ACM Committee on Women Honors Worldwide Leader in
Cryptography Research
AScribe Newswire (04/01/08)
ACM's Committee on Women in Computing (ACM-W) has named Shafi Goldwasser
the winner of the 2008-2009 Athena Lecturer Award. Goldwasser is known for
her outstanding research in cryptography, complexity theory, and number
theory. For example, Goldwasser teamed up with Silvio Micali and Charles
Rackoff for research on interactive and zero-knowledge proofs that have
helped provide the foundation for the secure transmission of information
over the Internet. Her work with Uriel Feige, Laslo Lovasz, Shmuel Safra,
and Mario Szegedi in the area of complexity theory led the way to the
modern approach for showing the difficulty of approximating the solution of
NP-complete problems. Goldwasser is the RSA Professor of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and she also is a professor of
computer science and applied mathematics at Weizmann Institute of Science
in Israel. Goldwasser is scheduled to address the ACM Symposium on Theory
of Computing, sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and
Computation Theory (SIGACT), in Washington, D.C., in May 2009. ACM will
honor Goldwasser with the award, which includes a $10,000 honorarium
provided by Google, at the ACM Annual Awards Banquet on June 21, in San
Francisco, Calif.
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Does Computing Add Up in the Classroom?
New York Times (04/01/08) Lohr, Steve
A recent report by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel calls for
computer-based instruction to address the "mediocre level" of math
achievement by American students. Computer activists say the report
suggests that computing should be seen as a valuable tool in mainstream
education, and should play a part in education from kindergarten through
high school. "There is a real battle going on to determine the role that
computing is going to play in K-12 education," says Indiana University
computer scientist Robert B. Schnabel, chairman of ACM's education policy
committee. "Is it going to be integrated into math and science curriculums
or is it going to be more like shop?" In higher education, computing is
considered a science of its own. However, below the university level
computing's status has not reached that stature. The math panel report
recommends well-designed computer instruction as a way to develop greater
fluency in math and understanding math concepts, with practice coming from
programming with visual languages such as LOGO. Progress is likely to be
slow, as math and computer science are still seen as two separate worlds in
most of the education community, and high school curriculums reflect that
divide, with most computer courses focusing on competency in applications
such as word processing and spreadsheets.
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Centers Tap Into Personal Databases
Washington Post (04/02/08) P. A1; O'Harrow, Robert Jr.
Fusion intelligence centers created by states following the 9/11 terrorist
attacks have access to personal information on millions of Americans, and
one even has access to top-secret data systems at the CIA, according to a
document obtained by the Washington Post. The centers were established to
identify potential threats and improve how information is shared. The
centers use law enforcement analysts and computer systems to collect and
combine otherwise separate pieces of information. A document that lists
resources used by fusion centers shows how a dozen of the centers in the
northeast United States have more access to commercial and government
databases than previously disclosed. The centers use a variety of data
resources and software programs that find patterns and display connections
between people. Most of the centers subscribe to Web-based information
brokers that deliver instant access to billions of records on individuals'
homes, cars, phone numbers, and other information. Some of the fusion
centers draw from records of currency transactions and almost 5 million
suspicious-activity reports filed by financial institutions with the
Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. "Fusion
centers have grown, really, off the radar screen of public accountability,"
says the Center for Democracy and Technology's Jim Dempsey. "Congress and
the state legislatures need to get a handle over what is going on at all
these fusion centers."
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CHI 2008 Offers Hands-On Experience Between People and
Computers
AScribe Newswire (03/31/08)
CHI 2008 will offer attendees many opportunities to experience prototypes
and systems for interacting with computers. The international conference
on human-computer interaction features a schedule of interactivity
presentations that includes iCandy: a Tangible User Interface for iTunes;
Gamelunch: Forging a Dining Experience through Sound; Dynamic Knobs: Shape
Change as a Means of Interaction on Mobile Phones; and SnapAndGrab:
Accessing and Sharing Contextual Multi-Media Content Using Bluetooth-Enable
Camera Phones. Participants will be able to view the film "Late Fragment,"
use a remote device to discover the backgrounds of the characters in a
non-linear manner, and determine how the story unfolds. A live audience
will get to experience a theatrical piece that uses interactivity in the
Design Theater. CHI 2008 also features a Student Design Competition and a
Student Research Competition. CHI 2008, sponsored by ACM's Special
Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI), takes place April
5-10, 2008, in Florence, Italy.
