Association for Computing Machinery's Turing Prize
Raised to $250,000
AScribe Newswire (07/26/07)
ACM announced that Google will join Intel as a contributor to the ACM A.M.
Turing Award prize, increasing the cash award from $100,000 to $250,000 to be shared equally between the two companies.
The Turing Award, named for Alan Turing, recognizes individuals for
significant and lasting contributions to the computing field and is widely
considered to be the Nobel Prize of computing. The new funding from Google
will help increase the visibility of the Turing Award as the premier reward
for innovations in computing. "The Turing Award is the highest award in
the field of computing science and recognizes achievements that push the
boundaries of innovation," says ACM President Stuart I. Feldman. "This
award is a significant contributor to ACM's mission--to advance computing
as a science and profession." Feldman, who is also vice president of
engineering at Google, says, "With the continuing financial support of
Intel and the newly added contribution of funds from Google, we can
significantly increase the award's cash value to better reflect the
importance and prestige of the Turing Award worldwide." Feldman says that
the stature of both Intel and Google in the computing field make them
"perfect partners to help ACM elevate the profile of the Turing Award and
to honor the contributions of its recipients."
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Senators to Abandon '08 E-Voting Paper Trail
Mandate
CNet (07/25/07) Broache, Anne
Democratic senators made another push to ban electronic voting machines
that do not provide a paper trail, but decided not to try to force states
to do so by next year's presidential election. Sen. Dianne Feinstein
(D-Calif.), the chief sponsor of the Ballot Integrity Act, which proposes
such a ban, says she fears requiring all states to use voter-verified paper
records in time for the next election "could be an invitation to chaos," as
some primaries are only six months away. "Pushing the date back to the
2010 elections will give us more time to reach a bipartisan consensus ...
to enact a new law that provides for increased accuracy and accountability
at the polls without raising the specter of creating major new errors,"
Feinstein says. Election watchdog groups and computer scientists have long
argued that paper ballots are one of the best ways for voters to be able to
verify their vote was correctly recorded, particularly since touch-screen
machines have proven to be vulnerable to security flaws and glitches.
However, election officials and some voting machine reviewers have argued
that paperless machines are not as faulty as some critics claim and that
replacing them would be time consuming and expensive. Some of the
provisions in Feinstein's proposal would immediately halt the purchase of
direct-recording electronic voting systems that do not provide paper
records, allocate $600 million for states and localities to replace or
adapt paperless machines as necessary, and allow voting machine software to
be inspected by state and federal authorities. For information about ACM's
e-voting activities, visit
http://www.acm.org/usacm
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NASA: Computer Bound for Space Station Sabotaged
USA Today (07/26/07) Halvorson, Todd
An employee at a NASA subcontractor purposely damaged a computer that was
to be placed aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, which is slated for launch
on Aug. 7. Among other things, the subcontractor produces sensors that are
placed within space shuttle wings. The damaged computer was scheduled to
be delivered to the international space station, where it would have been
used as part of an engineering evaluation of space station gauges. NASA's
Bill Gerstenmaier declined to comment on the motivation behind the
sabotage, which is under investigation by NASA's Inspector General. The
damaged computer will be repaired and placed aboard the shuttle in time for
the launch, NASA officials said. The subcontractor notified NASA about the
sabotage earlier this month. The damage to the computer was obvious and
easy to spot, consisting of wiring that had been cut; a qualification unit
at the subcontractor factory also had wiring that had been slashed.
