile enterprise enablement, emerging market mobility, and the enterprise to end user mobile experience. IBM already has developed a new technology called BlueStar, which automates the use of mobile phones and applications within a large enterprise. Meanwhile, IBM Research has established a pilot program in southern India, as part of their emerging market mobility effort, that will help consumers and small business owners find and share Internet information over their cell phones. To create an enterprise to end-user mobile experience, IBM plans to analyze consumer and business habits to enable the mobile Web to provide better personalized content. "Mobility and the associated analytics will change virtually every enterprise business process," says IBM Telecom Research chief technologist Paul Bloom.Games Without Frontiers The Engineer (United Kingdom) (06/16/09) Imperial College London professor of cognitive robotics Murray Shanahan is using graphics processing technology originally developed for the gaming industry to advance artificial intelligence (AI) research. Shanahan says that gamers' demands for increasingly realistic graphics have driven a corresponding increase in the processing capabilities of graphics processing units (GPUs). He says researchers in other fields are capitalizing on the potential these GPUs contain, and manufacturers are now producing specialized units for applications outside the gaming industry. Shanahan is developing large-scale neural networks that replicate how biological brains provide intelligence. "We're interested in simulating large numbers of neurons," he says. "If we ever wanted to make a robot move around using something that was a simulation of a brain, we would need to make millions of neurons work in real time." Shanahan is making progress, but still has more to accomplish. The human brain has about 100 billion neurons, and Shanahan's team is currently at around 100,000, which is roughly equivalent to an ant. He says biologically inspired artificial intelligence will be needed to advance traditional AI research to the next level. "Using traditional AI techniques, we've pretty much reached a plateau of intelligence and it's hard to see how we're going to be able to move beyond that," Shanahan says. "That's the motivation for trying to go back to the way nature has done it and try to replicate the way brains do things."Scientists Create Hybrid System of Human-Machine Interaction Florida Atlantic University (06/16/09) Florida Atlantic University (FAU) scientists have developed Virtual Partner Interaction (VPI), a hybrid system capable of examining real-time interactions between humans and machines. The researchers say that VPI is a major step toward understanding the laws of coordinated behavior, known as coordination dynamics. The equations of coordination dynamics describe how the coordination states of a system change over time. An interdisciplinary group of scientists at FAU's Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences created VPI. The researchers submitted the equations of human coordination dynamics to the machine and studied the real-time interactions between the human and virtual partners. The researchers say their findings create a new possibility to explore and understand a variety of interactions between people and machines, possibly leading to a completely new type of machine. "With VPI, a human and a 'virtual partner' are reciprocally coupled in real time," says FAU professor J. A. Scott Kelso. "The human acquires information about his partner's behavior through perception, and the virtual partner continuously detects the human's behavior through the input of sensors. Our approach is analogous to the dynamic clamp used to study the dynamics of interactions between neurons, but now scaled up to the level of behaving humans."Contracts Without Lawyers? ICT Results (06/19/09) European researchers working on the Contract project are developing computer systems capable of autonomously creating, monitoring, and managing online contractual agreements. The Contract project has developed a set of verification algorithms that enable on- and offline validation of e-business interactions based on contracts. Individuals and organizations can use the verification process to test for conflicts between a contract they are about to enter and other obligations that exist from previous contracts. The project also has developed a set of tools and libraries for inspecting the execution of contracts, which, along with the verification process, has been made publicly available. The project faced two major hurdles when developing the tools. The first was finding a contractual language that was expressive enough to be applicable to a variety of contractual agreement scenarios while still capable of being translated into terms a computer could understand. The second was increasing the level of semantic abstraction that service-oriented agreement technology could handle at execution time. The researchers say the electronic contracting language they developed is revolutionary because it goes beyond defining contractual clauses. The language's operational descriptions include the protocols that manage the contract process and enable computers to automatically activate, cancel, or suspend contracts in certain circumstances.Futurephile: A World With Less Waiting Financial Times Digital Business (06/18/09) P. 6; Shillingford, Joia The day will come when everyone will wear glasses that feature a computer overlay, which will be capable of processing the faces of passersby and telling you if you have met someone before, where you met the person, and his or her name, predicts IBM inventor Andy Stanford-Clark. By 2012, he expects businesses will operate more on alerts for everything, including when a product is running low, and by 2020 software will enable computer systems to perform less processing and consume less energy. In the public sector, open source software will gain traction by 2012, and by 2020 government agencies will be able to provide information to citizens in a more cohesive and connected manner. As for individuals, ambient technology will soon tell them that the next bus will arrive in two minutes, and in 10 years intelligent systems will control the flow of traffic and give drivers more clear runs of green lights. Stanford-Clark expects that networking will focus more on ubiquity, and adding more real-world data to the virtual world will enable it to overlap more with the physical world. He also shares his thoughts on 2050 and beyond. "If you want a pizza, you will tap a number into a machine, pour in some particles, and press a button," he says. "When you've eaten, you'll be able to pour in more particles and make yourself a pair of trainers." - May Require Free Registration Staying Ahead of the Game WA Today (06/15/09) Hill, Jason University of Melbourne researcher Florian Mueller was awarded this year's Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship in Technology for his research into video games that combine the advantages of sports with the benefits of networked computers, enabling players to compete from distant locations. Called "sports over a distance," Mueller has developed prototype games using networked computers, videoconferencing cameras, and projectors for tennis, soccer, and boxing. Mueller says his research stems from a desire to find better ways to build connections between people separated by large distances. He says that sports can create very intimate, social, and trusting relationships, even between people who have never met before. Most online video gamers communicate through headsets or text chat, but Mueller says digital cameras offer significant benefits other systems do not provide, including emotional communication and a greater ability to anticipate what other players will do next. "Creating better games that make use of this link has huge potential for more emotional, engaging, healthy, and social games, and technology has the opportunity to make a big contribution in a way that sports alone cannot," Mueller says.Japan Explores Using Cell Phones to Stop Pandemics Associated Press (06/06/09) Alabaster, Jay The Japanese government is funding an experiment by a Softbank subsidiary that will simulate the spread of pandemic diseases in school using a virtual virus that spreads between cell phones. Softbank plans to pick an elementary school with about 1,000 students and give them phones equipped with global positioning systems (GPS), which will enable the location of the children to be recorded every minute. A few students will be designated as "infected," and their movements over the previous days will be compared to other students' movements. The GPS data will be used to determine which children have interacted with the infected students and are at risk of contracting the disease. In a real outbreak, the families of students exposed to sick children could be notified by mobile phone that their child is at risk, helping prevent the disease's spread. "The number of people infected by such a disease quickly doubles, triples, and quadruples as it spreads," says Softbank's Masato Takahashi. "If this rate is decreased by even a small amount, it has a big effect in keeping the overall outbreak in check." One of the goals of the experiment is to determine how people react to having their location constantly tracked, since they would not be required to sign up for the system if it were launched for real. Another issue is how to notify people that an outbreak is happening. "If we don't think carefully about the nature of the warning, people that get such a message could panic," says Institute of Information Security professor Katsuya Uchida.New Exotic Material Could Revolutionize Electronics SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (06/15/09) Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have discovered that the compound bismuth telluride acts as a topological insulator, enabling electrons to flow freely across its surface with no loss of energy. The material has the potential to lead to much faster and more efficient computer chips and serve as the foundation for spintronics. Bismuth telluride serves as a topological insulator at room temperature, but the tests suggest that the material could withstand even higher temperatures. "This means that the material is closer to application than we thought," says physicist Yulin Chen. The electrons are well-behaved, and adding a voltage leads the special spin current to flow without heating the material or dissipating. "This could lead to new applications of spintronics, or using the electron spin to carry information," says theorist Xiaoliang Qi. The researchers add that bismuth telluride is a three-dimensional material that could be easily fabricated with current semiconductor technologies.The Grill: Jane Margolis Computerworld (06/15/09) Carpenter, Joyce The convergence of technology, education, and diversity is the topic of a new book written by Jane Margolis of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Her book is based on research at three Los Angeles "digital high schools"--a predominately Latino school, a predominately African-American middle- and working-class school, and a school in an affluent white neighborhood where one third of the students were local and two thirds were non-local minorities. Margolis, an academic at UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, says the schools with highest concentrations of minority students featured only the most elementary of computer science instruction. She identifies a lack of curricula, sequence of courses, computer science teaching methods courses, professional development opportunities, and a learning community as the most significant challenges that teachers are facing. Margolis says a lack of qualified educators is a far more critical shortage than an absence of new technology in schools. An earlier book by Margolis focused on the college-level challenges that computer science students must contend with, and she notes that female students' impetus for studying the field was often connected to other disciplines, such as robotics or space or environmental science. "We described this as computing for a purpose, as opposed to just hacking for hacking's sake," Margolis says. "Unfortunately, too many students experienced the first years of the curriculum and culture as more narrow and programming-centric; too many of the female students then felt they didn't belong in computer science and felt a gap between their motivation and the computer science culture and curriculum." Margolis says the situation has changed, and more people are now realizing that computer science must be introduced and contextualized in college in a meaningful, exciting, and interesting manner. Margolis will be a keynote speaker at the Computer Science and Information Technology Symposium on June 27 in Washington, D.C., which is sponsored by the ACM-launched Computer Science Teachers Association.

