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Volume 6, Issue 608: Friday, February 20, 2004

  • "U.S. Firms' Outsourcing to India Reaps Big Savings, Political Heat"
    Investor's Business Daily (02/20/04) P. A1; Alva, Marilyn

    U.S. companies see undeniable financial rewards from moving their IT and business services work overseas, especially to India: Brean Murray & Co. senior vice president Ashish Thadhani says the general rule is that firms save between $20,000 and $30,000 per worker based in India, while also noting that less than 3 percent of the global IT services budget is spent in India. At the same time, politicians are playing up discontent over American jobs lost to overseas operations--both Republican and Democratic leaders condemned Council of Economic Advisors chairman Gregory Mankiw's statement that global outsourcing was beneficial to the United States, and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry called business leaders who sent work overseas "Benedict Arnold CEOs." Other prominent economists besides Mankiw say outsourcing actually improves the quality of U.S. jobs in the long term, and will actually be vital to national competitiveness by 2015, when many baby boomers retire. Experts say between 100,000 and 200,000 IT and engineering professionals graduate from Indian educational institutions each year, including from top-flight schools such as Indian Institutes of Technology, which has seven campuses in the country. Despite the political opposition, top U.S. companies are still rapidly moving work to India by expanding their own operations there, while second-tier firms are handing business functions to third-party Indian outsourcers such as Wipro and Infosys. Cognizant Technology Solutions, for example, was able to lower a large client's costs nearly 20 percent while increasing the business volume threefold by moving work to India. Morgan Stanley's Mumbai outsourcing center conducted a study of U.S. firms' Indian growth and found IBM Global Services will employ 10,000 workers in India in three years, Intel 3,000 by 2005, Oracle 6,000 by next fall, and Accenture 8,000 by this August.

  • "University Unveils Chatty 'Roboceptionist'"
    Associated Press (02/18/04); Lin, Judy

    Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's computer science and drama departments have created a robot receptionist named Valerie that exhibits her own personality in an effort to develop an engaging machine with social skills. In addition to practical operations--giving directions, answering the phone, greeting visitors, etc.--Valerie chats people up about her fictional life, such as her boss, her therapist, and her hopes of becoming a famous singer. These aspects of her personality were scripted by drama writers. Valerie is situated in a custom-made booth at the entrance of a computer science hall, and uses motion detectors to greet people; inquiries can be directed to the robot through a keyboard. She can also recall people, and flips between tasks from talking on the phone to answering a question. Reid Simmons of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute notes that Valerie is programmed to give off the illusion that she is socially aware. The software Valerie employs is mostly based on Graduate Robot Attending Conference (GRACE), an autonomous robot Simmons developed to participate in the American Association of Artificial Intelligence's mobile robot challenge. Valerie's developers plan to give her some significant upgrades, including the ability to understand more complex questions; face recognition so she can remember people without them needing to use an identity card; and a more lifelike way to present her face than an image on a flatscreen monitor.
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  • "Scientists Tweak Robots"
    Memphis Commercial Appeal (TN) (02/18/04); McKenzie, Kevin

    University of Memphis professors Stan Franklin and Robert Kozma are working on "biologically motivated" computer software that could make next-generation interplanetary rovers more intelligent and less dependent on human operators. Rick Welch of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory notes that the vast distance between Earth and Mars--which takes Earth-based radio signals roughly 12 minutes to traverse--makes it unrealistic to control Martian exploration vehicles from Earth. NASA, along with the National Science Foundation, is funding U of M research into software that "encodes information in the form of complex, very complex, oscillations, in the style of brains," according to Kozma, who serves as director of the Computational Neurodynamics Lab. He points out that the software could be applied not just to space rovers, but to new kinds of computers, financial forecasting, defense systems, and "autonomous flying or floating vehicles." Also working on the U of M project is University of California, Berkeley professor Walter J. Freeman, whose work on how rabbits' brains identify odors was an inspiration to Franklin and Kozma, who are hoping to produce software with brainpower closer to that of a salamander, which possesses excellent navigational capabilities. The scientists are currently testing the software on a pair of robotic dogs that think and learn instead of adhering to a large set of rules. Welch says that NASA's interest in the project was sparked not only by the software's potential benefits to navigation, but its promise to make rovers capable of choosing the best surface samples for examination.
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  • "Inventors Strut Stuff at Demo Show"
    USA Today (02/19/04) P. 6B; Baig, Edward C.

