U.S. Tech Lead Challenged by Globalization of
Innovation
EE Times (04/21/06) Leopold, George
The globalization of innovation can provide benefits that outweigh
economic and political risks, says Jeffrey Macher, an economic professor at
Georgetown University. Speaking at a symposium on the impact of
globalization on innovation last Friday in Washington, D.C., Macher noted
that for semiconductor makers investing overseas gives them an opportunity
to take advantage of new technologies that can help "extend and augment
[their] capabilities." Macher says "process innovation is an essential
complement to product innovation for [IC] manufacturers." Like the chip
industry, PC makers have shifted R&D overseas, but innovative-related
activities have largely remained in the United States. However, PC makers
are not as focused on delivering innovation as they are on making cheaper
laptops for consumers, noted Ken Kraemer of the University of California at
Irvine, who added that job growth will continue to be an issue in the years
to come. In the software development community, outsourcing has been the
subject of much debate, but the United States remains the undisputed leader
in innovation when it comes to patents. Chris Forman of Carnegie Mellon
University wondered how long that would last, considering the declines in
federal research dollars and U.S. computer science graduates. Meanwhile,
venture capitalist David Morganthaler, a former engineer, questioned
whether IT hubs will resemble Rust Belt cities in 40 years.
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Canadian Scientists and Microsoft Researchers Present New
Ways to Use and Interact With Computers at Home and Work
PRNewswire (04/24/06)
At this week's ACM SIGCHI-sponsored CHI 2006 conference in Montreal,
Microsoft will reinforce its commitment to academic research partnerships,
as 92 percent of the company's papers that were accepted were written in
collaboration with a university or industry partner. "Working with and
sharing ideas with our academic and industry partners allows us to make the
greatest impact with our research," said Microsoft's A.J. Brush, who also
serves as a vice president for SIGCHI. CHI 2006 conference chair Gary
Olson praised Microsoft for its longstanding commitment to the
human-computer interaction (HCI) community. "Microsoft's continued
contributions at CHI demonstrate the company's commitment to pushing the
state of the art in the field," Olson said. Microsoft's active involvement
in the field dates to 1996, with the arrival of noted HCI expert George
Richardson, who will be honored with induction into the CHI Academy,
following fellow Microsoft researchers Bill Buxton, Susan Dumais, and
Jonathan Grudin, who have also been so recognized. One of Brush's papers,
written on the subject of LINC with University of Calgary student Carman
Neustaedter, details a digital, inkable calendar system for families
juggling numerous events and activities. Digitizing the family's schedule
enables members to access the information from a remote PC, a cell phone,
or even a Web browser at a public venue. Another Microsoft paper describes
a method for improving the way users access the information stored across
their personal digital resources, such as computer files, email, and Web
pages they have visited. Through a mix of keyword and property-valued
search, the technology seeks to level the barriers between browsing and
searching so that users can retrieve information from any environment
through a common interface.
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Congress Readies New Digital Copyright Bill
CNet (04/23/06) McCullagh, Declan
Despite several years of pressure from technology companies and academics
to moderate the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),
Congress is poised to move in the other direction with an expansion of the
bill's prohibitions against software that evades copy protections. Major
copyright holders such as the Recording Industry Association of America
have already voiced support for the draft legislation, which also expands
the wiretapping and enforcement powers of federal police. The proposed
legislation, drafted by the Bush administration and supported by Rep. Lamar
Smith (R-Texas), would create the new federal crime of intentionally
bypassing copyright protections that would be punishable, regardless if the
piracy was successful or not, by up to 10 years in prison. A bill calling
for the scaling back of the DMCA restrictions in the name of fair use has
been tied up in committee since being introduced by Rep. Rick Boucher
(D-Va.) in 2002. The draft legislation broadens the scope of Section 1201
of the DMCA that currently bars only the trafficking and distribution of
copyright-circumvention software or hardware by making it unlawful for
anyone to "make, import, export, obtain control of, or possess" any such
tools that could be redistributed. Critics have issued a report charging
the DMCA with stifling free speech and innovation. The draft legislation
also authorizes wiretapping in copyright crime investigations, criminal
prosecution of infringement on works not registered with the U.S. Copyright
Office, and stiffer penalties for criminal infringement than prescribed in
the 1997 No Electronic Theft Act.