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• 18 Jun 2009 00:52

  Welcome to the June 17, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress China Backpedals on Filtering Software Order IBM Awarded DARPA Funding for Cognitive Computing Collaboration Navy Wants Proposals on Cyber Research ACM Announces Advanced Web Analytics Software for Library Community Weta Finds Way to Manipulate Real Facial Expressions Semantic Web Set for Critical Mass Spintronic - The New Electronic? Computer Science Is Widening the Education Gap Data Center Overload Collaboration Eyes Computing Boost for New England Moon Magic: Researchers Develop New Tool to Visualize Past, Future Lunar Eclipses E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress New York Times (06/16/09) Risen, James; Lichtblau, Eric A National Security Agency (NSA) operation involving surveillance of American residents' communications, especially domestic emails, is fueling debate in the U.S. Congress about its legal and logistical ramifications, with current and former officials calling such monitoring much broader than previously admitted. Emails have been a particularly thorny issue for the NSA because of technological problems in drawing a distinction between messages by U.S. citizens and foreigners. Several former intelligence officials note that email traffic from all over the world is frequently channeled through U.S.-based Internet service providers, and when the NSA monitors a foreign email address, it does not know when the person using that address will send messages to someone inside the United States. A representative of national intelligence director Dennis C. Blair says that due to the complicated nature of surveillance and the need to comply with the rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and "other relevant laws and procedures, technical or inadvertent errors can occur." Agency advocates say the process of collecting millions of electronic messages by computer inevitably leads to the examination of innocent emails. Such messages are supposed to be filtered out, but critics say the NSA is not doing a good enough job in this area. An anonymous former NSA analyst verifies that the agency used a secret database that archived foreign and domestic emails and enabled analysts to read large volumes of messages to and from U.S. citizens, provided they fell within certain parameters and the citizens were not explicitly targeted in the queries. Officials acknowledge that the massive over-collection of U.S. citizens' communications can lead to a substantial number of privacy infringements, which has raised alarms in both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Congress.China Backpedals on Filtering Software Order Associated Press (06/17/09) Olesen, Alexa China has backed down on its mandate that all personal computers sold within its borders come with pre-installed Internet-filtering software. The software, called Green Dam Youth Escort, will still come with all PCs sold on the mainland beginning July 1, but computer users will not be required to install it. The software attracted heavy criticism in the form of legal challenges, petitions, and satirical cartoons. Beijing lawyer Li Fangping submitted a request to the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology demanding a public hearing on the "legitimacy and rationality" of forcing computer makers to include the software with every unit sold. Chinese blogger Yang Hengjun says the Internet plays a major part in the lives of Chinese citizens and allows them to criticize the government in a way that was not possible before. For example, the Internet played a central role in exposing recent scandals that were particularly dangerous, including the contamination of infant formula with industrial chemicals and the structural deficiencies of Chinese schools. China has the world's most extensive system of Web monitoring and censorship, and continues to impose more regulations in response to blogging and online communications, but the Internet is still far more open than the country's strictly controlled print and TV media. Critics argue that even packaging the software with new computers will lead to greater self-censorship among Chinese net users because they will fear that the program may secretly be running in the background.IBM Awarded DARPA Funding for Cognitive Computing Collaboration Frontier India (06/15/09) IBM Research and five universities are working together to create computing systems that will simulate and emulate the brain's abilities in sensation, perception, action, interaction, and cognition. The project has been awarded $4.9 million by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of the first phase of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics initiative. IBM's proposal, "Cognitive Computing via Synaptronics and Supercomputing (C2S2)," emphasizes research in areas such as synaptronics, material science, neuromorphic circuitry, supercomputing simulations, and virtual environments. Initially, the researchers will focus on nanoscale, low-power synapse-like devices, and on uncovering the functional microcircuits in the brain. The long-term objective of the C2S2 project is to demonstrate low-power and compact-cognitive computers that rival mammalian intelligence. "We believe that our cognitive computing initiative will help shape the future of computing in a significant way, bringing to bear new technologies that we haven't even begun to imagine," says IBM Almaden Research Center's Josephine Cheng. The IBM-led project's ultimate objective is to rival the brain's low power consumption and small size using nanoscale devices for synapses and neurons. IBM says the research and resulting technology could lead to entirely new computing architectures and programming paradigms.Navy Wants Proposals on Cyber Research Federal Computer Week (06/15/09) Bain, Ben The U.S. Navy has posted an announcement online seeking new models of computation and system architectures for cooperative cyberdefense, as well as research on controlling systems to produce trustworthy results. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) also is interested in research from industry and academia on metrics for comparing computation in networked environments; automated ways to define architectures for embedded real-time systems; and critical principles for new host architectures, focused on information assurance, manageability, and agility. The Navy plans to use the research for a large-scale and always-on information infrastructure that would be highly mobile and dynamic, and operate across many networks. ONR also is interested in research on "cyberphysical interaction spaces" caused by advances in networking and software-enabled devices. "ONR believes that significant fundamental advances can be achieved through research at the intersection of computer science, the natural sciences, and social sciences," according to the announcement. "There are many research opportunities and challenges we anticipate in this area." Researchers have until Aug. 27, 2009, to submit full proposals for approximately $14.5 million in awards.ACM Announces Advanced Web Analytics Software for Library Community AScribe Newswire (06/15/09) ACM recently announced that it will provide its corporate and academic library customers with an enhanced Web analytics platform that will measure the use of the ACM Digital Library full-text and bibliographic databases. The platform, which will be released in July and provided by Scholarly iQ, will enable librarians to access past and current usage statistics and receive COUNTER usage reports that comply with the industry standard for measuring the online usage data of scholarly journals. The platform also features a Web services framework to provide greater flexibility in library access to ACM's electronic resource usage data. "This next generation platform is a major advance for ACM Digital Library users who rely on its vast information resources to support their research and educational programs," says ACM Group Publisher Scott Delman. Scholarly iQ CEO Gary Van Overborg says the self-service platform will enable librarians to create custom reports that fit COUNTER Release 3 standards, and automate the download and delivery of this information to stakeholders within the library system.Weta Finds Way to Manipulate Real Facial Expressions New Zealand Press Association (06/01/09) Researchers from Weta Digital and universities in the United Kingdom and the United States have developed software for "cloning" facial expressions. The researchers examined established assumptions about human behavior and influences on behavior when communicating by tracking the expressions of individuals during live conversations through videoconferencing and mapping the facial movements to model faces. The researchers found that facial expressions and head movements can be manipulated in real time to alter the apparent expressiveness, identity, race, and even gender of someone communicating through videoconferencing. "These visual cues can be manipulated such that neither participant in the conversation is aware of the manipulation," the researchers say. The software is now being tested by psychologists interested in challenging preconceived assumptions