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• 07 Nov 2009 05:35

  Welcome to the November 6, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Online Collaboration With Built-In Clarity Secretary Clinton Announces New Initiatives to Bolster Science and Technology Collaboration With Muslim Communities Around the World US and Australia Dominate MAGIC Robot Competition Short List Dartmouth Professor Finds That Iconic Oswald Photo Was Not Faked Applause for the SmartHand ACM Announces Initiative for Long-Term Preservation of Content in Its Digital Library MU Research Leads to Improved Human, Object Detection Technology A New System Preserves the Right to Privacy in Internet Searches Innovation Spending Looks Recession-Resistant Tim Berners-Lee: Machine-Readable Web Still a Ways Off Futurists' Report Acknowledges Dangers of Smart Robots $1.2M Project Speeds Research Data Processing UM Students to Experiment With Future Ford Sync System Applications Online Collaboration With Built-In Clarity ICT Results (11/06/09) The European ECOSPACE project has developed a standardized architecture for online group collaboration. The project's researchers analyzed collaboration applications from various companies to identify the most common and essential aspects of the programs. The researchers then used their findings to develop a standardized architecture with software building blocks, or basic collaboration services, which would allow the collaboration applications to interoperate. The architecture uses a semantic ontology to define and correlate the concepts and terms used by the applications. Prototypes of the system allow users of common collaboration tools to all work on the same documents and projects. The ECOSPACE project also developed several tools to eliminate other barriers to online collaboration, including understanding who is available for collaboration, what their job is, and how they are progressing. One development is an expectation awareness tool that automatically tracks users' expectations, and can help keep users aware of upcoming deadlines or notify them when a deadline has been missed. The tool makes goals and expectations explicit. Meanwhile, ECOSPACE's collaboration mining tool oversees a project's progression by keeping track of who is making changes or is involved in an online project, information that is normally not visible.Secretary Clinton Announces New Initiatives to Bolster Science and Technology Collaboration With Muslim Communities Around the World National Science Foundation (11/04/09) Zacharias, Maria C. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently announced new initiatives aimed at promoting science and technology collaboration with Muslim communities around the world. Clinton named Bruce Alberts, Elias Zerhouni, and Ahmed Zewail as the first three U.S. Science and Technology Envoys. Clinton also announced that the State Department will expand positions for environment, science, technology, and health officers at U.S. embassies. "We want to help Muslim majority communities develop the capacity to meet economic, social, and ecological challenges through science, technology, and innovation," Clinton says. The U.S. Science Envoy program is part of President Obama's New Beginning initiative with Muslim communities. At a speech in Cairo, Egypt, Obama pledged that the United States would "appoint new science envoys to collaborate on programs that develop new sources of energy, create green jobs, digitize records, clean water, and grow new crops." Over the next few months, the science envoys will visit countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia to form partnerships in all areas of science and technology. The envoys will be supported by new embassy officers who will engage international partners on a range of environmental, scientific, and health issues.US and Australia Dominate MAGIC Robot Competition Short List Computerworld Australia (11/06/09) Clarke, Trevor The organizers of the Multi-Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge (MAGIC) have created a list of 12 teams to develop their proposals. Ten teams will receive $50,000, and the remaining two teams have the opportunity to self-fund their projects. The U.S. Department of Defense and Australia's Defense Science & Technology Organization are sponsoring MAGIC to encourage innovation in robotics, including next-generation military robots. "The quality of the submissions was very strong and exceeded our expectations," says Greg Combet, Australia's Minister for Defense Personnel, Material, and Science. The competition received 23 entries, and the final list included five teams from the United States, four from Australia, and one each from Canada, Japan, and Turkey. The list will be reduced in June 2010 to five teams, which will receive another $50,000 to complete their projects for a Grand Challenge Event that will take place in Australia in November 2010. Most of the teams are partnerships between universities and companies.Dartmouth Professor Finds That Iconic Oswald Photo Was Not Faked Dartmouth News (11/05/09) Knapp, Susan Dartmouth College computer scientist Hany Farid says the iconic photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle and Marxist newspapers is not a fake and was almost certainly not altered. Oswald and others claimed the photograph was a forgery due to seemingly inconsistent lighting and shadows. Farid and his team have developed digital forensic tools to determine if digital photos have been manipulated. The tools can measure statistical inconsistencies in the underlying image pixels, improbable lighting and shadow, physically impossible perspective distortion, and other changes made by photo manipulation. "The human brain, while remarkable in many aspects, also has its weaknesses," Farid says. "The visual system can be quite inept at making judgments regarding 3D geometry, lighting, and shadows." The lighting and shadows in the Oswald photo appear to be incongruous with outdoor lighting. To test this possibility, Farid created a three-dimensional model of Oswald's head and portions of the backyard scene, which he used to determine that a single light source--the sun--could explain all of the shadows in the photo. "It is highly improbable that anyone could have created such a perfect forgery with the technology available in 1963," Farid says. "As our digital forensic tools become more sophisticated, we increasingly have the ability to apply them to historic photos in an attempt to resolve some long-standing mysteries."Applause for the SmartHand American Friends of Tel Aviv University (11/04/09) Tel Aviv University (TAU) researchers and European scientists have succeeded in wiring an artificial hand to the existing nerve endings in the stump of a person with a severed arm. The bionic hand, called the SmartHand, resembles a real hand in function, sensitivity, and appearance. It features four electric motors and 40 sensors to replicate the movement of a human hand and provide a sensation of feeling and touch. The project's first human subject has been able to perform complicated tasks such as eating and writing, and says he has been able to "feel" his fingers once again. TAU researchers developed the interface between the body's nerves and the device's electronics. "Perfectly good nerve endings remain at the stem of a severed limb," says TAU professor Yosi Shacham-Diamand. "Our team is building the interface between the device and the nerves in the arm, connecting cognitive neuroscience with state-of-the-art information technologies." He says the challenge was to make an electrode that was not only flexible but that could be implanted in the human body and function properly for at least 20 years. After only a few training sessions, the human subject is operating the artificial hand as if it was his own, Shacham-Diamand says. The researchers say the same technology could be used to build a bionic leg. They say the SmartHand prototype currently looks very "bionic," but future versions could have artificial skin that will look human and provide the brain with even more tactile feedback.ACM Announces Initiative for Long-Term Preservation of Content in Its Digital Library ACM (11/05/09) ACM announced that it is providing institutional library customers with advanced electronic archiving services to help preserve their electronic resources. The services, which will be provided by Portico and CLOCKSS, address the scholarly community's need for long-term solutions for reliable, secure, and deliverable access to their growing collections of digital content. ACM is providing these services to protect the online collection of resources in its Digital Library, which is used by more than 1 million computing professionals and students around the world. "By partnering with Portico and CLOCKSS, we are able to meet a growing demand in the library community for a trusted, reliable third-party archive, and to ensure that digital collections remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students," says ACM Group Publisher Scott Delman. "Scientific discovery and the educational process are not possible without reliable access to the accumulated scholarship of the past and secure preservation of the scholarly record, and these agreements are a clear step forward with the relationship between the ACM and the library community." ACM hopes that the long-term digital preservation of content will make it easier for libraries to free up resources invested in print collections in favor of innovative electronic products and services. Portico preserves material through migration, which involves transitioning content from one file format to another as technology advances and file formats become obsolete. CLOCKSS uses Archive Nodes, which are stored at libraries chosen to be the custodians of the archived materials, and are located throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.MU Research Leads to Improved Human, Object Detection Technology MU News Bureau (MO) (11/02/09) Jackson, Kelsey University of Missouri researchers are developing software that would enable computers to search within videos and identify humans and specific objects, as well as perform other video analysis tasks. "The goal of our research is to improve how computers interpret the content of a video and how to identify it," says Missouri professor Tony Han. "There are lots of possibilities with video-based detection, and it could come at quite a low cost compared to object and human detection using other sensors, such as thermal sensors." Intelligent video surveillance would enable automated systems to quickly call for help if it detects that a human is falling, or make a car stop immediately if it detects a pedestrian in its way, for example. Han and his students are developing algorithms for automatic object detection, and have manually labeled more than 3,000 images with object locations to test their algorithms. This fall, Han and his students participated in the PASCAL grand challenge in object detection, a contest in which researchers compete to detect objects in 20 categories. Han and his team came in first place for detecting potted plants and chairs and second place for detecting humans, cars, horses, and bikes.A New System Preserves the Right to Privacy in Internet Searches Plataforma SINC (11/05/09) Researchers from Rovira i Virgili University, Autonoma of Barcelona, and Oberta of Catalonia have developed a system that protects the privacy of Internet search engine users through a new computer protocol. "It is a model based on cryptographic tools, which distort the profile of users when they use search engines on Internet in such a way that their privacy is preserved," says Rovira i Virgili University's Alexandre Viego. The researchers note that there are systems that provide anonymous navigation, but say their system provides a significant improvement in response time over anonymous systems, though it still delays searches slightly. The new protocol has already been tested in both closed research center intranets and on the Internet, and the results have made the researchers optimistic about a global implementation model. The researchers are currently working on the development of a final user version, and believe that it will soon be easy to integrate the system into the major platforms and browsers.Innovation Spending Looks Recession-Resistant New York Times (10/30/09) Lohr, Steve Corporate research and development (R&D) spending and patent activity have held up surprisingly well during the recession, according to a new Booz & Company survey of the 1,000 largest R&D spenders. The survey found that R&D budgets rose 5.7 percent during the recession in 2008, compared with a 10 percent increase in 2007. "The thing that surprised us was that R&D spending didn't actually drop," says Booz partner Barry Jaruzelski. "But innovation is a fundamental strategy for these companies to hold onto their markets and gain an edge on their competitors." The survey indicates that 70 percent plan to maintain or increase their R&D spending in 2009. Spending varied by industry, with 90 percent of the top-spending auto companies cutting back, while 80 percent of the top-spending software and Internet companies increased their spending. Booz also found that innovation activity tends to be resilient in economic downturns, noting that patent applications increased 25 percent during the Depression years of 1929 through 1932. Patent applications rose to 505,596 in 2008, and about 520,000 are expected to be filed this year. Many of the applications involve alternative energy, energy conservation, nanotechnology, and smartphone hardware and software.Tim Berners-Lee: Machine-Readable Web Still a Ways Off Government Computer News (10/30/09) Jackson, Joab World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee says the machine-readable Web is still a ways off and faces numerous obstacles. He says recent initiatives such as the U.S. government's Data.gov, specifically its spreadsheets and application programming interfaces, do not do enough to improve the reusability of data. There also are not enough commercial products available to easily transition Web sites to the Semantic Web. Berners-Lee says data published online should be put in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). However, he says few Web site managers are trained in RDF, and few Web development applications use the standard, so semantic Web enthusiasts need to reach out to the rest of the world to encourage its adoption. The use of RDF should not require building new systems, or changing how site administrators operate, according to Berners-Lee. Instead, scripts can be written in Python, Perl, or other languages to convert data in spreadsheets or relational databases into RDF for end users. Berners-Lee says the Semantic Web's complexity is partially responsible for its slow uptake, and he notes that supporting RDF "is still remarkably difficult as a paradigm shift."Futurists' Report Acknowledges Dangers of Smart Robots Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (PA) (11/02/09) Cronin, Mike A forthcoming report from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) will explore whether robots could eventually become so intelligent that they pose a threat to society. Although some researchers are concerned about the legal and ethical use of artificial intelligence, most computer scientists do not believe the radical view that robots could come to dominate the future, says Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz, who united the group to write the report. However, some researchers believe intelligent machines could threaten humanity, while others are concerned about what people may do with computers based on artificial intelligence. Horvitz says there is still plenty of time to address these concerns as the technology advances. The report marks the first time that AAAI scientists have come together to discuss artificial intelligence's potential positive and negative impacts on society, Horvitz says. Carnegie Mellon University professor Tom Mitchell says the real danger is the prospect of computer viruses becoming intelligent. Mitchell says an intelligent virus with speech-recognition abilities could be hidden in someone's electronic device and eavesdrop on conversations. Toyota Technical Institute at Chicago professor David McAllester believes it is inevitable that fully automated intelligent machines will be able to design and build smarter, better versions of themselves, an event known as the Singularity. The Singularity would enable machines to become infinitely intelligent, and would pose an "incredibly dangerous scenario," he says. The report also focuses on ethical and legal issues that are likely to arise as robots become more ingrained in society.$1.2M Project Speeds Research Data Processing University of Western Ontario (10/29/09) Mayne, Paul Canada's Advanced Research and Innovation Network has provided $1.2 million to researchers at the University of Western Ontario to develop a new high-speed network for handling huge amounts of research data from synchrotrons in Canada and the United States. When completed, Active Network for Information for Synchrotron Experiments (ANISE) will be capable of processing and providing feedback on data moving at rates of up to 10 terabytes per day. Synchrotrons have largely been used to gather and store data until now, says Mike Bauer, director of Western's Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network (SHARCNET). ANISE will allow for near real-time processing and enable users of synchrotrons to respond to experimental data within minutes. The project promises to improve the efficiency of labs, as their industrial and academic partners around the world would no longer have to wait days to analyze data. Researchers from SHARCNET will work with Canadian Light Source, IBM Canada, and IBM Research on the project.UM Students to Experiment With Future Ford Sync System Applications Crain's Detroit Business (10/29/09) Walsh, Dustin Ford Motor is giving University of Michigan (UM) electrical engineering and computer science students an opportunity to create software for future generations of its Sync system. Ford has partnered with the university's College of Engineering to launch "American Journey 2.0," a research project in which students will develop, beta test, and program open source applications for their in-car connectivity concept. The Sync system makes use of technologies such as data-over-voice, global positioning systems, and a text-to-speech engine, and Ford now wants to take advantage of social networking capabilities and other Web 2.0 functions. The students are likely to develop applications that will track driving habits and offer gas mileage tips, as well as social networking applications. "Research like this pushes the envelope of current technology and helps us identify and solve the next set of challenges in the evolving arena of vehicle connectivity," says UM professor Jason Flinn. "What excites me about this project is that it gives our students the opportunity to unleash their creativity using cutting-edge technologies that connect the vehicle and the 'cloud.' " The winning application will be installed in a Ford Fiesta, and the team will take it to the 2010 Maker Faire convention.

