Study Questions U.S. Shortfall in Math, Science
EE Times (11/06/07) Riley, Sheila
The common belief that U.S. students are falling behind in science,
technology, and engineering, eventually leading to a worker shortage
crisis, is mistaken, concludes an Urban Institute report, which says that
not only are U.S. students doing well in science and technology subjects,
but that the U.S. is educating a sufficient number of scientists and
engineers to maintain its current global competitiveness. Urban Institute
senior research associate Hal Salzman, who co-authored the report, says
international tests ranking students, which frequently show that U.S.
students are weak in math and science, are flawed. The study found that
over the past 10 years U.S. students took more math, science, and foreign
language courses than in previous decades. In 1990, only 45 percent of
high school students took chemistry, but by 2004 the percentage of students
taking chemistry rose to 60 percent. The percentage of students who took
three years of math rose from 49 percent in 1990 to 72 percent in 2004, and
the percentage of students taking four years of math rose from 29 percent
to 50 percent. Salzman says the education systems in Japan, Singapore, and
South Korea do lead to better test scores, but that does not necessarily
lead to better jobs, a better economy, or more innovation. Salzman
highlights the fact that Singapore is promoting a national "creativity
initiative" because the Asian city-state's leaders realize the need to
de-emphasize its narrow educational approach. Center for International
Industry Competitiveness at the University of New Haven director George
Haley says that testing a broad selection of countries puts the United
States at a disadvantage because in the U.S. poor-performing students
reduce the U.S. average, but in other countries those students would not be
eligible to take the tests.
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Microsoft Puts the 'F' in Functional
eWeek (11/05/07) Taft, Darryl K.
Microsoft recently announced that it would release a commercial version of
its F# functional programming language, designed specifically for
developers dealing with concurrency. Functional programming treats
computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions while avoiding
state and mutable data. Microsoft's S. "Soma" Somasegar says that many
ideas from functional languages are helping solve some of the biggest
challenges in the industry, such as impedance mismatches between data and
objects and the challenges of multi-core and parallel computing space.
Java creator and Sun Microsystems Fellow James Gosling says the main
problem with functional programming is that only a small portion of the
community is interested in or able to learn functional programming. Mads
Torgersen, the program manager for Microsoft's C# and a instrumental part
of the F# project, says that functional languages are very much in their
own world and tend not to interoperate well. F#, however, is designed to
run on Microsoft's Common Language Runtime. "F# stems from the functional
programming tradition and has strong roots in the ML family of languages,
though also draws from C#, LINQ, and Haskell," Somasegar says. "F# runs on
the CLR, embraces object-oriented programming, and has features to ensure a
smooth integration with the .Net Framework." Torgersen says that F# is a
very pragmatic adoption of functional programming and will serve the needs
of people doing numerical, scientific, technical, and financial programming
that have been forgotten about in the "traveling circus" of object-oriented
programming.
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MIT Develops Lecture Search Engine to Aid Students
MIT News (11/07/07) Trafton, Anne
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
researchers have developed a lecture search engine that could help students
find a specific section of a video recording of a lecture. "Our goal is to
develop a speech and language technology that will help educators provide
structure to these video recordings, so it's easier for students to access
the material," says James Glass, head of the CSAIL Spoken Language Systems
Group and principal research scientist. More than 200 MIT lectures are
currently available online. Most users are international students who
access the lectures through MIT's OpenCourseWare OCW initiative. Searching
through the lectures for specific topics is a difficult process, partially
because there is no easy way to scan audio like there is with text files.
The lecture search engine solves this problem by first creating lecture
transcripts using speech recognition software. A major challenge in this
process is that the lectures frequently contain technical terms that the
software cannot recognize, so the researchers use textbooks, lecture notes,
and abstracts to identify key terms and submit them to the computer. Once
the transcript is finished, a language processing program divides the
transcripts into sections by topic. Sections of text are compared to each
other to determine the number of overlapping words between each section.
Each word is weighted so the repetition of key words is more important than
non-key words. Glass and MIT associate professor Regina Barzilay hope to
add a lecture summarization feature to the language processing system, and
to get users more involved in the project by adding a Wikipedia-like
function that would allow users to correct errors in the lecture
transcripts and to add notes.
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FBI Director Targets the Internet's Top Dangers
Network World (11/07/07)
FBI director Robert Mueller spoke on Nov. 6 about the dark side of the
Internet and the army of experts working to battle the numerous online
dangers. Mueller used the example of al Qaeda Web master Younis Tsouli to
illustrate how infiltrated servers and scams can finance or aid terrorists.