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Experts See Computers Getting Bigger and Smaller at the
Same Time
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (04/23/06) Roth, Mark
Experts gathering at Carnegie Mellon University to celebrate the 50th
anniversary of computing at the school offered glimpses of their various
research projects that could appear within five to 10 years, but avoided
making grand predictions about what the next 50 years will bring.
Microsoft's Rick Rashid and Brigham Young University computer science
professor Dan Olsen Jr. both pointed to the rapid increase in storage
capacity. With a terabyte of memory now available for $700, the two men
said the next challenge will be developing the ability to navigate and
retrieve information quickly. Microsoft's Stuff I've Seen project will
enable users to search for information that they cannot remember where they
stored it by context clues, such as the month the item was created, or a
person with whom the user may have spoken that day. Displays are getting
larger, noted Stuart Card, a researcher at Xerox's Palo Alto Research
Center, who believes larger screens could lead to more significant
innovation. Computers are also shrinking, as processing power continues to
increase while feature sizes scale down. Researchers at Xerox are taking
advantage of the portability of processing power with the 3Book, a digital
book that enables users to turn pages simply by touching the corner of a
screen, provides a searchable index, and can create an abridged version of
the text by highlighting select passages using semantic processing
software. Because the device can store and download thousands of books,
the 3Book can effectively make an entire library mobile. Computing
portability is perhaps best illustrated by the cell phone and the iPod.
Intel's James Landay noted that "the real potential for computing in our
lives is all the rest of our lives that goes on when we're not in front of
the computer." That sentiment has guided the Aware Home project at Georgia
Tech, which uses sensors to monitor the elderly and help them remain
independent longer.
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Green Grid Project Seeks to Save Energy, Money
TechNewsWorld (04/20/06) LeClaire, Jennifer
In response to a survey of 1,200 technology professionals commissioned by
AMD in which 83 percent of respondents identified datacenter cooling and
power consumption as the most critical issues they face today, a group of
technology companies has launched the Green Grid initiative to cut down on
datacenter energy usage. Sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun
Microsystems, as well as AMD, the Green Grid is supported by the EPA and
the Alliance to Save Energy. To identify and promote the best practices of
datacenter design, construction, and operation, the project will seek to
establish itself as an interactive resource for IT professionals, enabling
them to share stories and practices and develop new energy-related metrics
and standards. Only 20 percent of the respondents to the AMD survey
reported that they have a plan in place to address rising energy use.
"Datacenter power consumption is a growing global concern on both a
business and environmental level," said AMD's Marty Seyer. The Green Grid
project is partnering with power supply and energy companies, channel
providers, and state and regional utilities in a sign of the maturing
technology industry's growing concern with the world's most urgent
priorities, Seyer said. In voicing its support for the initiative, the EPA
claims that technological innovation is critical to addressing the
environmental impact of rising energy consumption.