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• 04 Nov 2009 23:16

  Welcome to the November 4, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Amir Pnueli, Distinguished Computer Scientist and Researcher, Dies Social Networking Meets Ambient Intelligence Is the U.S. Killing Its Innovation Machine? NC State Research Shows Way to Block Stealthy Malware Attacks Robots Primed for 'Are You Being Served' Role in Arabic Anita Borg Institute, CSTA and the University of Arizona Hold K12 Computing Teachers Workshop First Test for Election Cryptography Animated Ink-Blot Images Keep Unwanted Bots at Bay HTML 5 Progresses Despite Challenges AI Spacesuits Turn Astronauts Into Cyborg Biologists New Keys for the Diffusion of Information in Social Networks New Honeypot Mimics the Web Vulnerabilities Attackers Want to Exploit Taking a Touching Approach to Transport Ticketing and Home Care for the Elderly Will Smart Grid power IPv6? Endowment Fund to Support ICT Research Amir Pnueli, Distinguished Computer Scientist and Researcher, Dies ACM (11/04/98) New York University computer science professor and ACM A.M. Turing Award winner Amir Pnueli passed away suddenly on Nov. 2. He received international recognition as a pioneer in verification, the process of formally demonstrating that systems behave as their designers intended. Pnueli's introduction of temporal logic, a formal method for specifying and reasoning about the behavior of systems over time, to computer science earned him ACM's 1996 Turing Award. The award praised his 1977 paper, "The Temporal Logic of Programs," as a landmark in the field of reasoning about dynamic system behavior. Pnueli additionally shared the 2007 ACM Software System Award for Statemate, a software engineering instrument that lets developers formally specify their programs' exact desired behavior.Social Networking Meets Ambient Intelligence ICT Results (11/04/09) European researchers working on the ASTRA project are combining the instant sharing capabilities of social networking with emerging ambient intelligence systems that use sensors and smart objects to create an awareness of a user's activities. The researchers say that combining the two technologies could create a new way to stay in touch with friends and relatives. The ASTRA system would use smart objects and sensors distributed throughout a person's office or home to continually update their status information, automatically informing friends and families if a user is busy in a meeting or doing a chore and unable to answer the phone, for example. "Not only is this information generated automatically, depending on the criteria set by each user, but it does not have to be displayed on a computer screen or in any other distracting way," says the Research Academic Computer Technology Institute's Achilles Kameas. "In a smart home or office environment, the system could let users know if someone is available for a phone call or not simply by changing the color of the frame of a photo of them." Phillips Electronics and mobile operator Telenor are conducting trials of the ASTRA technology, and Kameas says the response from test users has been positive, though some have raised concerns about privacy and security issues. He says the ASTRA system is similar to Facebook in that users can determine how much information is shared and who has access to that information. The researchers plan to launch a follow-up initiative for adaptive pervasive awareness systems based on the concept of a trustworthy personal "bubble" to ensure privacy.Is the U.S. Killing Its Innovation Machine? HarvardBusiness.org (11/03/09) Patterson, David A. The Bush administration's edict that the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) give the lead role in information technology (IT) research projects to companies rather than academia has severely weakened the U.S. IT industry. Restoring the original model is key to undoing the damage and protecting the country's global domination of IT, writes University of California, Berkeley professor and former ACM president David A. Patterson. Another flaw in the Bush-era DARPA operational model was the requirement that DARPA-funded programs reach milestones in 12 to 18 months or face cancellation, a prospect that Patterson calls "absurd." He writes that as a result of these policies, "not much progress has been made in solving some of the biggest IT problems confronting us. One worth singling out in particular is developing technology so software can run on multi-core, or parallel, processors." Patterson says that under the leadership of Tony Tether, DARPA allocated tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to private companies, but none of the research they performed with those funds has made much of a dent in the parallel processing challenge. He warns that if another nation successfully meets this challenge, "the software center of the universe could move from the United States to someplace else."NC State Research Shows Way to Block Stealthy Malware Attacks NCSU News (11/03/09) Shipman, Matt North Carolina State University (NCSU) researchers have developed a way to block rootkits and prevent them from contaminating computer systems. Rootkits often work by hijacking a number of hooks, or control data, in a computer's operating system. "By taking control of these hooks, the rootkit can intercept and manipulate the computer system's data at will," says NCSU professor Xuxian Jiang. To prevent a rootkit from taking over an operating system, Jiang's research team determined that all of an operating system's hooks had to be protected. "The challenging part is that an operating system may have tens of thousands of hooks--any of which could potentially be exploited for a rootkit's purposes," Jiang says. "Our research leads to a new way that can protect all the hooks in an efficient way, by moving them to a centralized place and thus making them easier to manage and harder to subvert." By placing all of the hooks in one place, the researchers were able to leverage hardware-based memory protection to prevent the hooks from being hijacked. The research will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Chicago on November 12.Robots Primed for 'Are You Being Served' Role in Arabic Agence France Presse (11/03/09) Galal, Ola Researchers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have developed "the world's first Arabic-speaking conversational humanoid robot," says UAE University professor Nikolaos Mavridis. The robot, named Ibn Sina, could be used as a receptionist, sales staff, or shopping assistant, Mavridis says. "There [are] a number of things he can do on his own: answer a couple of questions, connect to the Internet to get information and show you things on the screen regarding what you want to buy," he says. "We're very close to being able to get him to work as a receptionist or a helper in a mall." The robot speaks in classical Arabic, and can answer questions with human-like facial expressions. The physical robot, including motors used to make facial expressions, was created by Hanson Robotics, while UAE University researchers developed the software. Mavridis and his team worked for more than a year to develop the software that functions as the mind of the robot and provides vision, speech, memory, and motion. The robot can detect faces and objects, transcribe speech to text, and understand people speaking and talk back.Anita Borg Institute, CSTA and the University of Arizona Hold K12 Computing Teachers Workshop Business Wire (11/03/09) The high level of interest in the first K–12 Computing Teachers Equity Workshop at the 2009 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing indicates that computer science and information technology teachers are very concerned about engaging an increasingly diverse student population. More than 650 teachers applied for the workshop, and at least 100 attended the event. University of California, Los Angeles senior researcher Jane Margolis, author of "Stuck in the Shallow End: Race, Education, and Computing," delivered the keynote speech. The workshop addressed the need for systematic change in public education if underrepresented minority students and girls are to help meet the growing need for computing professionals. Participants discussed potential solutions for recruiting diverse students, teaching methods, and creating curriculum that appeals to diverse groups. A white paper on equity issues in computer science education will be published before the end of the year, and will include solutions for teachers, STEM practitioners, and other interested stakeholders. "The K12 Computing Teachers Workshop at the Grace Hopper Celebration was created to help address one of the greatest challenges facing the high technology industry, the need to bring more students into the technical pipeline," says the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology's Deanna Kosaraju.First Test for Election Cryptography Technology Review (11/02/09) Naone, Erica An election in Tacoma Park, Md., held this November will be the first to use Scantegrity, a new vote-counting system that uses cryptography to ensure that votes are cast and recorded accurately. Scantegrity's inventors say the system could eliminate the need for recounts and provide better assurance that an election was conducted properly. Scantegrity allows voters to check online to ensure their votes were counted correctly, and officials and independent auditors can check to make sure ballots were tallied properly without seeing how an individual voted. Scantegrity developer David Chaum says the system uses a familiar paper ballot, which requires that voters fill in the bubble next to the name of their preferred candidate. The ballot is then fed into a machine that scans it and secretly records the result. The difference from other systems is that a special type of ink and pen are used, and when the voter fills in a bubble on the ballot a previously invisible secret code appears. The voter can record the code or codes and check them online later. If the code appears in the online database, the ballot was counted correctly. Every ballot has its own randomly assigned codes, which prevents the process from revealing which candidates a voter selected. Auditors can ensure all votes were counted correctly by comparing a list of codes corresponding to votes and a list of the results. University of Maryland, Baltimore County professor Alan Sherman says Scantegrity is fundamentally better than other systems in regards to integrity, and makes it possible to audit elections with much greater accuracy and certainty.Animated Ink-Blot Images Keep Unwanted Bots at Bay New Scientist (11/03/09) Barras, Colin Indian Institute of Technology Dehli computer scientist Niloy Mitra says that Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) security tests would be more difficult for computers to solve, and easier for humans, if they were animated. Mitra, along with Tel Aviv University's Daniel Cohen-Or and colleagues in Taiwan, have developed "emerging images," which are seemingly random assortments of blotches from which a coherent image emerges after a few seconds. To create the emerging image, the researchers developed an algorithm that identifies key features within an original image and converts those features into an array of ink blots. The algorithm then removes a number of the splats to make it harder for bots to reconstruct the original shape while leaving enough information for a human to identify the image. The number of splats and the background noise can be adjusted to make the emerging image easier or harder to spot. Tests on 310 volunteers showed that 98 percent recognized more than 80 percent of the emerging images at the easy setting. And a test of three state-of-the-art software systems found that computers were only able to identify whether an image contained a horse or a human 51 percent to 60 percent of the time. When the researchers used the algorithm to convert three-dimensional animations into emerging videos, they found that all volunteers could spot the animated figure even when the emergence setting was on very hard. Mitra says adding animation makes recognition much easier for humans and much more difficult for computers.HTML 5 Progresses Despite Challenges InfoWorld (11/03/09) Krill, Paul Development of HTML5 is progressing, but the highly anticipated upgrade to the Web language still faces some major hurdles, particularly its lack of a standard video codec, says the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) Philippe Le Hegaret. HTML5 features new video capabilities, support for offline applications, and the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) specification. It is scheduled to move to a candidate recommendation phase by the end of 2010, which would last two years before final adoption could occur, according to Le Hegaret. "The underlying issue is finding a video format that is royalty-free," he says. "So far, we haven't been able to provide one video format that can satisfy everyone." Fallback scenarios could involve having a developer define a page to work in the Safari and Firefox browsers, and then provide two video formats. Le Hegaret says HTML5's multimedia capabilities could give developers less reason to use proprietary technologies such as Microsoft's Silverlight or Adobe Flash, except that those technologies would still be more advanced than HTML5. Although he praised SVG, which provides a language for describing two-dimensional graphics and graphical applications in XML, he said Microsoft's lack of support for SVG in Internet Explorer remains an "elephant in the room." However, Le Hegaret noted that Microsoft has not released plans for Internet Explorer 9, which could include SVG support.AI Spacesuits Turn Astronauts Into Cyborg Biologists Wired News (11/02/09) Keim, Brandon A research team led by University of Chicago geoscientist Patrick McGuire has successfully tested a feature-identifying system that could one day be used by "cyborg astrobiologists." The algorithms were able to pick out lichen from surrounding rock, and could be capable of handling other types of data. The team has incorporated a Hopfield neural network, a type of artificial intelligence for finding patterns in incoming data, into the system. McGuire envisions space explorers wearing data-crunching Hopfield networks on their hips. "You would have a very complex artificial intelligence system, with access to different remote sensing databases, to field work that's been done before in the area, and it would have the ability to reason about these in human-like ways," he says. McGuire hopes to train the network to process different textures, and then conduct analysis ranging from the microscopic to landscape-wide scales. The system could be used to search for Martian meteorites on Earth or uploaded to Mars-roving robots, until humans are ready to explore the surface of the planet on their own.New Keys for the Diffusion of Information in Social Networks Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain) (11/02/09) Information in social networks travels at an unexpectedly slow pace over the Internet with the exception of a few mass events, according to a study by researchers at Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) and IBM. The researchers say the spread of information in social networks is largely determined by the heterogeneity of internauts in their response time. Traditional models estimated that internauts respond in approximately one day and, consequently, it takes one day for information to be transmitted. However, the study found that the spread of information occurs at two speeds due to user activity. "Those who respond very quickly to emails, technology addicts who are always connected, are the ones responsible for spreading certain rumors or campaigns quickly via Internet," says UC3M professor Esteban Moro. The study found that more interesting information spreads faster because people forward the message more quickly. However, if information is not very interesting, diffusion is slower because it is controlled by people who take a long time to respond, causing some rumors or information to remain dormant in social networks long after it has been released. The researchers created a mathematical model that explains why viral campaigns take so long to work and assesses a campaign's potential impact. "With this experience, we have been able to predict, within a small margin of error, how many people will receive the information, and how long it will take to reach them," Moro says. "It is the first time that we have come up with quantitative models which enable us to predict what is happening."New Honeypot Mimics the Web Vulnerabilities Attackers Want to Exploit Dark Reading (10/29/09) Higgins, Kelly Jackson Glastopf is a new open source Web server honeypot project that enables researchers to study Internet attacks by acting as Web servers with thousands of vulnerabilities that provoke cybercriminals into attacking. Glastopf creator Lukas Rist says the program dynamically emulates vulnerabilities that attackers are looking for, so the decoy is more realistic and can gather more detailed information. "Many attackers are checking the vulnerability of the application before they inject malicious code," Rist says. "My project is the first Web application honeypot with a working vulnerability emulator able to respond properly to attacker requests." Rist built Glastopf through the Google Summer of Code program, in which student developers write code for open source projects. Glastopf uses a combination of known signatures of vulnerabilities and records the keywords an attacker uses when visiting the honeypot to ensure they are indexed in search engines, which attackers regularly use to find new targets. The project has a central database to collect Web attack data from the honeypot sensors, which are installed by participants who want to share their data with the database. "The project will contribute real-world data and statistics about attacks against Web apps--an area where we do not have good collection tools yet," says Rist's project mentor Thorsten Holz. He says Glastopf tricks an attacker by returning content that is often found on vulnerable versions of Web applications, such as characteristic version numbers or similar information.Taking a Touching Approach to Transport Ticketing and Home Care for the Elderly EUREKA (10/27/09) Tuikka, Tuomo The EUREKA ITEA software Cluster SmartTouch project used near-field communications (NFC) technologies to provide easy-to-use touch-based interactive mobile services, such as paying transportation fares or choosing a meal through a touch-based mobile device. The project has developed a service platform for a variety of uses, including accessing and controlling home entertainment and caring for the elderly. The ITEA project united a number of technology and service providers, researchers, and commercial companies to explore how NFC technology can be applied to commercial products. The project incorporated protocols, enablers, applications, security, and privacy, and created an inexpensive and open solution with no gateway requiring complex configurations. The ITEA consortium enabled participating companies to update their product portfolios with NFC technology, and a variety of commercial products and services are already being marketed as a direct result of the project, including a touch-based menu for ordering food; smart systems for paying for transportation, cinema tickets, and sporting events; and systems to enable the elderly to use electronics in the home. Will Smart Grid power IPv6? Network World (10/29/09) Marsan, Carolyn Duffy The Obama administration's effort to transform the U.S.'s electric transmission system into a smart grid could help accelerate the adoption of the next-generation Internet standard IPv6. The Smart Grid would deploy new smart electric meters, automated utility substations, and new sensor networks capable of capitalizing on the abundant space and built-in security provided by IPv6. The White House recently announced that it has awarded $3.4 billion in stimulus grants to electric utilities in support of 100 modernization projects. The grants are being matched by private sector funds for a total investment of more than $8 billion in the U.S.'s electricity grids over the next three years. Federal officials say the Smart Grid will support Internet standards, though it is still undecided whether it will support the current Internet architecture built on IPv4 or whether it will help promote IPv6. Although IPv6 has been available for more than a decade, its adoption has been slow due to a lack of an urgent driver to compel companies to upgrade their routers, servers, and applications to support IPv6. However, IPv4 is approaching the limits of its capacity in terms of space, and Internet experts say it is critical for Smart Grid projects to embrace IPv6. "If Smart Grid is going to be successful, it will support tens of millions of devices or potentially hundreds of millions of devices," says American Registry for Internet Number CEO John Curran. "We don't have that much IPv4 address space left for that project." The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) also is pushing for IPv6's adoption. "IPv6 is honestly a better solution," says former IETF chair Fred Baker. "If you're putting 5,000 homes in a single subnet, you can do that in IPv4, but I wouldn't want to try it … We can do it in a simpler, more scalable and more robust way with IPv6." View Full Article | Return to Headlines Endowment Fund to Support ICT Research CSIRO (10/22/09) Finlay, Jo Australia will continue to serve as a hub for research into wireless technologies as a result of new funding from the Science and Industry Endowment Fund. An initial round of grants has been announced, and up to $10 million will go toward a project that will expand the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization's (CSIRO's) research into next-generation applications, including those that have the potential to support Australia's National Broadband Network. The Science and Industry Endowment Fund will provide $2 million to help CSIRO and Macquarie University establish a joint professorial chair and associated appointments in wireless communications over seven years. Also, $7.5 million will be provided over two to three years to establish up to 100 scholarships and fellowships in information and communication technology mathematics, engineering, and other scientific disciplines. The scholarships and fellowships will help Australia address its skills shortage in areas such as computer science, electrical engineering, mathematical sciences, and physics. "We are in a position to continue to deliver real benefits to Australia from research into high-speed wireless communications," says CSIRO group executive Alex Zelinsky. CSIRO is providing the Science and Industry Endowment Fund with $150 million from the proceeds of its Wireless Local Area Network technology licensing program. View Full Article | Return to Headlines

