Immigration Bill's Defeat Will Prompt 'Plan B' From H-1B
Proponents
Computerworld (06/28/07) Thibodeau, Patrick
The defeat of the U.S. Senate's comprehensive immigration reform
legislation is a setback for the technology industry, but lobbying groups
are expected to continue to push for a higher H-1B visa cap. The H-1B cap
for the federal government's next fiscal year was filled on the first day
the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services accepted applications.
Several opportunities to raise the H-1B visa limit still exist. One option
is the Securing Knowledge, Innovation and Leadership Act, or SKIL bill,
which would raise the cap from the current 65,000 to 115,000 and provide
market-based requirements for future increases. The SKIL bill was
reintroduced to the House and Senate in April after failing to win approval
last year, but because it is an individual piece of legislation, amendments
related to immigration reform could be easily attached and kill the bill.
A second option is to increase the cap through an amendment to a spending
bill. A third option is to add a H-1B expansion amendment to one of
several bills Congress is considering as part of the Democratic majority's
Innovation Agenda, such as a bill to improve science and engineering
training programs. Software & Information Industry Association President
Ken Wasch says the Senate's action on immigration reform means focus on
H-1B reform will shift to the House. "Our companies have a huge problem,"
Wasch says. "And if the immigration problem is not solved, we create an
enormous incentive for our companies to do more development work where
talent is being developed."
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The Newest AI Computing Tool: People
University of Southern California (06/28/07) Mankin, Eric
University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute computer
scientist Kristina Lerman believes that people can be used as a new source
of artificial intelligence computing power to solve difficult IT problems
such as information classification, reliability, and meaning. Lerman says
that human intelligence on social Web sites, blog networks, video and photo
sharing sites, and other social exchange gatherings online involve hundreds
of thousands of observations and interactions, which can be used to extract
metadata about the transactions. The metadata would contain information on
who is interacting, what they are talking about, how conclusions are
reached, and how information spreads, all of which can help researchers
answer questions about document accuracy, quality, categorization, and
embedded terminology. Lerman says one benefit would be the automatic
determination of the semantics of content for metadata tags. She says tags
are crucial to returning accurate search engine results. The complexity of
natural language has made it difficult to assign tags, and attempts to
manually build intricate connections that signal different word meanings
have proved frustrating. Lerman found that by extracting the tags on
photo-sharing sites, and by using a mathematical technique called the
"expectation-maximization algorithm," it was possible to accurately
separate pictures of different objects with similar descriptions. Lerman
has gone beyond tagging and is now using metadata to obtain more accurate
information about the content of documents in social networking sites.
Lerman says, "The innovations introduced by social media have lead to a new
paradigm for interacting with information, what we call 'social information
processing.'"
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Cyber Security Report Released
Computing Research Association (06/28/07)
Cybersecurity is the focus of "Toward a Safer and More Secure Cyberspace,"
a new report from the National Research Council of the National Academy of
Sciences. The report identifies three broad areas of concern about
security, with the first being that a lack of security will enable enemies
to launch a cyberattack, in conjunction with a physical attack, to cause an
enormous loss of life and billions of dollars in other damages. Secondly,
the reports draw attention to the potential for billions of dollars in
losses due to fraud and extortion if businesses are unable to shore up
their cyberspace systems and networks. Finally, the report warns that a
lack of cybersecurity may curb the use of technology in the years to come
and lead users to discount the positive impact that IT can have on national
competitiveness, in addition to national and homeland security. The report
also includes a potential Cyber Security Bill of Rights that offers a set
of 10 provisions. The points include availability of system and network
resources to legitimate users; easy and convenient recovery from successful
attacks; and control over and knowledge of one's own computing
environment.
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The iPhone's Potential
Technology Review (06/29/07) Greene, Kate
Many of the features in Apple's new iPhone will be under-appreciated,
including the accelerometer, ambient light sensor, and infrared sensor, all
of which are used to gather information from the environment and adjust the
phone's functions. The iPhone can automatically change the screen from
portrait to landscape, adjust the screen's brightness based on light levels
in the environment, and disable the touch screen when the phone is being
used for a call. Massachusetts Institute of Technology research scientist
Nathan Eagle says that although these functions are useful and
entertaining, they are rather unremarkable for the technology in the
iPhone. "These are trivial uses for what has the potential to provide a
whole slew of new features and functionality," Eagle says. Independent
research projects at MIT, Intel, and other companies indicate that phones
built with hardware such as accelerometers, light sensors, a GPS, and a
microphone could provide clues about people's activities and behaviors.