    Dozens of high-tech innovations, ranging from small PCs to blogging tools to "augmented reality" software, were spotlighted at the Demo conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. Perhaps the most incredible product on display was Total Immersion's D'Fusion software, which uses Windows XP hardware to render virtual objects alongside actual physical objects in real time; the technology is currently employed for automobile and aircraft prototype design, but its potential applications for film and video games are staggering. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was on hand to introduce the 1-pound FlipStart PC from his company, Vulcan: FlipStart, which also uses Windows XP, comes with built-in Wi-Fi networking, a 30 GB hard drive, a 1 GHz processor, a small keyboard, and a 5.6-inch display boasting nearly HDTV-quality resolution. Among the blogging tools showcased at Demo was the Feedster blog search engine, and a "location-based blogging" system from WaveMarket that allows users to air their views publicly according to the time of day and their location. OurPictures Network unveiled a service in which pictures imported to a user's PC can be routed to whomever the user designates, while an enhanced version of Homestead Technologies' PhotoSite sharing service allows customers to publish and exchange photos remotely from portable equipment. Other products on display at Demo included Valence Technology's N-Charge battery, which keeps portable electronics powered up; BravoBrava software that provides access to pictures, music, and live TV on Web-enabled cell phones or personal digital assistants; and a new version of Mailblocks' email service that melds email with calendars and address books.
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  • "This Humvee Is Car and Driver"
    Wired News (02/18/04); Sjoberg, Lore

    The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Grand Challenge competition on March 13 will pit robotic vehicles in a race to see which machine can cover over 200 miles of rough desert the fastest without human intervention, with the winner receiving a $1 million prize. The entrant developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team under the leadership of professor William "Red" Whittaker is Sandstorm, a diesel-powered Humvee that uses stereo cameras, a laser range finder, and 180-degree radar to receive a constantly updated view of its surroundings by channeling the environmental input through Intel Itanium and Xeon processors. Sandstorm's navigational abilities are enhanced by GPS signals that can pinpoint its location to within 10 centimeters, as well as topographical information of the racing area collected by satellite in preparation for the contest. Whittaker reports that one of the biggest hurdles Red Team faced was devising a way to stabilize the vehicle's sensors so that their data remains reliable over uneven terrain, in the same way that a cheetah stabilizes its head to maintain focus on its prey while in motion. The Carnegie Mellon professor cares less about winning the race than advancing the technology Sandstorm uses, which brings together artificial intelligence, sophisticated storage development, and gigapixel imaging. "The Challenge is about raising all ships and bringing this kind of robotics to the world," he asserts. Sandstorm, which was unveiled at the Intel Developer Forum on Feb. 17, employs technology from over 12 companies to render environmental imagery into practical on-board data the vehicle will use for the race.
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  • "Perl's Extreme Makeover"
    NewsFactor Network (02/18/04); Ryan, Vincent

    Programmer Larry Wall and the Perl development community are performing a dramatic facelift of the Perl high-level programming language, known as Perl 6. Perl Foundation President and Perl 6 core developer team member Allison Randal characterizes Perl 6 as "a complete rewrite of the internals of Perl and a revision of the Perl syntax;" Monash University associate professor Damian Conway says the Perl 6 development team jettisoned the old syntax and built a cleaner syntax and more robust semantics from scratch. "In every case, they're changes for the better: changes that reduce the complexity of the language or the awkwardness of a particular syntax, or that remove an unnecessary limitation," Conway insists. Perl 6 also features embedded grammars, new control structures, a macro language, a more advanced type system, and a smaller core footprint for running on personal digital assistants. Conway adds that the new Parrot interpreter engine will support language interoperability, while Parrot's lead designer Dan Sugalski comments that Perl 6 is not the only language the interpreter will run; he also notes that Parrot's inclusion of a multi-platform, just-in-time compiler offers a significant speed upgrade. Conway says Perl 6 will be able to switch to a Perl 5 interpreter running atop Parrot when Perl 5 is identified in a program, obviating the need to update existing Perl 5 scripts. Sugalski predicts that Perl will become available in larger systems, thanks to Parrot's improved embedability and security features. However, Perl will also maintain its value to diehard developer enthusiasts that make up the backbone of its users; Sugalski expresses a personal hope to embed Parrot in games and office suites.
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  • "For the Multitasking Motorist, a Third Eye"
    New York Times (02/19/04) P. E8; Austen, Ian

