Future Nanoelectronics May Face Obstacles
Umea University (Sweden) (09/08/08)
Researchers from Umea University in Sweden and the University of Maryland
have demonstrated that there is a limit to how small light-based
electronics can be. The researchers say that when components are shrunk to
the nanometer level, all information will disappear before it can be
transferred. "Our findings throw a monkey wrench in the machinery of
future nanoelectronics," says Umea University professor Mattias Marklund.
"At the same time, it's a fascinating issue to address just how we might be
able to prevent the information from being lost." For several years,
plasmonic components have provided a possible way around the dilemma of
combining electronics and photonics. By combining photonics and
electronics, scientists have shown that information can be transferred with
the help of plasmons, which are surface waves consisting of electrons.
However, the Swedish-American research team found that difficulties arise
when the size of such components are reduced to the nanometer level. At
that scale, the dual nature of electrons comes into effect, with the
electrons no longer acting as particles but instead having a diffuse
character, with their location and movement no longer clearly defined.
This elusive characteristic causes the energy of the plasmon to dissipate
and be lost in the transfer of information. Marklund says the effects the
researchers discovered cannot be completely avoided, but the behavior of
plasmons could be controlled through meticulous component design that
compensates for the quantum nature of nanoscale-based electronics.
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Google to Digitize Newspaper Archives
New York Times (09/09/08) Helft, Miguel
Google has started scanning microfilm from some newspapers' archives to
make old newspapers searchable online, first through Google News and
eventually on each paper's own Web site. The program builds on a
two-year-old service that allows Google News users to search the archives
of some major newspapers and magazines. Readers will be able to search
through archives using keywords to view articles as they originally
appeared in the print pages of the newspapers. Similar to Google's
book-scanning project, Google will cover the cost of digitizing newspaper
archives. Google will place advertisements with the search results and
share the revenue from those ads with the newspaper publishers. "This is
really good for newspapers because we are going to be bringing online an
old generation of contributions from journalists, as well as widening the
reader base of news archives," says Google's Marissa Mayer. Many newspaper
publishers view search engines such as Google as a threat to the industry,
and while some recognize search engines as a potential source of revenue,
it is unclear whether they will willingly submit their archives to Google.
Google says it is working with more than 100 newspapers and with partners
Heritage Microfilm and ProQuest, which collect historical newspaper
archives on microfilm. The project has already scanned millions of
articles.
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Robots to Take Load as the World Ages
Australian IT (09/09/08) Foo, Fran
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Rodney Brooks believes
that in less than 50 years robots will be deployed in all aspects of
everyday life. He says the aging population and looming skills shortage
will eventually force people to turn to robots for aid with simple tasks.
"Around the world, the ratio of the elderly to working-aged people is
changing dramatically," says Brooks, who also sits on the board of NICTA,
Australia's Information and Communications Technology Research Centre of
Excellence. "Not only are social security funds going to get even more
stressed as the number of people paying into the system decreases, the
services that older people need won't be there or will come at a premium."
Brooks says there are companies working to design robots capable of doing
the low-level grunge work in hospitals, such as collecting dirty sheets and
moving around equipment, to allow nurses to spend more time on patient
care. Brooks notes that improvements in robotics technology are delivering
early results. For example, InTouch Technologies has developed technology
that enables doctors to visit a patient without having to be physically
present. Using a laptop and high-speed Internet connection, doctors and
patients can see each other through a robot stationed by the patient's bed.
The robot, remotely controlled by the doctor, can move around the
patient's room and conduct certain tasks such as checking the patient's
vital signs. In addition to health care, Brooks expects robots to become
common in other areas such as retail.
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Researchers Build Malicious Facebook Application
IDG News Service (09/05/08) Kirk, Jeremy
Researchers from the Foundation for Research and Technology in Heraklion,
Greece, and the Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore, have built
Facebot, a malicious program for Facebook as part of an experiment to
demonstrate the dangers of social networking applications. The researchers
developed a Photo of the Day application that provides a new National
Geographic photograph daily, but every time the application is activated it
sends a flood of traffic to a victim's Web site, causing a
denial-of-service attack. The researchers uploaded the Facebot application
to Facebook in January and nearly 1,000 people have installed it in their
profiles. The researchers then monitored traffic on a Web site they
established for a Photo of the Day attack. If the traffic patterns
observed could be applied to a Facebook application with a million or more
users, the researchers estimate that a victim's Web site could be flooded
with as much as 23 megabits per second of traffic. The researchers say
Facebook applications have a highly-distributed platform, offering
significant firepower for anyone that controls the applications. Facebook
applications also can access users' personal data, making it possible to
record and transfer personal data to a remote server. Social networking
sites can take measures to prevent such malicious applications, by ensuring
that applications cannot interact with hosts that are not a part of the
social network, and by vigorously verifying new applications added to the
social networking site.