Such a phone could monitor exercise habits, track an elderly relative's
activities, and let friends and family know if it is an appropriate time to
call or instant message the phone's owner. At Intel Labs, researchers
equipped first-year students at University of Washington with an
accelerometer, barometer, a humidity sensor, a thermometer, a light sensor,
a digital compass, and a microphone and were able to watch social networks
form as subjects with the sensors interacted. Eagle says it would not be
difficult to write consumer software that would deduce a person's basic
activities, which could be used to update the status listed on an instant
messenger program or a blog, for example.
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Branding Matters -- Even When Searching
Penn State Live (06/28/07) Hopkins, Margaret
Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology researchers
found that Web searchers overwhelmingly favor Yahoo and Google, even when
the search-engine results are identical, indicating that brand names are
important on the Internet. The researchers copied Google results pages for
four different searches and assigned them to four different search
engines--Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo, and an in-house search engine
created for the study. The researchers showed the pages to 32 study
participants who were asked to evaluate the engines' performances.
Participants believed Yahoo and Google provided better results than MSN
Live Search and the in-house engine, even though the results pages were
identical in content and presentation. "Given that there was no difference
in the results, all of the search engines should have had the exact same
score," says assistant professor and lead researcher Jim Jansen. "Some
emotional branding is having an effect here." The researchers' intention
was to understand why Web users tend to use a handful of search engines
when there are about 4,000 search engines that use similar technologies and
interfaces. The search engine created for the study, which had no
brand-name recognition, scored the worst.
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Williams Professor Receives Grant from National Science
Foundation for Work on Software Errors
iBerkshires.com (06/27/07)
The National Science Foundation has awarded a Faculty Early Career
Development Program grant to Stephen Freund, an assistant professor of
computer science at Williams College. The five-year, $400,000 CAREER award
will enable Freund to continue his promising research into "Hybrid
Atomicity Checking," which is a strategy for searching for bugs in software
systems. Freund considers atomicity violation to be a particularly
difficult bug to contend with because the errors occur when they are least
expected and they are also tough to identify and repair during testing.
Atomicity violations occur when different pieces of a software system
access shared data or files in the wrong way and at the same time. Freund
plans to develop automated tools to find atomicity errors by inspecting
software source code and monitoring running programs. The automated tools
will take a hybrid approach to checking, which offers more precision and
ease-of-use than current applications. The approach is also a better way
to deal with atomicity bugs in terms of cost.
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Solving the Web Security Challenge
CNet (06/28/07) Ricciuti, Mike; Evers, Joris
The gatekeepers of much of the world's most sensitive information are a
handful of major corporations, and this carries troubling implications for
Web security, especially since in many instances these companies are
adapting standard desktop security methods to new Web applications. The
security of online information is complicated by the ever-growing volume of
data as well as the upsurge in hacker attacks, and factors such as these
are triggering calls for independent oversight. SPI Dynamics researcher
Billy Hoffman says there is plenty of information on security practices
available, but what is missing is "an intermediary that says how these
things apply to you as you build Web 2.0 or other applications."
Industry-wide cooperation is one strategy to consider, but such an approach
has been tried with other digital technologies, only to come up short and
often lead to monopolization. Hoffman attests that standard bodies such as
the World Wide Web Consortium should concentrate on devising unambiguous
standards that establish solid baselines. Microsoft's Pete Boden
classifies the majority of online security problems as input validation
errors, and he thinks Microsoft has an advantage over rivals because it
received a fast education on Web security thanks to its extensive software
history and experiences with Trustworthy Computing, and thus was able to
create tools to help developers address bugs and test code quality.
Although Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo claim to have fortified servers
against attacks, email worms, phishing assaults, and other intrusions are
still common, which plays into the argument for more industry
collaboration. Security specialists at the "Big Three" companies see a
need for additional work at the most basic level of software development,
beginning with an effort to teach security to future employees while they
are still university students.
