How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers
New York Times (09/18/08) Hansell, Saul
Most Wall Street computer models radically underestimated the risk of
complex mortgage securities, partially because the level of financial
distress is "the equivalent of the 100-year flood," says Capital Market
Risk Advisors president Leslie Rahl. Rahl, and others, say that the people
who ran the financial firms chose to program their risk-management systems
with overly optimistic assumptions and to provide those systems with
oversimplified data, preventing the systems from detecting the problem
before it was too late. Top bankers cannot simply ignore computer models,
because after the last round of significant financial losses, regulators
required financial institutions to monitor their risk positions. If a
model says a firm's risk has increased, the firm must either reduce its
risk or provide more capital as a cushion should things turn south. "There
was a willful designing of the system to measure the risks in a certain way
that would not necessarily pick up all the right risks," says RiskMetrics'
Gregg Berman. "They wanted to keep their capital base as stable as
possible so that the limits they imposed on their trading desks and
portfolio managers would be stable." Berman says one way this was
accomplished was to make sure the computer models looked at several years
of trading history instead of just the last few months, which made the
computers slow to report that risk had increased as defaults started to
rise because the markets had been placid for several years.
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IBM Considers Quitting Standards Bodies
Wall Street Journal (09/23/08) P. B9; Forelle, Charles
IBM says it may withdraw from some of the groups that set common standards
for the technology industry. Company officials say IBM has become
frustrated by what it considers to be an opaque process and poor decision
making at some of the hundreds of bodies that set technical standards for a
variety of technologies. IBM controls a vast amount of intellectual
property in the high-tech field, and its contributions and agreement often
are critical to the formation of a standard. IBM is reacting in part to
the recent decision by the International Organization for Standardization
(ISO) to approve Microsoft's Open XML as an office document standard. IBM
supported a rival format called Open Document that was previously certified
as an ISO standard. IBM vice president Bob Sutor, IBM's top standards
official, says there are other problems with standards groups beyond the
office-documents area, citing high membership fees that discourage small
companies and organizations, complicated intellectual-property policies,
and opaque procedures. Sutor singled out Ecma International, a
Geneva-based group IBM helped form more than 45 years ago, for particular
criticism for certifying Open XML despite IBM's objection. Ecma
secretary-general Istvan Sebestyen says he was "really amazed" at Sutor's
contention that Ecma certification could be unduly influenced, and that he
has not formally heard from IBM about any intention to withdraw.
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New Study Examines Diversity in STEM Fields
Diverse Online (09/18/08) Delos, Robin Chen
Executives at Fortune 1000 companies say a shortage of science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers is threatening to
push the United States out of its position as a global leader and key
innovator in STEM fields. A new Bayer Corp. study found that most
executives agree that more minorities and women are needed to solve the
talent deficient. In STEM fields, Blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians
account for only 8 percent of employees, and women account for 20 percent
of employees. Executives blame the pre-college school system for the low
representation of women and minorities in science and technology fields.
Mae Jemison, who was the first Black women in space, agrees that grade
school experiences play a major role in determining how many women and
minorities pursue science and technology careers. Nearly all of the
executives surveyed said the best way for students to learn science is
through a hands-on approach. Jemison says that every child finds science
fascinating, but as they go through school that excitement is squashed
because science is not taught in an exploratory way. High school teacher
Hau Tran says the solution is to introduce more science in elementary and
middle school to give kids a stronger interest in the fields at a younger
age. However, teachers are not the only ones responsible for improving the
number of women and minorities in STEM fields. Jemison says the STEM
industry as a whole must do more to develop and recruit diverse workers.
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Robots Put Human Ingenuity to Test
West Australian (09/24/08) Maier, Alex
The National Robocup Junior competition in Perth, Australia, recently
brought nearly 50 teams of primary and secondary students from Australia,
China, and Singapore together to test their robots in soccer and dance
competitions and in rescue operations. The event exposes younger students
to a higher level of computer science, design, and technology, says Robocup
Junior WA chairwoman Helen Deacon. For the soccer competition, the teams
were charged with building fully autonomous humanoid robots that could
defeat a team of human soccer players. Similarly, the teams had to use
robotics and artificial intelligence to create sophisticated dance steps
for robots, which also had to keep time with the music. The student teams
also had their robots navigate various obstacles as they rescued a "person"
from an oil spill. "Seeing the students using their own initiative to
create something unique is fantastic and of course it's a lot of fun to
bring robots to life in the real world," says event coordinator Craig
Bloxsome.