    MobilEye Chairman Amnon Shashua used his experiences with computer vision and machine learning at MIT's artificial-intelligence lab to design a computerized camera system that can enhance road safety by alerting motorists to potentially hazardous situations, such as lane drifting or impending collisions. The technology Shashua has developed, the EyeQ chip, employs cheap cameras based on complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology to scan the road, which makes it a less expensive alternative to radar. Shashua says the first step in EyeQ's development was building a database of thousands of images of elements the system would need to clearly identify, such as other vehicles, pedestrians, and road markings, as well as objects that it could ignore--trees, for instance. Shashua says the system was trained to learn by example, and testing demonstrated the need to iron out kinks, such as EyeQ's initial tendency to misidentify pedestrians in white attire as road markings. To assess distances between the car and other objects, Shashua adopted the concept of one-eyed driving, as giving EyeQ binocular vision was deemed too costly. MobilEye is working on various car systems in conjunction with automakers and major auto-parts suppliers. Shashua expects one of the first applications to be a camera that warns drivers they are wandering within a lane by triggering a digital rumbling sound. Shashua also foresees the systems becoming capable of taking protective action against imminent collisions by sounding warnings and automatically locking seat belts.
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  • "Facing Up to New Technology"
    UC Berkeley News (02/18/04); Pescovitz, David

    University of California, Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Tamara Miller and computer science professor David Forsyth have invented a system that automatically correlates 45,000 face images extracted from online news articles with the names of the people in the photos, and relays information as a cluster of photos of a single individual. "The system enables you to browse the news by faces and bring up articles related to the people you see," notes Miller. The image cluster grows the more frequently a person appears in the news, while clicking on a specific photo links the image to its correlating news article. The system can recognize many images of an individual even when those images depict the individual under varying illumination, from different angles, or with different expressions. Once the system culls faces from photographs, rectifying software adjusts each face's position to match with a "canonical" pose. "The rectifying software finds the eyes, nose, and mouth and conducts the transformation between the original and the canonical pose," Miller explains; the software runs on a 1,000-plus PC testbed situated at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society. Miller, Forsyth, and colleagues report in a recent scientific paper that the system is 95 percent accurate in correctly matching faces to names, although it cannot yet label faces captured in profile. The technology could be used to organize and facilitate searches of massive photo archives without relying exclusively on text annotation, while Forsyth believes it could spawn a system that examines video footage taken before or during criminal activities for security purposes.
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  • "2 Brothers' High-Tech History in California"
    Los Angeles Times (02/19/04) P. C1; Hiltzik, Michael

    In every field of study there is some unsung genius that is well regarded by peers but not known by outsiders: Ivan and William "Bert" Sutherland are the computer science field's "engineer's engineers," having been involved in nearly every major computer innovation to date. Ivan helped found Caltech's computer science department and worked for a time with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency while Bert pioneered research laboratory management at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In 1962, Ivan created Sketchpad for the MIT TX-2 computer, which computing pioneer Wesley Clark created to test the viability of new transistor circuits; Sketchpad utilized new human-scale interfaces such as a video screen and light pen, and had ground-breaking graphics capabilities such as the ability to draw curves, circles, and have those forms translated back into mathematic symbols. Bert worked as a consultant to the Arpanet project, which broke ground for the Internet, before signing on at the PARC. Many of today's corporate research laboratories ascribe to the values Bert laid out as a PARC manager, including the necessity of drawing from a variety of scientific disciplines and also real-world problems. Under Bert's instructions, PARC researchers observed Xerox publishers cutting and pasting galley proofs, and thus came up with cut-and-paste desktop publishing concepts employed on the PARC's Alto personal computer; he also helped bring Ivan's work on very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits design technology to the working prototype level when he linked VLSI co-developer Carver Mead to PARC computer architecture expert Lynn Conway. According to Bert, the research laboratory was first a teaching institution that depended more on the people that created ideas rather than the ideas themselves; he postulates that successful research efforts needed ample funding as well as dedicated project champions.
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  • "View From the Alpha Geek"
    Technology Review (02/13/04); Stenger, Brad