about how humans behave while communicating. Previous research found that speakers move their head differently when speaking to a women than when speaking to a man, and the new software has helped show that this difference is not because of the woman's or man's appearance, but because women and men move their head differently when being spoken to. "If a person appears to be a woman but moves like a man, others will respond with movements similar to those made when speaking to a man," the researchers say. "This exciting new technology allows us to manipulate faces in this way for the first time."Semantic Web Set for Critical Mass InfoWorld (06/16/09) Krill, Paul The Semantic Web is finally approaching critical mass, said World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) officials at a recent technical conference. W3C technology and society technical director Ralph Swick said the Semantic Web is starting to see commercial developments. The W3C has jurisdiction over critical Semantic Web technologies, including the Resource Description Framework (RDF) for representing information on the Web, the Web Ontology Language to allow information in documents to be processed by applications, and SPARQL for querying RDF data. The Semantic Web could be used for a variety of purposes, including building better mashups or publishing social networking data, according to W3C Semantic Web activity lead Ivan Herman. He said Semantic Web technologies could allow information to be accessed and linked, including data in medical databases, geographical information, and government data. Thomas Reuters' Thomas Tague urged technology developers to create tools that use the Semantic Web and semantic data. Monetization of the Semantic Web could come from adding semantic capabilities to social sites, improving opportunities for advertising performance, and semantic search, Tague said.Spintronic - The New Electronic? ICT Results (06/17/09) European researchers working on the Nanospin project have developed spintronic devices using ferromagnetic semiconductors. Although still in development, spintronics has already led to faster, instant-on technology and massive increases in data storage capacity. Spintronic devices also use little power and are highly scalable. "It takes a very low current to switch spin, which makes these devices very efficient," says Nanospin co-coordinator Charles Gould. He also says that, theoretically, spintronic devices could have very high switching speeds. "We have not proven this in the lab yet, but many results in the theory have already been proven, so high switching speeds [are quite likely]," Gould says. The Nanospin project sought to achieve four objectives: writing information to ferromagnetic semiconductors, retrieving that information, switching between different states at high speeds, and the theoretical modeling of the devices to explain their operation and optimize performance. The researchers say the project was successful on all accounts. "Currently, we are looking at logic schemes for spintronics, so we are moving from memory and storage to processing," Gould says.Computer Science Is Widening the Education Gap Computerworld (06/15/09) Tapia, Richard The book, "Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing," by Jane Margolis, argues that technology and computer education programs that target minority students in underserved areas are not achieving their objectives of driving these students toward computer and technology programs in higher education, writes Rice University professor Richard Tapia. The book, which Tapia says mirrors the "Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future" report, cautions that the United States is at risk of losing its position as a world leader in science and technology innovation, and that it is at risk of not being able to fill its need for high-end technical jobs. Although the U.S.'s greatest hope of avoiding these dangers is to strengthen participation in technology and computing among underrepresented groups, the programs designed to stimulate greater involvement are not driving these groups to computing and technology in higher education. The programs provide minority students with high-tech experiences, but can make them technologically rich and cognitively poor, Tapia says. Students are not being encouraged to be innovative or to pursue paths that lead to high-end technology jobs, and the fault lies with a lack of encouragement from educators who often overlook them because they do not fall under the traditional notions of being "the best and the brightest." The book demonstrates that in addition to the established programs intended to spark student interest in technology, students need more encouragement from educators and clearer pathways into high-tech fields. Margolis will be a keynote speaker at the Computer Science and Information Technology Symposium on June 27 in Washington, D.C., which is sponsored by the ACM-launched Computer Science Teachers Association.Data Center Overload New York Times Magazine (06/14/09) P. 30; Vanderbilt, Tom Data centers are being threatened with an overload of the many search queries they receive as technological advancements and an expanding corpus of data demand more computing muscle at the lowest possible energy and resource costs, writes author Tom Vanderbilt. Microsoft supported close to 150,000 servers in 2008, and about 80,000 of those were used by its Bing search application. Uptime Institute founder Kenneth Brill notes that during the past few decades offices have swung back and forth between using centralized and decentralized computing power, and the latest wrinkle is the use of centralized servers instead of desktop software and operating systems to fulfill most computing requirements. This has been accompanied by an increase of servers in larger data centers. "The promise is that instead of making costly investments in redundant IT hardware, more and more companies will tap into the utility-computing grid, piggybacking on the infrastructures of others," Vanderbilt says. He says the hunger for data-center space is being propelled by the growth of Internet-driven business models, along with the data retention and compliance requirements of an array of tighter accounting specifications and other financial regulations. Data centers' energy requirements are expanding along with servers and the Internet. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Jonathan Koomey estimates that the computing cloud eats up 1 percent to 2 percent of the world's electricity. This trend is prompting research into ways to increase data centers' energy efficiency, and concepts under consideration include improvement of airflow via computational fluid-dynamics modeling and revisions to the data center's form factor.Collaboration Eyes Computing Boost for New England MIT News (06/11/09) Frost, Greg The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is leading a collaborative effort to design and build the Holyoke High-Performance Computing Center (HPCC), an environmentally friendly high-performance computing center. MIT says the HPCC will help establish Massachusetts as a leader in the application and development of the next generation of computing technologies. "Many of today's most important technical challenges will yield only to the power of high-performance computing, from modeling climate change to managing a massively complex 'smart grid' and developing novel materials for 21st century technologies, from biomedicine to batteries," says MIT president Susan Hockfield. "At MIT, we're committed to help drive the effort to deliver state-of-the-art computing performance to universities and companies across the region, through aggressive development of the Holyoke HPCC." In addition to MIT, the state of Massachusetts, the University of Massachusetts, Boston University, Accenture, EMC, and Cisco are involved in the development of the Holyoke HPCC. The new center will be built next to the Connecticut River, which will allow it to run on hydroelectric and wind power, and could allow the river's water to be used in a cooling system.Moon Magic: Researchers Develop New Tool to Visualize Past, Future Lunar Eclipses Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (06/08/09) Mullaney, Michael Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created a model that can generate picture-perfect images of lunar eclipses. Professor Barbara Cutler assisted graduate student Theodore C. Yapo with configuring and combining models for sunlight, the solar system, and the different layers and effects of the Earth's atmosphere to simulate and render a visualization of a lunar eclipse. The tool can show how famous eclipses in history look, how future ones will look, and how they would appear to someone in New York, Rome, or from any other geographical location on Earth. Cutler and Yapo say it is almost impossible to distinguish the computer-generated images of eclipses from actual photos. "Other researchers have rendered the night sky, the moon, and sunsets, but this is the first time anyone has rendered lunar eclipses," Cutler says. "Our models may help with investigations into historical atmospheric phenomena, and they could also be of interest to artists looking to add this special effect to their toolbox."

