ACM Security Experts to Urge Paper Trails for Electronic
Voting
ACM (09/27/06) Gold, Virginia
Barbara Simons, an electronic voting expert and past president of ACM,
will testify tomorrow that voter verified paper trails provide a
significant step toward mitigating the risks and ensuring the public�s
trust in the nation�s election process. At a Congressional hearing
reviewing security for e-voting machines, Simons will cite a range of
defenses against multiple security risks, including the kinds of human
error that have recently plagued primary elections in several parts of the
country. Also testifying will be Edward W. Felten, Professor of Computer
Science and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Two weeks ago, his
research team released a detailed analysis of the security of one of the
most widely used e-voting machines. The U.S. House of Representatives
Committee on House Administration will hold the hearing, which will be
available via Webcast from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. EST. Dr. Simons says there
is a consensus among computer scientists that all computerized voting
systems currently available carry risks. She will recommend that the
widely used paperless Direct Recording electronic (DRE) devices produce a
voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) or voter verified paper ballot
(VVPB) to mitigate these risks, and restore transparency to elections.
Moreover, she will urge the adoption of policies and procedures that
guarantee the integrity of the paper and the quality of the printers used
for printed paper trails as well as open, transparent, mandatory manual
recount if the manual count does not match the count produced by an
e-voting machine. The link to the live Webcast will be available 15
minutes prior to the hearing at
http://cha.house.gov/default.aspx
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New 'Threads' for Computer Science
Inside Higher Ed (09/26/06) Jaschik, Scott
In an effort to reverse declining student interest in computer science,
the Georgia Institute of Technology is scrapping its old computer science
curriculum with its intensive concentration on hardware and software
design, mathematics, and electrical engineering, replacing it instead with
the more broad-brush Threads program. Under the first part of the program,
students choose two of a possible eight "threads" of study. Collectively,
the series of courses that make up the threads are as challenging as the
old curriculum, though they deal more with the field's practical
applications. The computational modeling thread, for instance, deals with
the use of computer science to describe natural and physical processes;
media concerns systems that "exploit computing's abilities to provide
creative outlets." Once enrolled, students determine their "role,"
selecting an established professional in the field who could be a
programmer, entrepreneur, or innovator. Their academic advisor then helps
ensure that their chosen role supports their course selection, focusing
also on non-instructional skills such as how to write a business plan.
Professors developed the new curriculum plans out of the recognition that
"the one-size-fits-all approach to computer science just isn't working
anymore," according to Richard DeMillo, dean of Georgia Tech's College of
Computing. "The really big change here is that we were willing to give up
the idea of a core curriculum," he said. "If you have 90 percent of your
courses occupied with the core, you don't have the flexibility to do
anything creative." The faculty hopes that the new approach to computer
science education will help prevent the students from losing out to foreign
workers once they enter the job market. Freshmen entering the school this
fall were informed of the Threads program, and enrollment has spiked 33
percent.
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Vote Check-in Glitch Is Declared Fixed
Baltimore Sun (09/26/06) P. 1A; Harris, Melissa; Green, Andrew A.
Diebold Election Systems says a flaw in software customized for the state
of Maryland was the source of the problem with check-in computers during
primary elections earlier this month. The computer glitch caused delays
for voters at precincts. Speaking at the state's election office on
Monday, Tom Feehan, project manager in Maryland for Diebold, said it was
"an oversight" that the company did not sufficiently test the software for
its e-poll book. Diebold is scheduled to conduct a day-long test of the
software for check-in computers next week. The machines also experienced
two less-widespread problems during the primary election that Diebold has
yet to fix. Feehan said a small number of poll books had communication
problems, which would have enabled a voter to cast another ballot at a
different poll book in a precinct. Diebold plans to provide a solution for
this problem to the state before the end of the week. Moreover, Feehan
said some of the voter access cards used to activate voting machines did
not work. All of the fixes need to be installed on the state's 5,500
e-poll machines before the general election on November 7. State elections
administrator Linda H. Lamone says that if Diebold can't prove that the
machines are ready to go, she'll "pack them up and ship them back."
