Immigrants Fuel Tech Boom
eWeek (06/19/07) Perelman, Deborah
A new Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation report that tracks the educational
background of immigrant technology entrepreneurs found a strong correlation
between education in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)
fields and entrepreneurship. The majority of those surveyed were highly
educated, with 96 percent of immigrant technology and engineering company
founders holding bachelor's degrees, and 74 percent holding graduate or
post-graduate degrees. Three-quarters of all degrees were in STEM fields,
and 53 percent obtained their highest degree in U.S. universities. The
survey, which examined key founders of companies in 11 different
geographical centers of technology and engineering between 1995 and 2005,
found that very few who came to the United States to study had any plans to
start a company. Nearly 40 percent entered the United States for work, and
only 1.6 percent intended to start a business. Most founded their
companies after working and residing in the United States for an average of
13 years. The study is intended to make leaders more aware of the
significant role immigrants have played in U.S. technological
entrepreneurship, and argues that the United States could benefit from a
more "enlightened" immigration policy that would attract and retain highly
skilled foreign workers who could potentially become entrepreneurs. "The
U.S. economy depends on these high rates of entrepreneurship and innovation
to maintain its global edge," says lead researcher Vivek Wadhwa, Duke
University's executive in residence at the Pratt School of Engineering.
"We now face a choice--to encourage more Americans to complete higher
degrees in these fields, or to encourage foreign students to stay in the
United States after completing their degrees. We need to do both."
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Court Prohibits Access to Touch-Screen Source Code
Computerworld (06/19/07) Songini, Marc L.
The dispute over the Congressional seat for the 13th district of Florida
reached another milestone when a federal court ruled that it would not
allow the examination of source code on supposedly malfunctioning
touch-screen voting machines. Democrat Christine Jennings, who lost the
highly contested and controversial election to Republican Vern Buchanan by
only 369 votes, had asked that the software be examined to determine if
flawed e-voting machines caused voting irregularities. Jennings claims the
iVotronic touch-screen systems made by Elections Systems & Software did not
count about 18,000 votes. A Jennings spokesman said that a three-member
legislative task force appointed by the U.S. House Committee on
Administration is investigating the vote count disparity. "They have the
ultimate authority in this matter and are moving quicker than the courts
ever have," the spokesman said. An investigation is also being conducted
by the Government Accountability Office, and a preliminary ruling is
scheduled for the end of July.
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Prominent San Diego Researcher Ramachandran Announced as
SIGGRAPH Featured Speaker
Business Wire (06/18/07)
ACM's SIGGRAPH 2007 has added Vilayanur S. Ramachandran as the third
featured speaker for the 34th International Conference and Exhibition on
Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Ramachandran, a professor at
the University of California, San Diego, who is also the director of the
Center for Brain and Cognition, will discuss his pioneering research in
cognition and perception and its effect on his field of research and the
world today. His research in neurology, cognition, and visual perception
has brought Ramachandran international recognition, and he was recently
named one of the most influential people of the 21st century by Newsweek.
"We are honored to have such an internationally acclaimed leader at
SIGGRAPH 2007," says Joe Marks, SIGGRAPH 2007 Conference Chair from Walt
Disney Animation Studios. "V.S. is an excellent speaker and will provide
unmatched insights in perception and cognition that are key areas in the
SIGGRAPH research community." SIGGRAPH will have featured speakers this
year rather than a single keynote speaker presentation. SIGGRAPH 2007
takes place Aug. 5-9, 2007, at the San Diego Convention Center in San
Diego. For more information about SIGGRAPH 2007, or to register, visit
http://www.siggraph.org/s2007/
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You Down With SPP?
Shtetl-Optimized (06/17/07) Aaronson, Scott
At last week's Symposium on Theory of Computing, part of ACM's Federated
Computing Research Conference, former Computing Research Association chair
Ed Lazowska gave a speech titled "Computer Science: Past, Present, and
Future." Lazowska highlighted some achievements in computer science, such
as the fact that human beings produced more transistors than grains of rice
for the first time in 2004. Lazowska also said that academic computer
science research has more than paid for itself over the last two decades by
producing at least 15 billion-dollar industries. Looking toward the
future, Lazowska said computer scientists should be handling the biggest
issues in the world, including climate change and third-world poverty. For
example, he noted that thousands of sensors scattered in the ocean could
turn oceanography into a computer science problem. He also said that
computer scientists should turn self-driving cars into a reality, which
could save 45,000 lives in the United States every year. Lazowska argued
that the future of theoretical computer science lies in transforming other
sciences, like math, physics, economics, and biology, into computational
thinking. Lazowska also said that introductory computer science courses
need vast improvement, along with efforts to recruit women to the field.