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CACM Reports: Making Sense of Data From Diverse
Sources
AScribe Newswire (09/08/08)
The September issue of Communications of the ACM (CACM) features an
article written by researchers at Microsoft and IBM on the tools and
technologies that manage information integration from different and diverse
sources. The cover article, "Information Integration and the Enterprise,"
by Microsoft Research's Philip A. Bernstein and IBM Almaden Research
Center's Laura M. Hass, examines examples of a typical integration problem,
describes different types of information integration tools commonly used,
and reviews core technologies at the heart of integration tools. In CACM's
Viewpoints section, two Rice University researchers outline a world in
which textbooks are free for everyone through the Web and adapted to
numerous backgrounds and learning styles. Rice University professor
Richard G. Baraniuk and professor emeritus C. Sidney Burrus examine
opportunities for significantly improving and advancing the world's
standard of education through the Open Educational Resources (OER)
movement. OER uses technologies such as the Internet, XML, Web 2.0 tools,
and advanced visualization and graphics tools, combined with open copyright
licenses, to make teaching and learning materials available as low-cost
print materials. OER also is working to make course notes, curricula,
labs, and textbooks available for students with a variety of backgrounds
and learning styles.
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Seabed Archaeology Goes Virtual
BBC News (09/09/08) Mitchell, Elizabeth
The Virtual Exploration of Underwater Sites (Venus) consortium has used a
simulator to recreate two European shipwrecks. Computer scientists and
other experts on the Venus project team used a sophisticated system to
generate three-dimensional digital maps of the seabed, and a multi-beam
sonar to locate the exact position of the artifacts. Divers and
remotely-operated unmanned vehicles provided the high-resolution
photographic data. The statistical information from the data will enable
archaeologists to determine where the cargo from the shipwrecks is likely
to be found. Meanwhile, the simulator is being displayed at the BA Science
Festival in Liverpool and the Deep Aquarium in Hull to allow the public to
sense what it is like to explore underwater archaeological sites. People
will also be able to access the software online. "Members of public can
experience the actual dive process--from coming off the vessel and piloting
a submarine down to an accurate model of the seabed," says the University
of Hull's Paul Chapman.
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Real-Life Robots Obey Asimov's Laws
ICT Results (09/08/08)
Achieving a balance between safety and performance in interactions between
people and robots lies at the crux of Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics, the
most important of which states that robots must not harm humans. The
European Union-funded Phriends project coordinated by Antonio Bicchi of the
University of Pisa seeks to create a new generation of robots that have the
intrinsic safety and versatility to interact with people. Bicchi says the
robots' "safety is guaranteed by their very physical structure, and not by
external sensors or algorithms that can fail." The Phriends project has
focused on the development of new concepts and prototypes for actuators,
new reliable algorithms for supervision and planning, and new control
algorithms for handling safe human-robot physical interactions. Its main
area of concentration is robot arms, specifically the development of a
prototype Variable Stiffness Actuator that emulates the muscular movement
of humans and animals through the employment of two antagonistic motors to
manipulate a nonlinear spring that functions as an elastic transmission
between each of the motors and the moving part. So that inevitable impacts
with the arm are not damaging, the project has investigated a number of
solutions, including soft visco-elastic covering on the links, mechanically
decoupling the heavy motor inertia from the link inertia, and lightweight
robot design. "The real challenge for the future of robotics is not to do
something shockingly complex, but to do even simple things in a way that is
safe, dependable, and acceptable to ordinary people, thus making
human-robot coexistence possible," Bicchi says.
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Opening Search to Semantic Upstarts
Technology Review (09/08/08) Greene, Kate
The facilitation of semantic search is being aided by Yahoo's Build Your
Own Search Service (BOSS), an open-search platform through which
programmers and entrepreneurs can avail themselves of Yahoo's index of the
Web. "We're trying to break down the barriers to innovation," says Yahoo
Research director and Stanford University professor Prabhakar Raghavan.