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New Music Software Can Create Accompaniment to Any
Melody, in Style of Any Artist
University of Southern California (09/17/08)
Two University of Southern California (USC) researchers have developed the
Automatic Style Specific Accompaniment (ASSA) system, software that creates
appropriate musical accompaniment in the style of any chosen artist. USC
professor Elaine Chew, an accomplished pianist, and recent Ph.D. graduate
Ching-Hua Chuan, an accomplished guitarist, starting working on ASSA two
years ago. They say the goal of the ASSA project was to create an
automatic system that makes songwriting accessible to both experts and
novices, is able to identify the features important to the style specified
by the user, and allow the user to ask for harmonization similar to
particular songs. The ASSA system looks at a tree of possible accompanying
chords, first determining the chord tones in the melody, and then applies
machine-learning techniques to choose the chord tones from the input melody
based on the example pieces. The chords are then prescribed at checkpoints
in the melody to build chord progressions between the checkpoints. An
initial study took four songs from the band Radiohead and applied the rules
derived from analyzing three of the songs to generate an accompaniment for
the bare melody of the fourth. ASSA was 82 percent accurate on a 54-note
sample on one trial and 70.5 percent accurate on a 61-note sample on
another trial using a different song.
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More Evidence that Autonomous Agents Are Emerging From
the Laboratory
University of Southampton (ECS) (09/24/08) Lewis, Joyce
Talal Rahwan from the University of Southampton's School of Electronics
and Computer Science (ECS) has won this year's British Computer Society
Distinguished Dissertation Competition for developing new algorithms that
enable agents to coordinate their activities more efficiently. The
algorithms offer improvements on execution time, solutions quality, and
memory requirements. A year ago, another ECS researcher, Rajdeep Dash, won
the competition for his study into the way agents are used by auctions to
manage supply chains. "The fact that dissertations on autonomous
agent-based systems have won the British Computer Distinguished
Dissertation Competition two years running is firm evidence that our agents
are leaving the laboratory and are ready to be used in industry," says ECS
professor Nick Jennings. "We are now moving towards practical devices that
support the effective coordination and formation of teams of first
responders in major disaster response scenarios."
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As Text Messages Fly, Danger Lurks
New York Times (09/20/08) P. A1; Steinhauer, Jennifer; Holson, Laura M.
Even as the use of text messaging explodes, it is increasingly being
criticized because of the danger it can pose to distracted users and those
around them. A significant amount of anecdotal evidence suggests that the
number of fatal accidents resulting from texting while driving, crossing
the street, or similar activities is on the rise. Futurist Paul Saffo says
the act of texting automatically removes 10 IQ points. "You don't want to
do mushroom hunting and bird watching at the same time, and it is the same
with texting and other activities," Saffo says. "We have all seen people
walk into parking meters or walk into traffic and seem startled by oncoming
cars." In a backlash against text messaging, the California Public
Utilities Commission announced an emergency measure on Thursday temporarily
banning the use of all mobile devices by anyone controlling a moving train.
The ban was adopted after federal investigators announced that they were
exploring the possibility that a train engineer's text messaging may have
played a role in the U.S.'s most deadly commuter rail accident in four
decades. California also is considering banning text messaging while
driving, which already is illegal in several other states. Meanwhile, the
National Collegiate Athletic Association recently upheld a 2007 ban on all
text messaging by coaches to student recruits, arguing that it is
unprofessional, intrusive, and expensive. And Verizon recently started
offering a service that blocks texting during certain times of the day, to
help parents control their children's texting habits.
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'Cognitive Radios' to Improve Wireless Devices
iTnews Australia (09/16/08) Tay, Liz
Software-controlled digital electronic circuits could enable cognitive
radios to adapt to situations, similar to the way cell phones sign onto
different networks while roaming. Cognitive radios, based on
software-defined radio technology, could be used in public safety devices
and wireless networks. "A cognitive radio is aware of its environment, its
own capabilities, the rules within which it can operate, and its operator's
needs and privileges," says Virginia Tech professor Charles W. Bostian.