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• 02 Nov 2009 17:44

  Welcome to the November 2, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Intel Claims Memory Research Milestone Meeting Notes Progress for Women in Academic Science, but More Work to Do Software That Fixes Itself Study: No Shortage of U.S. Engineers Thwarting Cyber Criminal Xerox Claims Breakthrough in Printable Circuitry SPECIAL: Listen, Watch, Read--Computers Search for Meaning U.S. Cyber War Policy Needs New Focus, Experts Say Holding the Line Against Forgeries Cell Phones Become Handheld Tools for Global Development Living Wallpaper That Devices Can Relate To The Past, Present and Future of AI CALVIN: Clarifying California's Old and Murky Water Problems Intel Claims Memory Research Milestone InformationWeek (10/29/09) Gonsalves, Antone Intel and Numonyx recently announced a breakthrough in computer memory research that they say could eventually result in a less expensive and better-performing alternative to existing memory technologies. The two companies have been collaborating on a type of non-volatile memory called phase-change memory (PCM), and report that they have successfully stacked multiple layers of PCM arrays within a single 64 Mb die. By creating a vertically integrated memory cell composed of PCM and an ovonic threshold switch, the researchers demonstrated that it is possible to use the technologies to create chips that cost less and offer better performance and memory densities than traditional NAND flash memory. PCM could provide a better alternative to NAND because it uses significantly less voltage. While NAND uses an electrical charge to store and read memory, PCM uses heat on chalcogenide glass, the same material used in re-writable optical media. Lower voltage use enables PCM to store more memory in a single die while using less power, and at a smaller scale than is possible with NAND. However, switching to PCM may require significant changes to production processes.Meeting Notes Progress for Women in Academic Science, but More Work to Do Chronicle of Higher Education (11/01/09) June, Audrey Williams The current state of women in academia was addressed during the annual meeting of the grant recipients of the U.S. National Science Foundation's Advance program. Advance grants have helped fund initiatives for increasing the number of female scientists and engineers, as well as creating family-friendly university policies, networking groups, and mentor programs to help schools retain them. University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC) president Freeman A. Hrabowski III says it is time to focus more on the attitudes of department chairs, professors, and top administrators rather than the numbers. At UMBC, which received a $3.2 million Advance grant in 2003, 54 percent of assistant professors in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are women. "You can't change attitudes unless you know what people really think," says Hrabowski. He says colleges must continue to work toward institutionalizing the effects of the Advance grants in the current economic climate. "Even when we're cutting the budget, we have to say we really believe in this, and we're going to keep doing it," he says. - May Require Paid Subscription Software That Fixes Itself Technology Review (10/29/09) Naone, Erica Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers led by professor Martin Rinard have developed ClearView, software capable of finding and fixing certain types of software bugs within a few minutes. Rinard, who presented the software at ACM's recent Symposium on Operating System Principles, says the goal is to create an "immortal, invulnerable program." ClearView can operate without assistance from humans and without access to a program's underlying source code. By observing a program's normal behavior and creating a set of rules, ClearView can detect certain errors, including those caused by malicious programs. ClearView detects any anomalies that violate the rules and provides several potential patches that would force the software to follow the rules. The patches are applied directly to the binary, bypassing the source code. ClearView analyzes the possible solutions to decide which ones are the most likely to work and installs the top candidates and tests their effectiveness. If additional rules are violated or the patch crashes the system, ClearView rejects those solutions and finds another. The researchers say the system is particularly effective on a group of machines running the same software. They tested ClearView by installing it on a group of computers running Firefox and using an independent team to attack the Web browser using 10 different approaches. ClearView successfully blocked all of the attacks by detecting the anomalies and terminating the application before the attack could take effect.Study: No Shortage of U.S. Engineers BusinessWeek (10/28/09) Herbst, Moira The United States, contrary to popular belief, is not lacking graduates in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, according to a study by researchers at Georgetown and Rutgers universities. The study suggests the problem is that many of the top graduates are taking financial and consulting jobs. "It is now up to science and technology firms to attract the best and the brightest graduates to come work for them," says Rutgers professor Hal Salzman. The researchers say that employers could address recruiting challenges for the best talent by increasing the appeal of careers in STEM fields through bigger salaries and other incentives. However, Microsoft and other employers say the problem of drawing talent would more likely be solved by adding more of premium candidates to the talent pipeline than by boosting salaries. At a hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology last March, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates cited a decline in student interest in the sciences and contended that immigration policy needs to be changed to help fill the void in the labor market. He pushed for an extension of the period that foreign students can work in the United States following graduation, elevating the current limits on H-1B visas, and issuing many more green cards annually. Critics of the Georgetown/Rutgers study's conclusions include Computer Science Teachers Association executive director Chris Stephenson, who says that high schools have steadily been dumping computer science courses over the past six years. "It's clear that the number of students taking computer science is dropping," she says.Thwarting Cyber Criminal Norwegian University of Science and Technology (10/30/09) Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) say they have developed a digital signature system that is 17,000 times faster than current systems used for verification and 10,000 times faster in providing a digital signature. They say the new system, MQQ, was developed as a way to address the biggest pitfalls in current data security systems. Existing systems, when used with smart card applications or at credit card payment terminals, are often slow, do not protect against quantum computing attacks, and have not been optimized for parallel processing. MQQ was developed using a trapdoor function, which is generated by quasigroup string transformations based on multivariate quadratic quasigroups. The researchers say that MQQ's security is enhanced by a signing speed that is 10,000 times faster than corresponding RSA and elliptical curves digital signatures. The researchers also say that MQQ is one of the first algorithms specially designed for parallel processing, which allows the system to benefit from the recent trends in multicore parallel processing. "Due to the nature of its design, MQQ is secure against quantum computing attacks," says NTNU professor Dailo Gligoroski. He says MQQ also has been found to be secure against all known multivariate quadratic attack methods.Xerox Claims Breakthrough in Printable Circuitry V3.co.uk (10/30/09) Thomson, Iain Xerox says it has developed a new form of silver ink that aligns its molecules to conduct electricity more efficiently. The breakthrough enables electronics to be produced on a wider range of materials and at lower costs because a clean room would no longer be needed to print circuitry on new materials. "We will be able to print circuits in almost any size from smaller custom circuits to larger formats such as wider rolls of plastic sheets, unheard of in today's silicon-wafer industry," says the Xerox Research Center of Canada's Hadi Mahabadi. Printing circuitry on materials such as plastics was impossible because traditional metallic inks typically require a temperature of more than 800 degrees centigrade. However, the new ink is liquid at about 140 degrees. "We have found the silver bullet that could make things such as electronic clothing and inexpensive games a reality today," says Xerox's Paul Smith.SPECIAL: Listen, Watch, Read--Computers Search for Meaning ICT Results (10/30/09) The European MESH project has developed an integrated platform that combines semantic search with a variety of other tools to deliver more relevant results for a wider variety of sources. The MESH system can search annotated files such as photographs, videos, sound recordings, text, document scans, or any other media to find relevant responses to semantic search terms. The platform uses a variety of techniques, including optical character recognition, automated speech recognition, automatic annotation of video, and photographs that track salient concepts. While building its semantic search platform, the MESH project also developed some cutting-edge technology, says MESH project coordinator Pedro Concejero. For example, the project's automatic annotation for video is capable of identifying the general scene setting, detecting the general topic of the video, and recognizing the number of salient objects, such as people, within a scene. Concejero says the MESH platform could find use in numerous standalone commercial applications. The project's researchers will continue to develop new applications.U.S. Cyber War Policy Needs New Focus, Experts Say Computerworld (10/29/09) Gross, Grant Three cybersecurity experts recently told a meeting of the Congressional Cyber Caucus that current U.S. policies for protecting the United States against various forms of attack won't work for defending against cyberwarfare. Rand Corp.'s Martin Libicki said a policy of cyberdeterrence modeled after the strategy for nuclear attacks is problematic, largely because it is difficult to identify attackers, particularly when some nations appear to be sponsoring private attackers. Libicki also said it may be difficult for the U.S. to follow through with counterattacks when U.S. cyberexperts do not know how much damage those attacks could do. Good Harbor Consulting's Paul Kurtz said it is still unclear what the U.S.'s cyberwarfare policies will look like, which is particularly troublesome because the United States lacks a definition of what constitutes an act of cyberwar. Additionally, it may be unwise to label some countries as cyberadversaries, Kurtz said. For example, although the Chinese government is often blamed for encouraging or sponsoring cyberattacks, the U.S. government needs to engage the Chinese about cyberdefense. U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit director Scott Borg said the U.S. government needs to recognize that cyberattacks can cause "horrendous damage," and that attacks on targets such as electricity generators could have a long-lasting effect, primarily due to the U.S.'s limited ability to support new parts for damaged generators. Most of the parts for electricity generators come from China and India, and Borg said that emergency planners have not found a way to replace those parts quickly. He said shutting down electricity in a large area of the U.S. for several months would have the same level of economic damage as a nuclear attack.Holding the Line Against Forgeries New York Times (10/29/09) Wall, Barbara Eric Postma, an artificial intelligence professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, estimates that forgeries account for about 99 percent of the artwork for sale on the international market. Postma says that "auction houses could be doing more to protect client interests by having a more open attitude toward innovations that may help to establish authenticity." He says that new computer technology-based methods could make a substantial contribution to art authentication. His team has developed algorithms that can evaluate paintings based on brush stroke configurations, pigment, and canvas weave. Postma says that this digital analysis technique successfully indicated that a painting attributed to Vincent Van Gogh for many years was probably a forgery because its brush strokes were too prominent. Postma says the works of Rubens, Gauguin, and Monet are currently undergoing analysis, and "provided we have a large enough database of paintings to work from, I see no reason why we could not apply our methods to Old Masters and modern works of art alike." He says an ultimate goal is to invent an algorithm that can encompass a painting's entire visual structure. Postma acknowledges that many art historians view digital analysis with suspicion, partly because the algorithms are still under development, and partly because a full service is infeasible until a sufficiently large painting database has been constructed.Cell Phones Become Handheld Tools for Global Development UW News (10/29/09) Hickey, Hannah University of Washington (UW) doctoral students have developed Open Data Kit, a free suite of mobile tools that can be used by organizations that need inexpensive methods for gathering information. Open Data Kit uses the open source Android mobile operating system to turn cell phones into versatile data-collection devices. For example, the students say the devices could provide organizations with the ability to take pictures of deforested areas, add the location coordinates, and instantly submit that information to a global environmental database. Open Data Kit already is being used by the Grameen Foundation Technology Center to evaluate its Ugandan text-messaging information hotline, D-Tree International is using the suite in Tanzania to guide health workers treating young children, the University of California, Berkeley's Human Rights Center is using the platform to record human rights violations in the Central African Republic, and this fall the Jane Goodall Institute and the Brazilian Forest Service will use the suite to monitor deforestation. Open Data Kit can be used to collect data; store, view, and export data on remote servers; and manage devices in the field from a central office. The Open Data Kit also enables a phone to quickly record a location, scan a bar code instead of requiring the numbers to be entered by hand, and upload data automatically using a cellular network.Living Wallpaper That Devices Can Relate To New Scientist (10/28/09) Campbell, MacGregor The Living Wall project, led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab researcher Leah Buechley, features an electronically enhanced wallpaper that can interact with other devices, including lamps, heaters, and music systems. The wallpaper uses magnetic and conductive paints to create circuitry in attractive designs. Combining the wallpaper's circuits with inexpensive temperature, light, and touch sensors, light-emitting diodes, and Bluetooth capabilities turns the wallpaper into a control surface capable of communicating with nearby devices. For example, a user could touch a certain flower to turn on a lamp or adjust the room's temperature. "Our goal is to make technologies that users can build on and change without needing a lot of technical skill," Buechley says. To create the electronic wallpaper, the researchers started with steel foil sandwiched between layers of paper coated with magnetic paint. Conductive paint was then used to create the wallpaper's visual motif as well as the circuits, which can be attached to sensors, lights, and other devices. The system runs at 20 volts, drawing approximately 2.5 amps when fully loaded with devices. "You can go up and touch the wall and not even feel a tingle," Buechley says. She says the wallpaper is intended to demonstrate how existing technology can be used in innovative ways in materials and applications that are usually thought of as low tech.The Past, Present and Future of AI TechRadar (10/24/09) Hardwidge, Ben The idea that fully-fledged artificial intelligence (AI)--thinking machines that could mimic human intelligence precisely--would be realized by the year 2000 was driven by early breakthroughs in the field, such as the Logic Theorist program. The program successfully utilized a computer to solve logic problems through a virtual reasoning system that employed decision trees. However, since then the AI field has been one of deferred dreams, as many of the milestones predicted for the turn of the millennium have yet to come to pass. "The reality of the engineering requirements [of AI] and what it really takes to make this work was much harder than anybody expected," says David Ferrucci, leader of the IBM Watson project team. He cites the development of chess-playing computers as an example of an advancement that created false hope about AI overall. The enormous difficulty computers have in emulating distinctly human abilities, such as communicating with people via natural language, demonstrates what a hard challenge AI creators face. Among the latest AI achievements is Aberystwyth University's Adam, a robot that can make scientific discoveries using a method known as abduction. "Adam can ... abduce hypotheses, and infer what would be efficient experiments to discriminate between different hypotheses, and whether there's evidence for them," says Aberystwyth's Ross King. "Then it can actually do the experiments using laboratory automation." However, King says the really complex problems involve humans interacting.CALVIN: Clarifying California's Old and Murky Water Problems CITRIS Newsletter (10/09) Slack, Gordy The CALifornia Value Integrated Network (CALVIN) is an economic-engineering water model that taps 70 years' worth of hydrological data compiled from various sources to simulate California's water storage and distribution system. CALVIN simulates the engineering structures of the state's water system along with economic demands for water so that users can assess the impact of changing either economic or engineering parameters. CALVIN must be fed reliable data, and advancements in accurate sensor technology have been key to providing this function. "This revolution in sensors has buried us in numbers," says University of California, Davis (UC Davis) professor and CALVIN co-creator Jay Lund. "And the numbers are meaningless, unless you organize them so they bear insights into what's really going on and how it's likely to play out in the future. That's what is really exciting and important about the work. We're trying to develop insights, not numbers." UC Davis researchers have employed CALVIN's data-crunching abilities to help California resolve complex and pressing water challenges, such as the disposition of the San Francisco Bay Delta.

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• 31 Oct 2009 04:11

  Welcome to the October 30, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Defense University Builds China's Fastest Supercomputer MIT Researchers Developing Robotic Driving Companion GENI Goes Global Slump Sinks Visa Program Professor Working to Advance Computing as a Science Muscle-Bound Computer Interface Google CEO Imagines Era of Mobile Supercomputers Augmented Reality System Lets You See Through Walls Electrical Engineers Go Head to Head With Genius on Music Playlists Safety First for Robots Embedded Systems--The Whole Picture Open Source Identity: Ruby on Rails Creator David Heinemeier Hansson Are Militaries Lagging Their Non-State Enemies in Terms of Use of Internet? An Interview With Chris Gunderson Defense University Builds China's Fastest Supercomputer Xinhuanet (China) (10/29/09) Fei, Yu; Ruixue, Bai; Yushan, Wang China's National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) has unveiled the Tianhe supercomputer, the fastest supercomputer in China. Tianhe runs at 563.1 teraflops on the Linpack benchmark and is theoretically capable of petaflop performance. NUDT president Zhang Yulin says the system is expected to be used to process seismic data for oil exploration, perform bio-medical computing, and help design aerospace vehicles. If Tianhe had been operational for the most recent Top 500 list, it would have ranked as the world's fourth-most powerful supercomputer. NUDT says that approximately 200 computer scientists worked on Tianhe over two years. The supercomputer was housed at the NUDT campus in Changsha, and is scheduled to be moved to the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin at the end of this year. Tianhe features 6,144 Intel CPUs and 5,120 AMD GPUs. "As far as I know, a combination of CPU and GPU is something new used to make a petaflop computer," says NUDT professor Zhou Xingming. "After it's installed in Tianjin, we plan to add hundreds or thousands of China-made CPUs to the machine, and improve its Linpack performance to over 800 teraflops." Tianhe also could be ranked as the world's fifth-greenest supercomputer on the Green500 List, which is compiled by researchers at Virginia Tech to rank the world's most energy-efficient supercomputers.MIT Researchers Developing Robotic Driving Companion Computerworld (10/29/09) Gaudin, Sharon Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing the Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA), a robot that would act as a helpful companion for drivers. The robot would be capable of picking up a driver's usual routes and regular destinations, monitoring facial expressions for signs of fatigue or agitation, using visual clues such as winking and smiling, and communicating verbally to make suggestions about alternate routes, fuel level, energy efficiency, safe behavior, and gas stations with the lowest prices. AIDA would be embedded in the dashboard and use the Internet to provide real-time information about traffic, businesses, and gas stations along the driver's route. "With the ubiquity of sensors and mobile computers, information about our surroundings is ever abundant," says professor Carlo Ratti, director of MIT's SENSEable City Lab. "AIDA embodies a new effort to make sense of these great amounts of data, harnessing our personal electronic devices as tools for behavioral support." The MIT team is working with Audi and the Volkswagen Group of America's Electronics Research Lab on the project.GENI Goes Global International Center for Advanced Internet Research (10/29/09) Mambretti, Joe; Brown, Maxine D. A consortium of network researchers has received a three-year grant from the U.S. Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) program to develop iGENI, an international version of GENI. The GENI research initiative was launched by the U.S. National Science Foundation to create a virtual laboratory for researching and exploring future Internets at scale. Led by Northwestern University's International Center for Advanced Research (iCAIR), the consortium includes the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago; the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego; Cisco Systems; and BBN Technologies. "The iGENI initiative will enable our consortium to extend and build on these partnerships in order to develop and implement a large-scale distributed environment for GENI researchers, and to make that environment available to many more research communities," says iCAIR's Joe Mambretti. IGENI will integrate multiple network resources, segments of national research and education network infrastructures, a national wide-area private network run by Cisco called C-Wave, and components of the international optical-networking Global Lambda Integrated Facility. "One of the consortium's major strengths has been its ability to develop teams, tools, and infrastructure on an accelerated schedule," EVL's Maxine Brown. "Each consortium member has over a decade of experience of active involvement in international networking infrastructure, projects, and community development."Slump Sinks Visa Program Wall Street Journal (10/29/09) P. A1; Jordan, Miriam; Sheth, Niraj; Fowler, Geoffrey A.; et al. The H-1B visa program, designed to import skilled technology workers into the United States from overseas, will have thousands of vacancies for the first time in six years because of the economic downturn. Anti-immigrant sentiment in Washington and climbing costs related to hiring foreigners also have contributed to the fall-off in visa applications. "The best and the brightest who would normally come here are saying, 'Why do we need to go to a country where we are not welcome, where our quality of life would be less, and we would be at the bottom of the social ladder?' " says University of California, Berkeley visiting scholar Vivek Wadhwa. Another factor is greater economic momentum in countries such as China and India, which is enabling would-be immigrants to find new career opportunities in their homelands rather than going to the United States. Just 46,700 petitions for H-1Bs have been filed this year as of Sept. 25, whereas last year the 65,000-visa ceiling was reached in just 24 hours. Last year, 44 percent of approved H-1B visa petitions were for systems analysts or programmers, while university professionals comprised the second largest category. High-tech companies have long been petitioning the U.S. Congress to raise the cap on H-1Bs. Concurrently, some U.S. lawmakers have been urging restrictions on the program, arguing that it displaces U.S.-born employees.Professor Working to Advance Computing as a Science UA News (AZ) (10/28/09) Everett-Haynes, La Monica University of Arizona professor Richard T. Snodgrass has received a U.S. National Science Foundation grant to promote computation as a true science. Snodgrass, an ACM Fellow, says the process of computational thinking is universal and highly valued in subjects such as physics, biology, and chemistry. "The problem with computer science is that a few people think it equals programming," he says. "But that doesn't emphasize the great ideas behind computer science, and that's what we want to bring out in this grant." Snodgrass and Peter Denning, director of the Cebrowski Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, will use the three-year, $800,000 grant to elevate the status of computing and encourage students, particularly girls and women, at the K-12 level to enter the field. The grant will enable them to develop and organize the "Field Guide to the Science of Computation." The guide will feature various levels, from beginner to graduate students and professionals, and provide an organized body of information on computing, including theoretical frameworks and models related to automation, communication, evaluation, design, and other topics. ACM's education board and the Computer Science Teachers Association also will collaborate on the three-year project. Snodgrass said the grant came just before the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution endorsing the need to support computer science education at the K-12 level. The resolution designated the week of Dec. 7 as National Computer Science Education Week.Muscle-Bound Computer Interface Technology Review (10/28/09) Greene, Kate Researchers at Microsoft, the University of Washington, and the University of Toronto have developed a human-computer interface that uses muscle movement for hands-free, gestural interaction. A band of electrodes attached to the user's forearm is used to read electrical activity from different arm muscles. Signals are correlated to specific hand gestures, such as touching a finger and thumb together or gripping an object with a certain degree of tightness. The researchers say the technology could be used to scroll through and select songs on a MP3 player or to play a game without a controller. The project is focusing on bringing muscle interfaces to healthy individuals looking for richer input modalities, says Microsoft researcher Desney Tan. The researchers' most recent interface uses six electromyography sensors and two ground electrodes positioned in a ring around a user's right forearm to sense finger movement, and two sensors on the left forearm to sense hand squeezes. The system's software needs to be trained to associate the electrical signals with different gestures. "Most of today's computer interfaces require the user's complete attention," says Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Pattie Maes. "We desperately need novel interfaces such as the one developed by the Microsoft team to enable a more seamless integration of digital information and applications into our busy daily lives." The interface was demonstrated at the recent ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.Google CEO Imagines Era of Mobile Supercomputers InformationWeek (10/28/09) Claburn, Thomas Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes the future of computing lies in smart mobile devices and data centers. "A billion people on the planet are carrying supercomputers in their hands," Schmidt says. "Now you think of them as mobile phones, but that's not what they really are. They're video cameras. They're GPS devices. They're powerful computers. They have powerful screens. They can do many, many different things." Schmidt says over the next few years mobile technology will continue to advance and consumers will be exposed to new applications that are unimaginable now. For example, Google's Android phone division is working on an application that can take pictures of bar codes, identify the corresponding product, and compare prices online. Another Android application can translate a picture of a menu written in a foreign language. Cloud computing will provide the computational muscle for many of these future services, which Schmidt says is probably the next big wave in computing. He also believes that computing will continue to bring major changes to our society. "We're going from a model where the information we had was pretty highly controlled by centralized media operatives to a world where most of our information will come from our friends, from our peers, from user-generated content," Schmidt says. "These changes are profound in the society of America, in the social life, and all the ways we live."Augmented Reality System Lets You See Through Walls New Scientist (10/23/09) Giles, Jim Carnegie Mellon University researchers displayed a prototype of a system that would enable drivers to see through walls at ACM and IEEE's recent International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. The ability to see what is happening at dangerous junctions, such as blind corners, would make driving less hazardous, the researchers say. The team developed an augmented reality system that uses one camera to capture what the driver sees, another to record the blocked scene, and a computer to layer the feed of the second camera on top of the image from the first camera. Combining the images makes a wall transparent. The system has to alter images of the hidden scene so they appear as if they are being viewed from the position of a person driving a car, and prevent images of moving objects from being distorted. The team also is developing software that would integrate feeds in footage from a city's network of closed-circuit TV cameras. Cars could be built with an onboard video processor to pick up the wireless feed from the roadside cameras, the team says.Electrical Engineers Go Head to Head With Genius on Music Playlists UCSD News (10/27/09) Kane, Daniel University of California, San Diego (UCSD) engineers recently measured the performance of music recommender systems they built from scratch against that of the Genius music recommender system featured in Apple's iTunes. "The system we are developing can analyze and recommend completely unknown songs by new bands as accurately as it analyzes the most popular hits," says UCSD PhD student Luke Barrington. Researchers at the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering found that Genius seems to actually capture acoustic similarities between songs by averaging statistics about how millions of listeners buy and play music. Barrington contends that Genius in reality knows nothing of song acoustics, but its success as a recommender system stems from the fact that it taps acoustic analyses of music performed by millions of people. "Our computer system works by listening to the music--it doesn't know anything about artists or albums or charts," he says. The UCSD researchers learned that the playlist generator, which they constructed using their own auto-tagging algorithms, delivered performance that was equal to that of Genius under certain circumstances. Moreover, the UCSD music recommender works for songs with which Genius is unfamiliar. The accuracy and scope of the auto-tagging algorithms are being constantly improved through music discovery games the UCSD engineers created for Facebook, which produce song-word combinations that the engineers feed into the algorithms.Safety First for Robots The Engineer (United Kingdom) (10/26/09) Zolfagharifard, Ellie A three-year project by Edinburgh University researchers aims to combine the most recent advances in mathematics and engineering to develop robotic systems capable of handling flexible objects in extreme environments. The researchers have developed a technique that uses a topological model to account for the position of objects in relation to each other. The technique is based on Gauss' theory of linking numbers, which calculates the relationship between threads. "By considering the topological space using this theory, we are able to capture the invariances in the environment," says Edinburgh's Sethu Vijayakumar. "Topology-based motion synthesis is a fairly radical change in concept for programming robots. Our hope is that it will lead to robots that act more like humans." The researchers, collaborating with the Honda Research Institute Europe, plan to have a prototype humanoid robot that can dress itself by 2013. Vijayakumar says the research could lead to robots that can of help people out of burning buildings, or are capable of performing complex tasks in uncontrolled environments, such as nuclear clean-up operations. Taku Komura, the project's principal investigator, says one of the biggest challenges will be recording movements and feeding that information back to the robots.Embedded Systems--The Whole Picture ICT Results (10/28/09) The European Union-funded ANDRES project was launched to find ways of helping embedded system designers find the best balance between static, reconfigurable, and analog hardware and the software those systems run. Their solution is a process that allows a designer to build an idea from an initial concept to a physical system using a modeling language and FOSSY, a design tool to assist with reconfigurable hardware. "At the core of this ANDRES framework is a modeling language plus component libraries that enable the designer to describe these integrated systems containing hardware, software, and analog components," says project coordinator Frank Oppenheimer. "That means you can focus on the application, not the technologies." The designer can use the framework to simulate the proposed system to see how it works and to test modifications before specifying how it will be implemented. The modeling language is an extension of SystemC and the ANDRES framework can be used with existing simulators for SystemC. The complete ANDRES system will be made available through an open source license to encourage the design community to adopt and continue to improve the system.Open Source Identity: Ruby on Rails Creator David Heinemeier Hansson Computerworld Australia (10/22/09) Gedda, Rodney One of the most popular and successful open source software development initiatives is Ruby on Rails, created by David Heinemeier Hansson. With Rails, thousands of developers can organize sophisticated applications rapidly and consistently, and the development environment also has supported the advent of a Web application framework in which elements are employed for database connectivity and other common tasks. "I think the fundamental thing that set Rails apart was a culture of putting the programmer first," Hansson says. "The idea that Web programming should be fun and that programmers should be enjoying themselves." He believes that Rails gave the interest in frameworks a leg up, particularly for PHP programmers. Hansson says Rail is under constant development, and he responds to criticism that Rails is not sufficiently swift with the answer that it certainly could be faster, but then so could everything else. "We continue to work on it as much from a sense of professional pride as from a sense of practical need," Hansson says. He also says that cloud computing seems like a natural fit for Rails, since it promises to accelerate hardware deployment in the same sense that Rails promises to accelerate software development.Are Militaries Lagging Their Non-State Enemies in Terms of Use of Internet? An Interview With Chris Gunderson Ubiquity (10/09) Vol. 10, No. 10, Denning, Peter An acceleration in cyberattacks against military networks and servers has brought the issue of what action the global defense community is taking to protect military systems and the worldwide Internet to the fore. Network-centric warfare expert Chris Gunderson with the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School says that "despite spending billions of dollars with the expressed purpose of fielding network-centric capability, the defense community has generally not succeeded at implementing distributed netcentric systems. Rather, we cling to the notion that military communications requirements are unique." Gunderson says this has worked to the advantage of U.S. enemies, who "have applied the netcentric principles to achieve information superiority via the open Internet and World Wide Web." He believes it is necessary for the U.S. military--and the global defense community--to abandon private networks as a means for most communications. Gunderson characterizes information overload as the "fog" of netcentric war, and he suggests several solutions to this problem. The first solution is to train our information provider network in practices that send vital information and avoid burdening netcentric fighters with large data volumes. The second step is to make the fighters capable of independent innovation and thus more adaptive to changing conditions. "As the new [netcentric] processes prove their value, larger programs will gradually adopt them as a matter of course," Gunderson predicts.