Semantic Web companies are using BOSS in their development of software for
processing concepts and meanings so that information on the Web can be
better organized. For instance, Hakia uses the BOSS index to determine a
set of relevant results from a given query, and the company's software then
ascertains whether its semantic software has already analyzed the pages,
processing them if it has not. The Cluuz semantic startup presents BOSS
results that are reorganized according to the company's own semantic search
technology. "Instead of looking at pages being linked based on the
physical links, we're looking at them in terms of whether or not they are
talking about the same concepts," says Cluuz's Alex Zivkovic.
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MIT Probe Could Aid Quantum Computing
MIT News (09/03/08) Hamill, Gregory P.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have found a way
to overcome a major obstacle preventing the development of quantum
computers. Characterizing energy levels is fundamental to understanding
and engineering any atomic-scale device, but artificial atoms have energy
levels that correspond to a variety of frequencies, ranging from tens to
hundreds of gigahertz, making standard spectroscopy costly and difficult to
apply. William Oliver of MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Analog Device Technology
Group and MIT's Research Laboratory for Electronics developed a
complementary approach called amplitude spectroscopy that allows for the
characterization of quantum entities over broad frequency ranges. Oliver
says that obtaining a greater knowledge to such supercomputing structures
could quicken the development of a quantum computer. Amplitude
spectroscopy obtains information about a superconducting artificial atom by
probing its response to a single, fixed frequency that is strategically
selected to be "benign," Oliver says. The probe pushes the atom through
its energy-state transitions, and can even be made to jump between energy
bands at nearly unlimited rates by adjusting the amplitude of the
fixed-frequency source. The radiation emitted by the artificial atom as a
response to the probe exhibits interference patterns, which Oliver calls
"spectroscopy diamonds" because of their geometric regularity, which can
serve as fingerprints of the artificial atom's energy spectrum.
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Robot Builders Seek a Little Help From Sci-Fi
New Scientist (09/04/08) Simonite, Tom
Washington University in St. Louis roboticist Bill Smart and researcher
Lara Bovilsky recently held a workshop on people's wariness of robots at
the RO-MAN conference on human-robot interaction in Munich, Germany. "Most
people have never seen a robot before," Smart says. "Their
experiences--such as they are--all come from movies or literature." Smart
says that people have a pre-established theory about how things should
behave, and if a robot does not match that theory they get nervous. For
example, not everyone reacted well to a robot Smart and colleagues built
that moved around a room taking photos of people. Smart says people who
thought of the robot as a camera with legs were satisfied, but people that
thought of it as a photographer were disappointed. Smart believes that
these heightened expectations are the result of unrealistic human-like
robots in movies and books. Instead of forcing people to change their
expectations, Smart believes it makes sense to study how people's ideas on
robots are influenced by fiction. This knowledge could then be used to
design robots that match those expectations. Sheffield University
roboticist Noel Sharkey says that studying how computer animators make us
connect with simple, nonhuman objects also could help people connect with
robots.
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Safer Skies for the Flying Public
EurekAlert (09/03/08)
University of Texas professor Constantine Caramanis is working with
researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop a
computer model that would serve as the foundation for an air traffic
control system that optimizes the flow of air traffic. The system would be
capable of taking thousands of variables into consideration and quickly
changing flight recommendations without input from humans. The system
would track weather conditions, current airplane locations, probable
routes, and other variables. "The complicated nature of the process, and
the need to make quick adjustments when changes occur, will best be
addressed with a mathematical model that combines theories and calculations
from probability, statistics, optimization modeling, economics and game
theory," Caramanis says. "There is currently no unified decision-making
framework for air traffic flow optimization." Timeframes for taking off
and landing are provided by the federal government, and they are estimates
that are based on a number of variables. The air traffic optimization
model also will be designed to help reduce delays and flight
cancellations.
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Welcome to the Petacentre
Nature (09/04/08) Vol. 455, No. 7209, P. 16; Doctorow, Cory
The data center at the U.K. Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is a work in
progress to store an exponentially expanding corpus of data generated by
scientific research, writes digital-rights activist Cory Doctorow. The
center functions as an open-computing facility for the global research
community, and empty space is set aside at the data center for the
inevitable day when the facility will have to upgrade to next-generation
machines. The data center of Switzerland's CERN particle-physics lab is
currently an interim measure as a larger, faster center that will store 15
petabytes of experimental data annually generated by the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) is constructed. The LHC data is stored on tape so that it
can be reassessed regularly. The primary XS4ALL facility at the World
Trade Center in Amsterdam hosts a mirror copy of the Internet Archive,
which is stored in two PetaBoxes, or racks that each contain more than a
petabyte's worth of data. System administrators at each of these data
centers listed heat as their biggest threat, and the facilities are laid
out in alternating hot and cool aisles. Related to the heat problem are
power management issues, particularly since most of a data center's
computing capacity is not in use for most of the time yet still consumes
power and produces heat. Commodity components are gaining ground as the
solution to information storage and processing problems, as the need for
specialized hardware no longer exists, Doctorow says.
