New Data Show Strong Labor Market for Scientists and
Engineers
National Science Foundation (04/03/08) Mixon, Bobbie
The job market for scientists and engineers remains strong, and an ample
supply of workers is ready to fill those jobs, concludes three new reports
from the National Science Foundation. NSF data shows that the number of
people working in science and engineering occupations increased by 4.2
percent and unemployment in those fields dropped to 2.5 percent in 2006,
the lowest unemployment rate since the early 1990s. "On the supply side,
we can say that the current S&E labor force is expanding, new graduates are
coming out, and people are able to find employment, or are continuing their
education," says Nimmi Kannankutty, the NSF program manager responsible for
compiling the survey data. NSF collects data on scientists and engineers
through three national surveys--the National Survey of College Graduates,
the National Survey of Recent College Graduates, and the Survey of
Doctorate Recipients, which are collectively known as the Scientists and
Engineers Statistical Data System. NSF's report on recent college
graduates found that in 2006 there were 1.9 million new science,
engineering, and health graduates with degrees earned between 2003 and
2005. Nearly all of these graduates either entered the work force or
continued their studies in higher education. Women made up 50 percent of
the new graduates. Meanwhile, NSF's report on U.S. doctorates found that
45 percent of graduates who earned a doctoral degree from a U.S. university
held a postdoctoral position at sometime in their career.
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SIGCHI Announces Best of CHI 2008 Award Winners
AScribe Newswire (04/03/08)
The ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) has
announced the winners of the annual "Best of CHI" awards. Honored
technical papers and notes submitted for CHI 2008 include "Improving the
Performance of Motor-Impaired Users with Automatically-Generated,
Ability-Based Interfaces," which discusses driver attention and driving
behavior for three different interaction techniques; and "Large Scale
Analysis of Web Revisitation Patterns," which focuses on the different ways
people revisit Web pages and analyzes their actions. Other winners include
"An Error Model for Pointing Based on Fitts' Law," "Designs on Dignity:
Perceptions of Technology Among the Homeless," "In-Car GPS Navigation:
Engagement with and Disengagement from the Environment," "Multimodal
Collaborative Handwriting Training for Visually-Impaired People," and "The
Network in the Garden: An Empirical Analysis of Social Media in Rural
Life." "These papers and notes display not only extraordinary scholarship,
but they capture the range of topics the community deems important," says
Desney Tan, CHI 2008 technical programs chair. "This year CHI is
continuing its trajectory to solving problems in domains with broad
societal impact, such as homelessness, emerging technologies and emerging
markets, universal accessibility, and healthcare, among others." CHI 2008
takes place April 5-10 in Florence, Italy.
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Canadian Voting Machine Enters American Political
Machine
InterGovWorld.com (03/27/08) Lombardi, Rosie
The University of Ottawa's Scantegrity, originally a proof of concept
called Punchscan, is an open-source program designed to provide end-to-end
verifiable voter results, says PhD student Aleks Essex. "Scantegrity gives
voters a privacy-preserving receipt," says Essex. "It doesn't show other
people how you voted, but it does allow you to have a way to check to
ensure your vote gets counted." The concept is similar to the confirmation
numbers issued by hotels, Essex says, which allow hotel customers to look
up their confirmation number, but it does not display the room number.
Scantegrity also features software independence, which means if a software
error is made, the mistake can not go through the process undetected, Essex
says. The software also contains a tool that performs a cryptographic
self-audit to verify computations. The development team plans to invite
the Ottawa Linux users group to review the system to help make it more
secure. It is unlikely the technology will ever be used in Canada, which
still uses paper and pencil ballots and has such strict regulations that
even the type of pencil is regulated, but it could find a home in the
United States. Scantegrity team leader David Chaum says two American
municipalities have expressed interest in using the program, and Essex says
it has been presented to several American organizations in an effort to
attract research funding. "The question now is whether our technology will
be certifiable," Essex says. "A group of election experts and scientists
is saying a window should be allowed to give new voting technologies a
chance, and there's legislation pending to allow that."