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Mapping the Internet
Technology Review (06/19/07) Graham-Rowe, Duncan
A new study of the Internet's structure by Israeli university researchers
concludes that peer-to-peer network routing could improve the Net's
efficiency and avoid congestion. The researchers' Internet mapping
project, which involved the participation of 5,000 online volunteers who
downloaded software to help identify connections between Internet nodes,
paints a picture of the Net as a nexus of about 80 critical nodes
surrounded by 5,000 sporadically linked, cloistered nodes that are highly
dependent on the core nodes. The outer and core nodes are separated by
some 15,000 self-sufficient, peer-connected nodes. In the absence of the
core nodes, about 30 percent of the outer nodes become completely isolated,
but the middle region has sufficient numbers of peer-connected nodes to
keep the 70 percent of remaining outer nodes communicating. Bar-Ilan
University physicist Shai Carmi thinks these alternate routes should be
exploited to prevent the core nodes from becoming congested, thus boosting
Internet efficiency. The distributed software strategy of the mapping
project enabled as many as 6 million measurements to be collected daily
over a period of two years, and each individual node was evaluated on how
well linked it was to other, better connected nodes. Carmi explains that
this approach allowed dead-end connections to be disregarded. The mapping
project was detailed in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.
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CRA Names 16 to First Computing Community Consortium
Council
Computing Research Association (06/19/07)
The Computing Research Association (CRA) has selected 16 computing
researchers to serve as members of the first permanent Council for the
Computing Community Consortium (CCC). The Council is charged with
providing leadership as the CCC engages industry participants on the
direction of computing research and large-scale computing research
projects. Three-year terms on the Council will be served by Bill
Feiereisen of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Susan Graham of the
University of California at Berkeley, David Kaeli of Northeastern
University, John King of the University of Michigan, and Peter Lee of
Carnegie Mellon University. Two year-terms are to be filled by Andrew
McCallum of the University of Massachusetts, Beth Mynatt of the Georgia
Institute of Technology, David Tennenhouse of New Venture Partners, and
Dave Waltz of Columbia University. And one-year terms will be held by Greg
Andrews of the University of Arizona; Anita Jones of the University of
Virginia; Dick Karp of the University of California at Berkeley; Edward
Lazowska of the University of Washington, Chair; Fred Schneider of Cornell
University; Bob Sproull of Sun Microsystems; and Karen Sutherland of
Augsburg College. "Having representatives from such a wide array of sub
disciplines, from schools both large and small, and from industry and
government research labs should provide the diversity of thought necessary
to enhance our community's ability to envision and pursue long-term,
audacious computing research goals," said CRA Chairman and director of the
Renaissance Computing Institute Daniel Reed. Terms begin July 1, 2007.
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IBM to Show Stream Computing System Today
New York Times (06/19/07) P. C5; Lohr, Steve
IBM will demonstrate its System S stream computer system today at a
conference for Wall Street technology managers. System S is designed to
rapidly analyze data as it streams in from numerous sources, compared with
the conventional approach of applying computer analytics and data mining to
data that has been collected and stored in a database, a process that is
tightly structured and can be time-consuming. Stream computing allows for
business and science data to be handled and analyzed more quickly, and
accommodates Web sites, blogs, email, video and news clips, telephone
conversations, transaction data, electronic sensors, and other kinds of
information in digital form. Data that is streamed into the database is
analyzed by sophisticated algorithms, and text, voice, and
image-recognition technology may be used to determine the relevancy of
incoming data to a particular problem. "It's a computing system that can
morph and adapt to the problems it sees," says Nagui Halim, director of
high-performance stream computing at IBM labs. IBM says it could help
users make quicker decisions involving everything from surveillance
security to Wall Street trading.