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Computers to Merge With Humans
BBC News (04/02/08)
A Microsoft-backed report that draws from discussions with 45 academics
from computing, science, sociology, and psychology predicts that by 2020
fundamental changes in the field of human-computer interaction will
increasingly integrate humans with machines, and machines will be able to
anticipate what we want from them. The keyboard, mouse, and monitor will
be replaced by more intuitive forms of interaction and display such as
tablet computers, speech recognition, and touch-operated surfaces. Devices
will be embedded in everyday objects, clothing, and our bodies. Our
digital footprint will increase as we share more and more aspects of our
lives through digital photography, podcasting, blogging, and video, raising
questions about how much information we should share and store about
ourselves. An always-on network will channel mass-market information
directly to us while analyzing our personal information. The report calls
this the era of hyper-connectivity and predicts that it will lead to a
growth in "techno-dependency." The report compares the widespread
introduction of the calculator, widely blamed for a fall in mental
arithmetic abilities, with what may happen as computers become more
intelligent and take on new responsibilities. "Without proper
consideration and control it is possible that we---both individually and
collectively--may no longer be in control of ourselves or the world around
us," the report warns. The report, "Being Human: Human Computer
Interaction in the Year 2020," is available at
http://research.microsoft.com/hci2020/download.html.
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US Tech Companies Roll the Dice for Worker Visas
Reuters (04/01/08) Wutkowski, Karey
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received an estimated 200,000
visa applications for the 65,000 H-1B visas that became available on April
1. Last year, USCIS received 120,000 applications on the first day, and
closed the application window after only two days. This year, USCIS will
continue the practice of selecting H-1B recipients with a computerized
lottery system, which the agency says gives each applicant the same chance
of being selected. An applicant's odds of being selected this year may be
even slimmer than they were last year, partly because of the greater number
of applicants and partly because USCIS says it will not close the
application window for five business days. Applicants have repeatedly
expressed frustration over the fact that their ability to work in the
United States is essentially determined by luck, and tech companies say the
huge demand for the visas shows that the industry is forced to rely on
foreign sources for talent because of a lack of homegrown talent. Cisco
Systems' Heather Dickinson says the inability to access the best and
brightest workers leaves U.S. companies at a severe disadvantage.
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Voters Trust Touch-Screen Machines, Studies Show
IDG News Service (03/26/08) Weiss, Todd R.; Gross, Grant
American voters are becoming more comfortable with electronic-voting
methods, reveals two new studies. A study by the Brookings Institution
found that voters are generally more comfortable with some models of
touch-screen machines than with paper ballots that use buttons and dials.
Another study, "Trends in American Trust in Voting Technology," by
InfoSentry Services, found that public trust in direct recording electronic
(DRE) machines is about the same as in 2004. Two-thirds of the 1,000
respondents to the telephone survey said they trust DREs, while 68 percent
trusted DREs in 2004. The Brookings researchers tested five DRE systems
and found that the error rate of the worst-performing machines could reach
3 percent during a presidential race, and in more complex races the voting
error rate was even higher. University of Maryland professor Paul
Herrnson, lead author of the Brookings study, notes that a 3 percent error
rate is enough to change the outcome of an election. Voters generally
approved of verification systems such as printouts that come with some DRE
machines, even though the verification systems did not significantly
improve the error rate, and often caused confusion, prompting voters to
seek help from poll workers. University of Rochester professor and study
co-author Richard Niemi says he expected voters who participated in the
study to favor paper ballots because they are more familiar with those
systems, but people generally gave DRE machines higher marks because of
ease of use and confidence that their votes would be recorded as cast.
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Smartphones Will Soon Turn Computing on Its Head
CNet (03/31/08) Krazit, Tom
An estimated 115 million smart phones were purchased last year, and
although it is unlikely they will replace PCs, analysts say the sheer
number of the devices could seriously alter how we approach computing. In
Europe, phones with Web access have been available for some time, but in
the United States consumers are only just becoming aware of the
possibilities presented by having the Internet accessible at all times.