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2006 Grace Hopper Conference Attracting Record
Interest
Business Wire (09/26/06)
The 2006 Grace Hopper Conference of Women in Computing (GHC) is shaping up
to be the most successful gathering in the history of the event.
Registrations have reached an all-time high, with the number of
pre-registrations having already exceeded the 899 women and men who
attended the 2004 GHC, and sponsorships have shot up 50 percent, with 16
first-time sponsors helping the conference reach its new underwriting
record. Moreover, the number of scholarships for students to attend the
GHC has risen by 50 percent to 247. ACM is co-presenting the GHC along
with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI). The GHC is
scheduled for Oct. 4-7, in San Diego, and will offer plenary sessions,
technical papers, panels, poster sessions, workshops, personal and
professional development programs, and award presentations. Sensor
technology over the Internet and advanced robotics development are among
the leading-edge topics that will be discussed during the four-day event.
Keynote speakers include Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman
and former astronaut Sally Ride; Technology Access Foundation director
Trish Millines Dziko and Sun Microsystems engineer Radia Perlman are among
this year's invited speakers. For more information or to register visit
http://gracehopper.org/
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Google to Push for More Electrical Efficiency in
PC's
New York Times (09/26/06) P. C3; Markoff, John
On Tuesday, two Google data center designers will present a white paper at
the Intel Developer Forum arguing for a transition from multivoltage power
supplies to a single 12-volt standard. The result, the paper claims, will
be more power-efficient PCs and billions of kilowatt-hours of energy saved
annually. Authors Urs Holzle and William Weihl wrote that the multiple
voltage requirements of industry standard power supplies are not needed in
modern PC designs, which relocate voltage control to the motherboards. The
Google proposal's intent is similar to that of 80 Plus, a joint effort of
several electric utility companies and Ecos Consulting to offer computer
manufacturers incentives to design more efficient PC power supplies. "We
now have 70 compliant designs from 15 to 20 manufacturers," boasted Ecos
Consulting's Chris Calwell, a technical adviser for the 80 Plus project.
Calwell said the Google proposal's overall goal is laudatory, but he was
concerned that the overall efficiency may not be significantly boosted by
redesigning and streamlining power supply design, as Holzle and Weihl
suggest. EPRI Solutions estimates that more than 2.5 billion AC/DC power
supplies are employed in the United States and 6 to 10 billion are used
globally, while the current percentage of U.S. electricity consumption that
power supplies account for exceeds 2 percent; such consumption could be
halved with more efficient design, generating almost $3 billion in saved
electricity costs, according to EPRI. Calwell and the Google engineers
concurred that today's PC power supplies suffer from a design flaw known as
"overprovisioning," which Calwell likened to "putting a 400-horsepower
engine in every car, just because some cars have to tow large trailers
every once in a while."
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Microsoft's Interest in Research Is Healthy, Chief
Says
CNet (09/27/06) Fried, Ina
In a recent interview, Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid reflected on
the development and future of the division that he founded 15 years ago.
"When I first started Microsoft Research back in 1991, there were a lot of
people that I don't think thought we would still be around 15 years later,"
he said. "I'm feeling good about that." At a time when other companies
have been scaling back their basic research activities, Microsoft has been
increasing its investment, Rashid said. At the end of Microsoft Research's
fifth year, the division had come into its own, and had its graphics unit
contributed a significant number of the papers presented at that year's
SIGGRAPH, Rashid says, adding that from then on, it became much easier to
recruit top talent. Rashid generally takes a hands-off approach with his
researchers because of their high caliber, though he notes that the
division has been focusing increasingly on trying to prove the properties
of large programs containing hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of
code. Microsoft Research is also heavily investing in areas such as
computer vision and graphics, mobile technology, and robotics.