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In Poker Match Against a Machine, Humans Are Better
Bluffers
New York Times (07/26/07) P. C1; Markoff, John
In the "First Man-Machine Poker Championship," a poker competition between
two professional poker players and a software program running on an
ordinary laptop, the human players won, largely due to their superior
ability to bluff. The contest pitted professional poker players Phil Laak
and Ali Eslami against Polaris, a poker program written by a team of
artificial intelligence researchers from the University of Alberta. In the
past, computer researchers have focused on chess and checkers computer
programs, but poker is believed to be a more difficult challenge for
software designers. Poker requires computer scientists to develop
different strategies and algorithms to compensate for the uncertainties
introduced by not knowing the other player's cards and
difficult-to-interpret, risky behaviors such as bluffing. University of
Alberta computer science department chairman Jonathan Schaeffer, who
initiated the poker playing research effort 16 years ago, says the
advancements being made in poker software are more likely to have a
real-world application than chess research. Research interest have
generally shifted away from chess in favor of poker, partly because of the
rapid progress being made in developing new algorithms that could have
broad, practical applications in areas like negotiation and commerce, says
Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Tuomas Sandholm. Unlike
chess programs, which require massive amounts of computing power to
calculate every possible outcome while the game is being played, Polaris
performs a lot of precomputing, running calculations for weeks before a
match to build a series of bots that have different playing styles. In the
first two rounds of the poker match, the program ran a single bot, but in
the third round the programmers used a "coach" program that allowed them to
move bots in and out, like athletes on a roster.
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Local San Diego Seniors, Youth, and K-12 Teachers to
Participate in High-Tech SIGGRAPH Conference
Business Wire (07/24/07)
ACM's SIGGRAPH 2007 will open its doors to senior citizens, children, and
K-12 teachers in the San Diego area in several ways. Fifteen students from
the Regional Occupational Program will attend the conference. Meanwhile,
senior citizens and K-6 students will perform immersive, educational
exercises in the Guerilla Studio, the collaborative artist workspace. The
SIGGRAPH 2007 Educators Program could be attended by nearly 100 teachers,
and the event will include an in-service tutorial on design for K-12
teachers, in addition to papers, panels, workshops, QuickTakes, and forums.
"The SIGGRAPH 2007 Educators Program content details how to use
cutting-edge computer graphics as a teaching tool in all levels of
education," says Janese Swanson, SIGGRAPH 2007 Educators Chair from The Art
Apprentice and a San Diego K-6 technology teacher. "Everyone--from
children to seniors--can enjoy and use technology to enhance their lives
and foster creativity within themselves." SIGGRAPH 2007 takes place Aug.
5-9 at the San Diego Convention Center. For more information about ACM
SIGGRAPH 2007, or to register, visit
http://www.siggraph.org/s2007/
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Future of HTTP at Center of Debate
Network World (07/25/07) Marsan, Carolyn Duffy
A gathering of leading Internet engineers at an IETF conference in Chicago
this week focused on whether the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) should
be completely reworked to fix well-known security flaws or merely tweaked
to address the most pressing errors. Internet experts are aligning
themselves on both sides of the debate. Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, the
World Wide Web Consortium, and engineers from Microsoft, Adobe, and
Hewlett-Packard all believe that minimal corrections is the right approach
at this time and provided some recommendations for adjusting HTTP in a
document published by the IETF. "The current plan is to incorporate known
errata, and to update the specification text according to the current IETF
publication guidelines," the document says. Those who believe a complete
overhaul is necessary say requiring authorization mechanisms for HTTP would
make the system more secure and help eliminate the widespread problems of
spoofing and phishing, even if it sacrifices anonymity. "We need to clean
this mess up and that means facing the reality of HTTP security," says John
Klensin, an email pioneer, former executive for AT&T and MCI Worldcom, and
former chair of the Internet Architecture Board, an IETF oversight group.
Klensin argues that fixing known errors in HTTP and its authentication
weakness needs to be accomplished in parallel with each other.
Participants in the IETF debate supported establishing a working group to
fix HTTP's shortcomings and to create a document that outlines known
security holes. The IETF has twice tried to establish a working group to
fix HTTP problems and failed. "It's and interesting time for HTTP," says
Yahoo engineer Mark Nottingham, who led the HTTP debate. "There have been
other attempts to revise RFC 2616 ... I do think this is a unique
opportunity to get it done."
