How Many H-1B Workers? Counts Vary
San Jose Mercury News (CA) (07/15/07) O'Brien, Chris
The debate over H-1B visas continues to become more complicated due to a
lack of publicly available data on the program. "There's no good data,"
says Lynn Shotwell, executive director of the American Council on
International Personnel. "We know demand well exceeds supply, but we don't
really know what the demand is." The confusion over the numbers is a
result of the complex nature of the H-1B program and the lack of any hard
data on who is using the visas and for which jobs is frustrating to people
on every side of the debate. Visa applications are processed through three
different government agencies. A company submits an H-1B application to
the U.S. Department of Labor. The application is screened and then passed
to the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the office of U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services. Applications approved by the
immigration service are sent to the U.S. Department of State, which issues
the visa. Technology companies say there is a shortage of skilled workers
in the United States, and the increase in H-1B applications mirrors the
increase in general hiring practices. Shotwell, however, says the total
number of visa applications, which reached 119,193 applications for the
available 65,000 visas that will be awarded for the fiscal year starting in
October 2007, is misleading because companies often file multiple
applications for a single person, or large blanket applications because
companies want to submit as many applications as possible before the cap is
reached. Attempts to collect information from the government agencies
involved in the application process generally receive responses that vary
from non-disclosure statements to lists of the number of new and renewal
visas, but not the jobs the visas were issued for.
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Re-Vote Likely After E-Vote Error
IDG News Service (07/14/07) Lawson, Stephen
A Berkeley, Calif., city initiative is likely to be put back on a ballot
because of the mishandling of electronic voting machine data. Judge
Winifred Smith of the Alameda Country Superior Court indicated that she
would nullify the defeat of the medical marijuana initiative in Berkley in
2004 and order the measure to be put on a ballot in a later election. The
case highlights the dangers of electronic voting, which makes it harder to
ensure fair elections, says attorney Gregory Luke, who is representing
Americans for Safe Access, a medical-marijuana advocacy group that is suing
the county. Americans for Free Access wanted a recount of the vote for
Measure R in 2000, which would have established procedures for opening
marijuana dispensaries in Berkeley, and was defeated by fewer than 200
votes. A recount was not possible because the city failed to share
necessary voting records, a violation of election laws, Judge Smith ruled
in April. Luke says the country reused voting machines from Diebold
election Systems without saving enough data to have a recount or to review
the election. Additionally, election officials failed to save key evidence
after the suit was pending, and data from the vote in question has been
found on only 20 out of the hundreds of machines used in the election, Luke
argued.
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Intel, in Shift, Joins Project on Education
New York Times (07/14/07) P. B3; Markoff, John
Intel announced that it has agreed to partner with the One Laptop Per
Child Foundation. The foundation is working to provide children in poor
nations with inexpensive portable computers that can be used to enhance
their learning opportunities. Headed by former MIT Media Laboratory
director Nicholas Negroponte, the group's wireless-connected laptops would
make use of open-source software and are expected to cost $100 by the end
of 2008. Negroponte is targeting the end of September or early October for
the start of full-scale manufacturing. William A. Swope, an Intel vice
president and the director of the chip maker's corporate affairs group,
will join the board of the foundation, which will also use the company's
server technology for its educational systems. The laptops use a
microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices, but could use Intel chips in
the future. "By aligning here we are just going to help more kids," says
Swope.
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The Future of Search
Technology Review (07/16/07) Greene, Kate
In an interview, Google director of research Peter Norvig provided some
insight into the research and projects Google is working on to improve
search engines. A significant number of researchers are working on search
and advertising to make search results and ads match up better, as well as
gathering more sources of information, including text in books, still
images, video, and even audio for speech recognition. Norvig says the two
biggest projects at Google are machine translation and the speech project,
the results of which are used in services such as Google 411, which allows
people to call a completely automated service for information on local
businesses. Speech recognition is also being applied to video searches.