Additionally, the division is working to accelerate the development of RFID
sensors and to bring the costs down so the technology penetrates the
consumer market. "People are looking at, for example, being able to create
sensor networks just to keep track of the human body. We've been looking
at technology for aiding people with memory disorders. There are all sorts
of things that will be possible as you deploy these arrays of sensors. It
will happen," Rashid said. One of the areas in which Rashid's team has
contributed to the forthcoming Vista operating system has been device
drivers. The Static Device Verifier enables developers to verify the
properties of their drivers without testing. Looking down the road, Rashid
sees great potential for Microsoft Research to improve areas such as health
care and traffic analysis, and he sees no sign of the division losing
steam.
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Famed Inventor Ray Kurzweil to be Keynote Speaker at SC06
Conference
Business Wire (09/25/06)
Noted inventor Ray Kurzweil will be the keynote speaker at SC06's
"Powerful Beyond Imagination" conference in November. In his address,
Kurzweil will explain how the paradigm shift rate is doubling every 10
years. Among other inventions, Kurzweil is the principal developer of the
first CCD flat-bed scanner, print-to-speech reading machine for the blind,
and commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. He is the
recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the 1999 National Medical of
Technology award, and was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of
Fame in 2002. SC06 General Chair Barbara Horner-Miller says, "Ray
Kurzweil�s visionary thinking--and his ability to take his ideas from
thought to reality--make him an ideal speaker to open SC06, which is as
much a marketplace of new ideas as it is a showcase for new computing and
networking technologies. Ray�s work embodies our theme of 'Powerful Beyond
Imagination.'' The conference, sponsored by ACM's Special Interest Group
on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH) and IEEE, will take place Nov. 11-17 at
the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Fla. For more information or to
register visit
http://www.sc-conference.org/
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FSF Clarifies 'Inaccurate' Information About GPLv3
eWeek (09/26/06) Galli, Peter
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is attempting to correct information
regarding the second discussion draft of the GNU General Public License
that it claims are inaccurate. The foundation is also trying to allay
fears that it will require holders of the existing GPL to re-license their
software under the updated version. The clarification comes in the wake of
a paper signed by many prominent Linux developers enumerating their
grievances with the proposed update and warning that it could undermine the
entire open-source movement. Though he did not sign the document, Linux
founder Linus Torvalds has made his own objections to the draft update well
known. No one will be required to switch to the new version of the
license, and developers will still be permitted to license their code under
the GPLv2, according to the FSF's John Sullivan. "Contrary to what some
have said, the GPLv3 draft has no use restrictions, and the final version
won't either," he said, though he allowed that the update will bar some
distribution practices that curtail users' freedom to modify source code.
Those stipulations are intended to prevent companies from distributing free
software while controlling how it is used. Sullivan also said that
companies would not be stripped of their patent portfolios under the GPLv3.
"It simply says that if someone has a patent covering XYZ, and distributes
a GPL-covered program to do XYZ, he can't sue the program's subsequent
users, redistributors, and improvers for doing XYZ with their own versions
of that program. This has no effect on other patents which that program
does not implement," he said.
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Study Says U.S. Has Lead in Nanotechnology
New York Times (09/26/06) P. C6; Feder, Barnaby J.
The federal government is now devoting more than $1 billion a year for
nanotechnology research, and the economic benefits of the investment in the
field could still be decades away, says a new report from the National
Research Council. In its latest review of the National Nanotechnology
Initiative for Congress, the agency says improvements in government
coordination are evident, but the potential risks of nanotechnology require
more study. Last week, experts told the House Science Committee that $40
million is not enough to study the potential health and environmental risks
of nanotechnology, which involves the manipulation of atoms and small
clusters of molecules. The Research Council described nanotechnology as a
springboard for other innovations, similar to the impact of computing and
communications technology, which took 20 to 40 years to fulfill its
promise. The report called for a smaller, dedicated group to set
priorities for the government's technology managers, and to prepare
students and workers for nanotechnology by providing cross-discipline
training that includes biology, physics, and materials engineering.