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AP Language, Computer Courses Cut
Washington Post (04/04/08) P. A4; de Vise, Daniel
Students will not be able to take the Advanced Placement computer science
AB course after the 2008-2009 academic year with hopes of earning college
credits. The College Board has decided to cut the computer course because
of underenrollment. The computer science AB course attracted 5,064
students, and had 1,163 teachers. U.S. history and English literature are
among the most popular AP subjects, and they attract hundreds of thousands
of students each year. The College Board is also eliminating Italian,
Latin literature, and French literature. These classes are "all less
commonly taught disciplines in high schools," says Trevor Packer, vice
president of the College Board for AP. "And they're under fire sometimes"
in school systems that focus more on core subjects. He says there are no
plans to cut more classes for the next five years.
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45th Design Automation Conference to Feature Diverse
Keynote Lineup
Business Wire (03/31/08)
Justin R. Rattner, chief technology officer of Intel; Dr. Sanjay K. Jha,
chief operating officer and president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies Group;
and Jack Little, president and a co-founder of The MathWorks, will be the
keynote speakers for the 45th Design Automation Conference (DAC). ACM's
Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA) sponsors DAC, which
takes place June 8-12, 2008, at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim,
Calif. Rattner will give the opening keynote on Tuesday, June 10, on "EDA
for Digital, Programmable, Multi-Radios." Jha will deliver a keynote
presentation on "Challenges on Design Complexities for Advanced Wireless
Silicon Systems," on Wednesday, June 11. And Little will present "Idea to
Implementation: A Different Perspective on System Design," as the final
keynote address on Thursday, June 12. "This year's keynote speakers
represent a wide spectrum of our participants, with a major device
manufacturer, a wireless system manufacturer, and a system design solution
provider, so they will offer compelling information and useful insights for
all of our attendees," says Limor Fix, general chair of the 45th DAC
executive committee. For more information about DAC, or to register, visit
http://www.dac.com/45th/index.aspx
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Tech Jobs Still on Rise in the U.S.
Investor's Business Daily (04/02/08) Detar, James
The U.S. high-tech industry added a net of 92,400 jobs in 2007, a third
less than the 139,000 in 2006, according to the annual Cyberstates report
from the American Electronics Association. As a result, total U.S.
high-tech employment rose to 5.9 million last year. Software services
added 82,600 jobs, followed by 45,800 positions in engineering and tech
services, but the manufacturing sector lost 29,800 jobs due to outsourcing
to lower-cost regions abroad. Tech employment rose in 47 states with
California leading the way with 21,400 jobs, followed by Texas, Virginia,
New Jersey, and New Mexico. AeA, which used government data, also found
that the average tech industry wage was 87 percent higher than the average
private sector wage. "We added ... well-paying jobs with wage growth that
is twice as fast as the private sector," says AeA's Matthew Kazmierczak.
AeA expects job growth to slow this year due to the downturn in the
economy. "It's a good news, bad news scenario, but mostly good news," says
Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood.
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Software Vendors, Manufacturers, Universities, and Labs
Meet in HPC Applications Summit
NCSA News (04/02/2008) Bell, Bill
The Council on Competitiveness and the University of Southern California's
Information Science Institute sponsored a high-performance computing
application software summit that attracted more than 100 HPC experts from
universities, manufacturers, and research laboratories. "Simulation-based
engineering is fundamental to our nation's leadership--in manufacturing,
medicine, security, energy," says ISI's Robert Graybill. "The community
working on the software for simulation-based engineering is small and
fragmented. The effort required to make the most of it is large and
expensive." Council on Competitiveness vice president Suzy Tichenor says
companies must increasingly run multidisciplinary and full life-cycle
simulations to stay competitive in the global marketplace, but many
companies cannot accomplish this with current application software. Panel
discussions at the summit focused on the requirements that end users in
research and development have for multiphysics software and problems
surrounding pricing and licensing that software. Another discussion
focused on how best to conceive a software framework for integrating codes
that need to work together to run multiphysics models. The summit
organizers plan to spend the next few months updating a concept paper
prepared for the summit, defining the technical and business problems a
consortium would address, exploring how the consortium would be organized,
and securing interest from institutions.
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Matrix-Style Virtual Worlds 'a Few Years Away'
New Scientist (04/03/08) Barras, Colin
Brookhaven National Laboratory's Michael McGuigan says supercomputers are
on the verge of being able to create virtual worlds that are realistic
enough to pass a "Graphics Turing Test" in which a human judge viewing and
interacting with an artificially generated world should be unable to
reliably distinguish it from reality. McGuigan says the key to passing a
Graphics Turing Test is to be able to combine photorealism with software
that can render images in real time, which is defined as a refresh rate of
30 frames per second. McGuigan tested the ability of one of the world's
most powerful supercomputers, the Blue Gene/L at Brookhaven National
Laboratory, to generate realistic artificial worlds, focusing on the
supercomputer's ability to mimic the interplay of light with objects.