    Programmer Rael Dornfest keeps track of IT innovation and innovators as part of his job putting together O'Reilly & Associates' Emerging Technology Conferences. He says the key to understanding technology trends is to find the trend-setters, or alpha geeks, that are widely recognized by their peers as on the leading edge; for example, Dornfest says the hype around Web services has given way to a grassroots build-up where individual developers are harnessing pre-built infrastructure for new uses. John Udell tapped into Amazon.com's book search utility and linked it to local public library indexes: Dornfest calls that type of utilization of existing resources syndicated e-commerce, and says it can be done with systems already set up by eBay, Google, and Salesforce.com. RSS is also maturing and has transformed blogging from a popularity contest into a real informational resource. Although Dornfest goes to Google for specific answers, he uses RSS-enabled blogs more often to find out unexpected answers and thoughts. Mobile technology is important in that it enables new uses for online applications, but not necessarily because it allows people to do the same things in different places--in a store, for instance, one is now able to check with IRC contacts about a particular product. As mobile technology brings the online world into the real world, Dornfest says social networking software will be necessary to infuse new relationships with real-world subtlety. Similarly, new business models, services, and interfaces are needed for successful mobile Internet applications. Dornfest says mobile phone makers are experimenting with interface designs that need to keep changing as the sophistication of mobile data changes.
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  • "Coincidences Set Up Mental Error"
    Technology Research News (02/18/04); Patch, Kimberly

    Researchers at the Universities of York and Newcastle upon Tyne in the United Kingdom believe airplanes and other machines could be made safer with human-computer interfaces designed to bypass people's penchant to assume causal relationships between a sequence of events if those events adhere to a mental model they erect to filter data. This tendency can cause skilled operators to make errors with severe consequences without them realizing it. Denis Besnard of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne says the human brain is incapable of processing all the environmental input it receives, which induces an unconscious urge to strive for adequate rather than optimum solutions through a mental model. He adds that we usually assume to understand an event's causes when that event follows a predicted outcome, which makes us "act under a confirmation bias whereby we rely on instances that confirm our predictions instead of trying to find the cases in which our expectations do not hold." Besnard says the researchers are investigating scenarios in which operators--specifically, airplane pilots--can misinterpret situations, with the ultimate objective being to make the cockpit more ergonomic. Besnard's opinion is that modern cockpits must be able to show pilots how situations are likely to unfold and suggest solutions to anticipated problems. He says that "Pro-active pilot-centered support systems...that provide feedback to pilots about events that may occur in the future and for which actions will be needed"
    would be helpful. However, complexity, certification issues, and other factors will hold up the practical deployment of the researchers' methods for five to 10 years.
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  • "Interplanetary International Internet Launched"
    Space.com (02/12/04); Britt, Robert Roy

    A Feb. 6 "pioneering demonstration" of what is coming to be called the Interplanetary Internet (IPN) involved NASA mission controllers relaying instructions to the Spirit rover on Mars via a European spacecraft in orbit around the red planet. "This is the first time we have had an in-orbit communication between ESA and NASA spacecraft, and also the first working international communications network around another planet," boasted ESA (European Space Agency) project manager for Mars Express Rudolf Schmidt. ESA's Mars Express orbiter was used to transmit the signals to the rover. The Earth-bound segment of the test communication was relayed from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., to ESA's European Space Operations Center in Germany. Plans are afoot to develop a true IPN that more closely resembles the terrestrial Internet, which would be used to link interplanetary connecting hubs to spacecraft. Such a network could conceivably eliminate the line-of-sight problems that currently limit Earth-space communications. Hubs at various locations throughout the solar system would store data that would be relayed to recipients using the most optimal available route.
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  • "Se Habla Open Source?"
    CNet (02/16/04); Becker, David