Tsouli broke into servers to steal bandwidth, mounted phishing schemes to
access credit card accounts, and founded a Web site for terrorists.
Mueller pointed out that the Internet is a target for attacks as well as a
means for launching attacks. The "cyber blockade" of Estonia's federal and
infrastructure-related Web sites in April 2007 was the example used by
Mueller to illustrate this threat. Botnets and hackers continue to wreak
havoc as well, from disabling power grids to stealing sensitive
intelligence. However, cyber criminals are increasingly being found and
prosecuted by specialists in Regional Computer Forensic Labs. But because
a growing number of cyber threats are coming from abroad, more
international collaboration on such investigations is essential, Mueller
said. The FBI's Cyber Fusion Center is another valuable resource that lets
cyber experts, federal agents, merchants such as Target and Bank of
America, and others discuss security breaches and cyber threats. Finally,
the FBI's InfraGard program works on the community level to let members
share data about risks to their own businesses through a secure computer
service. Almost 21,000 members--from small companies to Fortune 500
businesses--currently participate in this localized private sector
partnership, according to Mueller.
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Giggling Robot Becomes One of the Kids
New Scientist (11/05/07) Inman, Mason
Toddlers treated a sophisticated, giggling robot much the same way they
did each other during the first long-term study of interaction between kids
and robots. Javier Movellan at the University of California San Diego led
the project, which involved placing a two-foot-tall robot in a classroom of
a dozen toddlers between the age of 18 months and two years. The QRIO
robot, developed by Sony, used sensors to stay in the middle of the
classroom and avoid bumping into the children, and was initially programmed
to giggle when its head was touched, occasionally sit down, and lie down
when its batteries died. The way the toddlers touched QRIO on the arms and
hands, and gave more attention and care, including hugs, to the robot
compared to an inanimate control robot, was viewed as signs of bonding.
The researchers also say the quality of the interactions increased over
several months, as the toddlers helped QRIO up when it fell, and covered up
the robot with a blanket and said "night, night" when its batteries ran
out. Although the study shows that kids will bond with robots over a long
period of time, Movellan says it is too early to say the same about older
children and adults. "This study opens the possibility for classroom
applications," says Takayuki Kanda of the Advanced Telecommunications
Research Institute in Japan, adding that it could help autistic
children.
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From Molecules to the Milky Way: Dealing With the Data
Deluge
CSIRO (11/07/2007)
Researchers in Australia are developing new mathematical approaches and
processes that will allow the science and business communities to handle
massive amounts of data in the years to come. CSIRO (Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) has launched the "Terabyte
Science" project with hopes of making Australia more of a global leader in
science. IT experts, mathematicians and statisticians, image
technologists, and other specialists at CSIRO will have a hand in the
development of computer infrastructure and tools. "CSIRO recognizes that,
for its science to be internationally competitive, the organization needs
to be able to analyze large volumes of complex, even intermittently
available, data from a broad range of scientific fields," says CSIRO
program leader Dr. John Taylor. Taylor says the methods used by small data
sets are not necessarily best for large data sets. "Large and complex data
is emerging almost everywhere in science and industry and it will hold back
Australian research and business if it isn't dealt with in a timely way,"
he says. The average PC is likely to have a few gigabytes of files, while
astronomers working with a high-powered telescope may process 10 million
gigabytes of data every hour in the next decade.
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CCNY-Led Team Receives $330,000 From NSF to Develop
‘Dynamic Tactile Interface' for Visually Impaired Computer
Users
City College of New York (11/07/07) Simon, Ellis
The National Science Foundation has awarded a team of researchers from
five institutions $330,000 over three years to develop a tactile surface
that will allow the visually impaired to control computers. Currently,
visually impaired and blind computer users are limited to Braille keyboards
that cost several thousand dollars and can only process text. "We're
trying to make a cheaper device that would receive information tactilely
and also be able to receive graphic information," says Ilona Kretzschmar,
assistant professor of chemical engineering at the City College of New
York, which is leading the project. The project, titled "A Dynamic Tactile
Interface for Visually Impaired and Blind People," aims to use an
electronically addressable and deformable polymeric film to develop the
interface device. The device will be made with three layers. The bottom
will have a touch screen connected to the computer with audio feedback to
tell users where they touched the screen. The middle layer will have
embedded isolated electrodes to address segments of the polymer top layer,
which will have an electro-active polymer film covered by a thin gold film.