McGuigan found that conventional ray-tracing software could run 822 times
faster on the Blue Gene/L than on a standard computer, allowing it to
convincingly mimic natural lighting in real time. Although the Blue Gene/L
is still too slow to render high-resolution images fast enough to pass the
Graphics Turing Test, McGuigan believes that supercomputers capable of
passing the test are only a few years away. Others believe that being able
to pass the Graphics Turing Test involves more than just realistic
graphics, and should involve being able to generate a real-time simulation
that includes realistic simulated behavior.
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Software Tackles Production Line Machine 'Cyclic
Jitters'
NIST Tech Beat (04/01/08) Blair, John
Engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have
developed the EtherNet/Industrial Protocol Performance Test Tool, software
that enables manufacturers to anticipate how individual machines will
perform in the data communication system. Data from the software provides
information that will allow vendors to better tune the performance of their
equipment. Frequently, vendors use different documentation techniques to
define the performance characteristics of network devices, which can make
it difficult for manufacturers or plant engineers to compare the high-speed
data transmission characteristics of similar devices. Determining how
different performance characteristics relate often requires time-consuming
searches through vendor manuals or contacting vendor company engineers.
Standardized tests can determine how well devices conform to communication
specifications, but until now manufacturers could never be sure how well a
device would actually work under normal or abnormally heavy transmission
conditions on the factory floor. The EtherNet/IP Performance Test Tool
collects device information from the user, generates a set of test scripts
based on that information, analyses performance data, and reports results
to the user. The Open DeviceNet Vendor Association plans on using the test
tool as part of a new performance laboratory service later this year.
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Hypercubes Could Be Building Blocks of
Nanocomputers
PhysOrg.com (04/01/08) Zyga, Lisa
Multi-dimensional structures called hypercubes could serve as the building
blocks in future nanocomputers. University of Oklahoma researchers Samuel
Lee and Loyd Hook say tomorrow's nanoelectronic-based devices will be
dominated by quantum properties that will require new architectures and
structures. "Compared to today's microcomputers, the main advantages of
future nanocomputers are higher circuit density, lower power consumption,
faster computation speed, and more parallel and distributed computing
capabilities," Lee says. For example, while current integrated circuits
process information as a continual flow of electrons, nano-integrated
circuits would process individual electrons. Lee and Hook are working on a
variant of the hypercube called the M-hypercube, which could provide a
higher-dimensional layout to support the three-dimensional integrated
circuits needed for nanocomputers. M-hypercubes are composed of nodes,
which act as gates that receive and pass electrons, and links that act as
the paths that electrons travel along. "The unique structure of
hypercubes, including M-hypercubes, has been shown to be effective in
parallel computing and communication networks and provides a unique ideal
intrinsic structure which fulfills many of the needs of future
nanocomputing systems," Lee says. "These needs include massively parallel
and distributed processing architecture with simple and robust
communication linkages."
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European Union, NATO to Tackle Cybercrime
Associated Press (03/31/08)
Cybersecurity experts are meeting in Paris this week to discuss how
governments should counter and prevent cybercrimes designed to cripple the
Internet and cause data loss, theft, and fraud. Gilles de Kerchove, who
coordinates anti-terror efforts for the European Union's 27 countries, says
an attack that shuts down the Internet could significantly amplify a terror
attack. Participants at the meeting also will discuss new guidelines for
cooperation between police and investigators and Internet service
providers. At the meeting the Council of Europe will review the
implementation of the Convention of Cybercrime, the only legally binding
international treaty to address online crime such as hacking and Internet
fraud. University of Cologne computer law lecturer Marco Gercke says the
challenges posed by cybercrime are different from conventional terror
attacks because computers exchange data so quickly across international
boarders. "Compared to regular terror attacks, it is much easier for the
offenders to hide their identity," Gercke says. "There are at least 10
unique challenges that make it very difficult to fight computer-related
crime." At a separate meeting in Romania, a North Atlantic Treaty
Organization summit debated its guidelines for coordinating national cyber
defense efforts.