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European Parliament Groups Reject Plan for Single Patent
Court
Computer Business Review (09/25/06)
A plan that has the potential to clear the way for software patents in
Europe has come under fire from several parliamentary groups. The European
Patent Litigation Agreement would create a European Patent Court to
determine the validity and infringement of patents. A year ago, the
European Parliament soundly defeated a software patent directive on a vote
of 648 to 14, with 18 abstentions. Technology vendors, business users, and
politicians were divided on whether to have a standard technology patent
law for the European Union. Internal market and services commissioner
Charlie McCreevy plans to present the European Patent Office's EPLA in the
European Parliament this week. "After the failure of the software patent
directive, the EPO has come up with another proposal backed by McCreevy,
and it's even more undemocratic and dangerous than the previous one," says
Umberto Guidoni, Italian MEP and representative of the parliamentary group
GUE/NGL. "That's why we don't want a new court that would be controlled
basically by the same people as the EPO." In addition to software patents,
critics are concerned about higher patent costs.
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Industry Effort Aims to Advance Women in Computing
Computerworld Australia (09/19/06) Tay, Liz
The Women in IT Executive Mentoring (WITEM) program in Australia is an
effort by eight top Australian technology leaders to help provide female
mentors for rising IT professionals. In 2005, 20.5 percent of Australian
IT workers were women, reports the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The
lack of female leadership at the top makes it difficult for female IT
professionals to find mentors, explains Dell Australia and New Zealand
managing director Joe Kremer. "We're trying to create more balance in the
organization, because I think if an organization under-represents women at
senior levels, then they are at a disadvantage because they lose a certain
point of view," he says. Dell launched WITEM in December 2005 along with
participating members from Cisco, EMC, Intel, and others. Phase one of the
program had each of the eight companies mentoring a female executive from
the marketing, legal, sales, or channel management division of another
company. Phase two, which began in July, focuses on mentoring women in IT
departments of companies that are not necessarily part of the technology
industry. Kremer says, "This program has opened doors. We have found more
of a voice for women in the company."
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Computer Scientist Spearheads $30 Million 'Open Science
Grid'
University of Wisconsin-Madison (09/25/06) Mattmiller, Brian
The Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science
Foundation announced on Sept. 25 the five-year, $30 million Open Science
Grid (OSG) initiative to supply an interconnected national computing
infrastructure that will employ distributed computing methods to deliver a
vast volume of computing power and storage capacity to researchers. More
than 30 universities and federal research laboratories will contribute
computational power to the grid, and University of Madison-Wisconsin
computer scientist Miron Livny is serving as principal investigator of the
project. Livny will also oversee the construction and maintenance of the
OSG facility as well as the coordination of the software activities. "Grid
computing has the capability to revolutionize research, but the tools
remain challenging for many scientists," notes Livny. "Projects such as
OSG are working to lower the barrier to individual scientists using
advanced computing." The OSG project's funding will be split among 11 U.S.
universities and four national laboratories, and Livny's team will get $1.2
million annually for OSG initiatives based at Madison. Livny's
participation is a reflection of the success of UW-Madison's distributed
computing projects, the Condor Project and the Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin
(GLOW).
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NSF Awards $3.3 Million Grant to Cornell to Bolster the
Percentage of Women Faculty Members
Cornell News (09/25/06) Steele, Bill
Women are underrepresented in the faculty of the science and engineering
departments at Cornell University, but university officials hope to make
some significant changes in the next few years. In the next five years,
Cornell plans to increase the percentage of women in the departments to 20
percent of all faculty members, and to one-third by 2015. A $3.3 million
grant from the National Science Foundation and its ADVANCE program will be
used to reach the goal. The ADVANCE program focuses on helping research
universities in their efforts to become more receptive to women. Cornell
is one of the leading research universities when it comes to graduating
female students who go on to pursue doctorates in science or engineering,
and producing women engineering faculty members. Women make up about 25
percent of science and engineering workers in the country, but less than 21
percent of science and engineering faculty at four-year colleges and
universities, and minority women account for about 2 percent. "With a
National Science Foundation ADVANCE grant, Cornell can renew its leadership
by demonstrating that reaching a critical mass of women scientists at an
elite, research intensive university is not only possible, but critical to
the quality of the institution," says Cornell Provost Carolyn Martin. "The
presence of greater numbers of female faculty at Cornell will have a
transformational impact at a national level."