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GMU Student's 'Pong' Makeover Is, Like, Wild
Washington Post (06/19/07) P. B1; Kinzie, Susan
Creating a psychedelic revamp of the classic video game "Pong" that places
the traditional ball and paddles against a trippy background of swirling
colors was no quick or easy challenge for George Mason University student
Stephen Taylor, who called upon his skills with fluid dynamics, algorithms,
and computer coding to realize "Plasma Pong." Taylor's labor of love took
more than a year to develop, and the game's popularity and the admiration
its creator has drawn from academicians is testament to universities'
growing respect for video game design as a discipline that harnesses
students' creative energies and focuses them on innovative pursuits. MIT
and Carnegie Mellon University have set up video game technology research
programs and facilities, and courses in game design are offered by various
institutions. MTECH Ventures director Dean Chang predicts that
universities and students will likely be the sources of tomorrow's
technology-driving innovations. The increasing capabilities of video games
is opening up new applications, including military and medical training and
virtual exercises. Another skill that an academic emphasis on game design
can nurture is entrepreneurialism, as illustrated by Taylor's plan to
launch a company of his own based on the success of "Plasma Pong," which
was downloaded so many times upon its debut that it severely congested the
GMU server it ran on.
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Getting Real
Indianapolis Star (06/19/07) Smith, Erika D.
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) professor Karl
MacDorman is focusing on the creation of life-like androids that can be
used for human behavior and social interaction studies, and possibly serve
as companions and social workers. MacDorman does not envision androids,
which are designed to resemble humans, as mere menial laborers. He notes
that Asians, particularly the Japanese, seem more open to potential android
applications such as receptionists and museum guides, patient care,
companions for the elderly, etc. MacDorman is intimate with the Japanese
perspective on robots and androids, having lived in Japan and held several
positions at Osaka University at a time when android science was just
starting to move forward. IUPUI is the only U.S. university to offer
instruction on android science, and MacDorman wants to create an android so
realistic as to be agreeable to humans, thus overcoming the "uncanny
valley," which is the point at which realistic robots start repelling
people. The IUPUI professor understands that there are also ethical
issues, such as how much autonomy humans should cede to androids, and at
what point emotional attachment to androids becomes unhealthy.
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U.S. Should Draw Warning From Estonian Web Site
Attacks
Congressional Quarterly (06/18/07) Berger, Matthew E.
After the statue of a World War II Soviet Soldier was removed in April,
the Web sites of Estonia's prime minister, Parliament, banks, and
newspapers were flooded with malicious data in an attack that some have
linked to the Russian government. The attack, which lasted until mid May,
was made worse by programs called bots, which took over computers and were
manipulated to send additional messages to the government networks. Though
such denial-of-service attacks are becoming less and less common, U.S.
officials are nonetheless concerned that an attack similar to the one in
Estonia could disrupt the federal government's networks. One potential
threat is China, which has developed a highly sophisticated, broadly-based
capability to attack and degrade computer systems in the United States,
Maj. Gen. Philip M. Breedlove with the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the House
Armed Services Committee last week. Former White House cybersecurity
expert Paul Kurtz says the unorganized nature of the attack point's to the
Internet's vulnerability. "The lesson is a more organized attack with
advanced planning can really disrupt the critical information
infrastructure," Kurtz says. Although he calls the U.S. "a big fat
target," he says the U.S.'s infrastructure is better able to withstand such
attacks. Still, Kurtz says the threat of cyberwarfare is a growing concern
worldwide. Arbor Networks security researcher Jose Nazario says
communication between Internet service providers and network users is
crucial to withstanding such attacks. He says that many government
installations are very well protected and have good contacts with the ISPs
that are providing the traffic for them. He adds that good mitigation
techniques are also in place.
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Mitch Kapor on Virtual Worlds
InformationWeek (06/18/07) Wagner, Mitch
Mitch Kapor, chairman of Linden Lab, which operates Second Life, said the
moment when he realized the potential of virtual worlds was during an
in-world Suzanne Vega concert. Vega performed in a recording studio, and
people all over the world watched from their computers. While delivering
the keynote address at the Virtual Worlds conference, sponsored by IBM and
MIT, Kapor said, "A huge number of passionate early adopters had some kind
of mystical experience." Beyond entertainment, virtual worlds can also
provide practical business applications such as faster and more effective
training opportunities and better lines of communications, said Rob Burns,
president of Proton Media, which operates remote learning virtual worlds.