Norvig says the two major problems in search technology are developing a
better understanding of users' needs and developing a better understanding
of a document's contents. He says Google's software looks at more than the
words typed into the search bar by looking at spelling variants and
breaking down longer search entries, creating more of a natural language
search. Norvig also says artificial intelligence is a big part of Google's
search engine. "There's an AI algorithm involved, there's software
engineering, hardware, and networking to make it fast and efficient," he
says. "I wouldn't want to say that AI is everything, but it's a big part
of it."
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Purdue Makes Distributed Rendering Available at SIGGRAPH
2007 via TeraGrid
Purdue University News (07/13/07)
University staff and faculty members will have an opportunity to use a
Purdue University-sponsored rendering service at the 2007 ACM SIGGRAPH
Conference. Attendees with accounts on the National Science Foundation's
TeraGrid will be able to render their animation files using Purdue's
TeraGrid Distributed Rendering Environment (TeraDRE). A pilot version of
TeraDRE was offered at the SIGGRAPH conference last July, according to
Laura Arns, research scientist and associate director of the Envision
Center for Data Perceptualization at Purdue. "We were able to take several
animations that would have required 142 days of rendering time running on a
single machine and complete them during the six days of the conference,"
says Arns. "This year we hope to have many more people bring files and try
to maximize the rendering we perform during the week." With Purdue's
rendering farm, 3D animations can be rendered in about a fraction of the
time it takes on a single computer. The conference is scheduled for Aug.
4-9 in San Diego. For more information about ACM SIGGRAPH, or to register,
visit
http://www.siggraph.org/s2007/
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'Dragon' Stalker Heads to Hopkins
Baltimore Sun (07/16/07) P. 1A; Bhanoo, Sindya N.
Carnegie Mellon University professor Jim Baker today joins the Johns
Hopkins University's new Human Language Technology Center of Excellence
with the goal of developing advanced systems for converting human speech to
written text. The center was opened with a $48 million Defense Department
grant. The ability to translate speech into text has been deemed critical
to the department to help sift through the massive amounts of raw voice and
text it collects every day. Baker, along with his wife Janet, developed
the program Dragon NaturallySpeaking, one of the first practical
speech-recognition programs. Baker's mathematical model for speech
recognition is still the gold standard for the industry today. Baker,
however, believes more can be done in speech recognition. "I'm not
satisfied," Baker says. "I'm still trying to leap-frog." Baker hopes his
work at the language technology center will lead to better
speech-recognition tools, as well as tools that can intelligently scan and
sort through billions of words on Web sites and blogs. About half of
Baker's work is expected to be classified. Baker hopes to advance
speech-recognition software beyond the Hidden Markov Model, a statistical
process that makes inferences about unknown or future events based on what
has come before. Baker used the Hidden Markov Model in his original
design, but thought that the technology would have progressed by now.
Current speech-recognition programs generally only work when a user is
deliberately dictating to the computer, but not for casual conversations,
which is what the Defense Department is interested in.
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Computer Science Teaching to Be Redesigned
Duke University News & Communications (07/13/07) Basgall, Monte
Duke University professor of the practice of computer science Owen
Astrachan is one of two recipients of a new National Science Foundation
(NSF) award intended to help redesign computer education for undergraduate
students in the United States. Astrachan will receive $250,000 over two
years to develop a solution to what the NSF believes is a national
shortcoming. "Unfortunately, despite the deep and pervasive impact of
computing and the creative efforts of individuals in a small number of
institutions, undergraduate computing education today often looks much as
it did several decades ago," the NSF said when awarding the grants.
Astrachan, who co-directs undergraduate studies in his department, says he
will use the funding to promote "problem-based learning" to revitalize how
computer science is taught. "Instead of teaching students a lot of facts
and then giving them a problem to solve, this method starts out by giving
them a problem," Astrachan says. "Then they have to figure out what facts
they need to solve it." Students may spend a couple of weeks on a problem
while the instructor stands back, providing minimal guidance to help
students find solutions on their own, Astrachan says. Astrachan will
develop the teaching method with help from an advisory board of former
students who currently work in a variety of professions. He will also
receive advice from five senior educators in computer science, engineering,
and biology.