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• 15 Jun 2009 16:18

  Welcome to the June 15, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Privacy May Be a Victim in Cyberdefense Plan Secret War on Web Crooks Revealed New Coalition Pushes for 'Big' Broadband Experts Say Chinese Filter Would Make PCs Vulnerable 46th Design Automation Conference to Offer Nine Workshops NASA: Robots Critical to Endeavour's Mission on Space Station Elijah Mayfield to Present Research in Singapore Innovation: Looking Forward to the Smarter Smartphone DOE Researchers Test Limits of Visualization Tool 5 Cool Cloud Computing Research Projects VCU Professor Co-Authors Report on Aviation Security If at First You Don't Succeed, Let the Search Engine Try Privacy May Be a Victim in Cyberdefense Plan New York Times (06/13/09) P. A1; Shanker, Thom; Sanger, David E. The U.S. Obama administration's cyberdefense strategy includes the formation of a new Pentagon cybercommand that critics warn may end up compromising personal privacy in order to fulfill its objective to monitor the myriad daily assaults on U.S. security systems. Pentagon and military officials say there is no way to effectively run computer operations without penetrating networks within the United States, where the military is banned from operating, or traveling electronic pathways through countries that are not themselves U.S. targets. Officials say the interception and analysis of some email messages may be necessary to guard against computer viruses or potential terrorist action, and supporters say the procedure could eventually be accepted as a digital version of customs inspections. Maren Leed with the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies says there needs to be a broad debate "about what constitutes an intrusion that violates privacy and, at the other extreme, what is an intrusion that may be acceptable in the face of an act of war." U.S. Gen. James E. Cartwright with the Joint Chiefs of Staff admitted in a recent speech that the military's legal establishment of an early warning system for cyberattacks remains an unresolved issue. Leed notes that although the U.S. Defense Department and related intelligence agencies are the only organizations capable of cyberattack protection, they are not the best-equipped entities to assume such duties "from a civil liberties perspective." The expectation is that the new cybercommand will be helmed by a four-star general who also will direct the National Security Agency in an effort to heal the rift between the spy agency and the military over who has authority to conduct offensive operations.Secret War on Web Crooks Revealed Financial Times (06/15/09) P. 18; Palmer, Maija Three times a year, leaders from the world's major technology and communications companies meet to discuss strategies for preventing the Internet from becoming overrun with attacks, spam, viruses, and hackers, though the specifics of these meetings is often kept secret. "Some people might get nervous if they knew all the things we talked about," says Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) chairman Michael O'Rierdan. "It's our job to make the Internet safe, but we don't want to put people off using the Web." MAAWG participants also are nervous about being targeted by the criminals they are trying to stop. Most of the spam and hacking online is now perpetrated by organized crime. Within the United States, retaliation against MAAWG generally comes in the form of lawsuits, but in other countries organized criminals in Russia and the Ukraine use more violent methods. MAAWG founder Steve Linford has been advised by the police not to open any unexpected packages. The MAAWG conferences attract approximately 270 delegates from 19 countries, and although the press has usually been kept out of the conferences, that trend is starting to change as participants feel the industry needs to reach out to consumers and get them to help fight spam and cybercrime. Nearly 90 percent of spam is sent from computers that have been hacked and are remotely programmed to send spam. More than 9.4 million computers have been hijacked for this purpose, and cleaning up all of these machines will be impossible without the public's help.New Coalition Pushes for 'Big' Broadband IDG News Service (06/11/09) Gross, Grant A new report from the Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition says that schools, libraries, and healthcare providers in the United States need broadband speeds of 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps to adequately serve their customers' needs. The SHLB Coalition, which features 28 members, including the New America Foundation, the American Library Association, Internet 2, and Educause, is urging U.S. federal, state, and local governments to seriously consider the needs of libraries, schools, and healthcare providers when developing broadband deployment plans. "High-speed broadband is the key infrastructure that K-12 schools, universities, libraries, hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare providers need to provide 21st-century education, information, and health services," says SHLB coordinator John Windhausen. The institutions are core elements of communities, and affordable, high-speed broadband will help both their immediate customers and surrounding neighborhoods through shared networks, says New America Foundation Wireless Future Program director Michael Calabrese. "The most promising public investment, given limited resources, would be high-capacity fiber networks connecting community anchor institutions in every local jurisdiction," Calabrese says. "By becoming both technology hubs and bringing fiber deep into every community, schools, libraries, and healthcare providers will [bring] affordable broadband access to everyone."Experts Say Chinese Filter Would Make PCs Vulnerable New York Times (06/13/09) P. A6; Jacobs, Andrew Computer security experts say the filtering software that China has required for all new computers is so technically flawed that it would be easy for hackers to infiltrate a machine and monitor Internet activity, steal personal data, or insert harmful and dangerous viruses. "It contains serious vulnerabilities, which is especially worrisome given how widely the software will be adopted," says University of Michigan professor J. Alex Halderman, who examined the filtering program. "What we found was only the tip of the iceberg." Called Green Dam-Youth Escort, the software must be preinstalled on all personal computers sold in China by July 1. The Chinese government says it will pay for the software for at least a year as part of a campaign against "unhealthy and vulgar" content on the Web. Computer manufacturers outside of China have asked Chinese officials to reconsider the new rules. They argue that there are too many unanswered questions about the software, including whether it could damage operating systems. Human rights advocates and China's Internet users say Green Dam is really a thinly veiled attempt to expand censorship. "Their goal is to limit the access of information, not just pornography," says Beijing rights lawyer Li Fangping. "I feel like, as a citizen, my right to know has been violated." Opponents of the software hope that its technical deficiencies will delay its release, or even completely destroy the program. Halderman says the program is so poorly designed that in only a few hours he and his students were able to infiltrate a Green Dam-loaded computer and force it to crash.46th Design Automation Conference to Offer Nine Workshops Business Wire (06/02/09) The 46th Design Automation Conference (DAC), co-sponsored by ACM and supported by its Special Interest Group on Design Automation, offers a lineup of nine in-depth workshops. A workshop on design for manufacturing and manufacturing interfaces will address a new equation-based design rule checking approach, while system-level design will be the focus of three workshops. A workshop on new and emerging technologies will discuss bio-design automation, and applying Programmable Electrical Rule Checking (ERC) technology to quickly correct ERC violations will be the subject of the physical verification workshop. The 14th annual Workshop for Women in Design Automation will weigh a technical career path against the management track, and a general interest workshop will discuss academia as a career. "DAC workshops allow attendees to stay current in focused technology areas, to learn about new topics from world-class experts, and to network with others who share similar interests," says Andrew B. Kahng, general chair of the 46th DAC executive committee. "We hope that this year's workshop lineup will provide high value to attendees and successfully continue the trend of expanding DAC beyond what can fit into the technical sessions, panel sessions, and tutorials." DAC, which takes place July 26-31 in San Francisco, also will offer nearly 60 technical sessions and an Exhibition and Suite area.NASA: Robots Critical to Endeavour's Mission on Space Station Computerworld (06/12/09) Gaudin, Sharon The U.S. space shuttle's current mission, one of the most technical ever attempted by NASA, would not be possible without the use of robotics, says Holly Ridings, the lead space station flight director for the Endeavour mission. "We have learned a lot about robotics and about working together with a robot," Ridings says. "Robotics is really one of the things that NASA has a lot of experience in and it's allowing us to do some wonderful things on the space station." After docking with the space station on the morning of June 15th, the Endeavour crew will take the mission's first spacewalk, assisted by two robotic arms. Ridings says that while the astronauts work outside the space station, a robotic arm will lift a 4-ton piece of the Japanese complex out of the shuttle's payload bay. The piece, which will be attached to the outside of the Japanese module, is designed to hold its own payloads and host experiments that need to be conducted in outer space. In addition to the station's two main robotic arms, which will hand off the new piece between them several times during the mission, a third robotic arm, attached to the Japanese module, will be used for the first time in about a week. The third arm, installed in June 2008, will pick up and move payloads to the new piece. The robotic arm's software features several redundancies and five to seven things would have to go wrong for the arm to let go of the space station and drift away, Ridings says.Elijah Mayfield to Present Research in Singapore UMM News (06/13/09) Hamberg, Ruth Elijah Mayfield from the University of Minnesota at Morris will be among the students presenting papers during the Student Workshop for the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. His paper, "Sentence Diagram Generation Using Dependency Parsing," relied on a computer program to convert linguistic graphs into sentence diagrams using an analysis of the relationships between words. "I felt that I was working at a graduate level, and [my paper's acceptance at the conference] confirms that belief," says Mayfield. The largest conference in the field of computational linguistics is scheduled for Aug. 2-7, 2009, in Singapore, and is paying for his trip. Mayfield's research builds off of his work for a capstone project for the university's honors program. "He's been fun to work with in large part because of his independence and imagination, both of which contribute to his success so far in computational linguistics," says professor Janet Schrunk Ericksen, who advised Mayfield on principles of grammar and sentence diagramming. Mayfield, who has served as the ACM Club President for Morris, plans to attend graduate school at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University next year.Innovation: Looking Forward to the Smarter Smartphone New Scientist (06/12/09) Barras, Colin Cutting-edge research suggests there are major changes in store for smartphones. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Brandon Taylor and Michael Bove are building pressure sensors into phones, enabling them to detect the exact position of a user's fingers. Such devices could change their function based on the user's grip, allowing the user to hold the device like a camera to take pictures, like a phone to make calls, or in another grip to play games or listen to music. Another idea is to put the touch screen on the back of the device, which would eliminate the problem of a user's fingers hiding the icon or button he or she is trying to select. A Microsoft Research team in Cambridge is working to completely remove the interface from the device. Microsoft researcher Alex Butler's team added infrared sensors to a phone to enable it to detect the position of a user's fingers up to 10 centimeters away when the phone is placed on a flat surface. Butler's system, called Sidesight, could be used to interact with objects onscreen without touching the phone and could be used as a handset to control another device, such as a robot or TV. Meanwhile, Nokia is working on a prototype that gathers energy from mobile antennas and TV masts to improve the device's battery life.DOE Researchers Test Limits of Visualization Tool HPC Wire (06/10/09) U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) researchers recently ran a series of tests to see whether the VisIt visualization application could extract scientific insight from massive datasets. Visualization researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) ran the application using 8,000 to 32,000 processing cores to manage datasets ranging from 500 billion to 2 trillion grid points. The researchers confirmed that VisIt could leverage the growing population of cores powering the world's most advanced supercomputers to address problems of unprecedented proportions. To run these tests, the researchers began with astrophysics simulation data, and then expanded it to generate a sample scientific dataset at the desired dimensions. This strategy was chosen because the data sizes reflect future problem sizes, and because the main goal of the experiments is to better comprehend the problems and limitations that might be confronted at extreme levels of concurrency and data size. "These results are the largest-ever problem sizes and the largest degree of concurrency ever attempted within the DOE visualization research community," says Berkeley Lab's E. Wes Bethel. ORNL researcher Sean Ahern says the degree of grid resolution created for the experiments is expected to be prevalent in the near future. Another objective of the experiments was to ready the establishment of VisIT's credentials as a Joule code that has demonstrated scalability at a large number of cores. A series of such codes is being set up by DOE's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research to function as a metric for tracking code performance and scalability as supercomputers are built with extremely high numbers of processor cores.5 Cool Cloud Computing Research Projects Network World (06/10/09) Brown, Bob The HotCloud conference on cloud computing in San Diego will showcase a number of research projects. One such project is a Trusted Cloud Computing Platform developed by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems that "enables Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon EC2 to provide a closed box execution environment that guarantees confidential execution of guest virtual machines (VMs)." The platform would guarantee customers that their data has not been interfered with by service providers while also allowing service providers to secure data even across many VMs. Meanwhile, University of Washington researchers are exploiting the fact that Web services and applications will be very closely situated to develop CloudViews, a common storage system designed "to facilitate collaboration through protected inter-service data sharing." University of Minnesota researchers have outlined a way to form nebulas from distributed voluntary resources that could provide greater scalability, more geographical dispersion of nodes, and lower cost than traditional managed clouds. Researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz, NetApp, and Pergamum Systems are considering the trade-offs between storing data and recalculating results as needed in an attempt to boost the efficiency of cloud computing. They write in a paper that "recomputation as a replacement for storage fits well into the holistic model of computing described by the cloud architecture. With its dynamically scalable and virtualized architecture, cloud computing aims to abstract away the details of underlying infrastructure. In both public and private clouds, the user is encouraged to think in terms of services, not structure."VCU Professor Co-Authors Report on Aviation Security VCU News Center (06/08/09) Porter, Mike Research conducted at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that airport passenger security screenings can be conducted more efficiently without sacrificing security. Since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, every passenger is viewed as a potential security risk, but the researchers say that screening all passengers is inconvenient, slow, and expensive. "We set out to find a real-time screening methodology that considers both available screening resources and the necessity of being robust in assessing threat levels," says VCU professor Laura A. McLay. The researchers developed methods to quickly determine the risk levels of specific passengers and screen them accordingly. McLay, along with Illinois professor Sheldon H. Jacobson and visiting scholar Alexander G. Nikolaev, considered a risk-based model in which passengers are classified as selectees (high-risk) or non-selectees (low-risk). Each classification has its own screening procedures, with selectees undergoing more rigorous screening. The model's objective is to use passenger risk levels for determining the best policy for screening passengers to detect threats without overextending airport security's limited resources.If at First You Don't Succeed, Let the Search Engine Try Penn State Live (06/05/09) Spinelle, Jenna; Messer, Andrea A Pennsylvania State University researcher has analyzed the way Web surfers reformulate their Web searches, and believes his research could lead to improvements in the design of search engines. Professor Jim Jansen studied nearly 1 million Web searches to uncover patterns in the way users change their search terms. He found that the search terms were changed in 22 percent of queries, but users did not often seek assistance from systems for finding the desired information. "The implication is that system assistance should be most specifically targeted when the user is making a cognitive shift because it appears users are open to system intervention," he says. Jansen also created models to predict how people change search terms to offer a more precise query, which could be helpful for designing more advanced search engines. "Given that one can predict future states of query formulation based on previous and present states with a reasonable degree of accuracy, one can design information systems that provide query reformulation assistance, automated searching assistance systems, recommender systems, and others," he says.

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• 12 Jun 2009 17:56

  Welcome to the June 12, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. 'Mobilization' for Math and Science Education Computing in the Quantum Dimension China Faces Criticism Over New Software Censor Software Liability Law Could Divide Open Source The Internet Is Incomplete, Says its Co-Designer, Vinton Cerf Computer System for Dementia Patients Brain-Computer Interface, Developed at Brown, Begins New Clinical Trial Social Networks Keep Privacy in the Closet Experts Urge Federal Efforts on Cybersecurity Robotic Ferret Will Detect Hidden Drugs and Weapons Does Parallel Processing Require New Languages? Facebook Games for a Better Music Search Engine 'Mobilization' for Math and Science Education Inside Higher Ed (06/11/09) Lee, Stephanie Math and science education in the United States needs to improve dramatically if the country wants to stay competitive in the 21st century, concludes a report from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The report, "The Opportunity Equation: Transforming Mathematics and Science Education for Citizenship and the Global Economy," outlines a comprehensive plan to advance math and science learning. The plan's primary objective includes establishing high and common assessment standards in math and science for all 50 states and aggressively recruiting and supporting teachers. More than 70 organizations, including government, schools, philanthropies, and businesses, have pledged their support to the recommendations. "We have to bring math and science to the forefront," says U.S. Department of Education secretary Arne Duncan. "Perpetuating what we have is not going to get us where we want to go." Duncan says science and math teachers should be paid more than they currently are, particularly those working in underperforming communities. Teachers should also work with engineers, doctors, and professionals in technical fields to demonstrate to students how the sciences can be applied in real life. Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian says the quality of math and science learned at colleges and universities is based on strong K-12 education. The report says that colleges and universities should create partnerships with higher education and K-12 systems to increase the number of students entering college that are prepared for math and science courses.Computing in the Quantum Dimension ICT Results (06/12/09) European researchers working on the Qubits Applications integrated project (QAP) are trying to solve some of the fundamental hurdles preventing real quantum computing applications. A group of 35 European scientists and industrial researchers are studying how to directly exploit quantum phenomena such as uncertainty, entanglement, and other aspects that are not fully understood. "We are not looking to create a quantum computer directly," says QAP co-coordinator Ian Walmsley. "Other people are working on that, and it will take a long time to solve that problem." Walmsley says QAP is working on some of the problems facing real-world quantum applications that could be deployed today that contain problems that need to be solved for quantum computing anyway, such as the storage of information encoded on a photon. "But by focusing on these problems, we can perhaps create important new products that could be developed in the short and medium term, and we could solve some of the fundamental problems affecting the advent of quantum computing," he says. The researchers are exploring issues such as the storage of quantum information and transmission of certain quantum states, like entanglement, over long distances using repeaters. The researchers also will be examining quantum applications for the simulation of exceedingly complex problems. The project's multidisciplinary nature is a major advantage, as computer scientists, applied mathematicians, experimental physicists, and industrial scientists and engineers are all contributing unique and diverse views and expertise, Walmsley says.China Faces Criticism Over New Software Censor New York Times (06/10/09) Jacobs, Andrew; Yang, Xiyun A government directive that all PCs sold in China come with software that can censor pornography and other "vulgar" content from the Internet has sparked howls of outrage among industry executives, proponents of free speech, and computer users. Manufacturers are facing a July 1 deadline to preinstall the software on machines, and U.S. PC makers say meeting this deadline is impossible. They note that it raises a complicated issue as to whether manufacturers would be held accountable if the software clashes with operating systems or causes computers to crash. Computer experts are worried that the software could enable the Chinese government to watchdog Internet use and collect personal information. The designers of the filtering software, which is called Green Dam, insist that it cannot function as spyware. Green Dam uses image recognition technology and text filtering to block content, and its designers say the software can be disabled or deleted. Critics claim the software underperforms, censoring perfectly innocent content while allowing objectionable material to slip through. Also inspiring criticism is the Chinese government's decision not to consult computer users on the regulations or allow other companies to submit comparable software.Software Liability Law Could Divide Open Source ZDNet Asia (06/10/09) Ho, Victoria The European Commission has proposed that software companies should be held liable for the security and efficiency of their products. Ovum's David Mitchell says the proposal will likely force software vendors to require support and maintenance agreements for each purchase to help fulfill warranty obligations. This requirement already matches the established business models of open source vendors, which sell support services, but the "garage open source model" of independent