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'Europa' Orbits Eclipse With 21 New Projects
InternetNews.com (06/27/07) Kerner, Sean Michael
The Eclipse Foundation today revealed 21 different projects comprised of
more than 17 million lines of code for the Eclipse open source development
environment. The new Eclipse Europa release train is the largest release
from Eclipse so far. Eclipse's Ian Skerrett says a predictable release
cycle is crucial to helping users and developers build their own Eclipse
products. Skerrett says Europa participation was not focused on any
specific Eclipse Foundation project, but that each project volunteered to
participate in the release train. The core Eclipse architecture is
structured so that everything is a modularized component that allows for
plug-ins. Each component has well-defined APIs that allow developers to
layer functionality on top of each other. Skerrett says some of the new
Europa projects are groundbreaking. The Eclipse Modeling Framework
supports Java generics, which allow for more sophisticated and flexible
models, and the Eclipse Mylyn project presents a new task-focused user
interface to the IDE, which allows the system to automatically find files
or resources instead of searching manually. Netbeans, another open source
IDE, is scheduled to release its newest version later this year.
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Virus 'Hybrids' Can Act as Nanoscale Memory
Devices
New Scientist (06/26/07) Dume, Belle
Researchers in the United States and Italy have developed a new type of
memory device that uses individual viruses placed on tiny specks of
semiconducting material called quantum dots. The 'hybrid' material could
help develop biocompatible electronics and an inexpensive and efficient way
to make high-density memory chips. Certain types of biological material
have been known to react to inorganic molecules and researchers have
already been using this phenomenon to build nanoscale devices that could be
used as biosensors. University of California at Riverside team leader
Mihri Ozkan and his colleagues have taken the technology a step further by
making a device that can also store digital information. Ozkan says
finding the memory storage capability was unexpected because each
nanoparticle does not have any memory characteristics on its own, only when
connected as a hybrid. Ozkan and his colleagues started by depositing the
plant virus cosahedral cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV), which is harmless to
humans, on quantum dots made of cadmium selenide and zinc sulphide. Next,
the hybrids were embedded into a polymer matrix and sandwiched between two
conducting electrodes for testing. The researchers found that low voltage
can be applied to operate each unit as a memory device with conductive
property states that can switched between high and low, corresponding to a
1 and a 0. The states are non-volatile, which means data is stored even
when the power is turned off. Ozkan says that, theoretically, these memory
devices could be used for high-density storage because each individual
hybrid could be a single storage unit, and millions of units would be able
to fit into a space only a few square centimeters.
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Welcome to the World's Largest Supercomputing Grid
Computerworld (06/26/07) Strom, David
Critical mass was reached this year on TeraGrid, a federally sponsored
computing initiative that eases corporations' access to the world's largest
supercomputers and encompasses nine distinctive academic and federal
institutions. The TeraGrid network currently boasts over 20 petabytes of
storage capacity and upwards of 280 teraflops of computing power. "The
point of TeraGrid is to pull together the capabilities and intellectual
resources for problems that can't be handled at a single site," explains
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NSCA) deputy director Rob
Pennington. "We make it easier for researchers to use these multiple
computing sites with a very small increment in training and technical
help." Grid Infrastructure Group director Dane Skow says the National
Science Foundation is helping to nurture TeraGrid's growth, and he foresees
the network allowing researchers to tackle scientific problems of
unprecedented size and scope. TeraGrid can also directly benefit a variety
of commercial fields and markets. One project in this vein involved a Rice
University professor's effort to concoct millions of different chemical
structures that could be employed as zeolites, whose use spans a broad
spectrum of industrial processes. Private-sector companies can become
corporate affiliates of participating TeraGrid institutions through NCSA's
Private Sector Program and similar initiatives.