"In a world that increasingly depends on graphical, pictorial and
multimedia technology, visually impaired and blind people have struggled to
keep up," Kretzschmar says. "If we can develop a viable dynamic tactile
interface that allows graphic and pictorial information to be presented in
real time in tactile rather than visual space, the amount of information
available to visually impaired and blind individuals will increase
dramatically." The researchers expect to have a prototype tablet build by
the end of the third year of the project.
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As Tech Jobs Rise, Changes Are Needed to Lure Youth to
the Field, Say Experts
CBC News (CAN) (11/07/07) Montgomery, Shannon
Children are learning how to manipulate and use technology faster than
ever, but grow less and less interested in how technology works.
Information and Communications Technology Council President Paul Swinwood
says that although children are more computer literate, their disinterest
in the concepts and technologies behind a computer show children have no
appreciation for the jobs and careers that make and advance computer
technology. Dalhousie University professor Jacob Slonim says enrollment in
computer science and computer engineering has been in freefall since 2001,
and that drastic changes are needed in almost every step of the process,
such as how the subjects are being taught and how new students are
recruited to the field. Further complicating the problem is the fact that
the number of available tech jobs continues to rise. An ICTC study
predicts there will be a shortage of 100,000 skilled workers in the field
by 2009, and 1 million by 2016. Reasons for the shortage include how
computer science is taught, parents who encourage their children to avoid
the field following the dot-com bust, and a lack of elementary and high
school teachers who specialize in computers and technology. In Canada, a
proposed national study that targets students as early as the sixth grade
would start next spring, examining how and when attitudes about computer
science careers are formed, and multidisciplinary programs, such as
Dalhousie's bachelor of informatics, show that real-world applications of
technology are becoming more popular. Canadian Information Processing
Society president Stephen Ibaraki says that about 92 countries have signed
a United Nations initiative that create an international standards body
that will monitor the technology field, starting in 2009.
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Programmed for Security
Government Computer News (11/05/07) Vol. 26, No. 28, Jackson, William
The promotion of improved software development is the goal of two recently
announced initiatives, including the SANS Institute's introduction of a new
Secure Software Programmers certification for several programming
languages. The program was organized to address the academic community's
failure to adequately train software developers, according to SANS research
director Alan Paller. The institute's leaders believe students' demand for
software training and certification will be stimulated by an
industry-recognized credential, while 23 out of 42 people who participated
in the first round of exams earned Graduate Studies and Special Programs
certificates. Paller notes that the certification's uniqueness resides in
the fact that it represents the first instance in which SANS has begun with
an exam rather than courses and curriculum to teach certification basics.
The other initiative is the formation of the nonprofit Software Association
Forum for Excellence in Code (SAFEcode) by EMC, Microsoft, SAP, Symantec,
and Juniper Networks in October, whose focus is the development and
exchange of best practices for secure software development. SAFEcode
executive director Paul Kurtz reports that many companies have internal
programs focused on improving code quality, but their effectiveness has
been hindered by poor communications; SAFEcode's objective is to develop
best practices through the recognition of commonalities between the
companies' practices. Kurtz says eventually SAFEcode members will
collaborate with SANS on the development of solid coding curriculums. He
asserts that SAFEcode seeks to enable cooperation between companies and
with government and the academic community, and its first goal is the
establishment of software assurance metrics.
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Union Awarded NSF Grants to Revitalize Computing
Education
Union College (11/07/07)
The National Science Foundation has awarded a total of $13 million in
grants to some 50 institutions to help rejuvenate computing education in
the United States and ensure that the talent needed for addressing
computing challenges in the 21st century workplace will be available.
Union College and Lafayette College were award $1.15 million for their
joint five-year project, titled Campus Wide Computation Initiative-- A New
Model for Computing Education. "Our goal is to get more students involved
by creating a curriculum that works across disciplines. Students in
various fields, from biology to psychology, would take a computation course
and go back to their home departments prepared to do discipline-specific,
computationally intensive work," says Union computer science chair Valerie
Barr, who is leading the project along with Lafayette computer science
department chair Chun Wai Liew. Union has interdisciplinary majors that
allow students to pair Computer Science with Visual Arts, Music,
Philosophy, Psychology, Economics, Biology, and Math. Union College also
received another grant intended to revitalize undergraduate computer
science that the school will use to build a social robotics curriculum.