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Map Reading for Dummies
ICT Results (04/02/08)
PReVENT is a European-based research initiative that aims to combine
satellite navigation with in-car wireless communication systems, terrain
scanning, and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The project could result
in a system that can track a driver's route, monitor the terrain and
driving conditions, track upcoming bends and intersections, and warn
drivers about hazards such as dips in the road and vehicles in the driver's
blind spot. One PReVENT subproject, MAPS&ADAS, is developing
safety-enhanced digital maps and a standard interface for an Advanced
Driver Assistance System (ADAS). MAPS&ADAS would inform drivers of
upcoming hazards by scanning the maps for the "speed profile" of the road
ahead, right-of-way patterns, and other information. MAPS&ADAS has not
developed a full prototype because data transmissions between car
components varies between manufacturers, but it has developed a standalone
system that focuses on "Dynamic Pass Prediction," which is intended to aid
in passing other cars and warn drivers of upcoming hazards. Manufacturers
can adapt this system to work with their own models. Other PReVENT
subprojects include LATERALSAFE, which uses sensors to scan the car's blind
spot; SAFELANE, which ensures that drivers stay in the correct lane; and
INTERSAFE, which helps drivers navigate intersections.
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Networks Promise 'Accident-Free' Cars
BBC News (04/01/08)
The application of embedded sensor networks to automobiles would enable
vehicles to monitor each other's speed and position, dramatically reducing
the risk of accidents. "I think that we may, in the future, go beyond just
communication to using the network to interact with the environment," says
University of Illinois Convergence Lab professor PR Kumar. "For example,
cars on a highway may talk to each other and find out each others' speeds
... these cars could then cooperate with each other to avoid accidents."
Embedded sensor networks represent a shift away from computer-based
networks to sensors that communicate directly with each other. The next
stage is an "actuator network" in which computers are able to act on the
information they receive from the sensors, which could mean reducing speeds
if slower traffic conditions are detected, for example. Kumar admits that
numerous problems need to be solved before such a network can be
implemented, including how the cars are controlled, whether it is through a
centralized computer system or through cooperative collaboration between
cars. There are also problems regarding the priorities of the networks and
how they may conflict, as well as simply ensuring that cars do not crash.
However, a typical car already has 60 to 70 microprocessor, "so we already
have taken a step into this world of complexity," Kumar says.
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NICS Unleashes 'Kraken' Supercomputer
HPC Wire (04/04/08) Vol. 17, No. 14,
The National Institute for Computational Sciences' "Kraken" supercomputer
is slated to come online in mid-summer, and will soon reach petascale
capacity. Kraken, officially known as the Cray XT4, is designed
specifically for sustained application performance, scalability, and
reliability, and will include key components of the Cray Cascade system to
prepare the user community for highly productive petascale science and
engineering. The computer and NICS are the result of a $65 million
National Science Foundation Track II award to the University of Tennessee
and its partners to provide next-generation supercomputing for the U.S.
science community. NICS project director Phil Andrews says the institute
is looking for "large, tightly coupled applications" to exploit the new
Cray-designed interconnect, and among the scientific fields that NICS will
explore with the help of Kraken are climate, fusion energy, biology,
lattice QCD, and astrophysics. Climate simulation is expected to be a
particularly important field for research efforts aided by supercomputing
systems, as climate change continues to assume an important position in
both science and policy. Kraken will be fully connected to the
NSF-supported TeraGrid supercomputer network. "Combined with the more
traditional approaches of theory and experiment, scientific computation is
a profound tool for insight and solution, as researchers move their
problems for modeling and simulation from existing terascale systems to
petascale systems later this year and onward to exascale [quintillion
calculations per second] systems in the next decade," says UT's Thomas
Zacharia.
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How PARC Sees Printers Boosting Clean Tech
CNet (04/02/08) Kanellos, Michael
The Palo Alto Research Center is examining ways of applying technology
originally developed for copiers and printers to the clean-tech industry.
For example, PARC scientists are working on a water purification system
that uses rotational force to remove particles and microorganisms. The
technology for this device came from previous research done for Xerox on
how toner powder moves in waves when ejected above a charged surface.