    Developing countries without basic desktop software in native languages are turning to open-source solutions, jeopardizing Microsoft's long-term interests in those potential markets. Proprietary software vendors usually wait until a market is well-enough developed economically before localizing their product, but open-source projects do not have similar profit considerations. In Rwanda, about 20 college students are translating 20,000 lines of English script in OpenOffice into the native dialect, Kinyarwanda; eventually, the volunteers see computers bringing greater prosperity to their country and want to provide their less-educated countrymen with more convenient access to the technology. There are other reasons for less-developed countries to consider open-source software: In Slovenia, the government and education institutions sponsored a team of 10 translators to convert the OpenOffice productivity suite into Slovenian, the rationale being that open-source software would be more accessible to local developers and save money over Microsoft's Slovenian-version software. In Thailand, a government-led effort to promote open source products led Microsoft to roll out a localized, bare-bones version of a combined Windows and Office package. In India, the software giant has promised to make Office 2003 and Windows available in all 14 major Indian dialects, while OpenOffice is already available in five of those languages; previously, piracy threats had delayed Microsoft investment in Asian markets in particular. Analysts say open-source software is a new factor in deciding when proprietary software enters a market, less it find itself fighting a localized open-source monopoly in the future.
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  • "Flurry of Worms Hits Companies Already on Guard"
    IT Management (02/18/04); Gaudin, Sharon

    A number of smaller, less vicious worms--such as Netsky-B and Bagle-B--are causing problems all over the world, spreading rapidly even if they are not shutting down networks or using too much bandwidth. They are nuisances to IT and security managers watching for major viruses to attack using a Microsoft's Windows buffer-overflow flaw or leaked Windows 2000 source code. "It's sort of like a pack of dogs nipping at your heels when you're waiting for the big pit bull to come and bite you," says Sophos senior analyst Chris Belthoff. Bagle-B peaked on Feb. 17 but is still spreading, with 25 percent of the infected emails originating within the United States. It installs a Trojan so it can compromise infected machines. The worm harvests email addresses from PCs and spoofs the "From:" field when it forwards itself to those addresses. Bagle-B is built to go dormant on Feb. 25. Steve Sundermeier of Central Command cautions that the worms may be a lead-up to a big attack that would make use of vulnerabilities found by examining leaked source code. MessageLabs CTO Mark Sunner believes many of recent worms are the work of spammers trying to grow their networks of controlled machines.
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  • "Converging on Network Security"
    Military Information Technology (02/09/04) Vol. 8, No. 1; Gerber, Cheryl

    Solving the most formidable network security problems is one of the goals of the National Security Agency (NSA), which has launched programs to address Internet interoperability, network convergence, and wireless security bugs. The convergence of different networks and appliances has prompted the agency to add compatibility both inside and between commercial infrastructures and existing, secure communications: Secure interoperability between certain wired and wireless systems was attained when the NSA started an industry/government coalition that approved the Future Narrow Band Digital Terminal (FNBDT) as a common signaling specification; FNBDT has moved beyond narrow band to include a common voice processing capability, a crypto-algorithm base, and a key-management process, which has helped it grow into the chief security protocol for cell phones, military radios, and emerging public safety communications devices for first responders and homeland security initiatives. Convergence of voice and data over secure wireless networks has moved closer thanks to the inclusion of secure voice and data interoperability in FNBDT mode, while the emergence of electronic re-keying has also helped advance FNBDT interoperability. NSA intends to finalize a Wireless Technology Vulnerabilities Database, which federal agencies can use to check commercial wireless products prior to purchase, by year's end. The Federal Information Processing Standard 197 doctrine issued by the National Institute of Standards in Technology (NIST) declared that AES is the standard encryption tool for government communications below the Type 1 level, which has spurred many vendors to start devising or offering AES in their non-Type 1 secure wireless products. The NSA also has set up the Secure Mobile Environment Integrated Products Team to cover mid- and long-term secure mobile environment challenges such as vulnerability discovery, research, product development, and certification.
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  • "Spam-Busters Sort Out the Fakes"
    New Scientist (02/07/04) Vol. 181, No. 2433, P. 26; Biever, Celeste