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Researchers Create Search Engine to Hunt Molecules
Online
Penn State Live (07/26/07) Hopkins, Margaret; Messer, Andrea
Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST)
researchers have created ChemxSeer, the first publicly available search
engine that is specifically designed to return information on chemical
formulae. The algorithm used in the search engine can identify related
chemicals with different formula representations, as well as chemicals with
related substructures or similarities, says C. Lee Giles, professor of
information science and technology and co-director of the IST Cyber
Infrastructure Lab. "Results from our search engine are much more relevant
than results returned by popular search engines," says Giles. "It is one
of several cyber tools under development in our lab which will enable
netter access to and sharing of information and data among scientists and
scholars." Popular search engines have traditionally performed poorly when
searching for chemical formulas, as search engines tend to focus on
keywords while scientists would enter parts of a chemical formula.
Additionally, some chemical molecules have more than one formula. For
example, CH4 can also be represented as H4C, so a search run on a
traditional search engine for either one would not return results on the
other. ChemxSeer also is capable of searching beyond exact matches and
searches for formulae with additional terms, elements, or similar
structures. To create ChemxSeer, the researchers used training samples of
both chemical formulae and non-chemical formulae to "teach" machines how to
recognize a chemical. Future research efforts will strive to improve the
reliability of identification, increase the relevance of search results,
and link to molecular databases and data archiving.
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An Emotional Cat Robot
Technology Review (07/26/07) Graham-Rowe, Duncan
Scientists in the Netherlands are giving a robotic cat a set of logical
rules for emotions in the hopes that introducing emotional variables to the
decision-making process will lead to more natural human and computer
interactions. "We don't really believe that computers can have emotions,
but we see that emotions have a certain function in human practical
reasoning," says Mehdi Dastani, an artificial intelligence researcher at
Utrecht University. Dastani says that by giving intelligence programs
similar emotions, the hope is that robots will be able to emulate emotion
to reach more human-like reasoning. The robot, called iCAT, can move its
eyebrows, eyelids, mouth, and head position to portray emotion, like
looking confused when interacting with its human user or performing
calculations. Eventually, the goal is to use Dastani's emotional-logic
software to improve human and robot interaction, but for the time being the
researchers will use iCAT to display an internal emotional status for the
robot. The use of emotional programming should help reduce the
computational workload during complex decision-making processes used when
carrying out planned tasks. The emotional logic consists of a series of
rules to define 22 emotions, including anger, hope, gratification, fear,
and joy. Instead of being based on abstract notions of feelings, the rules
are defined in terms of a goal the robot needs to achieve and the method by
which the robot plans to achieve it. Although other robots have been
designed to express human emotions, Dastani's focus on how emotions can be
used to affect decision making makes the iCAT project unique.
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Congress: P2P Networks Harm National Security
CNet (07/24/07) Broache, Anne; McCullagh, Declan
At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, politicians said peer-to-peer
networks constitute a threat to national security by their ability to
facilitate the unintentional sharing of sensitive or classified documents
by federal workers through their computers. Government Reform Committee
Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) reported that he is considering new
legislation out of concern that such documents could be accessed by foreign
governments, organized crime, or terrorists. Attending the hearing was
Lime Wire Chairman and Lime Group CEO Mark Gorton, who came under fire for
offering his LimeWire P2P software, which has provided "skeleton keys" that
allow people to access national security information, claimed one
representative. Evidence that P2P networks can expose sensitive data
reflects "the importance of strengthening the laws and rules protecting
personal information held by federal agencies" and other organizations,
declared ranking committee member Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.). Mary Koelbel
Engle with the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection
noted that the threat of sensitive information disclosure has less to do
with P2P technology itself than how people employ the technology. Waxman
said he was not pursuing a prohibition on P2P networks, which has been
proposed in the past, but instead desired striking a balance that shields
important federal, personal, and corporate information and copyright
statutes.