"It is capable of learning in the process and of developing configurations
that its designer never anticipated." For example, cognitive radios could
allow radios to automatically locate unused frequencies, share channels
based on a priority system, or provide interoperability between various
signals and automatically adjust radio performance. Developers still need
to lower the cost and improve the battery life of cognitive radios.
Researchers expect the technology to hit the market in five years, and to
become commonplace in 10 years.
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Award Will Lay Groundwork for Next Generation
Computers
Georgia Institute of Technology (09/17/08) Vogel, Abby
Georgia Institute of Technology professor Karsten Schwan has received a
2008 HP Labs Innovation Research Award to help solve some of the problems
in developing exascale machines, which would be capable of processing more
than a million trillion calculations per second. "The need for
exascale-sized machines is well established," Schwan says. "With exascale
machines, weather simulations will be able to operate at finer resolution,
biologists will be able to model more complex systems, and businesses will
be able to run and manage many applications at the same time on a single
large machine." Schwan says exascale computing will be reached by
combining common chips, such as quad-core processors, with special purpose
chips, such as graphics accelerators. Such a strategy comes with
challenges, specifically how to efficiently run programs on these
heterogeneous multi-core chips. Exascale machines also need to be able to
simultaneously run multiple systems and applications on a single platform,
while guaranteeing that they will not interfere with each other.
Virtualization may help solve this problem by hiding some of the underlying
computer architecture issues from the applications. "This future
virtualized and managed exascale system will guarantee some level of
service even when parts of the machine get too loaded or too hot or fail,
since applications can be moved while they are running," Schwan says.
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Mobile Video Communication From a Mountain Top
Umea University (Sweden) (09/18/08) Wikman, Karin
Ulrik Soderstrom from the Digital Media Lab at Umea University has
developed a method that enables high-quality mobile video to be transmitted
over any kind of connection. The approach focuses on key areas, such as a
person's mouth and eyes, and uses a model of the person's face to
reconstruct the image in a way that reduces storage space. The video can
be transmitted at speeds as low as 5 kbps, which is comparable to audio via
regular cellular phone networks that need almost 10 kbps. Soderstrom
currently uses a backpack with a video camera mounted on a bar in front of
the person wearing the backpack or mounts a small camera on a helmet, but
envisions future equipment being so small that such mobile video
communication would be almost hands free. He says users will be able to
transmit HDTV-quality videos over regular cellular phone networks.
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Team Bests Young Bill Gates With Improved Answer to
So-Called Pancake Problem in Mathematics
University of Texas at Dallas (09/17/08)
A new paper from a team of University of Texas (UT) at Dallas computer
science students and their faculty adviser discusses a better solution to
the pancake problem. Arranging a stack of different-sized flapjacks, using
the fewest flips, so that the smallest is on top and they increase in size
all the way to the bottom, is a theoretical issue. But the pancake problem
could potentially impact computing power. Processors could be configured
in a pancake network to increase its power, and using the smallest number
of steps to reorder the pancakes is synonymous with computing the shortest
path between any two processors in the network. "So our paper gives a way
to compute a shorter route in such a network," says UT professor Hal
Sudborough.
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University Students Create a Virtual RFID-Enabled
Hospital
RFID Journal (09/16/08) Bacheldor, Beth
University of Arkansas (UA) researchers are testing radio frequency
identification (RFID) technology for use in the health care industry. UA
professor Craig Thompson and his students created a digital hospital in
Second Life to model and test the technology. The project is connected to
the University of Arkansas' Center for Innovation in Healthcare Logistics
and the RFID Research Center. The Center for Innovation in Healthcare
Logistics includes an interdisciplinary team of researchers who investigate
supply chain networks and information and logistics systems for use in
health care. While attending SimU 2007, a conference on digital gaming,
massive multiplayer online games, and social networking, Thompson got the
idea to explore virtual worlds and ubiquitous computing as a model for
efficient operations. "It occurred to me that maybe we could build virtual
RFID, so I challenged my students," Thompson says. "In the real world, to
try out RFID in a hospital, you often have to hire a contractor to come in
with a design and estimates, then lay it out and test it, and perhaps it
works or doesn't work." The virtual world will enable hospitals to model
their environments in great detail, depicting everything from rooms to beds
and wheelchairs, and even doctors and patients. Eventually, Thompson would
like the project to move beyond modeling so the system can be utilized as a
tool by actual health care organizations.