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IT Skills Crisis Requires a Joint Effort
Computing (07/12/07) Williams, Lara
As IT departments increasingly align themselves with business and its
objectives, IT and academia grow farther apart, only worsening the skills
gap in the IT profession. To avoid a devastating talent shortage, the IT
profession needs to bridge the gap between academia and the real-world
skills needed in industry. As technical jobs are sent overseas, most
employers are no longer looking for pure technologists, and universities
have not changed their programs fast enough. Universities and employers
need to work together to develop curricula that will train workers with a
variety of technical and business skills. The British Council for Industry
and Higher Education reported that applications for computer science
degrees fell 29 percent from 2003 to 2006, and A-level candidates fell by
almost half. One successful effort to develop business-savvy technology
employees is the new IT management for business degree pioneered by sector
skills body e-Skills U.K., which will graduate its first students next
year. A number of universities offer the course, but it is not yet
available at major research-led institutions such as Southampton University
and Imperial College. If the course does not gain widespread acceptance,
students may believe that incorporating business skills is not worthwhile.
Top-tier universities need to include business skills in their curricula
and realize that because business skills are now a vital part of the IT
professions, their students will not succeed without them.
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Calit2 Looks Into the Games People Play
California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
(07/09/07)
Research into computer gaming conducted by the California Institute of
Technology (Calit2) and UC Irvine indicates that games offer far more than
mere entertainment value to children and adults; they are being used as
tools for learning, socialization, business, and even improvement of the
world. Certain researchers believe computer games help nurture
socialization skills by rewarding collaboration and linking people of
diverse cultural backgrounds, and UCI professor Bonnie Nardi says the World
of Warcraft massively multiplayer online game prepares participants for the
cultivation of relationships and collaboration with strangers through the
mastery of various tasks or quests. She notes that the game's
community-based operating principles are "actually the opposite of what
traditional culture does, which is cut us off from people who are different
from us." Calit2 researchers Bill Tomlinson and Lynn Carpenter have
designed a computer game that educates children about restoration ecology
by enabling them to virtually eradicate species to determine extinction's
ecological impact. "One wonderful possibility for games is the ways in
which they can be used to change the world," notes Tomlinson. "They can
help bring communities together, and help people learn about new concepts
and engage with new topics in new fields." Virtual-world games such as
Second Life enable real-world business applications, with some players
earning a livelihood by designing, purchasing, and selling actual products
in the simulated environment. UCI professor Patricia Seed teaches a course
in which students research and design games around specific historical
periods.
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Three Hamilton Students Examining Computer Security for
Summer Research Project
Hamilton College (07/12/07)
The Air Force Research Lab in Rome, N.Y., is sponsoring the computer
security-related summer projects of three students from Hamilton College.
One project will focus on how the formal access policies of SE-Linux are
defined, and how they are enforced by the Department of Defense-sponsored
secure operating system that controls computer use. Student Kyla Gorman
will write new programs to help determine failure in the policies, and show
how policies can be written to improve the security of operations.
Meanwhile, students Colden Prime and Tom Williams will team up to define a
framework for "live" computer forensics. Prime will concentrate on
rootkits and Williams will focus on other kinds of malware, with the goal
of creating a new framework for recognizing such programs while machines
are still running and possibly under attack. Professor Stuart Hirshfield
is overseeing the computer security research efforts of the students.
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Mobile Math Lab for Cell Phones
University of Haifa (07/10/07)
University of Haifa professor Michal Yerushalmy, of the Institute for
Alternatives in Education, working with researchers from the university's
computer science department, have developed software for cellular phones
that enables them to function like a computer and process mathematical
functions, from elementary school geometry to high school calculus.