developers, who do not have the resources to guarantee their products at that level, would suffer, he says. Keystone Law Corporation director Bryan Tan says the proposed law will likely inflate prices for consumers outside of the European Union due to the vendors' need to provide insurance, and the "death" of some smaller vendors will lead to increased prices due to a lack of competition. Mitchell says liability will be hard to pinpoint because of the inter-dependency between hardware and software, with a software failure potentially being blamed on hardware or the installation of another piece of software. However, Allen & Gledhill partner Stanley Lai says that consumers will benefit from the proposed law. While prices are likely to go up, Lai says consumers may see that price increase as a worthwhile investment in return for quality assurance.The Internet Is Incomplete, Says its Co-Designer, Vinton Cerf Computerworld (06/11/09) Thibodeau, Patrick Google Internet evangelist Vinton Cerf, the co-designer of the Internet's TCP/IP protocols along with Robert Kahn, says the Web continues to lack many of the basic features it should have, particularly in security. Cert says one of the most critical needs is authentication. Anyone who performs transactions over the Internet should be concerned about the technology and insufficient security, he says. "Authentication isn't available on an end-to-end basis at all layers of the architecture," says Cerf, co-winner of the 2004 ACM Turing Award. Although users excel at "building concrete tunnels" using Secure Sockets Layer techniques, they do not identify the end points and just secure the channel, he says. For example, it is possible to send an email with an attached, encrypted virus through an encrypted tunnel, and once it arrives it is decrypted and launches its attack. Mobile is another problem area, he says. To help solve these problems, Cerf says the U.S. government can use as a model the work being done by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in coordinating standards on the smart grid and health information technology.Computer System for Dementia Patients SINTEF (06/11/09) The shortage of healthcare workers has led to a demand for computer-based solutions that will allow elderly people to live in the own homes. However, the technology needed to care for the elderly is expensive, and different standards in home sensors create additional hurdles. To solve these problems, the European Union launched a series of projects to make it easier for industry to develop new equipment for elder care, including a project called Mpower, which was dedicated to creating a computer platform that could be used in numerous projects and fit a wide variety of needs. The project is testing a simple communication system based on a computer screen. The system does not need a keyboard, and features a touch screen that uses large, simple to understand icons. The screen can be used by family members and healthcare professionals to remind elderly residents to take their medication, perform other tasks, or when care givers will be arriving. The screen can relay information to care givers to inform them of whether the resident's appointments have been kept. Since last summer, several elderly people have been testing the system, which uses sensors and a global positioning system to provide smart solutions in the home and alert care givers if the resident has entered an unsafe area.Brain-Computer Interface, Developed at Brown, Begins New Clinical Trial Brown University (RI) (06/10/09) Hollmer, Mark The second clinical trial of the BrainGate Neural Interface System developed at Brown University is about to start at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. BrainGate is based on research and technology developed by professor John Donoghue, director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science. "The goal of our research is to harness the brain signals that ordinarily accompany movement and to translate those signals into actions on a computer, like moving a cursor on the screen, or the movement of a robotic or prosthetic limb," says fellow Brown professor and MGH neurologist Leigh Hochberg, who is leading the research with Donoghue. It was demonstrated in an earlier clinical trial that a computer can decode the neural signals associated with the intent to move a limb in real time and use them to operate external devices. The BrainGate interface involves a sensor implanted on a section of a study participant's motor cortex, and in earlier research sessions the computer was linked to the sensor via a pedestal on the subject's head. "We learned an incredible amount with the assistance of the first participants in the BrainGate trial, not only about how the motor cortex continues to work after paralyzing illness or injury, but also about how to harness these powerful intracortical signals for controlling computers and other assistive devices," Hochberg says. The hardware and software that decodes brain signals used to control assistive devices will be refined in the BrainGate2 trials. BrainGate2 is part of a larger research initiative to develop point-and-click capabilities on a computer screen, control a prosthetic limb or a robotic arm, control functional electrical stimulation of nerves severed from the brain due to paralysis, and further expand the neuroscience behind the field of intracortical neurotechnology.Social Networks Keep Privacy in the Closet Technology Review (06/11/09) Naone, Erica Social networks are being encouraged to downplay the privacy settings they build because of the tension between the desire to have users share as much personal information as possible and the need to protect that information and restrict how it is shared between users and outside their own borders. Privacy rights groups and activists are pressuring the networks to embed tools for users to control their information, but the networks also have an interest to keep privacy out of users' minds, according to research that will be presented at the Eighth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security. "Their goal is to create a very free-flowing environment where everybody is constantly sharing everything and seeing all this data on other people," says University of Cambridge researcher Joseph Bonneau. "The best way to achieve that is to not bring up the concept of privacy." The researchers studied 45 social-networking sites and determined that more popular sites did better with privacy overall because they face greater pressure to shield user data and also have more resources to address the problem. Bonneau says the disclosure of all sites' privacy practices could help put pressure on major sites to enhance the protection of users' information. Another researcher, Soren Preibusch, speculates that standardizing privacy settings could help users understand and control their information. University of Texas at Austin professor Vitaly Shmatikov is concerned that social networks will exacerbate the situation if they start focusing less on drawing new users and more on reaping profits from the ones they have.Experts Urge Federal Efforts on Cybersecurity Federal Computer Week (06/10/09) Bain, Ben The U.S. federal government needs to step up its cybersecurity efforts, experts from industry and academia recently told the House Science and Technology Committee's Research and Science Education Subcommittee. Information technology users are largely responsible for their own defense against cyberattacks, said Georgia Institute of Technology professor Seymour Goodman. He said the widespread use of cell phones and other mobile devices could lead to a tsunami in insecurity. "An effort must be made to get those people who are in the best position to mitigate risk to do so, and I think what should be done--and it's been done in other areas--industry and government need to get together, and they need to get together under some perhaps formal forum or other kind of an institutional mechanism with the mandate that they come up with greater security in cyberspace," Goodman said. Meanwhile, Applied Visions' Anita D'Amico said the government should put more money into research and development programs so that more projects can turn their work into products. Cornell University professor Fred Schneider said better formal and public cybersecurity education programs are needed. "We're not going to solve this problem only with Ph.D.s or only with bachelor's [degree] graduates," he said.Robotic Ferret Will Detect Hidden Drugs and Weapons Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (06/12/09) Scientists at the University of Sheffield have developed the first cargo-scanning device that can operate inside standard freight containers and detect illicit substances. The 30 cm-long robot ferret relies on sensors that use the latest laser and fiber-optic technology to detect tiny particles of different substances. The suite of advanced sensors enables the cargo-screening ferret to generate information on the shape and density of objects or substances, as well as on what they actually consist of. Placed inside a steel freight container, the robot ferret can attach itself magnetically to the top, automatically move around and seek out drugs, weapons, explosives, and illegal immigrants, sending a steady stream of information back to its controller. "The ferret will be able to drop small probes down through the cargo and so pinpoint exactly where contraband is concealed," says project leader Tony Dodd. The scientists hope to test working prototypes within two years, and believe that cargo-screening robot ferrets could be deployed in about five years.Does Parallel Processing Require New Languages? Government Computer News (06/05/09) Jackson, Joab The software-design community is split on the best approach for distributing their programs across a multicore architecture, and most programming languages were authored based on the assumption that only one processor would be working through the code sequentially. "The challenge is that we have not, in general, designed our applications to express parallelism," says Intel's James Reinders. He notes that parallel programming demands an approach with two areas of concentration--decomposing the problem so that it can be run in multiple parallel chunks, and achieving scalability. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is funding the development of new programming languages through its High Productivity Computing Systems program. The languages use the Partitioned Global Address Space architecture, which allows multiple processors to share a global pool of memory while also permitting the programmer to retain individual threads in specified logical partitions so they will be as close to the data as possible in order to exploit the speed upgrade supported by locality. Reinders contends that coder needs would be better served by extending commonly used languages instead of building new parallel-specific languages. He says the DARPA-developed languages would be too complicated for programmers to learn, and stresses that "people with legacy code need tools that have strong attention to the languages they've written and give them an incremental approach to add parallelism."Facebook Games for a Better Music Search Engine UCSD News (06/03/09) Kane, Daniel University of California, San Diego (UCSD) engineers have designed games for use on Facebook to improve their experimental music search engine. The search engine is capable of listening to new songs and automatically labeling them with keywords without human input. In April, the engineers launched the Facebook games in an application called Herd It. "The Facebook games are a lot of fun and a great way to discover new music," says UCSD professor Gert Lanckriet. "At the same time, the games deliver the data we need to teach our computer audition system to listen to and describe music like humans do." In Herd It, players select a genre of music and listen to song clips while playing the games. Some games ask players to identify instruments, while others focus on identifying music genres, artist names, emotions triggered by the song, and activities listeners could do while the song is playing. The more a player's answers match the other players' answers the more points are awarded. The song-word combinations collected through the game will enable the researchers to expand the search engine's vocabulary and the number of genres it comprehends. To label songs, the program searches for patterns in the music using machine learning. The Facebook games provide data for the algorithms to learn to label songs on their own.