Social robotics typically involves elements of design, psychology,
cognitive science, communication, and philosophy in addition to key
computer science and engineering principles. "We are going to lay the
foundation for social robotics to help bring more students into the
computer science fields," says Barr.
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Soccer-Playing Robot Goal of IPFW Group
Journal Gazette (11/07/07) Soderlund, Kelly
Faculty members and students at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort
Wayne and engineers from Raytheon are working to build robots that are
capable of playing soccer. The IPFW group has already built one robot, but
they are still working to develop an attachable leg that will enable it to
kick a ball, and write a computer program that will enable it to recognize
a black-and-white soccer ball. In its current form, the robot sits about
one foot off the ground, uses wheels, and has a camera on its flat top to
track an orange basketball. "It doesn't look like much, but it took a lot
to get here," says Robert Sedlmeyer, associate professor of computer
science. The IPFW group consists of four faculty members, eight students,
and three engineers from Raytheon, who will develop computer software and
engineering tools to build the team of six robots. Over the course of the
project, freshmen will develop basic engineering skills and seniors will
refine what they have learned at IPFW, while the professional engineers
will pick up experience as teachers. Participants could transfer what they
learn to future projects in which machines for rescue missions or assisting
the elderly are developed.
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The Fly's a Spy
Economist (11/03/07) Vol. 385, No. 8553, P. 91
Remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles or drones offer lower cost and
more flexibility than conventional surveillance/reconnaissance technologies
such as satellites or aircraft, but they also raise safety and privacy
issues. "We have just entered a new era, and we have got to be concerned
about protecting persons and property," says Nicholas Sabatini, who handles
aviation safety for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. UAVs are
finding use in military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other war-torn
regions, and among the technologies under development is a saucer-like
hovering device from Microdrones capable of automatic landings. Some
drones are small and lightweight enough to enter buildings and spy on
people without being detected. Such may be the case for Onera's REMANTA, a
dragonfly-like drone equipped with a video camera that can send images to
its operator via a remote-control unit. Meanwhile, Harvard University
researchers are developing a fly-like robot that weighs less than an ounce.
Eventually, UAVs will probably be used for all kinds of tasks in which the
use of manned aircraft is too hazardous, costly, or impractical. The
smaller UAVs are a source of concern in terms of their potential for
privacy infringement, while the larger drones raise fears of the damage
they could cause if they malfunction, crash, or collide with other vehicles
if they are operating in "controlled" airspace.
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Grid Computing Shows Promise
Inside Binghamton University (11/01/07) Vol. 29, No. 10,
Binghamton University grid computing experts are helping researchers in
bioengineering, physics, and other fields perform calculations that would
have been impossible without significant computing resources. Grid
computing relies on distributed and diverse resources to solve problems
that require more power than a single machine or local system can generate.
"Ideally," says computer science professor Kenneth Chiu, "grid computing
allows scientists to test more hypotheses, which allows them to discover
more stuff. This will increase the rate of scientific discovery."
Binghamton University participates in four computing grids: the Open
Science Grid, the New York State Grid, the PRAGMA Grid, and the TeraGrid.
There is also a 64-node cluster at the school serving as a testbed for an
Oakridge National Laboratory project on "checkpointing," which allows a
computer to stop and resume computations so the computer can be shut down
or work on a different problem. One of the projects at Binghamton is
examining heart arrhythmia and sudden cardiac death. The project uses a
computer program to simulate the generation of a cardiac beat, including
the sequence of events that lead to life-threatening arrhythmia, in the
hopes of understanding who is at risk. Running the program on the grid
could lead to answers in a matter of days instead of years.
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UN Approves Resolution Related to Cyber Attacks
eGov Monitor (11/05/07)
The United Nations Disarmament and International Security Committee on
Nov. 1 passed a resolution that deals with international security
developments in the IT and telecommunications fields. The measure contends
with concerns that information or telecommunication technology can be
exploited to compromise states' security. Upon the approval of the
resolution, the European Union Presidency Portugal issued a statement
highlighting potential cybersecurity threats that can be traced to
terrorists, organized criminals, or coordinated attacks by individuals
inspired by political propaganda. Cyberattacks against the Estonian
government establishment, Web pages, and media in the spring are largely
responsible for the resolution, says Estonian ambassador to the UN Tiina
Intelmann. "For this, an international legal framework must be created,"
Intelmann says, verifying that both Estonia and the EU have urged all UN
member nations to participate in the Council of Europe's Convention on
Cybercrime. The resolution calls for the organization of a team of
government experts in 2009, and this group will have the responsibility of
investigating both existing and potential threats to information security
and suggesting preventive measures. The team could also study assaults on
vital national information infrastructures, and consider suggestions as to
how these attacks could be probed and criminalized.