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Software Tracks Mood Swings of Blogoshere
New Scientist (04/20/06) Simonite, Tom
Researchers at Amsterdam University have developed software to monitor the
mood swings throughout the blogosphere and identify the events that
prompted the shift, with the ultimate goal of developing new approaches to
search and analyze the Web. The university's Gilad Mishne said that the
researchers began collecting information from the mood labels attached to
postings on LiveJournal. Moodviews keeps track of the roughly 150,000 new
LiveJournal posts that are created each day with a mood label (out of a
total 250,000 daily postings) and records them in a graph to track shifts
in the emotional state of the blogging community. A companion program
called Moodsignals attempts to correlate these fluctuations with events
happening in the real world by scanning for less frequently used words in
blog posts when a spike in label usage is identified. Moodsignals found
that the increase in usage of labels to convey excitement in July 2005 was
related to the publication of the new Harry Potter book by recognizing the
unusually common appearance of words such as 'Harry,' 'Potter,' 'shop,' and
'book.' The long-term goal of the research is to develop an
emotionally-cognizant search engine for release later this year to measure
bloggers' attitudes toward particular words, yielding a raft of data that
is not innately machine-codable, despite the common disparity between
bloggers' online personas and who they are in real life. The research
could have more immediately commercial applications also, as an investment
banker has expressed interest in the software as a vehicle for measuring
consumer confidence in various products.
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National LambdaRail Launches Transit and Peering
Project
AScribe Newswire (04/20/06)
National LambdaRail (NLR) sees peering and transit services as a way to
improve its nationwide network fiber and optronics infrastructure as well
as lower the cost of Internet services for member research universities and
tech companies. The consortium is launching a project, National
TransitRail, that will have the Corporation for Education Network
Initiatives in California (CENIC) and Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP)
oversee the initiative, using their experience in running the Pacific Wave
distributed peering exchange facility. Front Range GigaPoP (FRGP),
Mid-Atlantic Terascale Partnership (MATP), and Pittsburgh Supercomputing
Center (PSC) will also take part in the project. The peering and transit
program will be designed to intelligently manage traffic, quickly directing
it to the target network or organization, which would cut down on "hops"
while in transition. The project will address the relationship of peering
sessions and transit routes at geographically dispersed locations. "We
believe that it is time for the research and education community to further
exploit the reliability and redundancy that a national peering and transit
infrastructure affords," says NLR President Tom West. After the first nine
months, National TransitRail will be available to other NLR members.
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AJAX in the Spotlight Next Week and Beyond
InfoWorld (04/20/06) Krill, Paul
AJAX has become such a hot technology that developers and designers will
be gathering in San Jose, Calif., next week for the Real-World AJAX
Seminar, and in Santa Clara, Calif., in October for the AjaxWorld
Conference & Expo. The interest that independent developers have shown in
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web application scripting technology
has already prompted plans at Microsoft for its Atlas technology. "One of
the really [special] things about AJAX is that it is not a technology
platform that was handed down from on high by some vendor, but it's this
loose collection of browser-native technologies that the interest in which
has really come from the bottom up," says Jesse James Garrett, a consultant
with Adaptive Path who coined the term AJAX last year. Developers are
turning to AJAX to create applications because it allows them to move away
from the page-based interaction model of Web applications, he says. "It
allows them to be more dynamic," says Garrett, who will speak in San Jose.
The technology, which has been around for a while, still has its issues,
such as a lack of tools and a framework to make it easier to use.
Nonetheless, AJAX in many ways has come to serve as the client-side
technology that was expected out of Java.
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Linux Desktop Growth Could Spur New Malware
Activity
Computerworld (04/20/06) Lai, Eric
As Linux is implemented as a desktop OS in a growing number of
organizations and institutions, including the Indiana Department of
Education, experts say the platform could become increasingly targeted by
malware. Right now, one of the main attractions of Linux is its relative
immunity from malware as compared to Windows. However, the emergence of
the cross-platform proof-of-concept virus Virus.Linux.Bi.a/Virus.Win32.Bi.a
has raised concerns that actual malware will be launched inevitably. "I
think we'll see an increase in virus activity as Linux becomes more
mainstream," says Johannes Ulrich of The SANS Institute. The addition of
new access controls to the upcoming Windows Vista may also push some virus
creators to target other OS platforms, although Red Hat and Novell say they
have enhanced their own access controls in their respective offerings
Security Enhanced Linux and AppArmor.