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• 10 Jun 2009 21:35

  Welcome to the June 10, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. China Dominates NSA-Backed Coding Contest Opening Doors on the Way to a Personal Robot Extracting Meaning From Millions of Pages Computing Research That Changed the World--VIDEOS! No More Geeky Glasses to Watch 3D The Future of Robots Is Rat-Shaped World's Best Data Mining Knowledge and Expertise on Show in Paris at KDD-09 Is the Hacking Threat to National Security Overblown? Visual System that Detects Movement, Colors and Textures Created in Granada Supercomputing From Clusters to Clouds Swiss Supercomputer 'Monte Rosa' Switches On Improved Techniques Will Help Control Heat in Large Data Centers China Dominates NSA-Backed Coding Contest Computerworld (06/08/09) Thibodeau, Patrick The TopCoder Open, a National Security Agency-supported contest that tests individuals' programming and technology design skills, was dominated by competitors from China and Russia. Of the 70 finalists, 20 were from China, 10 were from Russia, and two were from the United States. Approximately 4,200 people participated in the contest, which is open to anyone, with about 894 contestants being from China, 705 from India, 380 from Russia, 234 from the United States, 214 from Poland, 145 from Egypt, and 128 from Ukraine, among others. The vast majority of contestants, 93 percent, were male, with 84 percent between the ages of 18 and 24. TopCoder's Rob Hughes says the success of China, Russia, and Eastern Europe is the result of the importance those countries place on mathematics and science education. "We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there," Hughes says. The United States needs to make greater efforts to teach and get children in middle school and high school involved in math and science, he says. Of the participants in the content, more than 57 percent had bachelor's degrees, mostly in computer science, of which 20 percent had earned a master's degree, and 6 percent had earned a Ph.D. The winner of the algorithm was an 18-year-old student from China. TopCoder contestants are tested in design, development, and architecture, among other areas. This year, competitors were challenged to unscramble and label two scrambled and erased social networks to see if they could possibly be from the same group of people, a problem known as the network isomorphism problem. Two contestants solved the problem.Opening Doors on the Way to a Personal Robot New York Times (06/09/09) P. D2; Markoff, John The ability to open doors is a significant step forward for robotics and an important milestone toward a personal robot industry. Such a milestone has been reached with Willow Garage's PR2, an experimental wheeled machine that was able to open and pass through 10 doors and plug itself into 10 standard wall sockets to recharge itself in less than 60 minutes. The PR2 has a maximum travel speed of 1.25 miles per hour, and it perceives its surroundings with a combination of sensors that include scanning lasers and video cameras. Stanford University roboticist Andrew Ng says PR2 appears to be the first robot capable of repeatedly and reliably opening doors and plugging itself in. Willow Garage is attempting to develop a new generation of robotic personal assistants by building a Robot Operating System (ROS), an open source project that seeks to take advantage of contributions from robotics experts around the world. Willow Garage CEO Steve Cousins says that a team of University of Tokyo roboticists recently tweaked the Willow Garage ROS to function on a machine they were developing. "The eventual goal is to provide a set of capabilities that are so generic and so universal that they can be used as building blocks in more complicated applications," says Willow Garage board member and Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory director Sebastian Thrun.Extracting Meaning From Millions of Pages Technology Review (06/10/09) Talbot, David University of Washington researchers have developed an automated information extraction software engine that mines meaning out of more than 500 million Web pages, contributed by Google, by analyzing fundamental relationships between words. The project expands the scale of the TextRunner application in terms of the number of pages and the breadth of topics it can examine. "The significance of TextRunner is that it is scalable because it is unsupervised," says Google research director Peter Norvig. "It can discover and learn millions of relations, not just one at a time. With TextRunner, there is no human in the loop: It just finds relations on its own." University of Washington researcher and project leader Oren Etzioni says the prototype still has a simple interface and is meant to function as a demonstration of automated information extraction rather than as a public search tool. "This work reflects a growing trend toward the design of search tools that actively combine the pieces of information they find on the Web into a larger synthesis," notes Cornell University scientist Jon Kleinberg. The University of Washington researchers are now working on the building of inferences from natural-language queries, using TextRunner as a jumping-off point.Computing Research That Changed the World--VIDEOS! Computing Community Consortium (06/07/09) The Computing Community Consortium held a day-long symposium at the Library of Congress in late March titled "Computing Research That Changed the World: Reflections and Perspectives." Ed Lazowska from the University of Washington gave the introductory talk, "Changing the World," and the symposium offered four sessions, which are now available as videos at http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium_slides.php. The first was titled The Internet and the World Wide Web, and included a presentation by University of California, Berkeley's Eric Brewer on "The Magic of the 'Cloud': Supercomputers for Everybody, Everywhere." Google's Alfred Spector gave the talk "Why We're Able to Google" and a presentation by Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University was titled "Human Computation." The second session, Evolving Foundations, included the talk "Global Information Networks" by Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University, who won the 2008 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences, and the presentation "Security of Online Information" by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Barbara Liskov, who won the 2008 ACM A.M. Turing Award. Transformation of the Sciences via Computation, the third session, offered the discussions "Supercomputers and Supernetworks are Transforming Research" by Larry Smarr of the University of California, San Diego, and "Computing and Visualizing the Future of Medicine" by Chris Johnson of the University of Utah. For the fourth session, Computing Everywhere!, UCLA's Deborah Estrin discussed sensing, Stanford University's Pat Hanrahan focused on pixels, and MIT's Rodney Brooks addressed robotics. Videos of all the presentations will be available on the ACM Queue web site, queue.acm.org, in the immediate future.No More Geeky Glasses to Watch 3D ICT Results (06/10/09) European researchers are working on technology that may make it unnecessary to wear special eyewear in order to watch three-dimensional (3D) video. The breakthrough was accomplished through the HOLOVISION project, which ended in April 2008, and the OSIRIS project, which will be completed at the end of 2009. The chief goal of the HOLOVISION effort was to develop technologies that could generate a very high-resolution 3D image. "We basically organized projection engines in a special way and used holographic imaging film for the display screen," says Akos Demeter of Holografika. "The combination of these, with the projection engines being driven by a cluster of nine high-end PCs, and new sophisticated software, allowed us to achieve our aims." HOLOVISION yielded a prototype system with about 10 times the resolution of high-definition TV at 25 frames per second in six colors, rather than the standard three. One of OSIRIS' key objectives is the development of high-resolution, big screen, reflective projection 3D cinema, and the prototype being worked on has a wall-mounted screen and a ceiling-mounted projector. The OSIRIS technology employs an array of mirrors and light sources to provide the re-projected images and give the screen a depth of between 15 and 20 inches. Holografika's Zsuzsa Dobranyi envisions military combat training and gaming as potential applications for the technology, while computer-aided design and other industrial and professional applications could be rolled out in a matter of months.The Future of Robots Is Rat-Shaped Agence France Presse (France) (06/07/09) Hautefeuille, Annie Some roboticists believe that artificial intelligence researchers are following the wrong path by trying to replicate human intelligence, and a better approach would be to start at a lower level and work out simpler abilities that humans and animals have in common, such as navigating, avoiding danger, and searching for food. France's Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR) is working on a robot whose intelligence and body is modeled after the rat. ISIR is developing a rat robot called Psikharpax that uses wheels to move around and has two cameras for eyes and a pair of microphones for ears. The robot rat is outfitted with artificial whiskers to sense obstacles, as its real-life counterpart does. Data from the whiskers is fed into a chip whose software hierarchy mirrors the structures in a rat's brain that process and analyze visual, auditory, and sensual input. Training the rodent droid to survive in new environments--by detecting and circumventing objects, avoiding collisions, and spotting