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• 29 Oct 2009 07:42

  Welcome to the October 28, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Wiser OWL Learns to Unravel Doctor Talk Testing the Accessibility of Web 2.0 Crash, Bang, Rumble! Bringing Noise to Virtual Worlds Pandemic Seen Slowing Internet Traffic CACM Reports: Digital Fluency for a New Generation of Computer Programmers Report Urges Colleges to Emphasize Math, Science, and International Studies In Industry First, Voting Machine Company to Publish Source Code Parallel Course Faster Maintenance With Augmented Reality Science at the Petascale: Roadrunner Results Unveiled Could Phones Bridge the Photo-Sharing Generation Gap? Semantic Integration: Meeting the Challenge Free Software Helps Prevent Food Poisoning Rensselaer to Lead Multimillion-Dollar Center for Social and Cognitive Networks Wiser OWL Learns to Unravel Doctor Talk University of Manchester (10/27/09) Waddington, Alex OWL 2, a new Internet language developed by an international team led by computer scientists from the University of Manchester and Oxford University, is designed to enable computers to understand and interpret the contents of its pages. "The World Wide Web as we see it today is rather like a collection of linked documents," says Oxford professor Ian Horrocks, who helped develop the language. "Whilst humans are very good at analyzing the data contained in these pages, languages such as HTML do not help computers to 'bridge the meaning gap,' and understand that, for instance, 'paracetamol,' 'acetaminophen,' and 'para-acetylaminophen' are all names for the same thing." One of the initial applications for OWL 2 is helping computers understand and analyze special medical terms. For example, the NCI Cancer Thesaurus has more than 50,000 medical terms, and ensuring that these terms are described, updated, and linked correctly has been a huge task for humans. However, OWL 2 can allow definitions to be written in such a way that computer programs can automatically update terms and identify errors. "The first stage was writing the NCI Thesaurus in the original version of the language, OWL, but now OWL 2 enables computer programs to interpret these terms in a much more human-like way," says Manchester's Bijan Parsia.Testing the Accessibility of Web 2.0 University of Southampton (ECS) (10/27/09) Lewis, Joyce The University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is launching a study that will explore how well people with disabilities can access Web services such as blogs, wikis, and social networking sites. The study, led by Mike Wald and E.A. Draffan in ECS' Learning Societies Lab, is based on an accessibility toolkit that will enable users to test the accessibility of Web 2.0 services. The accessibility tools were developed as a result of the LexDis project, which identified strategies learners can use to enhance their e-learning experience. Part of the toolkit, Web2Access, provides an online checking system for any interactive Web-based service such as Facebook. Another key feature of the accessibility kit is Study Bar, which can work with all browsers and reads text out loud, spell checks, provides a dictionary, and can enlarge or change text fonts and colors to make text more readable. "We developed it because nowadays users contribute as well as read information and so you cannot just click on a button to see if Web sites are accessible and easy to use," Draffan says. Wald says it is the first time that there has been a systematic way to evaluate and provide the results of accessibility testing of Web services.Crash, Bang, Rumble! Bringing Noise to Virtual Worlds Cornell Chronicle (10/27/09) Steele, Bill Cornell University computer scientists have developed a method for generating the crashing and rumbling noises of objects made from thin harmonic shells such as cymbals and garbage can lids. The method, developed by professor Doug James and graduate students Jeffrey Chadwick and Steven An, will be presented at ACM's SIGGRAPH Asia conference, which takes Dec. 16-19 in Yokohama, Japan. When a thin-shelled object falls or is struck, the metal or plastic slightly deforms and then snaps back into place, creating a vibration. Previous methods of synthesizing these noises did not account for the coupling effect that occurred when energy transfers from one vibration to another and back again, which resulted in a clean, clear sound that is more appropriate for a bell or chime. The new method accounts for this interaction and maps how the sound waves radiate to determine how the event will sound to a listener in any particular location. The researchers say that although their method is significantly faster than existing systems, the computations for a simple demonstration still take about an hour on a laptop. However, the researchers are hopeful that the simulation process can be accelerated by making some approximations. Their research is part of a larger project to synthesize various sounds, including dripping and splashing fluids, small clattering objects, and shattering glass.Pandemic Seen Slowing Internet Traffic GovInfoSecurity.com (10/26/09) Chabrow, Eric A severe pandemic could choke the Internet's capacity to handle the surge in traffic caused by a greater number of teleworkers, according to a report issued by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). "Increased demand during a severe pandemic could exceed the capacities of Internet providers' access networks for residential users and interfere with teleworkers in the securities market and other sectors," says the report, which refers to studies by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Internet service providers (ISPs). GAO cites ISPs' limited ability to prioritize traffic or take other actions in aid of vital teleworkers, while e-commerce could be adversely affected by actions such as lowering customers' transmission speeds or obstructing popular Web sites. The GAO study cites DHS's failure to devise a strategy to address potential Internet congestion or cooperate with federal partners to guarantee the existence of sufficient authorities. It also criticizes DHS for not analyzing the feasibility of running a campaign to secure public cooperation to reduce nonessential Internet use, and for not coordinating with other federal and private sector bodies to evaluate other actions that could be performed or ascertain what authorities may be needed to act. DHS's Jerald Levine has written a letter stating that the department will take action to ameliorate the effects of any pandemic-related congestion on the systems the federal government uses to convey critical national security/emergency preparedness information--but he says it is not the department's responsibility to address Internet congestion for other communications.CACM Reports: Digital Fluency for a New Generation of Computer Programmers AScribe Newswire (10/26/09) The programming tool Scratch is the focus of the cover story of the November issue of Communications of the ACM (CACM). Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory and colleagues from a company in Canada and the University of Pennsylvania discuss how "the YouTube of interactive media" has helped to improve the digital, design, and problem-solving skills of young people. Meanwhile, technology writer Leah Hoffmann takes a look at the challenges the health care industry faces in implementing digital record systems. CACM Editor-in-Chief Moshe Y. Vardi tackles computer science's "image crisis." The latest issue of CACM also features an article by Susan Landau of Sun Microsystems and Whitfield Diffie, former chief security officer at Sun and current visiting professor at the University of London, which examines wiretapping and the threat that wiretapping of the modern telecommunications system poses to national security. In another article, Microsoft Research technical fellow Butler Lampson weighs the tradeoffs of computer security versus user privacy. CACM also features the 2007 ACM A.M. Turing Lecture by model checking pioneers Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis, which was presented at the Design Automation Conference in 2008.Report Urges Colleges to Emphasize Math, Science, and International Studies Chronicle of Higher Education (10/27/09) Nelson, Libby Mathematics, science, and technology must continue to be a priority for U.S. higher education to ensure that the United States remains globally competitive, according to a report by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. A new year-long study, "Leadership for Challenging Times," found that U.S. residents ages 25 to 34 are less likely to earn degrees in math, science, and technology than their parents' generation. The report addresses issues such as the declining interest in math and science among students, as well as the current state of elementary and secondary math and science education. Moreover, the report says the United States should expect fewer students from other countries such as China and India to attend American colleges now that other nations are spending more on higher education, the study says. The report recommends that college presidents emphasize the importance of math, science, and technology, and recommends that colleges encourage students to learn foreign languages and study abroad. View Full Article - May Require Paid Subscription | Return to Headlines In Industry First, Voting Machine Company to Publish Source Code Wired News (10/27/09) Zetter, Kim Sequoia Voting Systems, which has been criticized for resisting public examination of its proprietary systems, recently announced plans to make the source code for its new optical-scan voting system available to the public. The new voting system, called Frontier Election System, will be submitted for federal certification and testing in the first quarter of 2010. The system's source code will be released for public review in November, according to Sequoia's Web site. Sequoia's announcement comes five days after a non-profit foundation announced the release of its open source election software for public review, although Sequoia's Michelle Shafer says the timing of the announcements are unrelated. "Fully disclosed source code is the path to true transparency and confidence in the voting process for all involved," says Sequoia's Eric Coomer in a press release. Previously, Sequoia had fought any efforts to examine the source code of its proprietary systems and even threatened to sue Princeton University computer scientists if they disclosed anything they learned during a court-ordered review of its software. The firmware for Sequoia's new Frontier optical-scan machines is written in C# and runs on Linux. "It's good to know the vendors are developing a new transparent optical-scan system," says Verified Voting president Pamela Smith. "That is probably the biggest recognition of the direction that the voting public wants to see the market going."Parallel Course MIT News (10/23/09) Hardesty, Larry Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab are helping make programmers' move to parallel programming less onerous as computer chip manufacturers produce multicore technology to upgrade performance. "Just writing anything parallel doesn't mean that it's going to run fast," says MIT professor Saman Amarasinghe. "A lot of parallel programs will actually run slower, because you parallelize the wrong place." Amarasinghe also thinks that computers are capable of automatically determining when to parallelize as well as which cores to assign which jobs. His group's multicore computing effort is split along two lines--tools to ease programmers' switch to parallel programming and tools to optimize programs' performance once that switch has been accomplished. Amarasinghe and two graduate students have designed a system to increase the predictability of multicore programs by assigning a core attempting to access a shared resource a priority not according to the time of its request but according to the number of tasks it has performed. Amarasinghe's lab has several projects focusing on parallel program optimization, one of which helps programs adjust to changing conditions on the spur of the moment. His group has devised a language that asks the developer to specify different techniques for executing a given computational job. When the program is operational, the computer automatically identifies the method with maximum efficiency.Faster Maintenance With Augmented Reality Technology Review (10/26/09) Grifantini, Kristina Columbia University researchers, working with mechanics from the U.S. Marine Corps, have developed an augmented reality (AR) system for performing vehicle maintenance repair tasks. Initial results suggest that AR systems could help users find and begin a maintenance task in half the normal time. Current practices require a Marine mechanic to refer to a technical manual on a laptop when performing vehicle repairs. In the Columbia study, mechanics used a head-worn display that projected three-dimensional (3D) arrows that pointed to relevant components, text instructions, floating labels and warnings, and animated, 3D models of appropriate tools. A smartphone worn on the mechanic's wrist provided touchscreen controls for advancing to the next series of instructions. The AR instructions were created using laser scans and photographs of the inside of the vehicle to create a 3D model of the vehicle's cockpit. The researchers then developed software for directing and instructing users in performing individual maintenance tasks. Ten cameras inside the cockpit were used to track the position of three infrared LEDs on the head-worn display, enabling the system to understand where the mechanic was looking. The researchers say that it may be more practical for future systems to have the cameras or sensors incorporated into the head-worn display.Science at the Petascale: Roadrunner Results Unveiled Los Alamos National Laboratory News (10/26/09) Roark, Kevin N. Roadrunner, housed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), recently completed its initial shakedown phase while performing accelerated petascale computer modeling and simulations for several unclassified science projects. The completion of the shakedown will allow Roadrunner, the world's fastest supercomputer, to begin its transition to classified computing. Scientists used the 10 unclassified projects to optimize how large codes run on the machine. The 10 test projects were chosen from academic and research institutions across the United States. Some of the projects include research into dark matter and dark energy, creating a HIV evolutionary tree to help researchers focus on potential vaccines, nonlinear physics in high-powered lasers, modeling minuscule nanowires over long time periods, and exploring how shock waves cause materials to fail. Roadrunner, developed by IBM along with LANL and the National Nuclear Security Administration, uses a hybrid design to achieve its record-setting performance. Each compute node in a cluster contains two AMD Opteron dual-core processors and four PowerXCell 8i processors that act as computational accelerators. Roadrunner will now be used to perform classified advanced physics and predictive simulations.Could Phones Bridge the Photo-Sharing Generation Gap? New Scientist (10/26/09) Marks, Paul Researchers at Deutsche Telekom and the University of Newcastle have developed a photo-viewing process that uses cell phones as the center of an interaction that resembles passing around prints of photographs. Initially, the researchers tried sitting groups of five people at a table and asked them to swap digital photos one-to-one on their cell phones using Bluetooth, but that resulted in people breaking into pairs. To create an interactive group experience, the researchers explored a method that could share photos with all members of a group simultaneously. "We came up with the idea of using spatial regions, like auras, around the table," says Newcastle lead researcher Christian Kray. An aura in the middle of the table was used to upload pictures to the entire group, while a concentric outer aura was established for downloading and viewing pictures. Software created for the project displayed a different barcode-like pattern at the top of every phone screen, so an overhead camera could recognize which aura each phone was in. When a phone was in the upload aura, the camera signaled a Bluetooth-enabled PC to broadcast the phone's photos to the other smartphones. "People really enjoyed sharing pictures this way, with everyone getting the photos at the same time and all having something to hold," Kray says.Semantic Integration: Meeting the Challenge Dr. Dobb's Journal (10/24/09) Erickson, Jonathan Interoperability between data sources is the fundamental challenge of data integration, and NASA computer scientist Richard Keller says that although standards and organizational policies can help to some degree, "data standards can be difficult to legislate and are onerous and expensive to institute." Semantic integration hinges on exercising rigorousness in the capture of semantic metadata, he says. "If you describe the meaning of the data, then you can automate the process of recognizing connections across data sources and allow them to be married together properly," Keller says. He describes ontology mapping as the next major challenge for semantic integration. An ontology map supplies data to support the translation of the objects, properties, and relations from one ontology model into those of another, and the difficulty arises when the underlying data models differ from a conceptual point of view. "More broadly, I think the challenge for making semantic integration work in the marketplace is to make it quicker and easier to specify data semantics," he says. There are commercially available tools that can streamline the specification process, but Keller says the cost/benefit calculations are not favorable enough to facilitate widespread implementation. The SemanticIntegrator project seeks to develop a framework to support semantic integration of NASA data assets through the integration of information sources using ontologies in combination with explicit integration rules.Free Software Helps Prevent Food Poisoning Technical University of Denmark (10/23/09) Dalgaard, Paw The Seafood Spoilage and Safety Predictor (SSSP) is a free program developed at the Technical University of Denmark's National Institute for Aquatic Resources in Denmark and designed to help seafood producers ensure that their products are safe for consumption until the sell-by date. The software can read specific temperature measurements to evaluate the effect of the temperature variation that seafood undergoes throughout the supply chain. SSSP is available in 15 languages to help the seafood industry around the world and because seafood products are often transported long distances. "We had completed extensive laboratory studies, developed mathematical models to predict shelf-life and safety of seafood, and published our findings in all the right places," says SSSP developer Paw Dalgaard. However, the researchers were concerned that the results of their work wouldn't reach the industry, so they created the software to provide access to their data. "The difficult bits, i.e. the mathematical models, have been kept out of sight, and the predictions are easy to obtain and ready to use," Dalgaard says.Rensselaer to Lead Multimillion-Dollar Center for Social and Cognitive Networks Inside Rensselaer (10/23/09) DeMarco, Gabrielle The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has received $8.6 million from the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) to launch the Center for Social and Cognitive Networks, a new interdisciplinary research center dedicated to the study of social and cognitive networks. The center is part of the ARL's newly created Collaborative Technology Alliance (CTA), which features four centers across the United States focused on different aspects of network science. CTA will receive a total of $16.75 million in funding for the first five years and an additional $18.75 million is anticipated from the ARL for the second phase, bringing the total to $35.5 million over 10 years. Other partners in the program include IBM, Northeastern University, the City University of New York, and collaborators from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, Indiana University, and the University of Maryland. "Together with other centers of the CTA, we are creating the new discipline of network science," says Rensselaer professor Boleslaw Szymanski, the center's director. The Center for Social and Cognitive Networks will connect social scientists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists in an effort to uncover, model, understand, and predict the complex social interactions that occur on social networks. The center will focus on dynamic processes in networks and the human interactions and underlying technological infrastructure they use, organizational networks and how knowledge spreads from peer to peer in the modern military, the study of adversarial networks and how to deal with terrorists and hidden groups in a society, trust in social networks and measuring the level of trust within a network, and using computational systems to predict how human error or bias influences judgment. View Full Article | Return to Headlines