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Open Source Search Technology Goes Beyond Keywords
NewsForge (09/25/06) Stutz, Michael
The semantic search engine that academic researchers have quietly been
developing for years has now been licensed under the GNU General Public
License, and a version for the desktop is forthcoming later this month,
according to Middlebury College's Aaron Coburn, lead developer of the
initiative. The Semantic Indexing Project promises to be able to recognize
synonyms or near matches of words, instead of simply retrieving results
that contain the literal search terms. The entirety of the source code is
available for download, which includes the central technology of the
Semantic Engine, distributed in C++, Perl bindings, and all of the
requisite code for creating the graphical user interface. One of the more
impressive demonstrations of the project has been the ability to
graphically visualize novels, an application whose origins began when the
researchers partnered with a Spanish professor interested in developing a
searchable e-book reader for Don Quixote. Coburn integrated a stable of
Project Gutenberg texts with software to visualize semantic data in the
database, which led to the ability to visualize plots, mapping the
interactions of characters throughout the course of a novel. "And the
algorithms seemed to do a really good job of detecting how the characters
interacted," Coburn said. The origins of the Semantic Engine date to a
National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) conference
in 2001. Following the conference, where experts spoke on hot topics such
as XML and Latent Semantic Analysis, NITLE conducted a study that had a
college instructor create a syllabus and apply to it the appropriate
Learning Object Metadata. Finding that it took the professor more than
four times as long to apply the metadata than to create the syllabus,
Coburn says that it then became evident that a tool to automatically
produce metadata or retrieve information from collections with no metadata
would prove extremely useful. NITLE researchers set to work building a
semantic search engine around latent semantic indexing technology, working
variously with Perl and C++.
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Johns Hopkins Joins Effort to Boost 'Smart Tag'
Security
Johns Hopkins Gazette (09/25/06) Vol. 36, No. 4, Sneiderman, Phil
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University, the University of Massachusetts
Amherst, and RSA Laboratories are collaborating on a project to improve the
security of smart tags. Some of the same features that make these devices
easy and convenient to use are also potential security threats, researchers
say, claiming that thieves can swipe sensitive information from the tags
without the user even knowing. The security of smart tags is of increasing
importance as the devices are being deployed for applications such as
merchant payments and gaining access to medical records. At Johns Hopkins,
assistant research professor in the Department of Computer Science Adam
Stubblefield will use his portion of the NSF grant money to examine the
protocol and architecture of the systems, which include RFID tags. "We
want to make it tougher for unauthorized readers to communicate with smart
tags, and we want to do a better job of preserving people's privacy,"
Stubblefield said. RFID tags work by transmitting coded data from a chip
through the electromagnetic field of a reader antenna, which some
scientists are concerned could enable a tech-savvy thief with the right
equipment to swipe data from someone's back pocket or purse. The
participants in the project, which has been dubbed the RFID Consortium for
Security and Privacy, are also working with the San Francisco Bay Area
Rapid Transit District to develop the first open, publicly available
software application for exploring RFID privacy and security.