Another PARC project has developed a way to enable inkjet nozzles to print
grid lines, the thin black strips in solar cells that transfer electricity
from the silicon to a wire. Using inkjet technology, PARC can print grid
lines as thin as 60 microns, which leads to a 6 percent improvement in
relative efficiency in the experimental solar panels. In an ongoing
project, PARC researchers are working to apply the adaptive control systems
that manage the internal operations of printers and use them to control
data centers. Instead of controlling the paper feed, the adaptive system
could shut down a bank of servers to cool part of a data center. PARC is
also working on a series of membranes that would convert carbon dioxide
into fuel. Carbon dioxide from a power plan would be funneled through the
membranes and mixed with hydrogen to make methane or another
hydrocarbon.
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Total Recall: Storing Every Life Memory in a Surrogate
Brain
Computerworld (04/02/08) Gaudin, Sharon
Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell is dedicated to his vision of a personal
computer as a storage system for one's personal life record, so much so
that he has been recording and storing information about every personal
moment of his life--emails, phone conversations, pictures, etc.--on his
laptop for nine years as part of the MyLifeBits project. Bell's goal is to
create a repository where one's personal memories can be retrieved in
astonishing detail, and since 2003 he has been wearing a SenseCam digital
camera that automatically takes snapshots without user interaction so that
a record of events is preserved as they happen. "This was built to be
entirely personal, to aid the individual," Bell says. "You will leave a
personal legacy--a record of your life." MyLifeBits software developed by
Microsoft Research's Jim Gemmell and Roger Lueder records Web pages, IM
transcripts, and radio and television programs through the use of
hyperlinks, fast search, annotations, and saved queries. Bell figures that
he could store a complete life record from beginning to end on a terabyte
of storage. He projects that the digitization of memories will be routine
within two decades.
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IT on the Campuses: What the Future Holds
Chronicle of Higher Education (04/04/08) Vol. 54, No. 30, P. B6
The future of IT on campus was the subject of a discussion between
Catalyze Learning International President Mark David Milliron, Richard
Garrett of Eduventures, and Richard A. DeMillo, dean of the Georgia
Institute of Technology's College of Computing. DeMillo says IT velocity
is currently being driven at Georgia Tech by the impulse to stay a step
ahead of industry forces, and to that end the school has replaced its core
curriculum with a curriculum called Threads that improves flexibility by
offering 28 degrees instead of one degree. Milliron says that "some of the
big conversations that people are really pushing, which is really
encouraging to see, is that they are beginning to talk about ending the
'segregation'" of their facilities conversations and technology
conversations. Garrett talks about the migration of online higher
education from rhetoric to reality as demonstrated by its increasing
popularity, but points out that "in terms of day-to-day application,
actually having an online degree that actually embodied [the promise of
online education]--I think that is still a horizon for innovation."
Milliron says higher education lags far behind the online business model of
companies such as Amazon, which combines data mining and predictive
modeling to offer customers a better choice of purchases and services than
universities, which have nowhere near the breadth of information at their
disposal to help students in their experience. He adds that students must
be taught to learn beyond technology and nurture their faculties for
critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making, since they will be
living in world where data about them will be widely exploited.
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When Markets Beat the Polls
Scientific American (03/08) Vol. 298, No. 3, P. 38; Stix, Gary
Internet-based financial markets appear to be better predictors of
elections than polls, an example being the accuracy with which the Iowa
Electronic Markets (IEM) have forecast the outcome of presidential
elections from 1988 to 2004. Yet a fundamental comprehension of prediction
markets' workings remains evasive, and economists are still struggling to
devise theories to provide definitive answers. Developers of IEM and other
prediction markets say a market, unlike a poll, takes a reading of whom
people think will win the election rather than whom they will vote for and
supplies a monetary incentive to make the best choice. The market also
accepts anyone who wishes to trade, depends only on the fluctuation of
prices, and represents the probability of a candidate winning or receiving
a given portion of the vote on election day. A study of trading patterns
undertaken by University of Iowa researchers uncovered a select group of
"marginal traders" who would buy and sell actively when the share price was
not properly valued, but the inability to identify specific qualities of
this class of traders has caused some economists to doubt their existence.
Even with the debate raging and no resolution in sight, IEM has inspired
the development of other prediction markets that trade on virtually any
conceivable event, while such markets are being increasingly embraced by
both the public and private sector as decision-making aids. "Prediction
markets will never replace traditional surveillance systems, but they may
provide an efficient and relatively inexpensive source of information to
supplement existing disease surveillance systems," says University of Iowa
professor Philip M. Polgreen.
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