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• 28 Oct 2009 05:40

  Welcome to the October 26, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Scan of Internet Uncovers Thousands of Vulnerable Embedded Devices Robotic Perception, on Purpose Google Envisions 10 Million Servers Scientists Hope to Network Facebook-Style Immersive Exhibit Redefines Bird's-Eye View NSF Awards Wetzel & Lechler $144,000 for 2-Year Information Security Management Study IBM Researchers Simplify Mobile Web Browsing California Investigating Problems With Voting-Machine Audit Logs Fingerprint Technology Beats World's Toughest Tests...Including 100s of Builders' Thumbs Carnegie Mellon Expands Mobile Learning Project in India With Support From Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto A New Time Management Model to Improve Company Business Intelligence 5 New Technologies That Will Change Everything Scan of Internet Uncovers Thousands of Vulnerable Embedded Devices Wired News (10/23/09) Zetter, Kim A scan of the Internet by Columbia University researchers searching for vulnerable embedded devices has found that nearly 21,000 routers, Webcams, and VoIP products are vulnerable to remote attack. They say there could be as many as 6 million vulnerable devices on the Internet. The scan also found that the devices' administrative interfaces are viewable from anywhere on the Internet, and their owners have not changed the devices' passwords from the manufacturer's default. The study scanned networks belonging to the largest Internet service providers (ISPs) in North America, Europe, and Asia, and vulnerable devices were found in significant numbers in all parts of the world. Since starting the project last December, the researchers have scanned 130 million IP addresses and found nearly 300,000 devices whose administrative interfaces were remotely accessible from anywhere on the Internet. Devices with default passwords are most vulnerable, but others are theoretically vulnerable to brute-force password-cracking attacks. The researchers have provided ISPs with their findings, but Columbia professor Salvatore Stolfo says product manufacturers are the real culprits. He says that they need to hide their administrative interfaces by default and give customers clear instructions on how to alter the configuration to protect themselves. Stolfo also says that vendors should be more vocal in encouraging customers to change default passwords.Robotic Perception, on Purpose ICT Results (10/26/09) The Perception-on-Purpose (POP) project is an effort by European researchers to develop technology enabling a robot to integrate visual and audio data to facilitate purposeful perception. "It is not that easy to decide what is foreground and what is background using sound alone, but by combining the two modalities--sound and vision--it becomes much easier," says project coordinator Radu Horaud. "If you are able to locate 10 sound sources in 10 different directions, but if in one of these directions you see a face, then you can much more easily concentrate on that sound and throw out the other ones." The researchers followed this strategy in their development of algorithms that allowed their robot, Popeye, to reliably identify speakers. "Most often, sound research is conducted in specialized labs, with arrays of microphones and a very controlled acoustic environment," Horaud says. "But we integrated our two microphones and two cameras onto the head of our Popeye. The idea is to have an agent-centered cognitive system." Horaud believes there is a link between multi-sensory perception and cognition, and that some modern artificial intelligence applications are constrained by their inability to learn from their environment.Google Envisions 10 Million Servers Data Center Knowledge (10/20/09) Miller, Rich The computer industry had an opportunity to learn about the technical details of Google's infrastructure during LADIS 2009, ACM's recent SIGOPS International Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware. Jeff Dean, a Google engineer who was one of the keynote speakers, also talked about Spanner, a new storage and computation system for automating the management of services across multiple data centers. Spanner, which will have a scale of 1 million to 10 million servers in the future, would be capable of automatically allocating resources across "entire fleets of machines," Dean says. The goal will be "automatic, dynamic, worldwide placement of data and computation to minimize latency or cost." Spanner also would offer a cost management strategy for addressing regional differences in bandwidth and power costs. Google would have energy management opportunities because Spanner can seamlessly shift workloads between data centers. Automated capacity management also would enable Google to route around failures or data center downtime as well as plan more energy-efficient facilities.Scientists Hope to Network Facebook-Style Associated Press (10/21/09) Kates, William A coalition of seven academic institutions will use a $12.2 million National Institutes of Health grant to develop VIVOweb, a Facebook-style professional networking system for biomedical researchers across the United States. Participating institutions say VIVOweb will make it easier for scientists to find one another, ultimately enabling them to improve their ongoing studies and create long-term collaborative projects that could result in new discoveries. University of Florida professor Michael Conlon, the principal investigator on the project, says scientists often have difficulty finding each other, and currently the best way to connect with others performing similar research is through lists of publications. Dean Krafft, who is leading the project at Cornell University, says VIVOweb will use the Semantic Web to make information more available to scientists. The public also will be able to access the site, but some information will be available only to scientists. The open source software developed by Cornell for VIVOweb collects the facts a person is looking for and assembles a unique Web page just for that search. Participants expect to have VIVOweb connected across the country within two years, and eventually plan to connect scientists from around the world.Immersive Exhibit Redefines Bird's-Eye View Futurity.org (10/21/09) Leonard, Jenny ACM's SIGGRAPH 2009 conference in August featured an exhibit that enabled visitors to experience the various levels of vision and hearing of animals, such as the ultraviolet vision of birds or the ultrasonic hearing of whales. Computer scientists at Texas A&M University worked with the university's fine arts expert Carol LaFayette on the virtual environment program, "I'm Not There." Professor Fred Parke developed the system, which requires participants to don three-dimensional glasses and use a Wii controller to navigate through the immersive exhibit. He also is working on a liquid-crystal display version of the system. The virtual environment was enhanced by surround-sound recordings of animals in the wild and scenes set on Cocos Island, located southwest of Costa Rica. "The Viz lab is about the synthesis between art and science, so we inserted artistic elements into these scenes to make them more realistic and interesting," LaFayette says. She believes science and natural history museums could use such technology to enhance the experience for visitors. "Think of all the exhibits that could come to life--and in a very green way," she says.NSF Awards Wetzel & Lechler $144,000 for 2-Year Information Security Management Study Stevens Institute of Technology (10/22/09) Berzinski, Patrick A. Stevens Institute of Technology professors Susanne Wetzel and Thomas Lechler have received a two-year, $144,038 U.S. National Science Foundation grant to study advanced problems in managing information security. Wetzel and Lechler say their project has the potential for significant practical and theoretical progress in information security management. "During the past decade, research in information security has expanded from a purely technical focus to a more general technology-economic focus," the researchers say. "Despite its expansion, a multidisciplinary approach to understand and theoretically explain the interaction of security and economy within complex systems of partners is still missing." The project's primary objective is to develop an interdisciplinary information security framework to optimize and advance both system information security and system productivity. The researchers give the example of a hospital that exchanges patient data records with governmental data and insurance companies. "This may allow an insurance company to combine and deduce information from different data sources that could pose a security threat which is not addressed by traditional security considerations," they say. "From a security economics perspective, the impact of information exchange between partners on their productivity has to be considered to understand the conditions under which partners will obey or violate information security policies."IBM Researchers Simplify Mobile Web Browsing eWeek (10/26/09) Taft, Darryl K. IBM researchers have developed technology that will make it easier to design Web sites for mobile devices. IBM researchers in Tokyo developed a visual editor that enables Web masters to arrange their Web site content in a logically-ordered, flowing sequence so it can be more easily read on a small, mobile device, without requiring the Web master to change the content. The editing tool also can improve the browsing experience for the visually impaired. The visual editor uses arrows to show in what order content should be presented, and editing the reading order only requires dragging and dropping to rearrange the arrows. This approach is a major improvement over traditional approaches, such as using voice browsers to check reading flow line by line or requiring Web masters to copy and paste content to a memo pad to check reading flow. The tool also can be applied to electronic presentations, PDF documents, and Flash content. IBM plans to make the new tool available through the Social Accessibility research project.California Investigating Problems With Voting-Machine Audit Logs Wired News (10/22/09) Zetter, Kim California is engaged in a lengthy probe of the audit logs inside its electronic voting systems following reports of major defects, including the ability for parties to delete votes without being traced. Secretary of State Debra Bowen says the investigation focuses on what the audit logs record and whether they can be easily modified or erased. In January, investigators discovered that the tabulation software used with Premier Election Solutions' e-voting systems did not record critical events, including the deletion of votes from the system. Furthermore, the logs failed to record who conducted an action on the system and listed some events with the incorrect date and timestamps. A Premiere representative admitted at a March hearing that none of the logs in its Global Election Management System (GEMS) records significant events, and California verified the problems in a later report in which it also found that some versions of the GEMS software had a button that permits anyone with access to the system to indelibly erase certain audit logs "that would be essential to reconstruct operator actions during the vote-tallying process." The new version of the GEMS tabulation software records vote deletion and similar events, while also featuring other security measures that would block the system from operating if the event log was deactivated, according to a testing lab that examined the software for the federal government.Fingerprint Technology Beats World's Toughest Tests...Including 100s of Builders' Thumbs University of Warwick (10/26/09) Dunn, Peter University of Warwick researchers have developed technology capable of quickly identifying partial or distorted fingerprints. Most fingerprint technology tries to identify a few key features on a fingerprint and match them against a database of templates. The Warwick researchers considered the entire detailed pattern of each print and converted the topological pattern into a standard coordinate system. The process enables the researchers to "unwarp" any fingerprint that has been distorted by smudging, uneven pressure, or another factor and create a clear digital representation of the fingerprint that can be mapped onto an "image space" of all other fingerprints held in the database, instead of comparing a print against each entry in the database. The technology has been examined by two of the world's leading technical fingerprint benchmarking tests. The National Physical Laboratory ranked the technology best overall for accuracy, and a test of 36 fingerprint technologies by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology ranked the technology third overall.Carnegie Mellon Expands Mobile Learning Project in India With Support From Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto Carnegie Mellon News (10/21/09) Spice, Byron Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) recently announced the expansion of its Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies (MILLEE) project, which aims to determine the effectiveness of mobile phone-based games for teaching English in rural India. Mobile phones could serve as learning tools as wireless carriers extend their services into underdeveloped regions, says CMU professor Matthew Kam. The MILLEE project has designed mobile phone-based educational games that are relevant to the culture in rural India. Over the next two years, the project will conduct a controlled study involving 800 children in 40 villages through the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. "Our previous, smaller studies have shown that students have significant gains in learning when they use these games," Kam says. "By aiming to replicate these results in a much larger study, we anticipate that we can understand how to design and develop phone-based games to improve educational prospects for billions of people throughout the developing world." Kam and his team are developing games that support a new English curriculum adopted by Andhra Pradesh schools this summer, and they plan to have at least six, and as many as a dozen, games ready for deployment next year. If the trials are successful, the project wants to establish partnerships with content developers who are currently focused on educational programs for desktop computers.A New Time Management Model to Improve Company Business Intelligence Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (Spain) (10/26/09) Martínez, Eduardo Universidad Politacnica de Madrid (UPM) School of Computing student Laura González Macho has developed a time management model that can be applied to data warehouse systems to optimize a company's business intelligence. The model was designed to alleviate the complexity of time management in data warehouse systems. The UPM system features a time management model that can be developed using relational database management systems capabilities and the most recent database standard query language. The model accounts for data structure issues, data query and modification operations, and any selected constraints. The time management model allows data structures to store time-variable data, and accounts for the extension of data modification and query operations to include time semantics. The model gives an overview of all aspects that need to be accounted for to build time management into a data warehouse system and provides a work guide that lays out all issues in a checklist format.5 New Technologies That Will Change Everything PC World (10/20/09) Fleishman, Glenn Five new technologies are on their way that will give users unprecedented access to data thanks to new high-speed connections and user interfaces. First, USB 3.0 is a new standard that preserves backward compatibility by allowing older cables to plug into new jacks, but features an extra pin that boosts the data rate to 4.8 Gbps. USB 3.0, dubbed SuperSpeed by the USB Implementers Forum, can transfer a 30 GB video in just over a minute. Second, by 2012, two new wireless protocols--802.11ac and 802.11ad--should be able to provide over-the-air data transmissions of 1 Gbps or faster. The faster wireless data rate will enable users to stream multiple high-definition videos throughout a room or house. Third, the next wave of next-generation TVs will allow viewers to experience three-dimensional (3D) videos at home. 3D TVs are likely to rely on alternating left-eye and right-eye views for successive frames. Many HDTVs already operate at 120 Hz, so the ability to alternate left and right eye images far faster than the human eye can see is already available. This type of 3D viewing will require glasses that use rapid shutters to alternate the view to each eye, but TV manufacturers also are working on 3D sets that do not require glasses. Fourth, augmented reality in mobile devices will become increasingly popular as consumers expect to be able to receive information on any subject in any location. Researchers also are developing contact lenses capable of projecting images into someone's sight. Finally, HTML5 promises to do away with browser conformity issues and the need for audio, video, and interactive plug-ins. HTML5 will enable designers to create Web sites that work the same on every browser and give users a better and faster Web experience.