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Cisco Looks to University Students for Ideas
CNet (04/19/06) Reardon, Marguerite
Cisco Systems has partnered with MTVu, MTV's college network, to develop
the Digital Incubator program, an annual contest that will award 10 student
teams with $25,000 each to fund projects that will enhance content for
broadband users. "My biggest regret is that I haven't found the next
Google of online content," said Cisco's Dan Scheinman. "The media business
is in a disruptive era and consumers are being empowered to create and
share their own content." The winning entries this year incorporated
elements of gaming, social networking, instant messaging, podcasting,
short-form programming, and mobile phone interactivity. Cisco, which
earlier this year acquired Scientific-Atlanta to serve as a platform for
the delivery of digital content from the Internet to the television, is
banking on the disruptive potential of Internet Protocol technology as
content owners such as Disney/ABC, CBS, and NBS increasingly are making
their programming available on the Internet. Added to the trend are the
race among the phone companies to build new networks and the increasing
adoption of advanced new mobile gadgets that enable consumers to share more
personal content on the Internet. While the proliferation of content
clearly heralds a shift in the direction of the Internet, it is too early
to determine which services will have staying power. Flickr and
Myspace.com have become tremendously popular, but Scheinman is betting that
the next killer application will come from university students. Scheinman
views Cisco's program as an inexpensive and often better alternative to
funding entrepreneurial startups. Though none of the winning entries has a
business model yet, Scheinman sees commercial potential in several of the
projects down the road.
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Mesh Nets to Become "Mainstream" Says Motorola
EE Times (04/19/06) Walko, John
An IEEE working group is developing the 802.11s mesh networking standard
that could be ratified by early 2007, reported Motorola Mesh Networking
Group executive Joe Hamilla. Hamilla said the IEEE task force has approved
the 802.11s proposals, which are now open to comment. "With the standard
will come ubiquity for the mesh networking concept, and we anticipate a
major build up in demand next year," he said. "It will become mainstream
in the near future." Approval for a mesh technology standard has been
relatively free of difficulty, and a pair of competing proposals from the
Wi-Mesh Alliance and the SEEMesh Alliance were integrated into a single
specification. The meshing of Wi-Fi hot spots turns them into an
interconnected network that can cover an area with wireless broadband
connectivity, and mesh-enabled access points not only deliver Wi-Fi to
users, but also function as routers/repeaters for other access points.
This establishes a wireless broadband cloud that can organize and repair
itself, lowering the cost of backhaul, implementation, and system
engineering.
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Of Open Source, GUI Design and X Windows
SD Times (04/15/06)No. 148, P. 5; Handy, Alex
In a recent interview, Trolltech's Matthias Ettrich, most famous in the
Linux community for developing the K Desktop Environment (KDE), discussed
his thoughts on GUI development and the current state of open source.
Matthias says that in creating a GUI, developers cannot predetermine the
platform on which it will be used, and that they must be mindful of users
with disabilities and ensure that their applications can be modified and
adapted to enlarge fonts or provide interfaces in specific colors.
Adaptability must be worked in at the framework level, Ettrich claims,
noting that no one will develop the perfect interface on the first try. He
points to phone interfaces and argues that a single interface would ideally
be able to integrate both a pen-based and thumb-based input method, but
developers are often limited by time-to-market constraints. Usability
studies have convinced Ettrich that software engineers need to be subjects
in the testing process of any new interface, because the interface
developers often fall victim to pique when their design encounters
criticism. "But when they see that a person who's knowledgeable with
software, someone they respect, struggling with these things, that's very
eye-opening," he says. Open source is currently bogged down in
configurability, Ettrich argues, claiming that the environment is
overburdened with complex code because developers often cannot not agree on
how an application should work. His solution is to establish "a strong
maintainer who can kill things." Ettrich also defends X Windows because,
despite its age, it supports thousands of programs for Linux users.