opportunities to recharge itself--is the goal of the experiment. "We want to make robots that are able to look after themselves and depend on humans as least as possible," says ISIR researcher Agnes Guillot. "If we want to send a robot to Mars, or help someone in a flat that we don't know, the robot has to have the ability to figure out things out for itself."World's Best Data Mining Knowledge and Expertise on Show in Paris at KDD-09 Business Wire (06/08/09) Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 2009 (KDD-09), organized by ACM's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, will offer more than 120 presentations by data-mining experts from around the world and is expected to be attended by more than 600 leading data-mining researchers, academics, and practitioners. "Some of the best minds from the scientific and business communities will be there, ready and willing to share the results of their cutting-edge research and data-mining projects with end users," says KDD-09 joint chair Francoise Soulie Fogelman. "No other industry event offers anything like the depth and breadth of expertise on offer here." Social network analysis will be a focus of KDD-09. Data mining experts also will focus on using real-time Web applications for data mining for custom advertising and personalized offers. KDD-09 will take place June 28 through July 1 in Paris.Is the Hacking Threat to National Security Overblown? Wired News (06/03/09) Singel, Ryan U.S. President Obama recently made cybersecurity a national priority, but at the ACM's Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference, Threat Level editor Kevin Poulsen asked whether hacking and cyberattacks are an actual threat to the United States or simply the latest exaggerated threat to national security. Former Bush administration cybersecurity czar Amit Yoran says that hacking is absolutely a national security threat, and cites stories about the denial-of-service attacks against Estonia, attacks against government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, and the recently reported breach of defense contractor computers that gave the attackers access to information on the Joint Strike Fighter. Poulsen says the threat of cyberterrorism is "preposterous," pointing out the long-standing threat that hackers would attack the power grid, which has never happened, and arguing that calling such potential attacks national security threats means that information about any possibility of defeated attacks is unnecessarily classified. "If we can't publicly share info that the attackers already have--since it's about them--then we are doing far more harm than good," says Poulsen, who argues that classification makes it impossible for the security community to, as a whole, prepare defenses for such attacks. Furthermore, Poulsen points out that the Joint Strike Fighter attack involved only unclassified information. However, security expert Bruce Schneier says there will be cyberattacks that affect the real world, though the current threat is exaggerated. "Passive defenses alone are not sufficient," says National Research Council cyberattack expert Herb Lin. "You have to impose costs on an attacker and maybe the only way to do that is a cyberattack yourself."Visual System that Detects Movement, Colors and Textures Created in Granada Plataforma SINC (06/08/09) A University of Granada research team has evaluated the accuracy of several models that estimate movement, and combined the responses of four movement detection cells, two of which are static, either on or off, and two are transitory, which have varying degrees. The objective was to create an artificial retina by combining movement and attention data based on information provided by a visual system capable of selectively capturing moving objects in real time. An event-driven model, which allows the system to focus only on areas of activity, was critical to the process in both the movement processing model and in the multimodal selective attention model. One result of the study is the ability to estimate movement reasonably accurately using the responses from the four cells. "By selecting only 10 to 20 percent of the information, which we selected on the basis of reliability of the measurements, we obtained precise results at a lower computational cost and with greater stability," says Granada researcher Fran Barranco. The researchers also developed advanced integrated intelligent sensors that can pre-process a scene using techniques similar to those used by retinas. The devices created by the project are designed for use in video surveillance and monitoring applications, though their low power consumption also makes them well suited for implants in patients or in research dedicated to understanding the brain, particularly the visual system.Supercomputing From Clusters to Clouds Northwestern University News Center (06/03/09) Monroe, Ian; Berret, Charles; Leonard, Michael Scott The Intrepid supercomputer is the largest installation of IBM's Blue Gene architecture to date. Part of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, the $77 million supercomputer, the fifth fastest in the world, is used in a limited number of projects selected by the U.S. Department of Energy for their potential scientific significance. Some of the projects that will use the supercomputer this year include an experiment by University of Washington researcher David Baker designed to predict protein structures, and an Argonne project that will examine fluid flow inside nuclear reactor cores. The supercomputer draws a massive amount of power, 1.2 megawatts, for both its computing and ancillary systems, which is why Argonne scientists are working on ways of optimizing when software runs based on generated heat. Argonne's Mike Papka says some software run hotter than others, and programs that continuously run a processor at full capacity could run approximately 20 degrees hotter than programs that run intermittently. Part of Argonne's efforts to advance supercomputing is Nimbus, cloud computing software that allows nontechnical users to setup a virtual supercomputer at a low cost and in only a few minutes. Cloud computing can be used to pool the processing power, memory, and storage space of thousands of remote, small, and inexpensive computers to create virtual supercomputers. Nimbus is intended for scientific users, who can access a variety of science-related clouds for free, providing universities and researchers with access to computing power that previously may have been unobtainable.Swiss Supercomputer 'Monte Rosa' Switches On Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (06/04/09) The Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) has completed the upgrade to its Monte Rosa supercomputer, making it the most powerful computer in Switzerland with a peak performance of 141.6 teraflops. The Monte Rosa supercomputer's peak performance has improved more than eightfold over its predecessor, making CSCS one of the world's leading high performance computing centers in terms of computer capacity. CSCS scientists say the Monte Rosa will place in the top 50 at the international supercomputer conference in Hamburg this June, where the top 500 fastest supercomputers will be announced. The machine's 14,752 processors are capable of performing 141 trillion computer operations per second. Swiss researchers have been called upon to submit high-impact projects involving challenging simulations that were previously impossible due to a lack of sufficient large-scale computing facilities. The CSCS is using these projects to test the capabilities of Monte Rosa. Despite the recent completion of Monte Rosa, CSCS team members are already planning the next upgrade, aiming to provide users with a petaflop computer capable of performing a quadrillion computer operations per second.Improved Techniques Will Help Control Heat in Large Data Centers Georgia Institute of Technology (06/02/09) Toon, John About a third of the electricity consumed by large data centers is used for cooling the servers, an amount that is expected to rise as computer processing power expands and as cloud computing grows increasingly popular. "Some people have called this the Moore's Law of data centers," says Georgia Institute of Technology professor Yogendra Joshi. "The growth of cooling requirements parallels the growth of computing power, which roughly doubles every 18 months. That has brought the energy requirements of data centers into the forefront." Georgia Tech researchers are using a 1,100-sqaure foot simulation data center to optimize cooling strategies and develop new heat transfer models that designers can use to improve future data centers and equipment. The researchers' goal is to reduce the percentage of electricity used to cool data centers by as much as 15 percent. Most data centers rely on large air conditioning units to pump cool air into server racks, and traditional data centers have used raised floors to allow air to circulate beneath equipment. As cooling demands have increased, data center designers have developed systems of alternating cooling outlets and hot air returns throughout the facilities. "How these are arranged is very important to how much cooling power will be required," Joshi says. "There are ways to rearrange equipment within data centers to promote better air flow and greater energy efficiency, and we are exploring ways to improve those." The Georgia Tech simulated data center features different cooling systems, partitions to change room sizes, and both real and simulated server racks. Fog generators and lasers are used to visualize air flow patterns, infrared sensors quantify heat, airflow sensors measure the output of fans and other systems, and thermometers measure temperatures on server motherboards.

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