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Internet's Future in 2020 Debated
BBC News (09/24/06)
The Internet of 2020 will be an inexpensive mesh of billions of devices,
according to a Pew Internet and American Life survey of 742 computing,
political, and business experts. "Key builders of the next generation of
Internet often agree on the direction technology will change, but there is
much less agreement about the social and political impact those changes
will have," noted lead author of the Future of Internet II report Janna
Quitney Anderson. "One of their big concerns is: Who controls the
Internet architecture they have created?" Microcost President Louis Nauges
projected mobile Internet as becoming predominant, with most mobile
networks supplying a minimum speed of 1 Gbps by 2020. Ethernet inventor
Bob Metcalfe wrote, "Many more of today's 10 billion new embedded micros
per year will be on the Internet." Some experts were skeptical that a
universal Internet will emerge because of issues with interoperability,
commercial interests, and government regulation. Australian Internet Mark
II Project leader Ian Peter wrote, "The problem of the digital divide is
too complex and the power of legacy telco regulatory regimes too powerful
to achieve this utopian dream globally within 15 years." Nearly 60 percent
of the Pew survey respondents warned of the emergence of a Luddite
counterculture whose resistance to technology could get violent. "Today's
eco-terrorists are the harbingers of this likely trend," wrote Internet and
education expert Ed Lyell. Some experts believe such outbursts will be
related to the technology's societal impact and not the technology itself.
Most respondents thought that more and more people will be living and
working in "virtual worlds" and enjoy more productivity online than offline
by 2020. There was disagreement as to whether the increased transparency
and decreased privacy resulting from the growing online presence of
people's personal details and dealings would be a positive force.
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Future of Broadband Networking: Less Complexity, More
Flexibility
InformationWeek (09/25/06)No. 1107, P. 63; Hoover, J. Nicholas
The future of broadband will allow users to stay connected no matter where
they go through mesh networking, say several tech visionaries.
"Conversations won't stop and people won't understand that you've changed
technologies," says Mark Francis, vice president of enterprise architecture
at AT&T Labs, which is developing a new delivery platform that twill change
the way network traffic is labeled to make the current model that requires
device integration with directory clients obsolete. National Science
Foundation computer and network system division program director David
Goodman sees a day when mobile devices use peer-to-peer networking that
will allow phones to borrow a signal from other phones' wireless
connections when its signal is weak. Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president
at Cisco Systems, envisions a time when user identities, settings, and
preferences are transferable across networks and devices. Meanwhile, work
on the Internet2 is proceeding among the various universities involved,
designed to improve networking capabilities for scientific research
purposes. However, eventually businesses will benefit from the Internet2
technologies, says Steve Corbato, associate director for the Scientific
Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah. He says, "As we
learn how to mine data and apply visualization techniques better, and if we
demonstrate the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of these techniques, it
drives down the cost of these services for a standard computing
environment."
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Tapping the Power of Text Mining
Communications of the ACM (09/06) Vol. 49, No. 9, P. 76; Fan, Weiguo;
Wallace, Linda; Rich, Stephanie
Demand for text mining technology and applications will be fueled by the
increasing amount of data that is placed online, and the inability of data
mining tools to sift through massive collections of unstructured or
semi-structured data. Text mining offers a much better solution for
companies that require the merger and management of large volumes of
diverse information, and it is critical to text mining that technology is
created that mates a computer's speed and accuracy with a human being's
linguistic proficiency. Advances in the field of natural language
processing are yielding technologies that allow computers to learn natural
language to support their analysis, understanding, and generation of text,
while text-mining technologies such as information extraction, topic
tracking, summarization, categorization, clustering, concept linkage,
information visualization, and question answering are also important
components. Information extraction technology analyzes unstructured text
and spots key phrases and relationships within text by seeking predefined
sequences, while a topic tracking system retains user profiles and predicts
other documents that may arouse the user's interests based on the documents
the user views. With summarization, users can determine whether a long
document fulfills their requirements and is worth reading, and
categorization tools identify a document's central themes based on how
frequently certain words appear in the document. Similar documents can be
grouped together by clustering, which diverges from categorization in that
it does not rely on predefined topics; connecting related documents through
the identification of common concepts is the mechanism of concept linkage
tools, and information visualization hierarchically arranges large textual
sources and makes them browsing-capable. Finally, question answering tools
employ multiple text mining methods to help computers find the best answers
to given questions.
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