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• 23 Oct 2009 22:41

  Welcome to the October 23, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. FCC to Draft Net Neutrality Rules, Taking Step Toward Web Regulation ACM Software Competition Pushes Students to Create Smarter Software Where the Virtual World and Reality Meet Universities Face Challenges of Embracing the World Wide Web 47th Design Automation Conference Announces Calls for Submissions to Technical Program Vulnerability Seen in Amazon's Cloud-Computing 'Humanised' Computers That Know What You're Thinking To Protect Your Privacy, Hand Over Your Data Georgia Tech Wins NSF Award for Next-Gen Supercomputing ANU Plans $50m Supercomputer Spend RIT Scientists Use Supercomputers to ‘See’ Black Holes Intelligent System to Help Autistic Children Recognize Emotions Researcher Paves Alternate Path for Hard Drives FCC to Draft Net Neutrality Rules, Taking Step Toward Web Regulation Washington Post (10/23/09) P. 18A; Kang, Cecilia The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) unanimously voted to start drafting rules to support Internet neutrality. "It's hard to imagine anything more important to the future of the success of our economy than a healthy and vibrant Internet, and there is no question that the openness of the Internet is the secret sauce to its success," said FCC chairman Julius Genachowski following the vote. He also noted that the FCC has a core agenda to drive investment, innovation, and opportunity in 21st century communications. In addition to providing their customers with consistent Web traffic, Internet service providers (ISPs) would need to detail their network traffic management operations to ensure no wrongdoing. The U.S. government's previous stance on the Web regulation issue was one of non-involvement, but it changed its position as worries mounted that ISPs could begin to exhibit favoritism toward their products and services. Crafting the rules will be a long, contentious process as wireless carriers, telecommunications firms, and other industry players and participants sound off on the benefits and drawbacks. The FCC's Democratic commissioners are vocal advocates of net neutrality rules, while the agency's Republican commissioners argue that such regulations are unnecessary. Critics are concerned that Web regulation will have an adverse effect on innovation in the Internet sector. However, Genachowski disagrees that the rules would hamper investment in broadband networks. "I reject the notion that we must choose between open Internet rules and investment by service providers in their networks," he said during the meeting. - May Require Free Registration ACM Software Competition Pushes Students to Create Smarter Software Campus Technology (10/22/09) Schaffhauser, Dian ACM's International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), sponsored by IBM, challenges students to solve real-world problems using open technology and advanced computing methods in a very short time period. Last year's competition attracted tens of thousands of students on 7,100 teams from universities in about 90 countries. "The world faces many daunting problems such as pandemic diseases, climate change, water pollution, food safety, finite energy resources, as well as issues with urban management and mass transportation," says IBM's Doug Heintzman, ICPC's sponsorship executive. "At IBM, we believe we have a responsibility to help develop the next generation of technology leaders, help them to understand and tackle these complex business issues." ICPC executive director Bill Poucher, a professor at Baylor University, says the contest gives students the opportunity to demonstrate their talents and present themselves to top recruiters. "The contest is also a forum for advancing technology in an effort to better accommodate the growing needs of the future," Poucher says. "At the same time, the competition is a chance for students of similar interests to exchange ideas and peer educate." Following the regional contests currently underway, finalists will attend the World Finals, which will take place in February 2010 in Harbin, China, hosted by Harbin Engineering University.Where the Virtual World and Reality Meet EuroNews (10/21/09) Researchers in Barcelona are developing virtual reality spaces that incorporate touch-sensitive tiles and immersive animations. Pompeu Fabra University professor Paul Verschure says his research team has built an experience-induction machine as part of the PRESENCCIA project to understand how humans can exist in physical and virtual environments simultaneously. One of the project's major challenges was creating a credible virtual environment, which required the researchers to understand how people's brains construct a vision of the world. "Imagine what we see is sort of rapidly jumping about--that would not be a believable experience for us," Verschure says. "So that means one thing we have really tried to engineer here also from a psychological perspective is how do I feed this continuity of expectations that our brain is generating about the world." The researchers say the ultimate goal is to advance human-computer interaction beyond the traditional keyboard, screen, and mouse. "What we're trying to do is to understand why people behave in a more or less natural way in a virtual reality," says PRESENCCIA project coordinator Mel Slater. Petar Horki, a student at Austria's Graz University of Technology, is using PRESENCCIA concepts to create a virtual reality system that uses mind control, allowing the user to simply think about an action to perform that action in the virtual world. "Actually, I'm not doing anything, I'm just imagining I'm doing a brisk foot movement, and by this imagination I can move at least in this virtual room," Horki says.Universities Face Challenges of Embracing the World Wide Web University of Southampton (ECS) (10/09/09) Lewis, Joyce The Research & Development Society recently presented Dame Wendy Hall of the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science with the Duncan Davies Medal. Awarded annually, the medal was established to honor individuals who have helped to keep the United Kingdom at the forefront of research and development. In addition to accepting the award, Hall, president of ACM, also delivered the 2009 Duncan Davies Lecture titled "Research 2.0: The Age of Networks." Hall discussed the development of Web science, the increasing need for interdisciplinary research, and how universities will be impacted. The next generation of Web technology will allow for greater opportunities of interdisciplinary research by international teams, she said. "The role of government is crucial in setting policies to create an environment in which such research can flourish but in the age of networks, universities may also have to radically change in order to facilitate such exciting and necessary developments and better train people to meet the needs of businesses in the future," Hall said. "There is a growing realization that a clear research agenda aimed at understanding the current, evolving, and potential Web is needed."47th Design Automation Conference Announces Calls for Submissions to Technical Program Business Wire (10/21/09) The organizers of ACM's 47th Design Automation Conference (DAC) are now accepting contributions for the technical program of next year's gathering, which takes place June 13-18, 2010, in Anaheim, Calif. Members of the electronic design and design automation (EDA) community have until Oct. 26, 2009, to make suggestions for special sessions, which are geared for emerging areas that have not been sufficiently covered in research papers. The deadline for suggestions on panels and tutorials is also Oct. 26. Submissions for research papers and Wild and Crazy Ideas (WACI) papers are due on Nov. 19. Research papers should focus on multicore/many core architectures, system prototyping technology, and embedded software design and debug, while WACI papers give industry professionals and researchers an opportunity to cover more unconventional technical ideas. Students have until Nov. 25 to enter their designs for electronic systems into the Student Design Contest, which is jointly sponsored by ISSCC and DAC. Submissions for User Track Presentations, due on Jan. 18, 2010, should address the real-life issues that IC designers, application engineers, and design flow developers face. And ideas for the specific design, design methodologies, and design automation topics of workshops should be submitted by Jan. 29.Vulnerability Seen in Amazon's Cloud-Computing Technology Review (10/23/09) Talbot, David A new study by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) suggests that leading cloud-computing services may be vulnerable to eavesdropping and malicious attacks. The study found that it may be possible for attackers to accurately map where a target's data is physically located within the cloud and use various strategies to collect data. MIT postdoctoral researcher Eran Tromer says the vulnerabilities uncovered in the study, which only tested Amazon.com's Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) service, are likely present in current virtualization technology and will affect other cloud providers. The attack used in the study involves first determining which physical servers a victim is using within a cloud, implanting a virus on those servers, and then attacking the victim. The researchers demonstrated that once the malicious virtual machine is on the target's server, the malware can carefully monitor how access to resources fluctuates, potentially allowing the attacker to glimpse sensitive information about the victim. The attack capitalizes on the fact that virtual machines still have IP addresses visible to anyone within the cloud. The researchers found that nearby addresses often share the same physical hardware within the cloud, so an attack can set up numerous virtual machines, look at their IP addresses, and determine which ones share a server as the target. It may even be possible to detect the victim's passwords using a keystroke attack, Tromer says. Amazon's Kay Kinton says that Amazon has deployed safeguards that prevent attackers from using the techniques described in the study.'Humanised' Computers That Know What You're Thinking iTWire (10/23/09) Dinham, Peter University of Surrey researchers have developed an automatic system to identify non-verbal social signals in conversations, which could enable computers to better understand meaning in speech and eventually lead to more intuitive computer interfaces. Tim Sheerman-Chase, the leader of the research effort, says the technology could allow social cues such as agreement, understanding, thinking, and questioning to be identified in videos. He says humans unconsciously use body gestures, emotions, and gaze direction to understand the meaning of spoken language, and enabling computers to understand these signals could provide an invaluable tool in the study of social situations and in advancing computer interfaces. In the study, human conversations were recorded and interesting clips from the conversations were rated by 21 annotators in a Web browser. "This provided clear examples of 'thinking' and 'not thinking,' along with positive and negative examples of the other non-verbal signals," Sheerman-Chase says. "A computer learned which parts of the face could be used to identify each social signal in video." He says the ability for computers to understand meaning in natural conversation is critical to enabling them to recognize and use humans' innate communication skills. "Although the accuracy of the system is far from perfect, it is comparable to human performance for some types of social signals," he says.To Protect Your Privacy, Hand Over Your Data New Scientist (10/22/09) Venkatraman, Vijaysree A new proposal from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Human Dynamics Laboratory suggests that digital identities would be more secure if they were based on data collected from "reality mining," which studies how people behave using the digital data produced by computerized activities. MIT researcher Alex Pentland says that researchers and corporations have already realized the potential for reality mining, and argues that if people were to gain control over their own personal data mines they could use that information to prove who they are or inform smart recommendation systems. Pentland believes that allowing access to that data is safer than relying on key-like codes and numbers, which can be stolen or faked. He proposes creating a central body--supported by cell phone networks, banks, and the government--that would manage a data identity system. Banks could provide pieces of data to a third party running a check on a person's identity, and individuals could use their own data for services such as apps on a smartphone. Pentland says such a system would be far more powerful than existing recommender systems. He has been working to alleviate concerns over using personal data as an identification system, and has gotten the Harvard Law Lab and the World Economic Forum to develop and support the idea. He says 70 other industry partners have expressed interest and will be asked to test a design for the system.Georgia Tech Wins NSF Award for Next-Gen Supercomputing Georgia Institute of Technology (10/21/09) Wilson, Stefany Georgia Tech has received a five-year, $12 million award from the U.S. National Science Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastructure to develop and deploy a high-performance computing (HPC) system. Georgia Tech will lead a partnership of academic, industry, and government experts in the creation of two heterogeneous HPC systems that will expand the range of research projects scientists and engineers can undertake. The project will unite experts and resources from Georgia Tech's College of Computing, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee, the National Institute for Computational Sciences, Hewlett-Packard, and NVIDIA. "Our goal is to develop and deploy a novel, next-generation system for the computational science community that demonstrates unprecedented performance on computational science and data-intensive applications, while also addressing the new challenges of energy efficiency," says Georgia Tech professor Jeffrey Vetter. The project will be developed and deployed in two phases. An initial system delivery is planned for deployment in early 2010, with innovations in performance and power being achieved through heterogeneous processing based on graphics processing units.ANU Plans $50m Supercomputer Spend ZDNet Australia (10/20/09) Tindal, Suzanne The Australian National University's (ANU's) National Computing Infrastructure (NCI) is expected to receive $50 million from the Australian government to build a new data center and supercomputer that could be available by 2012. The funding follows a recent report that strongly urged the government to upgrade Australia's computing infrastructure. The new computer primarily will be used for climate change modeling and research, although it also will be available for other projects from universities and institutions. NCI director Lindsay Botten is developing a project plan for the government that, if approved, will enable the computer to be bought and operational by late 2011 or early 2012. Botten says that approximately $30 million will go to the hardware and $20 million will be used to build the necessary data center facilities. None of the funding will go toward on-costs for the computer and data center, which would have to be paid by research institutions using the facility. ANU recently negotiated the purchase of a Sun supercomputer, which is expected to be operational by the end of the year. That computer will be capable of a peak performance of 140 teraflops.RIT Scientists Use Supercomputers to ‘See’ Black Holes Rochester Institute of Technology (10/19/09) Gawlowicz, Susan Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) scientists will use several grants to expand their supercomputer and use two of the world's fastest supercomputers to advance research on black holes. RIT researchers are using supercomputers to run mathematics and computer graphics to simulate elements of black holes that cannot be seen directly. "It is a thrilling time to study black holes," says RIT's Manuela Campanelli. "We're nearing the point where our calculations will be used to test out one of the last unexplored aspects of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, possibly confirming that it properly describes the strongest gravitational fields in the universe." RIT's computer lab hosts NewHorizons, a cluster that consists of 85 nodes with four processors each, connected through an Infiniband network capable of sending data at 10 Gbps. The researchers recently received an $85,000 U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to improve their computer power by nearly 50 percent with an additional 20 nodes. The researchers also were awarded 3.5 million CPU hours on the Ranger supercomputer through the TeraGrid. The researchers also received a NSF grant that reserves time on Blue Waters, a supercomputer that is scheduled to begin production in 2011 at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Blue Waters will consist of more than 200,000 processing cores, and is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world for open scientific research.Intelligent System to Help Autistic Children Recognize Emotions AlphaGalileo (10/19/09) Computer scientists from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore are developing an intelligent facial expression recognition system that would help autistic children understand the emotions of other people. The system makes use of derivative-based filtering to locate the edge of the human face, as well as boosting classifier to recognize facial expressions. Teik-Toe Teoh, Yok-Yen Nguwi, and Siu-Yeung Cho of the Center for Computational Intelligence in the School of Computer Engineering use Gaussian derivatives and Laplacian derivatives, and filters out non-face images using Adaboost. The technique is capable of finding key fiducial points for feature extraction and selection processing. Meaningful features are then classified into the corresponding classes. The team says the use of derivative filtering and boosting classifier makes for an efficient facial expression recognition system, which would be a portable device.Researcher Paves Alternate Path for Hard Drives EE Times (10/19/09) Merritt, Rick Carnegie Mellon University professor Jimmy Jian-Gang Zhu is developing a prototype hard disk technology based on his microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technique, which could potentially allow three terabits (Tbits) of data to be stored on a square inch of a spinning disk. Meanwhile, Seagate Technology is developing heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, which uses a laser light on each drive head to heat a portion of the disk just before data is written to it, and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is working on a way to use patterns to track bit location on media. One analyst says the industry may have to choose one of the competing technologies within the next year. Either patterned media or HAMR could create densities of 1 to 10 Tbits per square inch, and both have similar costs based on available estimates. However, Zhu believes his approach could cost less than either technology and provide similar advancements. His lab is fabricating a prototype device and plans to test its performance. In MAMR, a drive head emits a microwave field that excites the electrons in the media, building up energy that makes it easier to write data. MAMR uses a localized high frequency AC magnet field generated by a magnetic thin film stack integrated with existing recording heads. Zhu says the stack contains only a few more magnetic layers than modern recording heads. He says that MAMR "represents the least disruptive approach with substantial gain of storage capacity."