Yerushalmy says the software means students are no longer restricted to
computer classrooms and schools to perform mathematical functions. "I
believe that mathematics needs to be learned in creative ways, and not by
memorization and repetition," he says. "Just as physics and biology labs
teach through experimentation, I believe that there should also be math
labs, where learning is experimental." The program also allows users to
send graphs and formulas to one another as short text messages, allowing
for collaborative learning and problem solving. During a pilot research
program, students recorded simple events, like the speed of a dripping
faucet or a bus pulling away, with the video cameras on their cell phones.
The students were then asked to turn the video clip into a mathematical
model using the program. "It was important for us to see whether or not
the students actually do use their phone as a medium for communication to
help solve the problem," says University of Haifa Faculty of Education
member and researcher in the pilot study Dr. Galit Botzer.
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Computer Science Prof Researches Program Safety
Regina Leader-Post (CAN) (07/10/07) Couture, Joe
Philip Fong, a computer science professor at the University of Regina,
views the granting of access rights only to programs on a need-to-know
basis as a way to make computers safer. He uses the game Solitaire as an
example of a program that has all the access rights of computer users, and
is not considered to be dangerous. "But as soon as vulnerabilities of
these seemingly safe programs get discovered by malicious parties, they
could exploit them to attack our machines," he says. Thanks to nearly
$250,000 in funding from the National Sciences and Engineering Research
Council of Canada (NSERC), Fong plans to create a software language that is
trustworthy and a deployment platform for safely running untrusted
software. "My research really is about how to build programming
abstractions or programming languages that would allow us to implement the
principle of granting only enough access rights to a program so that they
can function, rather than granting them all the rights that we have as
users," he says. Fong wants to develop open source tools that software
developers can build on and use to create safe applications.
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Emoticon Turning 25: You Can Thank This Guy :-) ... or
Not :-(
Network World (07/10/07) McNamara, Paul
In a few months' time the emoticon will have reached the quarter-century
mark, and its inventor, Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Scott
Fahlman, explains in an interview that his invention did not yield any
financial riches for him. He released it into the world in a purely
philanthropic gesture. "If there were some practical way in which I could
charge people a few cents every time they used these symbols, nobody would
use them," Fahlman reasons. He acknowledges that emoticons can be
infuriating for first-time users. "They generally settle down after a
while, but until they do, these people can be annoying to those of us who
have been using this stuff for many years, and who try to use them
sparingly--and also to those writers who see no need for smiley faces in
the first place," Fahlman comments. Backlash against emoticons can
sometimes be very heated, although Fahlman says none of this vitriol has
ever been directed at him personally. "It has been very interesting to
watch the infectious spread of the smiley face and the 'turn your head
sideways' principle from my first message, through the research community,
on to other universities, and then around the world as the Internet spread
into people's homes," Fahlman says.
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Cyberterrorism: By Whatever Name, It's on the
Increase
InformationWeek (07/09/07)No. 1145, P. 32; Greenemeier, Larry
Recent incidents in Russia and England suggest that criminals are
increasingly using the Web to organize or initiate Web attacks intended for
political or cultural treason. In Britain, three Muslim men dubbed
"cyber-jihadis" were convicted of inciting Muslims to attack non-Muslims
via the Internet; the men received prison terms of up to 10 years. The
U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team described Russian cyberattacks that
struck political Web sites such as the United Civil Front. Moreover,
cyberwarfare has existed for months, with a Russian newspaper, a Russian
radio station, and Estonia's cyberinfrastructure all targeted by
denial-of-service attacks in April 2007 and May 2007.
On the jihadi Web site Al-jinan.org, the "Electronic Jihad Program" is an
application that lets users select a Web site to attack. Al-jinan has
existed for over four years, but contradictions in its domain name server
registration make it hard to track its source. Large-scale cyberattacks
would significantly affect American businesses, as companies in the private
sector run most of the country's crucial infrastructure. Still, everyone
must be aware of security issues, as electronic jihad is out to produce
economic disruption of any kind.