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H-P's Emerging Task: Deter Forgeries
Wall Street Journal (06/28/07) P. B3; Range, Jackie; Agarwal, Vibhuti
A Hewlett-Packard research and development lab in India is researching a
way to mark paper documents with a bar code to prevent forgeries. Forgery
is a big problem in India and one of the most common types of fraud. The
project, called "Trusted Hardcopy," does not use holograms or water-marked
paper and is capable of working on ordinary office equipment, mainly a
computer, a scanner, printer, and software. The bar code acts like a
digital signature and is intended to bring network-level security to paper
documents. The bar code is used to authenticate the document and contains
the information on the page. By including the information on the page in
the bar code, any unauthorized changes to the document would be
recognizable because the bar code would be unaltered. HP believes that
government agencies, public offices, and companies will all be interested
Trusted Hardcopy for official documents. Trusted Hardcopy is only one of
several innovations being developed by HP designed to appeal to customers
in emerging markets, primarily China and India. Another product is HP's
"TVPrintCast," which sends data over television networks. Computing over
television networks is potentially an extremely lucrative market in India,
as televisions are far more prevalent than computers. In 2005, India had
500 million TV viewers but only 6.5 million Internet users. TVPrintCast
would allow users, for example, to view a cooking program and
simultaneously print out a copy of the recipe.
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The Three Questions of Robustness
EDN (06/25/07) Leibson, Steve
Professor H.J. Siegel of Colorado State University's Electrical & Computer
Engineering Department presented a technical workshop at WORLDCOMP '07 in
Las Vegas that was notable in that he raised three questions for
determining "robustness" and for objectively comparing that quality in
systems, products, or services. Siegel's questions give the term
robustness meaning and have implications with regard to its potential broad
use in all system designs, writes Steve Leibson. Siegel uses
multiprocessor systems in his tutorial titled "Robust Resource Allocation
for Heterogeneous Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems" to answer the
first question, "What behavior of the system makes it robust?" The
question speaks to satisfying a specific set of throughput and latency
constraints set forth by the customer. The second question, "What
uncertainties is the system robust against?," addresses the uncertainties
of boosting sensor inputs, and the potential impact on processing power,
processing throughput, processing latency, and ultimately the constraints
on these parameters. For the third question, "Quantitatively, exactly how
robust is the system?," Siegel, who develops robust systems, uses the
smallest number of incremental sensor inputs that would lead to latency or
throughput violations to determine the merit.
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Security Issues and Programming
ZDNet (06/25/07) Murphy, Paul
Blogger Paul Murphy notes that it is a widely held belief that security is
a function, rather than an application, of programming language. He makes
the case that "C code compiled and run in a safe code environment is as
safe as Java run in a virtual machine--and, by extension, a Java virtual
machine is itself as vulnerable as any other C application." C's greater
simplicity in comparison to Java should help shield C against attack, which
dovetails with the concept of using virtualization to maintain the
separation of user processes. "Thus you can think of the PC's BIOS, ring
zero, kernel, and user modes as switchable virtual machines, note that this
hardware design has determined a lot of the software evolution around it,
and conclude that much of today's PC "security" problem is ultimately
rooted in a mistake," Murphy explains. "A mistake, not because
virtualization was the wrong answer, but because a better answer was known:
The use of typing instead of address based authorizations." He concludes
that it is erroneous to regard a language such as C as being more hazardous
than Java, since it is the whole execution environment that matters in the
final analysis. Most of the risk on Windows and Unix stems from hardware,
and by extension compiler design, as opposed to language design.
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Handwritten Passwords
Technology Review (06/28/07) Naone, Erica
A new online authentication system called Dynahand could eliminate the
need to remember multiple and lengthy passwords. Dynahand verifies user
identity by asking the user to identify their own handwriting. University
of Glasgow computer scientist and Dynahand researcher Karen Renaud says
requiring users to remember passwords is ridiculous and places an
unrealistic burden on people. Biometric authentication, using physical
attributes such as fingerprints or retinal scans, has become an alternative
to passwords, but requires additional hardware. Dynahand eliminates the
need for extra hardware and passwords. Dynahand only requires users to
submit a variety of handwriting samples. To log in, the user must identify
his or her writing out of a series of samples. Multiple tests can be used
depending on the desired level of security. The handwriting samples
contain only digits because numerals are harder for an outside party to
recognize than letters, and digits are displayed at random, so the
handwriting is the only clue. The system uses an algorithm to analyze
characteristics such as line width of all handwriting samples to be sure
samples are distinct and do not confuse legitimate users. Renaud says a
handwriting recognition system is particularly appealing to older users,
who can find it difficult to remember multiple passwords, and dyslexic
people, who sometimes chose weaker, shorter passwords intentionally because
they have trouble remembering longer passwords. Renaud does not believe
that Dynahand is secure enough to protect sensitive information such as
bank accounts or health records, but that it would be appropriate for
social sites where the user wants a private account but no real harm would
result from a break in.