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Why Are So Many Women and Girls Dropping Out of Sciences
and Technology Careers?
eGov Monitor (07/23/07) Melhem, Samia
Various cultural issues create barriers for girls interested in a career
in science and technology, writes Samia Melhem, a senior operations officer
for the policy division of The World Bank Group. For starters, Melhem says
very little of the amazing achievements engineering, science, and
technology professionals accomplish is ever acknowledged, or advertised, in
the mainstream media. Stories of scientific achievements play a secondary
role in the news, and that attitude is reflected in academia by a lack of
teaching in primary schools and low interest in science and technology in
students enrolled higher education. Moreover, the list of negative labels
associated with students in science and engineering in America, like nerd
and geek, is lengthy. Even worse is the stereotype of a woman interested
in science and technology--a lonely, unattractive woman competing in social
handicaps with her male counterparts. The image of a female scientist is
almost the exact opposite of the trendy, popular girl who, more often than
not, openly detests science and math. Melhem asks when was the last time a
sitcom established a significant female character as a computer scientist,
engineer, or Web master. Melhem believes it is impossible to get children
interested in science, engineering, and math when the Disney channel
portrays such professions as mundane jobs filled by nerdy, socially
awkward, depressed adults.
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Government Reports Cybercrime Poses National Risk
InformationWeek (07/24/07) Gaudin, Sharon
The public and private sectors are threatened by ever-increasing domestic
and foreign cyberattacks on operational security and law enforcement,
concludes a new Government Accountability Office report. The GAO reported
that more stringent security must be employed by IT managers, while federal
and commercial sectors are faced with ongoing difficulties in detecting
Web-based crime. Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.) of the subcommittee on
Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology said that
compromised federal Web sites, classified email susceptible to unclassified
networks, and infiltration of Department of Homeland Security networks are
among the government's security challenges. The DHS and its CIO Scott
Charbo were faced with reports during a congressional hearing that the
department had experienced 844 "cybersecurity incidents" within two years.
Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) wrote that the DHS is at the forefront of
cybersecurity for the nation yet department investigations have
demonstrated that "'information security' has become an oxymoron."
Langevin said China has been "coordinating attacks against the Department
of Defense for years," and that potential malware could infiltrate
first-strike attacks on U.S. computer systems. "I encourage all
businesses--small and large--to take a very close look at their
cybersecurity practices," Langevin said. "Though 100 percent security may
be unattainable, there are many policies and procedures that businesses can
implement to better safeguard their data."
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With Simple New Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape
Mapmaking
New York Times (07/27/07) P. A1; Helft, Miguel
New Internet tools are fundamentally changing the ways people use maps as
professionals and amateurs alike are drawing digital maps and annotating
them with text, images, sound, and videos. Such open participation is
reshaping the world of mapmaking as people create maps that revolve around
their interests, creating richer, more diverse, and messier maps than
previously possible. Some examples of interest-based maps include maps
focused on biodiesel fueling stations in New England, yarn stores in
Illinois, hydrofoils around the world, detour routes around the collapsed
bridge in the Bay Area, and the path of the two whales that swam up the
Sacramento River delta in May. "Any time you can take data and represent
it visually, you can start to recognize patterns and see where you need to
put resources," says James Lamb, who started a map to track the spread of
graffiti in Federal Way, Wash. People will increasingly be able to visit
their favorite map service to find information on specific locations, such
as the location of hotels, restaurants, crime statistics, school rankings,
weather patterns, and recent area news. These maps are like wikis in that
they are collaborative projects that represent the knowledge of numerous
contributors, and are becoming an increasingly important aspect of how
information is organized and found on the Internet. "What is happening is
the creation of this extremely detailed map of the world that is being
created by all the people in the world," says Google Maps and Google Earth
director John V. Hanke. "The end result is that there will be a much
richer description of the earth."
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Europe Approves $166 Million for Next-Generation
Web
Dow Jones Newswires (07/20/07)
Germany has received the approval of the European Union to provide $166
million through 2011 to companies to conduct research on the
next-generation Web. The money will fund the Theseus project, with hopes
of developing "new search technologies for the next-generation Internet,"
including "semantic technologies which try to recognize the meaning of
content and place it in its proper context." With a semantic Internet, the
Web would intelligently search for and return the specific needs of the
user, who would not have to click through pages for the information. SAP,
Siemens, EMPOLIS, and Deutsche Thomson will lead the way on the Theseus
project, and smaller firms will add on to their research and potentially
pursue other areas of R&D. There are other pragmatic research projects
being conducted on the semantic Web, including the Quaero project that
France is pursuing. Google is more likely to use whatever version catches
on with the mass market and can be used with its AdWords advertising
platform, than develop a single version of the semantic Web, says analyst
Trip Chowdhry.