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Arresting Developments
Economist (07/12/07)
Weizmann Institute researcher David Harel has been developing an accurate
computer simulation of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans in the hopes of
revealing the specialization methodology of pluripotent stem cells, and he
proposes to assess the result through an updated Turing test to see whether
scientists familiar with the organism can distinguish between the
simulation and the actual nematode. Microsoft Research's Stephen Emmott is
considering inverting the strategy by building computers out of biological
elements, and he speculates that a biological computer might be more
capable of meeting long-standing challenges such as recognizing visual
input. Emmott is collaborating with Stephen Muggleton of London's Imperial
College to create an "artificial scientist" that combines inductive logic
with probabilistic reasoning, and which could design experiments,
accumulate the results, and incorporate those results into theory. Emmott
and Muggleton believe such a computer could construct hypotheses directly
from the data. Other researchers are studying how the proliferation of
diseases such as AIDS and malaria can be likened to information systems,
and are investigating their relationship with machine learning. The
University of Cambridge's Peter Lipton suggests that computers that
prescribe the wrong treatment for patients based on misdiagnosis of their
symptoms could be held morally accountable, and this raises the issue that
computers might also be awarded credit for good work as well.
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Mounting Scrutiny for Google Security
InfoWorld (07/12/07)
Search behemoth Google is experiencing an increasing amount of examination
as it expands into the business sector with new products. Ponemon
Institute researchers have completed a report focusing on the only
substantial security flaw found in the Google Desktop program, to date; the
flaw was a cross site scripting vulnerability discovered and patched in
February 2007 by Google. Still, the Ponemon report reveals that nearly
three quarters of the approximately 600 IT security specialists polled
believe that Google Desktop probably contains other security flaws. Google
recently acquired GreenBorder Technologies and Postini to augment its
security skills and sponsored Stopbadware.org, a malware research project.
However, Ponemon contends that Google's prominence in the market makes it
an increasingly attractive target to hackers. Google's intent to cultivate
"deep integration" between Web-based and desktop tools has also concerned
some who believe that remote queries can jeopardize sensitive data stored
on computers. Google CIO Douglas Merrill says Google pays more than 1,000
engineers to test for gaps in its software, encourages communication
between technology providers, security researchers, and white hat hackers,
and promotes responsible problem disclosure. Google also has an advantage
in that problems can be resolved immediately on its servers, unlike
companies that must convey patches to all users, notes Merrill. In
addition, Google Desktop and Google Apps systems actually add an additional
layer of security to joint business endeavors by requiring authentication
and by helping companies locate improperly used data. The company also
notifies customers of its security efforts and stays informed of
cutting-edge attack strategies through Stopbadware.org and the Google
Security Blog. Industry experts concur that Google has excelled at
safeguarding its users from attacks and major vulnerabilities thus far, but
nevertheless recommend that Google learn from Microsoft's mistakes in order
to maintain a strong reputation.
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Dan Wallach: Security Watchdog for the Industry
Computerworld (07/09/07) Vol. 41, No. 28, P. 58; Collett, Stacy
Dan Wallach is on sabbatical from Rice University, where he is a tenured
associate professor, but he continues to focus on making sure key
technologies affecting the public are secure. The security researcher is
serving as associate director of ACCURATE, and is concentrating on voting
security at the $7.5 million research center. Among the many papers that
Wallach has published is one that analyzed the Secure Digital Music
Initiative and found that all of the proposed systems were very vulnerable.
For another research project, Wallach led a team that identified similar
security flaws in the electronic voting systems from Diebold. Exposing the
security flaws prompted threats of lawsuits from the SDMI consortium and
Diebold, but they ultimately decided against mounting a legal challenge to
Wallach, who says his claims are backed by scientific evidence. "I'm not a
hacker," says Wallach, 35, who even uncovered security flaws in Sun
Microsystems' Java technology while pursuing graduate studies at Princeton
University. Wallach, who was named one of Computerworld's 40 leading
innovators under the age of 40, says he joined ACCURATE because "it's hard
for me to think of anything more important [to work on] than our
democracy."
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