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Be Focused and Fearless, Wired Women Tell
Colleagues
Computerworld Canada (06/18/07) Lau, Kathleen
At the Toronto Chapter Wired Women Society, an association that helps
women build IT careers, nine women at different stages of their IT careers
spoke about the challenges and success they have experienced. The women
provided a uniquely female perspective on topics including succession,
career changes, balancing work and personal life, and the rapidly changing
world of IT. Globe & Mail director of business development Andree Gosselin
O'Meara shared her experiences starting in IT as a systems engineer and
having to struggle against misconceptions surrounding women's skills and
having to be vocal about equal pay. "Do push. It's important that women
have their place," O'Meara said. Annemarie Edwards, the director of
eSolutions at CPC Healthcare Communications, said she was attracted to the
dot-com community by the idea of changing traditional business models, and
that her interest has only grown with the development of Web 2.0. Edwards
said that keeping up and interacting with evolving technology will be a
"must-have skill," and that people should embrace technology. The other
speakers included Manta Group partner Fariba Anderson, Sequentia
Communications CEO Jennifer Evans, HP Canada district sales manager Leyland
Brown, former corporate advisor with the Office of the President at Bell
Canada Enterprises Lib Gibson, IBM Canada manager of corporate diversity
and inclusion Rukhsana Syed, Yahoo Canada head of media Anjali Kapoor, and
Wireless Payment Systems business and operations analyst Aleema Seadath.
The overall message the speakers offered women was to be confident and
persistent when pursuing a career in IT.
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Just the States: How Effective Are STEM Pipeline
Programs?
Diverse: Issues in Higher Education (06/22/07) Majesky-Pullmann, Olivia
The National Science Foundation founded the Loius Stokes Alliance for
Minority Participation (LSAMP) in 1991 to support and increase the number
of minority students pursuing advanced degrees in science, technology,
engineering, and math (STEM). In 1991, LSAMP gave grants to only six
institutional alliances and supported fewer than 4,000 students. In 2006,
LSAMP supported 35 alliances involving more than 450 institutions and
thousands of minority students. Based on data from the National Science
Foundation, in 1991 only 35,670 minority students were enrolled in STEM
fields. By 2003, minority enrollment in STEM fields increased 470 percent
to 205,000 students. From 2004-2005, roughly 24,642 LSAMP students earned
degrees. LSAMP includes pre-college programs, student academic support,
student professional development, mentoring, faculty development,
curriculum reform, and graduate studies orientation. A study by the Urban
Institute found that LSAMP students, on average, had a better GPA than
their non-LSAMP minority, white, and Asian student counterparts. Slightly
more than half of LSAMP graduates had a cumulative GPA of 3.25 or above,
whereas only 27 percent of underrepresented minorities not involved in
LSAMP, and 42 percent of Whites and Asians had similar GPAs. LSAMP
participants were more likely to enroll in post-BA courses and earn
graduate degrees.
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Social Scripting for the Web
Computer (06/07) Vol. 40, No. 6, P. 96; Lau, Tessa
How-to knowledge can be captured and shared with others through IBM's
Koala Web application instruction repository, whose scripts are both human-
and machine-readable, writes IBM Almaden Research Center research staff
member Tessa Lau. Koala allows script contributions from anyone, and
enables non-programmers to produce scripts automatically through the use of
a programming-by-demonstration method. Lau says the system provides
easy-to-understand, step-by-step instructions for online procedures, and
parses each step to ascertain whether it can be automated or requires user
consultation; the latter determination is made by looking for the word
"you" in the instruction. The provision of a "Run" button lets the user
implement the entire script without interruption, which facilitates the
automation of routine online tasks. Koala can parse plain-text commands
through a "sloppy programming" approach in which a relatively small
terminology can be used to describe actions on Web pages, and the current
Web page can limit the set of potential targets. By clicking a "Save"
button, users can automatically store a generated script on the project's
wiki to share with others, and Koala has a "Personal Database" feature that
offers a way to create scripts that work across users. Lau notes that
Koala can accommodate the "long tail" of business processes by letting
small teams simply automate their own unique workflows.
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