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Sing to Computer to Download Song
ABC Science Online (Australia) (07/25/07) Cooper, Dani
RMIT University computer scientist Sandra Uitdenbogerd predicts that the
next generation of search engines will enable users to find a song by
simply singing it to a computer. "In the next three or four years it
should be on the computer of everyone who is a music fanatic," Uitdenbogerd
said at a recent Human Communication Science Network forum at Macquarie
University. One way to retrieve audio by singing will have users visit a
Web site and sing a tune or lyrics into a computer microphone, although the
quality of the user's voice will affect the search. "The more in tune and
accurate you are the less you will have to sing," Uitdenbogerd said, adding
that no matter how bad someone's voice is, most people can get the "ups and
downs" of a tune in the correct spots. The problem with current text-based
music searches is that the same lyrics may exist in multiple songs, or as
with classical music, not at all. The major problems a music search system
needs to overcome are the diversity of music and the effect interference
can have on the program's ability to detect notes. Uitdenbogerd said it is
easier to solve retrieval problems by focusing on one genre of music, but
that this could lead to a retrieval system that only searches a limited
range of music. Uitdenbogerd's research team is also exploring the
possibility of searching by instrument timbre and mood.
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'Smart' Traffic Sign Stops Collisions
American Technion Society (07/24/07) Hattori, Kevin
Technion-Israel Institute researchers at the Transportation Research
Institute have developed a "smart" traffic sign that can help drivers make
the correct decisions and avoid collisions at confusing intersections or
intersections that lack traffic signals. The smart sign has two cameras
mounted on a pole at the intersection. One camera faces the main road and
the other faces the secondary road. A computer processes data from both
cameras, and when it detects a potential collision, activates flashing
lights to warn approaching drivers. Yotam Abramson, one of the developers
of the system, says accidents at intersections without traffic light occur
when drivers on the secondary road do not see the traffic sign and are
unaware that they do not have the right of way. Accidents at these
intersections can also be caused when drivers notice the traffic sign, but
fail to properly internalize and respond to the information. "In both
cases, the driver makes the incorrect decision," Abramson says. "The
assumption is that the flashing light will draw the driver's attention to
the sign and increase his alertness." The smart sign is expected to reduce
the amount of accidents and near-accidents without impeding traffic flow at
a four-way intersection in Tel Aviv, where the device is being tested. The
researchers are also working on a "smart" traffic light that can identify
when a driver is about to cross an intersection against a red light. If a
driver is about to go through a red light, the light will either flash, or
delay the green light in the other direction. Abramson says the system
would also serve as a traffic violation camera.
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Canada to Co-Develop IT Projects With Developing
Nations
IT World Canada (07/23/07) Smith, Briony
Funding for alliances dedicated to helping ICT deployments in developing
countries will be provided through a partnership between the International
Development Research Center (IDRC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). "Our motto is 'empowerment through
knowledge,' and the digital revolution is a means to empower even the
poorest of the poor," said the IDRC's Laurent Elder. "By giving them
access to digitization, it can help solve their development problems."
Elder reported that his agency has had the most successful ICT
implementations in the areas of education, livelihood, health, and
government. He noted that the IDRC has done very well in terms of
enhancing telecommunications policy, while other areas he thinks would be
prime project candidates include disaster warning, censorship, and
interoperable health systems. The researchers' partners are required to
hail from the IDRC's stable of lower and middle income countries such as
Uganda, Mozambique, Senegal, Kenya, Chile, Colombia, Peru, the Philippines,
Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. Such partners' contributions can run the gamut
from design to governance to particular requests or questions. Nine
applicants will be selected and awarded $30,000, and given nearly 12 months
to ready a full research proposal; just three projects will ultimately be
chosen, and receive $400,000 yearly for up to five years.