Thomas Malone, a professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of
Management, said virtual worlds can offer tools for leaders, as games
create a structure that nurtures and encourages leadership by providing
rewards, performance statistics, and communication channels. Such tools
make it easier for people to manage themselves, which makes it easier to
lead them. Malone said the possibility of such a system suggests that
current real-world leadership development may be misplaced, and should
focus on opportunities where leaders can naturally emerge, rather than
leadership training. Kapor said virtual worlds have a long way to go
before they become mainstream. Virtual worlds need to be decentralized to
allow private spaces to be made, and user interfaces need to be improved to
make virtual worlds easier to use.
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European Commission Backs New E-Skills Body
IT Week (06/19/07) Murray, James
The European Commission has thrown its support behind a new group that
leading IT vendors, training firms, and certification bodies have
established to find answers for the widening IT skills shortage. EMEA
President at Global Knowledge Richard Pryor-Jones says the EC considers the
IT skills crisis across the continent to be a competition issue,
considering the demand for skilled IT workers is driving up salaries and IT
professionals could also find appealing opportunities in economies where
the cost structure is more attractive. Global Knowledge, the IT training
provider, is participating on the new e-Skills Industry Leadership Board,
along with exam groups such as CompTIA and Exin, and vendors such as Cisco,
Microsoft, and Oracle. The board will serve as a forum for discussing
ideas and initiatives. "We want to reflect on what is happening in
different countries and start to establish some best practice sharing
across different countries and companies," says Pryor-Jones. The body will
identify effective skills programs for adoption on a more widescale basis,
make recommendations to the EC by autumn, and encourage the European Union
and individual companies to support the implementation of the programs.
"We need to address why people don't find IT sexy and why even computer
science graduates are leaving the sector," Pryor-Jones says.
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Linux Foundation Charts Linux's Future
DesktopLinux.com (06/19/07)
The Linux Foundation released a statement on June 19 to summarize the
inaugural Linux Foundation Summit, where over 230 Linux leaders convened to
discuss key issues, including the development of a better collaborative
method for improving the Linux operating system and the applications,
hardware, and people that rely on it. On hand at the summit were
representatives from the foundation's Accessibility Workgroup to
communicate to leading independent software vendors, end users, kernel
developers, and Linux Standard Base (LSB) workgroup participants the model
for writing accessible applications. Key representatives from the kernel
community, end users, and vendors came together for a session on device
drivers, in which the Linux model and a newly created program that offers
free Linux driver development to all companies was explained. A meeting of
desktop architects was held to unveil a new series of priorities for the
community, including multimedia, software packaging, developer tools, power
management, printing, and word typography. There was a conference between
representatives from major printing vendors and Linux community leaders to
discuss new printer driver support improvements and collaborate on future
improvements. Efficient power management in Linux was also a major point
of discussion, and meetings covering this topic prompted the Linux
Foundation to form a "Green Linux" effort to enhance power functionality in
Linux. A presentation of the LSB Test Framework and Testing tools was made
by the LSB workgroup.
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Warnings of 'Internet Overload'
BBC News (06/15/07) Kelly, Spencer
Doomsayers have long predicted that the Internet will inevitably buckle
under the weight of ever-increasing data, and the explosion in demand for
such services as concurrent video streaming and gigabyte-scale data
downloading is rekindling this fear, writes Spencer Kelly. Though
scientists believe each strand of high-speed optic fiber--whose abundance
currently exceeds necessity--is capable of carrying almost unlimited
volumes of data, there is concern that the routers may be overloaded. Phil
Smith with the world's leading router manufacturer Cisco boasts that
current routers can accommodate 92 terabits of data per second, adding, "We
have enough capacity to do that and drive a billion phone calls from those
same people who are playing a video game at the same time they're having a
text chat." But Kelly notes that many of the Internet's end connections
are copper, not fiber, and Net expert Bill Thompson comments that ISPs have
begun to scale back the bandwidth that is available to households. "They
do this because they have a limited capacity to deliver to 100 or 200
homes, and if everybody's using the Internet at the same time then the
whole thing starts to get congested," he explains. There are other threats
besides data overload facing the Internet, including damage to major links
and routers from a variety of causes, which range from natural disasters to
deliberate sabotage.