Analysts say that three trends in particular are driving smart phone
interest among ordinary consumers. First is the increasing amount of time
people spend on social networks and similar sites. Second, people are no
longer willing to wait until they are home or find a hotspot to check
messages or update their status. Third, the sleek and attractive design of
many smart phones make them a must-have consumer item. Deustche Bank
senior analyst Jonathan Goldberg says eventually we will be able to retire
the term smart phone because all phones will be smart. Meanwhile, Intel
and ARM are in a race to develop more and more powerful chips for mobile
devices. In developing parts of the world, where PC adoption is still in
the early stages, many people may skip the PC completely and start using a
powerful phone that gives them the Internet at broadband speeds, lasts all
day, and can fit in their pocket.
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Music File Compressed 1,000 Times Smaller Than MP3
University of Rochester News (04/01/08) Sherwood, Jonathan
University of Rochester researchers have encoded a 20-second clarinet solo
in a music file smaller than 1 kilobyte, or almost 1,000 times smaller than
a MP3 file. The file was generated by recreating in a computer the
real-world physics of a clarinet and clarinet player. "This is essentially
a human-scale system of reproducing music," says professor Mark Bocko. "I
think we may have found the absolute least amount of data needed to
reproduce a piece of music." When replaying the music, the computer
reproduces the original performance based on information it has on
clarinets and clarinet playing. The researchers recorded every aspect of
clarinet playing, such as the backpressure in the mouthpiece, fingering,
and how sound radiates from the instrument, to build a computer model of a
clarinet. The result is a virtual instrument based on real-world
acoustical measurements. The researchers then modeled how a clarinet
player interacts with the instrument. Bocko says the next step was
allowing the computer to "listen" to a real clarinet performance to infer
and record the various actions required to create specific sounds. The
original sound is reproduced by feeding the record of the musician's
actions into the computer model, instead of recording the actual music. So
far, the method can only handle a single instrument at a time, but Bocko
says eventually it could be applied to vocals.
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Who Will Write Tomorrow's Code?
BBC News (04/01/08) Thompson, Bill
Most people today are only users of the information technology systems
provided, making changes only when prompted, using "creativity" tools that
stifle innovation, and accepting failures, disappointments, and crashes as
inevitable and expected, writes Bill Thompson. In general, he says users
accept the lack of programming tools or encouragement to engage in writing
code, possibly because of the increasing complexity of modern computer
systems. With so many users completely ignorant on how to program, it
becomes difficult to have a serious debate about the core technical issues
that affect the development and deployment of IT systems in our lives. The
applications that support all aspects of society are all built by
programmers, and there is a startling lack of programmers entering the
software industry. Universities have seen applications for computer
science degrees drop off, and computing is considered a non-essential
subject in high school. Thompson says children need to see that
programming is a useful skill that can be applied to a variety of careers.
He says if more children were provided with suitable languages and tools
for programming at school or at home, there would be at least some chance
that those with an aptitude for coding would discover it early enough to
become interested in the field.
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HTML5 Jumps Off the Drawing Board
InformationWeek (03/29/08) Lee, Mike
The first public working draft of the HTML5 specification was announced by
the World Wide Web Consortium in mid January, although this does not mean
the W3C has abandoned XHTML 2.0, which is still being developed. "The
HTML5 specification is a good step because it's a fairly realistic one,"
says Opera Software's Charles McCathie Nevile. "It doesn't aim to change
the world in a radical way." Among HTML5's revisions are updates to
simplify interactive Web development; header, footer, section, article,
nav, and dialogue capabilities to more clearly split page sections; and a
"canvas" with a corresponding 2D drawing application programming interface
that supports dynamic graphics and animation on the spur of the moment.
Components that HTML5 removes to eliminate usability problems include
frames and framesets and most presentational attributes. HTML5 includes
APIs that support direct provisions for audio and video, client-side
persistent storage with both key/value and SQL database support,
cross-document messaging, and offline-application, editing, drag-and-drop,
and network APIs. HTML5 design principles focus on the support of existing
content, compatibility, interoperability, universal access, and utility.
The W3C expects the ratification of the full HTML5 recommendation in the
third quarter of 2010, but Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, and Safari
already offer pieces of support for the specification.