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Vint Cerf's Keynote at Domain Roundtable
CircleID (04/20/06)
At the recent Domain Roundtable conference, keynote speaker Vint Cerf,
chairman of ICANN, weighed in on various topics important to the domain
industry. On the topic of new TLDs, Cerf said that it's not that he
opposes them but rather that he is seeking to revamp the process of
approving new TLDs. He also touched on international domain names, noting
that though they are needed there are technical and security challenges to
their implementation, including the risk they present of phishing attacks
utilizing domain names that include characters improperly displayed by
browsers. Cerf admitted that ICANN's monitoring policy in regard to
registrars was in need of tweaking and that ICANN needed additional options
for disciplining violators of ICANN rules, not just the one it currently
has at its disposal--disaccreditation. Referring to attempts by other
countries to gain a say in oversight of the Internet, Cerf said that ICANN
was not itself in charge of the whole Internet, only certain aspects, and
that he did not think transferring oversight to the ITU was wise. Fielding
questions from the audience, Cerf said that ICANN's controversial pact with
VeriSign to settle litigation between the two was the best thing to do in
the end.
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The Open Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the
Inevitable
University of Southampton (ECS) (04/17/06) Shadbolt, Nigel; Brody, Tim;
Carr, Les
The future capabilities of the Open Access (OA) Research Web hinge on the
prediction, measurement, tracking, navigation, assessment, and augmentation
of research impact, which is the degree of a piece of research's usefulness
to other researchers and users in nurturing additional research and
applications. Research impact is measured according to the publication of
the research paper, the level in the journal quality hierarchy of the
journal that accepts the paper, the degree of the paper's usage, and the
work's citation as a component of further published research. Citebase is
a Google-like search engine that ranks articles and authors by citation
impact, co-citation impact, or download impact through the use of citation
links rather than arbitrary hyperlinks. Research impact, ranking articles,
authors, or groups can be compared by citation and download counts, which
can also be tapped to compare an individual's own research impact with
itself over time. A team of Southampton University researchers has devised
and will devise software that, combined with the expanding OA article
database and the data that will be collected and analyzed with it, will
spur more researchers to supply OA through self-archival; diagram OA growth
across disciplines, nations, and languages; navigate OA literature via
citation-linking and impact ranking; gauge, outline, and forecast the
research impact of individuals, groups, institutions, disciplines,
languages, and countries; assess the performance and productivity of
research; evaluate research funding candidates; map the trajectory of
earlier research lines according to individuals, institutions,
publications, fields, and nations; study and anticipate the path current
and future research will take; and offer educational resources that enable
students to navigate through OA research literature in a manner that far
transcends the Google approach to Web searches.
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Next Generation Simulations? Not on the Internet You're
Used To
Wisconsin Technology Network (04/19/06) Stitt, Jason
The national Internet2 network is helping educational institutions
throughout Wisconsin meet their high bandwidth needs, according to David
Lois, executive director of WiscNet, an alternative to the regular
Internet. WiscNet operates as a statewide segment of Internet2 that has
brought high-speed Internet connections to all University of Wisconsin and
technical college campuses, and 75 percent of K-12 districts. This week,
Steven Senger of UW-La Crosse used WiscNet to provide a real-time
demonstration of a virtual cadaver in 3D for an audience in Madison during
the WiscNet Future Technologies Conference. The audience was able to watch
images on PDAs. WiscNet not only meets the greater connectivity needs of
such exercises and tools, but is flexible and quick in delivering
high-bandwidth. "Some connections I might need for a week, and I can't
just get that from my telephone company," says Patrick Christian, who works
on WiscNet for UW-Madison. Officials affiliated with WiscNet still have
not figured out how to bring high-bandwidth applications to the greater
public, and home DSL connections are not fast enough to take advantage of
tools such as immersive 3D.