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Group Pushes Internet Protocol for Sensor Nets
EE Times (09/16/08) Merritt, Rick
The newly created IP for Smart Objects Alliance (IPSO) is developing an
interoperability standard for running IPv6 on networks based on the IEEE
802.15.4 standard. Advocates say Internet Protocol can be used to link
sensor and other simple networks directly to the Internet, but some
developers say that sophisticated programming techniques would be needed to
pack IPv6 into the memory and power requirements of sensor nets. "The
technical people like [IP] because it means they don't have to build
translation gateways, but the business people wanted to see an ecosystem of
companies behind it," says IPSO Chairman Geoff Mulligan. An
interoperability program could be set up by November, and initial tests
will involve the interoperability of the 10 or more 6LoWPAN software stacks
that have been released to date. All of the pieces for IP sensor nets are
now available, but there has been only a handful of pilot programs. "Most
of these organizations deploy on TCP/IP today and they also see 6LowPAN as
an easy extension to this architecture," says analyst George West.
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reCAPTCHA: Human-Based Character Recognition via Web
Security Measures
Science (09/12/08) Vol. 321, No. 5895, P. 1465; von Ahn, Luis; Maurer,
Benjamin; McMillen, Colin
The reCAPTCHA project employs CAPTCHAs to help digitize scanned typeset
texts by having people decipher the words that computers are incapable of
recognizing, says Carnegie Mellon University's Luis von Ahn and colleagues.
CAPTCHAs are distorted word puzzles that humans can successfully solve but
current computer programs cannot, and they are used to prevent the abuse of
online services by automated programs. Von Ahn notes that reCAPTCHA "is
used by more than 40,000 Web sites and demonstrates that old print material
can be transcribed, word by word, by having people solve CAPTCHAs
throughout the World Wide Web." ReCAPTCHA provides the user with two
words, the one for which the answer is unknown and a second "control" word
for which the answer is known. A correctly typed control word causes the
system to assume that the user is human and confidently conclude that he
also typed the other word correctly. ReCAPTCHA accounts for human error in
the digitization process by sending every unrecognizable or suspicious word
to multiple users, each time with a different random distortion. The
authors have learned from a large-scale implementation of the reCAPTCHA
system that deciphering words using CAPTCHAs can match the highest-quality
guarantee provided by dedicated human transcription services. Von Ahn and
colleagues conclude that reCAPTCHA clearly shows that "'wasted' human
processing power can be harnessed to solve problems that computers cannot
yet solve."
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Preserving Digital Data for the Future of eScience
Science News (08/30/08) Vol. 74, No. 5, P. 32; Szalay, Alex
Libraries and other archives have been struggling to preserve diverse
digital media, and scientists are falling behind the curve in protecting
digital data, threatening the ability to create new findings from existing
data or validate research analysis, writes Johns Hopkins University
professor Alex Szalay. Scientific data approximately doubles every year,
largely due to the availability of successive new generations of
inexpensive sensors and faster computers. Such progress has essentially
created an industrial revolution in the collecting of digital data for
science. However, every year it takes longer to analyze a week's worth of
data because the ability to perform software analysis has not kept pace.
Extracting knowledge has become increasingly more difficult, with new
indexes needed to help search through the accumulating mountains of data.
Data in many areas are growing so fast there is no time to send data to a
central repository. Instead, data is quickly stored in an increasingly
anarchic system. New information management systems are needed to process
and calibrate, transform, reorganize, analyze, and publish data and
scientific findings. Szalay says that once such huge data sets are
created, people will find new ways of mining them in previously unimagined
ways. For example, he says the Sloan Digital Sky Survey provides account
holders with the ability to extract, customize, and modify the data they
use. Instead of physically looking at the sky through telescopes, people
can examine the data collected from some portion of the sky and analyze
what they "see" in the virtual universe. Szalay says the key to success is
the need for a new paradigm in publishing in which people collaborate to
publish raw data.
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