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Saying It With Rooftops
University of Minnesota News (06/06/07) Moore, Rick
Jesse Vig, a computer science graduate student at the University of
Minnesota, created GeoGreeting.com, a popular Web site that offers unique
greetings. GeoGreeting enables users to send free electronic messages that
are spelled out via images of letter-shaped buildings and landmarks. The
Web site has been visited by over 800,000 users since it was launched in
November 2006. In addition, GeoGreeting became popular in other countries,
and was nominated for the Best NetArt Web site in the 2007 Webby Awards
Competition. Vig thought up the concept after working on various Google
Maps projects for an advanced Internet programming class and observing how
many buildings were shaped like letters. Vig says he spent roughly 100
hours finding enough buildings and landmarks to cover the alphabet. "I've
gotten emails from all over the world, like India and Japan," Vig says.
"It's been interesting how international the response has been."
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Re-Engineering the Engineer
Business 2.0 (06/19/07) Myser, Michael
The Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering is a five-year-old educational
experiment, chartered with a $460 million endowment by the F.W. Olin
Foundation, that is radically altering how engineers are trained. The
Needham, Mass., school, only 17 miles from MIT, has no academic
departments, no tenure track, no tuition fees, and no fixed curriculum.
The school focuses on a hands-on, project-based, interdisciplinary
approach. "We've redefined what engineering is and what engineering
means," said Olin's founding president Richard K. Miller. "We want to be
an irritant that will cause other to make changes." Miller and a handful
of faculty members designed and tested a new course of study and enrolled
the first class of undergraduates in 2002. Olin's curriculum is focused on
courses such as User Oriented Collaborative Design and Design Nature.
Miller says traditional engineering programs are like music schools that
teach music history and theory, but never allow students to play an
instrument. In addition to an unconventional engineering education, Olin
students spend more than a quarter of their time studying business and
entrepreneurship, humanities, and social sciences. Students can also
participate in Olin's senior consulting program for engineering. This year
12 corporations paid Olin a combined $700,000 to have groups of five
seniors work as consultants on some of the companies' technological and
engineering problems. Olin's approach appears to be working. Olin's
retention rate is 91 percent, about 50 percent above the average for U.S.
engineering schools, and the schools first group of graduates have taken an
impressive array of jobs and graduate school placements, including two
Fullbright scholarships and four National Science Foundation
fellowships.
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Teaching Wireless Sensor Networks at the University of
Melbourne
IEEE Distributed Systems Online (06/07) Vol. 8, No. 6, Tanin, Egemen
Sensor Networks and Applications is a postgraduate course taught by Egemen
Tanin in the University of Melbourne's Master of Engineering in Distributed
Computing program that focuses on wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The
course had to contend with the challenge of addressing students'
misconception that WSNs are a fairly recent development, educate students
in various hardware and software layers, and face the complexities inherent
in lab facilities for teaching WSNs. Tanin notes that a WSN course is
advantageous on a number of levels: There is a definite interest in this
subject among postgrads; many academics in various engineering and computer
science disciplines participate in WSN-related research and activities and
are happy to share their experience and expertise; and the course's demos
and projects could easily feature concrete teaching probes and tools that
could potentially enhance students' attention span. Among the topics
covered by the syllabus are introduction to WSNs, network setup, data
collection and processing, software engineering, case studies, and student
projects, and while Tanin focused for the most part on introductory
material, lectures by academics and industry partners were also
incorporated to provide specialist expertise for certain topics. At the
start of the semester, Tanin gives basic rules and expectations about
student projects, and encourages students to devise a topic by themselves
while also offering a list of possible topics to choose from if they lack
inspiration. Interaction with sensing devices for in-class demos and
student project support was another component of the course. "In the
future, we plan to extend our laboratory facilities to involve some fixed
infrastructure so students can connect their projects to a large-scale
deployment of sensors with the devices that they already can check out from
the department," notes Tanin.
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