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Canadian Prof Offers Model for System Management
Computerworld Canada (10/31/07) Lau, Kathleen
Carleton University professor Murray Woodside and Ph.D. student Tao Zheng
are tracking IT system behavior for improved performance planning using
technology that was once employed to track aircraft and spacecraft.
Woodside says the concept of system performance tracking is founded on the
fact that system parameters differ according to how many people may visit a
site at a time, and the idea moved forward as corporate IT environments
transformed to include Web-based systems whose parameters varied
increasingly. Zheng says the performance model augments data center system
management tools by carrying out system provisioning according to
application response time and other additional variables; the tool
previously executed provisioning solely via the measurement of utilization.
The consideration of response times allows IT managers to anticipate
system changes and be granted additional time to implement more resources,
Woodside says. Zheng expects the spread of virtualization to not only help
resource management, but also to get a boost from the ability to plan
machine provisioning. "If virtual machines are a new trend in the IT
world, then this technology is quite useful," he says. The Carleton
initiative, conducted in collaboration with the IBM Center for Advanced
Studies, was named the CAS Project of the year.
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Anti-Social Bot Invades Second Lifers' Personal
Space
New Scientist (10/02/07) Simonite, Tom
University College London researchers are using an automated avatar in
Second Life to study the psychology of Second Life users. The automated
avatar, called SL-bot, has been used to see if Second Life users expect
other avatars to give their avatar the same amount of personal space as is
normally expected in real life. In one experiment, SL-bot searched for
avatars that were alone. When an isolated avatar was found, SL-bot would
approach the avatar, greet the avatar by name, wait two seconds, and then
move to within the virtual equivalent of 1.2 meters. SL-bot then recorded
the other avatar's reaction for 10 seconds and sent the data back to the
researchers. Out of the 28 avatars approached in this manner, 12 moved
away and 20 also responded with text chat. Another experiment observed
pairs of avatars as they interacted and found that users are, on average,
six times more likely to shift position when someone comes within 1.2
meters. The findings show that people value their virtual personal space
much like people value their real personal space. During an experiment
where undergraduate students with scripts interacted with subject avatars,
it was found that female avatars protect their personal space less than
male avatars, reflecting real world behavior. The research project
replaced undergraduate student avatars with SL-bot because using human
testers raised several ethical questions. The experiment on the whole
raises several ethical questions regarding the use of virtual test
subjects. Stanford's Nick Yee says the ethics of experimenting in virtual
worlds is still largely under negotiation. "Some review boards are
probably too cautious and others too liberal," Yee says. SL-bot was
presented in a paper at the 7th International Conference on Intelligent
Virtual Agents, in Paris, in September.
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The Diamond Age of Spintronics
Scientific American (10/07) Vol. 297, No. 4, P. 84; Awschalom, David D.;
Epstein, Ryan; Hanson, Ronald
Room-temperature quantum computers fashioned from synthetic semiconducting
diamond may one day be realized by radical electronic devices that exploit
electron spin. Critical to making diamond viable for quantum spintronics
is doping it with an impurity, specifically a nitrogen-vacancy center where
two adjacent sites in diamond's carbon atom lattice are altered so that a
nitrogen atom replaces a carbon atom at one site while an empty space is
left at the other site. Electrons orbit in the vacant space and around the
neighboring three carbon atoms and carry a spin that can be harnessed by
quantum applications. Study by University of California, Santa Barbara
researchers has demonstrated that spins in diamond are highly resistant to
environmental disturbances, allowing the quantum state of the N-V center
spin to be used to encode quantum information at room temperature. The
scientists have measured an N-V center spin's interaction with another spin
on an nearby nitrogen impurity with no vacancy, leading to the dependence
of its splitting of its 0 and 1 states on the other nitrogen's spin state.
This phenomenon makes a controlled NOT gate, in which one quantum bit
(qubit) is inverted if and only if the other qubit is a 1, possible. The
composition of any arbitrary quantum operation on any number of qubits can
be achieved by combining CNOT gates acting on qubit pairs and rotations of
individual qubits. Photons could be employed as mediators to facilitate
longer distance interactions between N-V spins in diamond.
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