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Internet Has a Trash Problem, Researcher Says
IDG News Service (04/01/08) McMillan, Robert
Meaningless packets of information used in distributed denial-of-service
attacks (DDoS) to knock Web sites offline account for up to 3 percent of
all Internet traffic, concludes a new Arbor Networks report. The finding
is based on a study of traffic flowing between more than 68 ISPs and
approximately 1,300 routers over 18 months. "The thing that's surprising
is it's consistently 1 percent to 3 percent," says Arbor's Danny McPherson.
"It's pretty significant." The bandwidth for the DDoS attacks cost
hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, he adds. The SYN or ICMP
packets used in DDoS attacks rarely account for less than 1 percent of all
traffic, and attacks tend to decline during Christmas and New Year's, but
they could easily rise to 6 percent during peak periods. Internet Relay
Chat servers, where hackers often meet and chat, are the most common
targets of DDoS attacks. Most email traffic is spam, and McPherson
believes trash could account for up to 10 percent of Internet traffic.
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An Interview With Bjarne Stroustrup
Dr. Dobb's Journal (03/27/08) Buchanan, James
C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup says in an interview that next-generation
programmers need a thorough education that covers training and
understanding of algorithms, data structures, machine architecture,
operating systems, and networking. "I think what should give is the idea
that four years is enough to produce a well-rounded software developer:
Let's aim to make a five- or six-year masters the first degree considered
sufficient," he says. Before writing a software program, Stroustrup
recommends that a programmer consult with peers and potential users to get
a clear perspective of the problem domain, and then attempt to build a
streamlined system to test the design's basic ideas. Stroustrup says he
was inspired to create a first programming course to address what he
perceived as a lack of basic skills for designing and implementing quality
software among computer science students, such as the organization of code
to ensure it is correct. "In my course I heavily emphasize structure,
correctness, and define the purpose of the course as 'becoming able to
produce code good enough for the use of others,'" he says. Stroustrup
thinks programming can be vastly improved, especially by never losing sight
of how important it is to produce correct, practical, and well-performing
code. He describes a four-year undergraduate university course in computer
science he helped design as having a fairly classical CS program with a
slightly larger than usual software development project component in the
first two years of study. Courses would cover hardware and software,
discrete math, algorithms and data structures, operating and network
systems, and programming languages, while a "programming studio" would be
set up to expose students to group projects and project management.
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Robotic Minds Think Alike?
ICT Results (03/27/08)
European researchers led by Linkoping University in Sweden have developed
COSPAL, an artificial cognitive system that learns from experience and
observation instead of relying on predefined rules and models. COSPAL
robots can recognize, identify, and interact with objects in random,
unforeseen situations, and can perform tasks based on their own experiences
and observations of humans. COSPAL coordinator Michael Felsberg says
children reach an understanding of cause and effect by testing and trying
everything. When applied to an artificial cognitive system, this approach
helps create robots that learn very similarly to how humans do, and can
even learn from humans, allowing the robots to continue to perform tasks
even when their environment changes or when objects they are not
pre-programmed to recognize are put in front of them. A COSPAL robot with
no pre-programmed geometric knowledge was able to recognize objects simply
from experience, even when the surroundings and the position of the robot's
camera was changed. The robot was able to solve a shape-shorting puzzle
similar to ones used to teach small children. Through trial and error, the
robot was able to place cubes in square holes and cylinders in round holes,
proving that it is possible to solve geometric problems without knowing
geometry, Felsberg says. The robot also learned to identify colors by
sight, instead of by assigning a number to correspond with the colors.
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Collaborative Art in 3D
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (03/27/08) Cosby, Renata
The blue-c project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
was an interdisciplinary initiative that attracted participants from
architecture, computer vision, computer graphics, and mechanical
engineering. The goal was to develop collaborative telepresence systems
that would allow viewers to experience being at an event while actually
being located at a remote site. "By rendering a fully three-dimensional,
live representation of the remote user, we would create the illusion of
everybody being in the same locale," says Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology Zurich graduate Dr. Martin Naef. "This would enable a much more
natural mode of interaction than previous means, such as
videoconferencing." Eight years after the start of the blue-c project, the
Living Canvas project is extending blue-c's concepts even further. For
example, while intended for entertainment, the Living Canvas project has
significantly more potential, particularly in motion tracking, and enables
performers to interact with recorded visuals. "Living Canvas frees the
artist from such restrictions by following the performer on stage using
very fast machine-vision technology and adapting the projected video
according to the position and pose of the moment," Naef says. He says the
audience should be immersed in the story and leave remembering the
beautiful scenes and not pondering the high-tech projection system.