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Informatics Designs Tools to Promote Health Care,
Independent Living
Indiana University (07/19/07)
Researchers at the Indiana University School of Informatics will design
tools that address the privacy concerns of the elderly, as information
processing becomes more integrated in everyday devices around them. They
will build a "living lab," and volunteers from a Bloomington retirement
community will participate in studies and provide feedback on how to
improve designs and the design methodology. The digital toolkit could
include a sensor that would be mounted to the kitchen counter for
volunteers to place a finger before making breakfast, and a sensor embedded
in a TV remote control that measures the participant's heart rate each time
it is used. "Our proposal addresses the acute privacy challenges of using
ubiquitous computing in a home-based health care environment, where
vulnerable populations risk enforced technology intimacy," says associate
professor Jean Camp, who specializes in privacy issues and the impact of IT
on society. They will concentrate on developing tools that will allow the
volunteers and their caregivers to communicate their privacy concerns in
the second year of the study, and in the third year the team will design a
ubiquitous computing system for two households at the retirement community
and study the interaction. The National Science Foundation is funding the
project with a $821,000 grant.
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Diversity in the IT Workplace
CIO Insight (07/26/07) Chabrow, Eric
Statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that while
the IT industry is slightly more diverse than it was at the beginning of
the decade, it is still lagging behind the rest of the U.S. workforce.
According to the BLS, the percentage of African-Americans in IT managerial
and staff positions dropped nearly 26 percent over the past six and-a-half
years, the percentage of whites increased by 2.3 percent, and employment
within IT among Asians increased by more than 17 percent.
African-Americans represent only 6.5 percent of IT management and staff, as
compared to 11 percent of all other industry management and staff
professionals. Whites are also under represented in the IT industry, with
75.2 percent of all IT employees being white while 82.1 percent of all
other managers and staff professionals are white. Asians currently hold
16.3 percent of IT jobs but only 4.6 percent of managerial positions in
other professions. Gina Billings, president of the National Black Data
Processing Association, believes that globalization, and the outsourcing of
IT jobs, is to blame for the low percentage of African-Americans in the IT
industry. Billings argues that because many African-Americans entered the
industry later than their white counterparts, they were the first to get
fired when jobs started moving oversees, and that negative experience has
caused a ripple effect. A study by Global Lead Management Consulting for
the Information Technology Senior Management Forum indicates that many
African-Americans are now leaving the IT industry voluntarily. Of the
survey respondents, all of which were employed African-American IT
professionals, 56 percent considered leaving their jobs in the previous 12
months. Nearly all of the respondents said they felt comfortable working
with diverse peers, but fewer than half said they trusted their peers.
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What Can Be Done About Software Security?
SD Times (07/01/07)No. 177, P. 37; Worthington, David
Problems with project management and organizational commitment and
training were traced by experts to be the most frequent root causes behind
the increasing incidence of software code vulnerabilities, and tight
schedules and a lack of management-defined standards were among the factors
cited as contributing to software security deficiencies. SPI Dynamics
co-founder Caleb Sima commented that security must be a process that
encompasses the entire organization and that is embedded within the
existing development life cycle, and he and other experts concurred that
companies with a serious security investment must make a bigger commitment
to quality assurance tooling, realize the effective use of such tools, and
secure developers capable of using those tools to write vulnerability-free
code. Intelligent Decisions' director of security business units Roy
Stephan advised the establishment of best practices emphasizing boundaries,
where applications communicate via protocols or between libraries, and also
supported peer code reviews. Consultant Rex Black explained that
organizations currently lack an incentive to invest more in security
because they can pass the cost of security failures on to users and
consumers, and he suggested that government intervention might divert the
cost back to companies, spurring a corporate interest in patching security
flaws. Oracle program director John Heimann aimed criticism at entry-level
developers' prowess, complaining about a dearth of secure coding classes
offered by university computer science and training programs. "They do
good things, but this is basic knowledge that software engineers should
have," he said. Heimann attested that most academics have little secure
code development skill, have no desire to teach such a subject, and do not
wish to be criticized for their lack of knowledge; he indicated that
accreditation standards should impel program revisions that would enable
qualified faculty to teach secure programming.
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