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• 21 Oct 2009 19:41

  Welcome to the October 21, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Congress Endorses Computer Science Education as Driver of Innovation, Economic Growth Solving the IT Graduate's Dilemma Immigrant Scientists Create Jobs and Win Nobels All-in-One Computerised Scheduling Will Make Airports Greener and More Efficient ACM, IEEE-CS Honor Pioneer of Grid Computing Crystals Hold Super Computer Key Caltech Scientists Create Robot Surrogate for Blind Persons in Testing Visual Prostheses Jumping the Queue for Official Documents Computers Have Speed Limit as Unbreakable as Speed of Light, Say Physicists Nokia Opens New Research Center in Berkeley Volunteering Computers for Science Cheetah, Gecko and Spiders Inspire Robotic Designs Is My Robot Happy to See Me? Quantum Computers Could Tackle Enormous Linear Equations Congress Endorses Computer Science Education as Driver of Innovation, Economic Growth ACM (10/21/09) ACM and several computing community partners commend the U.S. House of Representatives' passage of a resolution to improve the visibility of computer science as a transforming industry that propels technology innovation and improves economic productivity. The House resolution designates the week of December 7 as "National Computer Science Education Week" and calls on educators and policymakers to improve computer science learning at all education levels and to encourage increased participation in computer science. ACM is working with Microsoft, Google, Intel, the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), and the Computing Research Association to improve awareness that computer science education is a national priority. "National Computer Science Education Week will help us draw attention to the need for an educational system that values computer science as a discipline and provides students with critical thinking skills and career opportunities," says ACM Education Policy Committee chair Bobby Schnabel, dean of the School of Informatics at Indiana University. CSTA executive director Chris Stephenson notes the vital role that computing plays in people's daily lives, and stresses the urgency of building a strong computing workforce. "We need to expose K-12 students to computer science concepts to help them gain critical 21st century skills and knowledge, and we're grateful for Congress' recognition of this need as a national priority," Stephenson says. NCWIT CEO and co-founder Lucy Sanders says the annual commemoration of National Computer Science Education Week can strengthen efforts to inform students, teachers, parents, and the public about how computer science enables innovation in all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields and creates economic opportunities.Solving the IT Graduate's Dilemma Computerworld Australia (10/19/09) Edwards, Kathryn The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) new global information technology (IT) education-focused body used the WE Rock event at Australian Web Week to learn what the IT industry and universities believe are the best ways for Web professionals and IT graduates to prepare for the workforce. The Open Web Education Alliance's (OWEA's) John Allsopp said that new educational standards need to be formed because the industry cannot continue to rely on IT professionals to teach themselves Web development. "We need to transition a much more structured approach to educating future Web designers, Web developers, and information architects," Allsopp said. "A challenge exists to take the self-help ecosystem of the Web and make it become a profession with formal training." University of Tennessee professor Leslie Jensen-Inman acknowledged that the IT industry moves fast and academia struggles to quickly update curriculum. Meanwhile, Yahoo Design Pattern Library curator Christian Crumlish said IT graduates should have "an engineering bent, technical skills, as well as an interest in what it's like for a user." OWEA, which launches in early 2010, has prepared a white paper outlining its operational plans for the W3C.Immigrant Scientists Create Jobs and Win Nobels Wall Street Journal (10/20/09) P. A19; Hockfield, Susan Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) president Susan Hockfield notes that the majority of the 2009 Nobel Prize winners for physics, chemistry, and medicine are immigrants who came to the United States as scientists or as graduate or post-doctoral students. She writes that they were drawn by the openness and prestige of the U.S. system of higher education and advanced research, but "that openness stands in sharp contrast to arcane U.S. immigration policies that discourage young scholars from settling in the U.S." Student immigrants play a vital role in job creation, and Hockfield notes that foreign MIT graduates have started 2,340 active U.S. businesses in which more than 100,000 people are employed. She points out that U.S. immigration statutes require that students go back to their homelands after graduation and then apply for a visa if they wish to return and seek employment in the United States. "It would be hard to invent a policy more counterproductive to our national interest," Hockfield says. She advocates the creation of a wider-ranging immigration policy that would allow foreign students who earn advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math to easily obtain legal permanent residence. Also critical is the aggressive cultivation of more domestic talent, especially Ph.D.s in the sciences, as other countries' graduation rates are outpacing those of the United States. "To be part of [the] global creative network we must inspire more young Americans to pursue scientific careers, and we must rapidly reform U.S. immigration policies that drive away talented young scholars who would otherwise decide to live, work, and innovate here," Hockfield concludes.All-in-One Computerised Scheduling Will Make Airports Greener and More Efficient Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (10/19/09) A project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and led by University of Nottingham researchers is developing a new computerized approach to scheduling airport operations that is designed to reduce delays, speed up baggage handling, and decrease pollution. The project aims to computerize and coordinate the scheduling of take-offs, landings, gate assignments, and baggage handling. The end result will be a search engine capable of analyzing the billions of possible scheduling combinations to provide the controllers with the most efficient courses of action. Currently, these four areas are organized manually by staff members who make decisions based on observations, reports, and experience. The scheduling improvements will make flying easier for passengers and reduce pollution by minimizing the time planes spend on the ground with their engines running. The project will develop computational models for each of the four areas of operations and determine how to run those models in conjunction with each other. One of the critical issues is how long an airplane needs for preparation on the ground before it can take off. Preparation includes enough time for the safety briefing and warming the engines. Sending a plane to the runway before either of these steps has taken place will cause delays on the runway that could affect other flights.ACM, IEEE-CS Honor Pioneer of Grid Computing AScribe Newswire (10/20/09) ACM and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) have named Francine Berman the winner of the inaugural Ken Kennedy Award. Established this year, the award, named for the high-performance computing expert who founded Rice University's computer science program, honors individuals who have made significant contributions in programmability and productivity in computing, as well as in community service or mentoring. ACM and IEEE-CS sought to recognize Berman's "influential leadership in the design, development, and deployment of national-scale cyberinfrastructure." Berman, currently vice president for research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, headed the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure when it developed a national-scale grid and created an integrated package of software to support large-scale domain applications. Berman is co-chair of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, and has served on key advisory boards for the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Academies, the National Institutes of Health, and other groups. Berman was a founding member and a co-chair of the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research, and currently serves on the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology Board of Trustees. ACM and IEEE-CS will present the 2009 Kennedy Award to Berman at the SC09 Conference, which takes place Nov. 14-20, in Portland, Oregon.Crystals Hold Super Computer Key BBC News (10/18/09) University of Edinburgh researchers used low-energy lasers to make salt crystals in gel, which could make it possible to store a terabyte of data in a space the size of a sugar cube within the next 10 years. The researchers focused two overlapping low-energy laser beams on a salt solution, which provided the exact right amount of energy to form a temporary crystal. Edinburgh professor Andy Alexander says the process could be used to improve on traditional methods of optical data storage such as CDs. In comparison to the two-dimensional surface of a CD, three-dimensional (3D) optical data storage contains far more layers, and tiny crystals could act as storage points. Information would be stored by making marks in a pattern and read using light. Alexander says that 3D, crystal-based devices could be available within 10 years and would enable users to easily store, access, and move massive amounts of data. "This research builds on a discovery that was made by accident many years ago, when it was found that light can be used to trigger crystal formation," he says. "We have refined this technique and now we can create crystals on demand. There is much work to be done before these crystals can be used in practical applications such as optical storage, but we believe they have significant potential."Caltech Scientists Create Robot Surrogate for Blind Persons in Testing Visual Prostheses California Institute of Technology (10/19/09) Oliwenstein, Lori California Institute of Technology (Caltech) scientists have developed a remote-controlled robot capable of simulating the experience of a blind person who has received visual prosthesis implants such as an artificial retina. Caltech's mobile robotic platform, called CYCLOPS, is the first device to emulate what a blind person can see with an implant, says Caltech scientist Wolfgang Fink. An artificial retina uses a miniature camera to capture images, which are processed and sent to the implanted silicon chip's electrode array. The chip directly stimulates the eye's functional retinal ganglion cells, which send the image information to the vision centers of the brain. CYCLOPS fills a gap in the process of testing visual prosthesis by approximating what the blind can see with a prosthesis to enable researchers to make improvements. CYCLOPS can be equipped with a camera like those used in retinal prosthesis, which allows researchers to determine what the robot receives as visual input. Researchers can use CYCLOPS to test improvements in retinal implants, or to test a home or workplace to see how it can be made more accessible to a blind person with a particular vision implant. For example, if CYCLOPS can navigate a room using a 50-pixel array there is a good chance that a person seeing through a 50-pixel retinal prosthesis would be able to do so as well.Jumping the Queue for Official Documents ICT Results (10/21/09) The European Union-funded SWEB project has developed secure, interoperable software that enables citizens and local governments to exchange official documents over mobile phones. The open source software's developers say that SWEB will be particularly useful in countries without an extensive fixed-line infrastructure. "With this software, regional public administrations could skip the step of electronic government and enter directly into the provision of mobile government services," says SWEB project coordinator Petra Hoepner. SWEB's developers installed and tested the software at municipal governments in Siena, Italy; Tirana, Albania; Skopje, Macedonia; and Backi Petrovac and the municipality of Stari Grad, Serbia. Authentication is provided through a security token, and other security precautions include time-stamping documents. Although the trials demonstrated that the system could be used successfully, it also raised concerns over the lack of a legislative and regulatory framework throughout the European Union that would allow governments to provide these services.Computers Have Speed Limit as Unbreakable as Speed of Light, Say Physicists ZDNet (10/15/09) Jablonski, Chris Boston University physicists Lev Levitin and Tommaso Toffoli have demonstrated that if processors continue to improve in accordance with Moore's Law, an unbreakable speed barrier will be reached in approximately 75 years. Even with new technologies, there will still be an absolute ceiling for computing speed, no matter how small components get, according to Levitin and Toffoli. The two physicists have created an equation for the minimum amount of time it takes for a single computation to occur, which establishes the speed limit for all possible computers. Using the equation, Levitin and Toffoli calculated that, for every unit of energy, a perfect quantum computer produces 10 quadrillion more operations each second than today's fastest processors. However, if following Moore's Law, it would take about 75 to 80 years to achieve this quantum limit, and no system can overcome that limit. "It doesn’t depend on the physical nature of the system or how it's implemented, what algorithm you use for computation," Levitin says. "This bound poses an absolute law of nature, just like the speed of light." The physicists note that technological barriers may slow down Moore's Law as technology approaches the limit.Nokia Opens New Research Center in Berkeley Technology Review (10/20/09) Bourzac, Katherine Nokia recently launched a new research center at the University of California, Berkeley that will develop technologies that can be brought to market in three to five years. The research center will primarily focus on user interfaces, cognitive radio, technologies designed for emerging markets, and applications that rely on information from sensors and global positioning systems (GPSs). At the launch event, Nokia offered demonstrations of some research projects already in development at its Palo Alto, Calif., research center, including a phone playing a three-dimensional (3D) movie. The 3D effect is created by projecting a different image to each eye. Phones with two cameras could be used to create their own 3D content, says Nokia Research Center's Henry Tirri. Nokia researchers also demonstrated a project being worked on in Bangalore, India. The company is testing a set of location-aware services that are based on text messaging, which could be useful in countries such as India, where most of the phones are limited to calls and text messages and do not offer GPS or Internet access. The system could enable a user to send a text asking how to find a specific location and receive directions in the form of a text message. The user's location is determined by his or her proximity to cell towers. Another service being tested in Bangalore enables users to display their location to someone they are texting.Volunteering Computers for Science Wall Street Journal (10/20/09) P. D2; Singer-Vine, Jeremy To aid in the number-crunching needed to process ever-growing volumes of data in biomedical and other types of scientific research, researchers are recruiting citizen volunteers to contribute the power of their idle household computers. This is possible thanks to a massive network that allows scientists to parcel out the work in small chunks. The volunteers download an application onto their system that connects to a network that includes other citizen volunteers and researchers. The network assigns each system a tiny piece of a project's puzzle to solve, and sends the results back to the network's server when complete. Volunteer computing efforts are usually founded on the open source software known as the Berkeley Open Infrastructure of Network Computing (Boinc). University of California, Berkeley scientist David Anderson, who created Boinc, says two key security precautions have been implemented to mitigate the open network's security risk. One precaution uses digital signatures to prevent hackers from hijacking an existing project's network. The second precaution blocks off all Boinc activity from the rest of a host computer, which prevents any malicious code from causing significant damage. Recent advances in Internet speeds and personal computer power have helped to triple the combined power of volunteer computing efforts over the past two years, according to boincstats.com. Currently, four million computers owned by almost two million users provide approximately 60 projects using Boinc with access to about 2,500 teraflops of processing power. Projects that take advantage of such volunteer number-crunching include IBM's nonprofit World Community Grid, which lends research support to various medical and humanitarian studies.Cheetah, Gecko and Spiders Inspire Robotic Designs Wired News (10/16/09) Ganapati, Priya Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Sangbae Kim is trying to replicate the mechanisms used by animals in robotics. Kim says the animal kingdom provides the best ideas for creating mobile robots. "Moving is one of their biggest functions, and they do it very well," he says. "That's why ideas from nature are very important for a robotic designer like me." Kim has designed several robots by adapting biological models. For example, Stickybot is a robot with foot pads based on a gecko's feet, and iSprawl is a robot that replicates the motion of cockroaches. Kim is now working to develop a robot based on a cheetah, with the goal of building a prototype robot from a lightweight carbon-fiber-foam composite capable of running 70 mph. The first step will be creating a computer model to calculate optimal limb length, weight, gait, and torque in hip and knee joints. Kim says the biggest challenge will be getting enough power from a motor to achieve the desired speed quickly. Kim and his researchers also are working on improving Stickybot, which has feet covered with tiny hairs made of rubber silicon. The silicon hairs are much thicker than a gecko's hairs, and Stickybot can only climb extremely smooth surfaces. The researchers are working to adapt the robot to climb on walls with uneven textures.Is My Robot Happy to See Me? Georgia Institute of Technology (10/19/09) Terraso, David Georgia Tech researchers recently tested humans' ability to interpret a robot's "emotion" by reading its expression, and to see if there were any differences between people of different ages in how they perceived robots. Using a virtual version of the iCat robot, the researchers had the robot exhibit seven emotions at various levels of intensity, and tested how well each participant could read its emotions. The study found that older adults were less accurate in recognizing anger and fear, which was expected, but also had difficulty recognizing happiness, but not sadness. Georgia Tech graduate student Jenay Beer says the similar success both younger and older adults had in recognizing sadness could be due to the difference in how a human actually expresses an emotion and how it is exaggerated in the cartoon look of iCat. As for why older adults had difficulty recognizing the happy robot, Beer suspects that the robot simply does not do a good enough job of expressing its emotion, though it may be that older adults were not as cognizant of the facial features that differentiate happy from neutral. The study also found that people of all ages had trouble distinguishing disgust, which could be due to the difficulty in programming a robot to portray that emotion. The researchers concluded that if robots are going to be accepted by older adults in social situations, they need to be designed to display emotions that are easily recognized. View Full Article | Return to Headlines Quantum Computers Could Tackle Enormous Linear Equations Science News (10/16/09) Sanders, Laura Aram Harrow of the University of Bristol in England along with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Avinatan Hassidim and Seth Lloyd believe that encoding large datasets of linear equations in quantum forms will enable quantum computers to quickly solve problems with billions or even trillions of variables. The team's new quantum algorithm could potentially enable quantum computers to be used for a wider range of applications. Complex processes such as image and video processing, genetic analyses, and Internet traffic control require enormous linear equations. "Solving these gigantic equations is a really huge problem," Lloyd says. "Even though there are good algorithms for doing it, it still takes a very long time." A classical computer might need at least 100 trillion steps to solve a problem with a trillion variables, while the newly proposed algorithm would enable a quantum computer to solve the problem in a few hundred steps, according to the researchers. They plan to test the algorithm in the lab by having a quantum computer solve a set of linear equations with four variables, among other problems. View Full Article | Return to Headlines

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• 20 Oct 2009 02:18

  Welcome to the October 19, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. Jeff Dozier of UCSB's Bren School Wins Microsoft Research's Jim Gray Award IT Jobs Will Expand Globally by Nearly 6 Million in 4 Years Q&A: Defcon's Jeff Moss on Cybersecurity, Government's Role Computers, Freedom and Privacy 2010 Conference: Call for Proposals Tracking Devious Phishing Websites Study Backs Open Access to Broadband Networks UAB International Conference Focuses on Preventing High-Capacity Computer Data Theft Going Plasmonic in Search of Faster Computing, Communications Field Experiment on a Robust Hierarchical Metropolitan Quantum Cryptography Network NSF's Cyber-Network Now Expands Across the Northern Hemisphere and Connects Half the Globe Radio Waves 'See' Through Walls The A-Z of Programming Languages: Arduino's Tom Igoe Jeff Dozier of UCSB's Bren School Wins Microsoft Research's Jim Gray Award University of California, Santa Barbara (10/16/09) Desruisseaux, Paul University of California, Santa Barbara professor Jeff Dozier has received Microsoft Research's second annual Jim Gray eScience Award. The award was created to honor the memory of the late Microsoft visionary in data-intensive computing, and Dozier was recognized because of the impact that his research in remote sensing, water resources, and climate change has had on environmental science and computer science. "Jeff Dozier's work epitomizes what the Jim Gray eScience Award is all about ... using data-intensive computing to accelerate scientific discovery and, ultimately, to help solve some of society's greatest challenges," said Microsoft's Tony Hey, who presented the award during the recent 2009 eScience Workshop at Carnegie Mellon University. Dozier said he first met Gray while serving on a National Academy committee in the early 1990s. He noted that he was interested in taking advantage of large data streams back when he served as senior project scientist in the early days of NASA's Earth Observing System. "Over the years, we had many fruitful exchanges about current technology and the likely computing future," Dozier said.IT Jobs Will Expand Globally by Nearly 6 Million in 4 Years eWeek (10/16/09) Sears, Don E. IDC predicts that by 2013, jobs in information technology (IT) will expand by 5.8 million worldwide, and that 75,000 new businesses will be created during that time. IDC says that growth in software and cloud computing will be major factors in new business and job creation, and expects new cloud-based businesses to generate $800 billion in revenues by 2013. IDC also predicts that IT spending will increase to $1.7 trillion annually by 2013, up from $1.41 trillion in 2009, in the 52 countries covered in the report. The rate of increase in IT spending will be more than three times the expected rate of gross domestic product growth in the 52 countries. "The advantages of a growing IT sector are more extensive than the raw numbers alone suggest," the IDC report says. "IT jobs tend to be higher skilled than most others, particularly in emerging economies, and countries with higher computerization can be more competitive in world markets." Information Technology and Innovation Foundation founder Robert D. Atkinson says the past 20 years have shown how investments in IT innovations foster economic growth. Atkinson says that continued IT innovation and investment will help to jump-start the economy out of the current recession and will significantly contribute to job and new business creation.Q&A: Defcon's Jeff Moss on Cybersecurity, Government's Role CNet (10/16/09) Mills, Elinor Defcon founder and organizer Jeff Moss, who was named to the U.S. Homeland Security Advisory Council in June, notes that there is a desire in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other agencies to augment the cybersecurity alert system as well as adopt Web 2.0 technologies. "It goes back to this theme I keep hearing from people there that they need to fully engage in the cyber area with distributing information," he says. "They want to be more transparent and they want to communicate information faster to broader audiences in different ways. The hang-up seems to be, what are the best ways to do it?" Moss says that DHS has been authorized to hire as many as 1,000 cybersecurity employees over the next three years, but he does not think that specialists are available in such numbers. Moss says agencies' fierce protection of their bureaucratic fiefdoms plays a part in the U.S. government's inability to respond adequately to a cyberattack. He acknowledges that the position of cybersecurity czar has been marked by a lot of turnover, and he presents a theory that "the longer you go without a czar the more they realize that maybe they don't need one, that what they envision what a czar doing, the role is changing." Moss argues that the position should be one tasked with coordinating intelligence, civilians, and the military. "So it's probably more important to get the right person and explain the position so they don't end up with one of these 'all the responsibilities and none of the authority' situations, which is what it sounded like, [a] multiple reporting structure with little budget and little staff and no real authority," he says.Computers, Freedom and Privacy 2010 Conference: Call for Proposals USACM Technology Policy Weblog (10/16/09) Organizers of the 20th annual ACM Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, which takes place June 15-18, 2010, in San Jose, have announced a call for proposals to help shape the program for next year's gathering. The theme of the conference is Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in the Networked Society and seeks to address how constant connection in social, communication, information, and physical environments impacts freedom and privacy, and how computers can be used to improve freedom and privacy. Organizers are seeking suggestions for speakers, topics, workshops, tutorials, and panel sessions. The proposals should take advantage of the location of the conference, include a diverse set of panelists and new voices, offer a number of perspectives on challenging issues, and explore cutting-edge technology, legal, and policy issues. Possible topics include social networks, cloud computing, surveillance networks, anonymity in a networked world, ethics and computing, accessibility, open source, and media concentration, advertising, and political campaigning on the Internet. The final program will be assembled partly from the proposals. The early bird deadline for proposals is Dec. 1, 2009, and the final deadline is Jan. 31, 2010.Tracking Devious Phishing Websites Technology Review (10/16/09) Naone, Erica Internet security experts have discovered that many phishers are using a trick called a flux, which allows a fake Web site to rapidly change its URL, making it difficult for defenders to block phishing sites or warn unsuspecting users. New research has found that about 10 percent of phishing sites are now using flux. Indiana University professor Minaxi Gupta says that because phishers often have access to thousands of hijacked machines they can quickly move a site around the Internet, protecting it from security professionals while keeping the fake site operational. To use a flux, phishers must control a domain name, giving them the right to control its name server. The phisher can then set the name server so it directs each new visitor to a different set of machines, rapidly cycling through the thousands of addresses available within its botnet. If the name server also is moved to different locations on the Internet, it is particularly difficult for defenders to pinpoint a central location where the fake site can be shut down. Gupta has identified several methods for detecting a flux and suggests that flux detection should be incorporated into the domain name system itself, because only a fraudulent site is likely to use a flux. There are some legitimate reasons for using a flux, but a legitimate flux looks different from a flux on a botnet. Shortening the detection time of phishing sites by even a few hours can make a major difference and make the scams less profitable for criminals, Gupta says.Study Backs Open Access to Broadband Networks Computerworld (10/14/09) Lawson, Stephen The majority of countries with the most successful broadband deployments have opened up the networks of their main carriers to competing service providers, according to a draft report issued by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The report, by Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, analyzed findings from a variety of market-oriented democracies in an effort to understand what approaches are the most successful at ensuring that citizens have adequate high-speed Internet access. Most of the highest ranked countries use open access policies in which the incumbent carriers must allow competitors to lease capacity on their networks to offer their own services. In comparison, the United States established open access rules in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, but has backed away from implementing them early in this decade, according to the report. The study found that open-access policies were a major contributor to the success of many first-generation wired network transitions, and is now helping second-generation wired rollouts. Japan, South Korea, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom are among the countries that have used open-access rules to foster strong broadband markets. In most measurements of broadband success, the United States ranks in the middle of developed countries, according to the study's analysis. The U.S. ranks 15th on broadband penetration per 100 people, and 19th in 3G wireless penetration. However, the U.S. ranks fifth in both median upload speed and in a broad measure of prices for low-speed broadband, and ninth in the number of Wi-Fi hotspots per 100,000 people.UAB International Conference Focuses on Preventing High-Capacity Computer Data Theft University of Alabama at Birmingham (10/14/09) Hayenga, Andrew At the recent International Conference on Applied Modeling and Information Security Systems, high-performance computing researchers cautioned that worldwide computer use puts a growing amount of digitally stored modeling, design, and supercomputer-processed projects at risk for theft by hackers and called for renewed vigilance in field-related data security. "Modeling and computing helps to solve the world's complex problems, but the information we process on the high-speed devices of our field can easily be abused if lost to those with ill intent," says Bharat Soni of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which hosted the conference. "That is why our conference has focused on securing the data we generate as researchers." At the conference, applied modeling information security experts gave lectures on the strategies for securing high-performance computing data, with an overall theme of creating awareness for the threat of data theft. "Now when we work to generate new information and data, we will know to protect it," says Eastern Illinois University professor and conference chair Suhrit K. Dey. "The information developed in computer modeling is the intellectual property of the researchers and designers, and we do not want it abused."Going Plasmonic in Search of Faster Computing, Communications ICT Results (10/16/09) Researchers working on the European Union-funded Plasmocom project have demonstrated some of the first commercially viable plasmonic devices, which they say could lay the foundation for a new era of high-speed communications and computers capable of handling electronic and optical signals simultaneously. The devices, which are expected to be incorporated into commercial products within a decade, use electron plasma oscillation to transmit optical and electronic signals along the same metal circuitry through waves of surface plasmon polaritons. Plasmonics is an emerging nanoscale technology that shares the same benefits as fiber optics--including ultra-high-speed data transfer rates--and the benefits of electronic components. The technology could lead to all-optical computer chips capable of operating at ultra-high speeds, faster communications, and new sensing devices. "For the last five years or so it has been possible to build an optical computer chip, but with all-optical components it would have to measure something like half a meter by half a meter and would consume enormous power," says Queen's University of Belfast researcher Anatoly Zayats. "With plasmonics, we can make the circuitry small enough to fit in a normal PC while maintaining optical speeds." Until now, however, plasmonics had been unachievable due to the limited distance over which plasmons could transmit data signals, which Zayats and his team say they have solved. "I think that we will start to see this technology make its way into commercial applications over the next five to 10 years," Zayats says. "A key breakthrough will be using plasmonics for inter-chip communication, making it possible to transmit data between one or more chips at optical speeds and eliminating a major bottleneck to faster computers."Field Experiment on a Robust Hierarchical Metropolitan Quantum Cryptography Network Science in China Press (10/16/09) ZhengFu, Han The University of Science and Technology of China recently demonstrated a metropolitan quantum cryptography network (QCN) for use by the government in Wuhu, China. The researchers say that combining quantum key distribution (QKD) with a "one-time pad" algorithm can create unconditionally secure communication between users. With that objective in mind, the researchers built a QCN that uses a hierarchical structure with multiple levels and three different existing networking techniques. In the Wuhu QCN, nodes with different priorities and demands are set in the central backbone net or the subnet, and assigned suitable networking methods. All QKD links are based on the BB84 protocol with decoy state method, which provides security for the network. The Wuhu WCN runs the Faraday-Michelson interferometer system, which is a unidirectional QKD scheme capable of auto-compensating for the influence of the birefringence in the transmitting channel, which can jeopardize the performance of QKD systems. Several demonstrations of the QCN show that the stability and robustness of the QKD device is sufficient for practical applications. The researchers say that quantum cryptography should eliminate security issues such as hackers and Trojans.NSF's Cyber-Network Now Expands Across the Northern Hemisphere and Connects Half the Globe National Science Foundation (10/14/09) Zgorski, Lisa-Joy The Taj network, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), has expanded to the Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development (GLORIAD), and now connects India, Singapore, Vietnam, and Egypt to the GLODRIAD global infrastructure. The Taj network will support every knowledge discipline, including high-energy physics, atmospheric and climate change science, renewable energy, nuclear nonproliferation, genomics, medicine, economics, and history. The population of countries with access to the NSF-sponsored GLORIAD program now exceeds half the world. "Science is increasingly data driven and collaborative, and does not respect national borders," says NSF's Ed Seidel. "High speed optical networks are critical to both national and international scientific efforts." NSF's Bill Change says the Taj network provides a new model of international cooperation, will make sharing global network management tasks easy, and focuses on user-leave performance. The Taj expansion significantly extends GLORIAD's existing research and education network and upgrades existing U.S.-China network service from 2.5 Gbps to 10 Gbps, allowing for the placement of high capacity network applications on dedicated lightpaths. Taj principal investigator Greg Cole says the network dramatically expands the world's science infrastructure by connecting scientists, educators, and students with the most advanced services available.Radio Waves 'See' Through Walls University of Utah (10/12/09) Siegel, Lee J. University of Utah engineers have demonstrated that a wireless network of radio transmitters using radio tomographic imaging (RTI) can track people moving behind solid objects. "By showing the locations of people within a building during hostage situations, fires, or other emergencies, radio tomography can help law enforcement and emergency responders to know where they should focus their attention," write Utah professor Neal Patwari and doctoral student Joey Wilson. A study on the RTI-based system involved placing a wireless network of 28 radio transceivers, or nodes, around a square-shaped portion of an indoor atrium and an outdoor area. The strength of the radio signal between the nodes was measured as a person walked in each area. The radio signal strength data was displayed on a computer screen to create a bird's-eye view of the area, which included a blob-like image of the person. A second study showed that an improved version of the system allows for tracking through walls, and demonstrated how variations in radio signal strength within a wireless network of 34 nodes could be used to track people moving behind a brick wall. The system can be used to track a person to within three feet of their actual location. RTI, which is less expensive than radar, measures "shadows" in radio waves that are created when they pass through a moving object or person. RTI has several major advantages, since radio signals can travel through obstructions like walls, trees, and smoke, which optical and infrared systems cannot.The A-Z of Programming Languages: Arduino's Tom Igoe Computerworld Australia (10/12/09) Clarke, Trevor Tom Igoe is a co-developer of the Arduino programming language, which he says was created out of a desire to provide a tool for teaching physical computing to artists and designers, with a specific focus on microcontroller programming. "The assumptions of those coming at it from a background other than computer science or electrical engineering are quite different, and we wanted tools that matched those assumptions," he says. Igoe points out that many people currently being introduced to code and microcontrollers went by the assumption that the computer's graphical user interface was its core interface, and that learning is a matter of copying and tweaking code. Arduino was thus designed to dovetail with that mindset, he says. Igoe calls Arduino the embodiment of "glass box encapsulation," in that it removes the need to look at the lower level code that constitutes the libraries, but still leaves it as an option. In addition, Arduino's hardware designs are completely open source, and the software has been cross-platform from the outset. "The open source nature of [Arduino] has had a huge impact on its spread, I think," Igoe says. "There are tons of clones out there. Many of them aren't even looking for a customer base beyond their friends, students, etc. But there is great learning value in making your own version of a tool you use."