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Danger: Authenticating Email Can Break It
CNet (04/19/06) Evers, Joris
Email authentication schemes such as SenderID and DomainKeys Identified
Mail (DKIM) have drawn attention as ways to guarantee email senders'
identities, but experts warn that improper implementation could simply
break an email system. Microsoft, the biggest backer of the Sender ID
system, says the number of Fortune 500 companies that sent authenticated
mail was up to 20 percent at the end of March from just 7 percent in July
2005. SenderID has seen more adoption so far than DKIM, but it relies on
ISPs, companies, and other Internet domain holders to identify their mail
servers with published Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records. Meanwhile,
Yahoo! and Cisco Systems are backing DKIM, which uses public-key
cryptography to attach digital signatures to outgoing email. While the
SenderID concept usually does not require companies to put new hardware or
software into place, it does require them to do inventories of all their
mail servers and to keep their records up-to-date, which can produce
onerous IT costs. "If you are a large multinational organization, you may
have email gateways in 10 countries, you may have marketing companies that
send email on your behalf," said Paul Judge of the email security company
CipherTrust. This complexity was a big problem at Bank of America, whose
Erik Johnson warned at the Authentication Summit in Chicago that companies
must "deploy smart" to keep from breaking their email systems.
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Research on the Rails
Network Computing (03/16/06) Vol. 17, No. 7, P. 39; Hohlhepp, Robert J.
The National LambdaRail (NLR) project, a high-performance fiber backbone
that can link over 25 U.S. cities at 10 Gbps or faster, was sponsored by a
consortium of universities and nonprofits to fulfill their bandwidth and
performance requirements, which far outstrip what commercial network
providers can affordably offer, notes Robert Hohlhepp with the University
of Wisconsin-Madison's College of Engineering. NLR can place multiple
wavelengths or lambdas on each fiber pair through dense wave-division
multiplexing (DWDM), giving each subscriber its own wavelength, equal to 10
Gbps of bandwidth, and facilitating network-provisioning to multiple
subscribers on a single fiber pair. Regional and metropolitan alliances
have taken a cue from NLR's collaborative investment strategy to serve
connectivity needs in localized markets, writes Hohlhepp. For instance,
the Northern Tier Network Consortium intends to deploy the fiber structure
across the northern states so that education and governmental institutions,
communities, and nonprofits can enjoy high-speed connectivity throughout
the region. The regional Boreas Net consortium, meanwhile, is securing
private fiber links between numerous connecting points in Wisconsin,
Missouri, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa. UW-Madison uses a DWDM optical
link to carry the school's Internet2 traffic over a 10 Gbps connection that
the university shares with its WiscNet partners. DWDM enables the
provision of additional capacity for a fraction of the initial deployment
cost.
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Computing With Quantum Knots
Scientific American (04/06) Vol. 294, No. 4, P. 56; Collins, Graham P.
A practical quantum computation methodology might be realized with a
machine based on odd quasiparticles called anyons that defines a
calculation as a series of braids moving through space and time. Current
technologies that follow conventional quantum computer designs cannot
provide the low error rates quantum computers need to function, but a
topological quantum computer would implement quantum computation by tapping
topological properties that are not changed by slight perturbations. Such
a system would be inherently immune to errors like those generated by
random interactions with the ambient environment. The uniqueness of
anyons, which are theoretical at this point, lies in their ability to exist
in two dimensions, and topological quantum computers would put these
particles to use. Recent fractional quantum Hall physics experiments have
hinted that anyons exist in special, ultra-cooled planar semiconductor
structures immersed in strong magnetic fields. If thermal fluctuations in
the substrate material produce a stray pair of anyons that intertwine with
the braid of the topological computation before they self-annihilate, then
errors will be introduced and the computation will be corrupted; the
likelihood of error decreases exponentially with the distance that the
anyons travel. It has been demonstrated that there is no standard quantum
computer computation that a topological quantum computer cannot simulate,
the tradeoff being that it is an approximate simulation. The theory that
a topological quantum computer could be more powerful than its conventional
equivalent is disputed by another theory suggesting that any sufficiently
advanced computer that exploits quantum resources has identical
computational abilities.
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