    Email authentication strategies announced to delegates at the annual Spam Conference could be a more effective measure against the growth of unsolicited commercial email than content filters or anti-spam laws. Most spammers resort to spoofing, a tactic in which their junk email pretends to originate from the addresses of innocent senders; this technique thwarts blacklisting measures, and makes owners of spoofed addresses the targets of angry spam recipients, as well as any spam bounced back by content filters. Authentication schemes require checking each email to see if its sender is genuine, a strategy that could foil spoofing. The Internet Engineering Task Force is currently examining a pair of email authentication protocols as possible candidates for standardization: Yahoo!'s Domain Keys protocol and the Lightweight Message Access Protocol (LMAP). Domain Keys would tag all emails with an encrypted signature that links message to source, and this signature would be decrypted by the receiving server and checked to ensure that content and coded sequence match, while the identity of its domain would also be inspected for verification. LMAP, an extension to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, would require email providers to augment their servers with a program designed to check the legitimacy of the address entered in the email's "from" field; if the claimed source's IP address does not match that of the actual source, the email will be deleted as a spoof or labeled as "suspected spam" and shunted to a file for later examination. Authentication schemes will give spammers little choice but to use real domain names, which means it will be tougher for them to conceal themselves. Meanwhile, Martian Software is developing TarProxy, an anti-spam tool designed to channel suspected spam through a "tar pit," thus slowing down its transmission and discouraging spammers from sending more junk email.

  • "Valid Voting?"
    Technology Review (02/01/04) Vol. 107, No. 1, P. 74; Jonietz, Erika

    Stanford University computer science professor David Dill says a major flaw in electronic voting systems is the voter's inability to observe the votes that are recorded, and argues that e-voting machines should be enhanced with voter-verifiable audit trails. Such a feature would support accurate recounts, and help ensure against election fraud as well as accidental errors. To this end, Dill crafted the Resolution on Electronic Voting, which would make voter-verifiable printers a required component of e-voting machines. The Stanford professor predicts that the most frequent problems with e-voting systems will be incorrect votes stemming from error rather than intentional tampering. He thinks that e-voting machines' software, whose security has been roundly criticized, can never be made truly unbreakable, regardless of what procedures providers adhere to, what designs are followed, and how the products are examined at independent labs. Dill believes that the best current solution is a precinct-based optical scan system in which the voter personally enters the ballot into the machine, which can be programmed to reject erroneous ballots so that voters can correct them on the fly. The alternative is to use direct-recording electronic systems with a voter-verifiable printer, but Dill cautions that these systems are even more costly than touch-screen machines, and have not been thoroughly tested in real-world elections. He concludes that Internet voting is perhaps "the only idea worse than electronic voting in precincts."
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    To read more about ACM's activities in regard to e-voting, visit http://www.acm.org/usacm.

  • "Better Displays With Organic Films"
    Scientific American (02/04) Vol. 290, No. 2, P. 76; Howard, Webster E.

    Organic light-emitting diode (OLED)-based displays offer a far more radiant, energy-efficient, and flexible alternative to liquid crystal displays (LCDs), and promise to increase the convenience and pervasiveness of electronic viewing. The organic materials used in OLED displays are easier to fabricate, which makes them potentially less expensive; the technology can also be used to generate high-resolution images by patterning different OLEDs on a given substrate, be it glass, metal foil, or polymer. OLEDs may not last as long as common LEDs, but they emit over 100 candelas per square meter, and boast a radiant half-life of tens of thousands of hours. Roll-up TVs, real-time situational maps, computer screens, and wearable computers are just some of the possible applications for OLED display technology. Both LEDs and OLEDs are formed via the layering of semiconductors--in the case of OLEDs, organic, amorphous-molecule semiconductors that are solid yet noncrystalline. Organic light emitters come in two general categories: Small-molecule OLEDs consisting of relatively lightweight molecules deposited on glass substrates, and polymer light-emitting diodes (PLEDs) formed from plastic semiconducting layers that are more power-efficient than small-molecule devices. The energy conservation of fluorescent OLEDs and PLEDs is impressive, but research is underway to make organic light-emitting materials that are even more efficient; researchers at Princeton University and the University of Southern California have created phosphorescent OLEDs that raise theoretical OLED efficiency to almost 100 percent by incorporating a heavy metal into the emitting material. A joint Oxford University/OpsSys/University of St. Andrews project seeks to marry the best elements of small-molecule OLEDs and PLEDs via the synthesis of dendrimer molecules.
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