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• 17 Oct 2009 00:23

  Welcome to the October 16, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week. What Kind of Cloud Computing Project Would You Build With $32M? Carnegie Mellon Researchers Save Electricity With Low-Power Processors and Flash Memory Merging Video With Maps Seeking Privacy in the Clouds NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing In Search of Machines That Play at Being Human Four NSF Grants Awarded to Stevens' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Recommender Systems Make Learning More Fun Seeing Things Increased Success a 'Virtual' Certainty for Rugby Players Dispute Finder: Making the Call on Web 'Facts' Louisiana Tech Receives DOE Grant for Cyberspace Education Program What Kind of Cloud Computing Project Would You Build With $32M? Network World (10/14/09) Cooney, Michael The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) plans to build a large cloud computing test bed in an effort to determine whether cloud computing can help meet scientists' demand for computing resources. Approximately $32 million will be spent on the Magellan project, which will combine the commercial cloud offerings of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. The project also will link the 100Gbps Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) to the Argonne National and Lawrence Berkeley National laboratories to rapidly transfer data between geographically dispersed clouds. ESnet will enable DOE scientists to access the computing resources regardless of their location. As DOE scientists use the Magellan system for their computations, performance-monitoring software will be used to analyze the kinds of science applications being run on the system and how well they perform on a cloud. The researchers say the project will help provide a better understanding of cloud computing's potential as a cost-effective and energy-efficient tool for scientific discovery. "We know that the model works well for business applications, and we are working to make it equally effective for science," says Argonne's Pete Beckman.Carnegie Mellon Researchers Save Electricity With Low-Power Processors and Flash Memory Carnegie Mellon News (10/14/09) Spice, Byron During ACM's recent Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Intel Labs Pittsburgh (ILP) won the best paper award for their article on Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes (FAWN), a server architecture that can handle data-heavy applications with greater speed and efficiency than current systems. To create FAWN, CMU computer scientist David Anderson and colleagues collaborated with ILP to integrate netbook processors with flash memory. Flash memory works more quickly than hard disks, costs less than DRAM chips, and is the most energy efficient option available. To test the server architecture, the researchers constructed a FAWN computing cluster out of 21 nodes, each equipped with a low-cost, off-the-shelf processor and a four-gigabyte flash card. They discovered that the FAWN cluster could manage 10 to 100 times more requests than a disk-based one while using the same amount of energy. Researchers are now constructing a FAWN cluster that uses Intel's Atom processor. "FAWN systems can't replace all of the servers in a data center, but they work really well for key-value storage systems, which need to access relatively small bits of information quickly," Anderson says. He says that in the future the researchers hope to use FAWN for data analysis.Merging Video With Maps Technology Review (10/14/09) Kremen, Rachel Microsoft and researchers from the University of Konstanz in Germany are collaborating to create Videomap, navigation software that incorporates videos of driving routes. The program gives drivers visual cues by highlighting landmarks and emphasizing one side of the road before a turn. Videomap uses algorithms for "turn anticipation"--essentially, the video slows before a turn and points out key images where the turn must be made. The program points out landmarks in the same way. "As we pass a landmark, the field of view will expand to encompass that landmark and create a landmark thumbnail," says Microsoft's Billy Chen. The image is held for a few seconds so that the driver can commit it to memory. Video speed varies depending on whether the driver wants to note landmarks or get an idea of the length of the trip. To test the system, 20 volunteers read normal driving instructions for five minutes. Then they were shown a simulation of the route and were asked several times to state where the car would turn next. The second time participants used Videomap instructions. With normal directions, the drivers were correct 60 percent of the time; with Videomap, the number rose to 80 percent. Chen calls the study "pretty conclusive," and points out that drivers relied less on text instructions after using Videomap and most of them preferred the software. Chen plans to test participants a second time using a new video simulation to see how the program holds up in different environments. He also wants to develop the program so that users will look only at the video when it covers a landmark, rather than looking equally at both the moving map and video. University of Zurich researcher Arzu Coltekin says that Videomap could potentially be useful for bikers and pedestrians as well.Seeking Privacy in the Clouds Duke University News & Communications (10/13/09) Basgall, Monte Duke University professor Landon Cox recently received a three-year, $498,000 U.S. National Science Foundation grant to research alternatives for providing social networking services that do not concentrate all user information in a single place. Cox believes creating a peer-to-peer architecture to spread the information out would make individual data harder to steal or exploit. "The basic idea is that users would control and store their own information and then share it directly with their friends instead of it being mediated through a site like Facebook," he says. In a report for ACM's Workshop for Online Social Networks, Cox proposed three possible options. In each option, users would load personal information into a virtual individual server (VIS), which could be hosted on the user's computer or be distributed within redundant clouds of servers. One of the options is called hybrid decentralization, which would keep VISs on desktops when possible, but switch to the cloud distribution option when individual computers go offline. "Users can try to put their information in clouds of servers, which are going to be highly available but expensive," Cox says. "Or they could try to store it on their own machines, which would be cheap but subject to service interruptions."NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing National Center for Women & Information Technology (10/16/09) The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) says the 2010 NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing will include affiliate award programs in Texas, Illinois, and Florida. Young women in high school who apply from these states will be entered into both the local and national competitions. A grant from the Motorola Foundation has made the affiliate award programs possible. NCWIT created the Award for Aspirations in Computing to recognize the computing-related achievements of young women, generating the kind of visibility and support that will encourage female students to pursue their computing-related interests. Award winners are selected for their outstanding aptitude and interest in information technology and computing, solid leadership ability, good academic history, and plans for post-secondary education. Winners and their school receive an engraved award. Winners also receive a trip to attend the Bank of America Technology Showcase and Awards Ceremony, which takes place March 27, 2010, in Charlotte, N.C.; $500 in cash; and a laptop computer.In Search of Machines That Play at Being Human Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain) (10/14/09) This year, 15 teams from Brazil, Canada, the United States, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Spain, among others, participated in the BotPrize contest, which applies the Turing Test to video games. In the competition, a judge started a game against two players, one human and one artificial. After 15 minutes of play, the judge had to identify which player was a human and which was a program. None of the computer programs, or bots, entered in this year's contest was able to deceive 80 percent of the judges. "In our case, we didn't have enough time to program a good bot, since I am still in the process of migrating the control architecture that I use in real robots to the bots in the Unreal Tournament 2004, so we didn't place among the first five, but I will try again next year with a more advanced bot which implements the abilities of prediction of the opponent," says Carlos III University of Madrid professor Raul Arrabales. He says replicating human behavior in any environment is complex because it becomes necessary to combine different cognitive capabilities. Arrabales says the problem is that although much is known about the brain, it is only on a relatively high level, which prevents the creation of artificial neuron networks that mimic human ones with enough detail. The finalists in the competition were able to convince at least one of the judges that their bot was human.Four NSF Grants Awarded to Stevens' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Stevens Institute of Technology (10/08/09) The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Stevens Institute of Technology four grants that total more than $1 million to help fund studies that advance cognitive radio (CR) technology, which in the future could make networks faster and more secure. Stevens professor Rajarathnam Chandramouli will use an NSF grant to study methods of developing CRs that mirror human psychological and social abilities, including the ability to learn from circumstances and human behavior. Chandramouli says the team will study "how humans use or misuse their cognitive abilities to evolve into different societies. Our approach is inter-disciplinary, cutting across anthropology, drama theory, wireless networking, and stochastic analysis." Professor Yu-Dong Yao is using an NSF grant to study xBeam, a defensive program used to counter denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on wireless networks. Professor K.P. Subbalakshmi will use her NSF grant to study DoS attacks on dynamic spectrum access (DSA) networks. Professor Hongbin Li will use his NSF grant to find ways to create a united framework for wireless sensor nodes. "These techniques will afford improved awareness of the dynamically changing environment in a cognitive network," Li says. He hopes that his research will counteract issues with network bandwidth and power.Recommender Systems Make Learning More Fun Centre for Learning Sciences and Technology (10/13/09) Winnubst, Marga As part of the European Union TENCompetence project, the Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies' Hendrik Drachsler searched for the most suitable way to recommend learning activities, considering the personal needs, preferences, and learning goals of community members. Drachsler explored commercial navigation and recommendation systems and concluded that the specific behavior of community members required a combination of different recommendation techniques. Drachsler developed a prototype navigation system and ran experiments to determine if such a system offers additional value to informal learning communities. The project concluded that the system has a significantly positive influence on learning. The experiment group needed less time to complete the same number of learning activities, and participants in the group chose more personalized learning paths than members in a control group, primarily because they explored more learning paths. A second experiment showed there was no noticeable difference between informal and traditional learners, but that informal learners were more satisfied with the experience. The results of the study led to a second prototype, called ReMashed, which shows how recommendation systems can benefit from the information gathered through Web 2.0 technology by life-long learners in a learning network. ReMashed recommends the most suitable sources using tags and evaluations from individual learners.Seeing Things MIT News (10/13/09) Hardesty, Larry Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Antonio Torralba and students from the school's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) say they have developed an object recognition system that requires no training and can identify objects at least as well as and any other available program. The CSAIL system uses a modified version of a motion estimation algorithm. Consecutive frames of video normally change very little, so data compression schemes often store the unchanging elements of a scene once and only update the positions of moving objects, with motion estimation algorithms determining what objects move. The MIT system treats unrelated images as if they were consecutive frames in a video sequence. When the modified motion estimation algorithm attempts to determine what objects have "moved" between one image and the next, they system can identify objects of the same type. "It's a real commonsense solution to a fundamental problem in computer vision," says University of Central Florida professor Marshall Tappen. "The results are great and better than you can get with much more complicated methods."Increased Success a 'Virtual' Certainty for Rugby Players Queen's University Belfast (10/14/09) Researchers from Queen's University Belfast are immersing rugby players in realistic simulated environments in an attempt to learn more about their perceptual skills and how they use visual information as they make decisions during games. As part of a new virtual reality training program, the rugby players wear a backpack of sensors and a head-mounted display for presenting a series of 360 degree virtual scenarios. "By presenting stereoscopic images in a head-mounted display and tracking head movements, the user's viewpoint is automatically updated giving a 360 degree virtual experience," says lead researcher Cathy Craig. PhD student Gareth Watson adds that "by controlling the events presented to the players, we can see how the visual information available to the participants at any moment in time influences the player's decision about when and how to act." Jeremy Davidson, forwards coach with Ulster Rugby, believes the virtual training scenarios can help develop a player's peripheral vision.Dispute Finder: Making the Call on Web 'Facts' Christian Science Monitor (10/13/09) Gaylord, Chris Intel Labs researcher Rob Ennals has developed Dispute Finder, software that highlights inaccurate online information in pink with a link pointing toward a reliable body of evidence that disputes it. Dispute Finder, which currently only works with the Firefox Web browser, can be downloaded from disputefinder.cs.berkeley.edu. The program also has an ignore feature that, when activated, will prevent it from highlighting a certain factual error again. "I'm not trying to create a consensus or show the truth," Ennals says. "Something can be true and be disputed." He also wants to avoid opinions or biases, and thus relies on neutral source material that is not partisan. Dispute Finder relies on its 10,000 users to keep it abreast of new information. Ennals says that registered users can highlight disproven statements and label them as disputed. Conversely, they can mark a reliable source of information as evidence. Although he considers the program experimental, Ennals has already improved upon the software. Earlier this year, Dispute Finder could only monitor Web sites that its users had labeled themselves, but now it can highlight specific allegations wherever they appear on the Web. Ennals hopes that Dispute Finder will be expanded to social Web sites and Internet TV in the future. "So, if you're watching one of the more crazy cable news shows, a little box might appear that lets you know that the New York Times or Christian Science Monitor has disproved this," he says. Louisiana Tech Receives DOE Grant for Cyberspace Education Program Louisiana Tech University (10/05/09) Guerin, Dave Louisiana Tech University has received a $951,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to support interdisciplinary cyberspace and science education initiatives in the state. The program, "Cyber K-12: Building a Foundation for Cyber Education in North Louisiana," is led by professor Galen Turner and will help train elementary through high school teachers in northern Louisiana. Cyber K-12 is one facet of Louisiana Tech's STEM Talent Expansion Program. Cyber K-12 also collaborates with the Cyber Innovation Center (CIC) to showcase the Cyber Discovery Summer Camp, which teaches educators and students about the history of cyber and its technological, social, and political benefits. "It shows students how life is interconnected and that they must pay attention to all of the issues surrounding the real problems that we face as a society," Turner says. Louisiana Tech's Les Guice hopes that Cyber K-12 will expand to become a national resource, serving as a model for universities in every state. "National leaders have emphasized the great importance in protecting the U.S. from cyberattacks," he says. Turner believes that Cyber K-12 will provide students with new opportunities and make cyber a more accessible discipline. "We're still teaching science, math, and engineering concepts; we're just doing it in a much more fun and dynamic way," says CIC's G.B. Cazes.

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