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A Pioneer Looks to Balance Internet Scale
Government Computer News (09/01/08) Vol. 27, No. 22, Walsh, Trudy
Larry Roberts, one of the founders of ARPAnet, which later became the
Internet, says today's Internet is being overloaded with video and
peer-to-peer network traffic, which was never one of its designed uses.
Roberts says he had a perception that knowledge would be made available
instantly to everyone around the world, entirely on computers, and while
the current version of the Internet is doing that, more needs to be done.
At first, Roberts says, all the computers were incompatible, and there was
no way to move information. Ray Tomlinson built the first file transfer
mechanism, called Send Message and Read Message, and started sending
messages. Roberts says he read the first email envelope in 1971, and notes
that email looks about the same today. At the time, all messages sent were
text and data, with binary data being transferred for photographs. The
ARPAnet researchers almost immediately starting testing voice, which had a
low enough bandwidth that they knew it would work, but they never believed
that video would be feasible. The network was not, and still is not,
designed to carry video, Roberts say. "It doesn't scale," he says.
"Changes will have to happen to make video work over the network in the
scale we're using it." In five years, Roberts hopes to see a significant
deployment of systems that protect users and provide equality, and that
manage video properly. Lastly, Roberts hopes more network security will be
added, though he does not know how that will be achieved.
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UD's Swany Finds Quicker Computer On-Ramp
Delaware Online (08/31/08) Ruth, Eric
University of Delaware computer scientist Martin Swany has spent the past
eight years working on a better, quicker "on-ramp" for Internet data that
researchers can use to move from the old Internet to the next-generation
Internet2. Swany's hardware and software system, called Phoebus, offers
Internet2 users a more reliable and user-friendly way to send data through
dedicated pathways, eliminating the competition for bandwidth space
normally encountered on the Internet. Such transfers are possible on
Internet2 without Phoebus, but only with the help of computer engineers
with skills far more advanced than the typical researcher. Syracuse
University scientists studying the detection of cosmic gravitational waves
are already using Phoebus to send enormous packets of data from one side of
the continent to the other. One researcher has been able to send data that
used to take 40 days to transfer in as little as four days. "The Phoebus
part of it really makes it easy for users to use," says Rick Summerhill,
chief technology officer for the Internet2 consortium. "These are gateways
that form the basis of a data movement service that allows more users, not
just users that are data engineers ... to get all the performance," Swany
says.
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Concurrency Work Happens in Parallel
Software Development Times (08/15/08)No. 204, P. 3; Worthington, David
Microsoft seeks to switch to parallel computing throughout its divisions,
and is trying to make the transition easy on developers. The concurrency
division's initial work in this area is oriented around its development of
a concurrency that functions on top of Windows, and the addition of
extensions and libraries to existing .NET programming languages so that a
common scheduling framework for developers can be created. Microsoft's
research labs are exploring new languages that are designed for
parallelism, and these languages and libraries will have corresponding
tools, says Microsoft's Lynne Hill. Microsoft Robotics Group general
manager Tandy Trower says his division's concurrency strategy involves
technologies that scale across machines, and so far its primary
developments include the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio composed of
the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) and a distributed runtime
called Decentralized Software Services (DSS). CCR enables coordination of
components and transactions, while DSS scales out across networks. Trower
says DSS employs uniform resource identifiers to represent components in a
representational state transfer framework that keeps components deeply
isolated, and components forward operations to a real-time, machine- and
human-readable transport document, which consequently issues the updates.
Meanwhile, Microsoft distinguished engineer John Manferdelli is tasked with
creating new operating system technologies, and among his areas of
concentration is distributed parallelism. He projects that most future
operating systems will possess specialized application programming
interfaces to address concurrency and could deploy new nonkernel mode
scheduling either by relying on runtimes or by developing completely new
systems.
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