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Cybercrime Is in a State of Flux
Guardian Unlimited (UK) (03/27/08) Knight, Gavin
Cybercriminals are increasingly using a technique known as fast flux to
hide the location of phishing sites, spamming sites, botnets, and illegal
malware. Fast flux enables a machine on a botnet to frequently change the
DNS records of a phishing or spamming site. When the DNS records of a
phishing or spamming site are changed, the machine on which the site is
hosted also changes. As a result, shutting down the phishing or spamming
site requires shutting down every single machine on the botnet, since each
of these machines hosts the same site. In addition, the constant changing
of the DNS records means that the botnet's Command & Control server cannot
be found. The use of this technique is a growing problem, says Robert
McArdle at TrendLabs EMEA. "Normally the DNS servers will be hosted on
networks that are infamous for being difficult to shut down, such as the
networks offered by the Russian Business Network," he says. "In the past
we had only one malicious Web server to clean up before the threat would be
neutralized, now we need to shut down thousands--most of which are home
PCs." Several organizations have proposed solutions to help solve this
problem. For instance, the Anti-Phishing Working Group has proposed
introducing a policy that would shut down a site across the Internet,
instead of simply shutting it down on an Internet service provider's
servers. Meanwhile, ICANN has proposed that registrars uniformly
authenticate any requests for configuration changes to name servers and
establish a minimum "time-to-live" threshold for a name server record.
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Virtual Pets Can Learn Just Like Babies
New Scientist (03/28/08)No. 2649, P. 24; Biever, Celeste
Autonomous artificial intelligence programs that can learn behavior by
observing the actions of human-controlled avatars, like human infants learn
from parents, will function as pets in the virtual realm when they are
released to Second Life and other virtual worlds later this year. The use
of virtual characters that can be taught is expected to greatly enhance
computer games, with the Electric Sheep Company's Sibley Verbek noting that
virtual pets could be trained by owners to aid them in battles in adventure
games. Novamente's virtual pets require direct communication from human
controllers, who could tell them that they are about to teach them a task,
and then demonstrate the physical action to be performed, such as sitting
down. The pets are preprogrammed to seek praise from their owners by
performing the action correctly, but they also have other basic desires
such as hunger, along with random movement and exploration of the
environment. Their "memory" records their observations as they explore,
and then the pets perform statistical analysis to find combinations of
sequences and actions that appear to predict fulfillment of their goals,
applying that knowledge to guide future behavior. Thus more sophisticated
behavior can be nurtured. Novamente's Ben Goertzel thinks learning
gestures could serve as a foundation for virtual pets to learn language.
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People Who Read This Article Also Read...
IEEE Spectrum (03/08) Vol. 45, No. 3, P. 46; Linden, Greg
Personalized news will soon be delivered by recommendation systems that
suggest items based on user behavior for services such as Netflix, TiVo,
and Amazon, writes Findory.com founder Greg Linden. Already the ball has
started rolling with innovations such as Google News, which employs
software to automate the prioritization and laying out of stories. But
news sites could be vastly improved by automatically learning what stories
each reader desires and using that knowledge to provide scores of
personalized virtual newspapers. Among the challenges inherent in
achieving this breakthrough is the cold-start problem, which is rooted in
the difficulty of rating any item that either has yet to attract the notice
of recommenders or has attracted only those about whom no knowledge exists.
The job of clustering news stories on the same event is also highly
complex, and Google News' solution is to use hierarchical agglomerative
clustering to distinctly stack together news articles with similar
phrasing. Google News could not use traditional clustering methods because
of the immense numbers of users and articles, so Google tested a series of
algorithms including covisitation, a collaborative filtering algorithm that
studies everyone who has read a given article and then computes the chances
that they will also have viewed other articles. Meanwhile, Findory worked
on a system for implicit news personalization that aggregated articles and
determined each reader's interests from past behavior, automating the
routing of articles to individual readers so that unique front pages could
be produced. Findory used a hybrid collaborative filtering algorithm
combining statistical analysis of what people read with examination of
article content.
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